Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History: 4 Volume Set [2, Illustrated] 0195148908, 9780195148909

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The OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA of

IN

World

THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

WOMEN IN WORLD HISTORY

EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR IN CHIEF

Bonnie G. Smith Board of Governors Professor of History Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

SENIOR EDITORS Iris Berger

Asuncion Lavrin

State University of New York at Albany

Arizona State University

Indrani Chatterjee

Chana Kai Lee

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

University of Georgia

Barbara Alpern Engel

Paul S. Ropp

University of Colorado, Boulder

Clark University

Natalie Boymel Kampen

Judith E. Tucker

Barnard College, Columbia University

Georgetown University

ADVISORY BOARD Barbara Watson Andaya

Anne Walthall

University of Hawai‘i

University of California, Irvine

Frangoise Dussart

Merry Wiesner-Hanks

University of Connecticut

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Theda Perdue

Judith P. Zinsser

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Miami University

THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

WOMEN IN WORLD HISTORY Bonnie G. Smith Editor in Chief

Volume 2

Dance-Judith

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

2008

\

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Oxford encyclopedia of women in world history / Bonnie G. Smith, editor in chief. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-514890-9 1. Women—History—Encyclopedias. 2. Women—Biography—Encyclopedias. I. Title: Encyclopedia of women in world history. II. Smith, Bonnie G., 1940 HQ1121.093 2008 305.4203-dc22 2007034939 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

WOMEN IN WORLD HISTORY

'

DANCE

context, cultures worldwide bring recreational dance into festival venues. Unlike settings for deity- or ritual-centered historical dancing, Western and non-Western festivals are secular, human-centered events, largely in an open marketplace. They often include structured rules for dress and gender interaction, with mockery of classes or genders built into the dances. Colonialism brought popular dance to non-Western cultures, where Western popular dance met festival recreational dance. Western concert stages were vehicles for social dance transmission when popular dances were woven into stage productions. Popular dance has been influenced by massmedia productions featuring scores of women performers, such as ballet and Broadway revues, as well as by celebrities including Vernon and Irene Castle and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Nineteenth-century French ballet popular¬ ized social dances from other countries; early-twentiethcentury American vaudeville and Broadway revue stages popularized jazz dances. In the twentieth century, popular dance in America ran parallel to the developing of modern concert dance, which was started and sustained by women. Some women came to popular dance later from a modern dance background, bringing to popular dance a tradition of women leaders. Pre-Twentieth-Century Europe. Many popular dances have their roots in European courts, where European dances use an upright torso. The ballroom was a social setting where deals were made, marriages were planned, and social status was determined. From the time of the Renaissance, where the aristocracy learned dances from traveling dance-masters, through the eighteenth-century minuet era, men escorted and presented their women partners, who because of constricting fashions had limited mobility in contrast to the men’s ability to execute intricate footwork and high jumps. During the eighteenth century, women began performing minuet solos with increasingly difficult footwork. During this time selected women began to teach, although men remained dominant. The popularity of ballroom dancing was reflected in early-nineteenth-century literature in the works of such authors as Jane Austen (1775-1817) in England. These

This entry consists of two subentries: Popular Forms Modern and Professional

Popular Forms Dancing is at the heart of cultures around the world and throughout history. As a folk, social, and concert art form, dance evolves over generations through various media. Dance embodies different meanings in different contexts: some dance forms are for religious or cultural ritual, some are crafted with communication in mind, and some are enjoyed by participants in social environments. Despite the notion that women are predominantly the ones who dance, the transmission of dance has historically been by men; women’s place in dance transmission has come late, and women’s roles have only recently been acknowledged. Popular dance forms include dances that circulate widely in a cultural population, are disassociated from religion, ritual, or storytelling, and are used publicly for social and recreational purposes. Trade, war, immigration, and mass media influence the cross-cultural fertilization of popular dance. Dances reflect their societies, as well as the gender roles therein; people’s relationships are present in the dance movements transmitted from one generation to the next. Many countries also have a classical dance form. In some African and Asian cultures, dancing was traditionally so embedded in society that there was not a word for “dance” to distinguish it as separate from daily activity and interac¬ tion. Conversely, in Western culture there has historically been a divide between social and classical dance forms: the forms have influenced each other but have remained separate entities. This article primarily discusses women’s roles in Euro-American popular dance and these dances’ cross-cultural circulation. Though the construct of “popular” dance and “popular” culture is largely Western, delineation among folk, ritualistic, traditional, and classical dance occurs in non-Western forms, where “popular” dance is instead recreational. In a wider

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DANCE: Popular Forms

dances were designed for social mingling through the con¬ stant mixing of partners in such dances as the French quad¬ rille. Women carried dance cards with the goal of filling them with potential husbands. The French Revolution brought about a brief revival of classical dress, and the empire-waist fashions freed women of rigid corsets, allow¬ ing for a modicum of freedom in torso movement. The Romantic movement of the mid-nineteenth century brought an interest in the folk culture and dances of other countries. Dances including the eastern European polka and mazurka, the German waltz, and various Spanish dances went from the ballet stage to the ballroom. A closed embrace between partners was introduced, instead of prior side-by-side or distanced handholds. European dances were popular in the United States during the mid- to late nineteenth century, alongside influences from African dance introduced through the slave trade, which later mixed with the European imports and developed into jazz forms. Black dances, stemming from the rhythmic clapping and stamping of the circular ring shout, brought rhythmic syncopation, improvisation, a relaxed body posture, and a communal dance circle to the United States. The jazz age catalyzed the Western popular dance center’s shift to the United States from Europe during the late nine¬ teenth century. The 1890s saw a rise in popularity in physical education for women, notably in Franpois Delsarte’s system adapted by Genevieve Stebbins, which taught middle- and upper-class American women how to use their energy effec¬ tively through poses and movement combinations. Social dance flourished in New York City dance halls, where many cultures met as immigrants brought their dances to the city. There is a common pattern of transmission between societal strata: dances of nondominant classes are appro¬ priated by upper classes, are “cleaned up” to acceptable aristocratic social standards, are put back into dancing cir¬ culation, and are picked up again by lower classes, which sometimes mimic the dances of the dominant classes, con¬ tinuing the cycle. The cakewalk, popular in 1890s America, originated as a black dance mocking the movement of the white dominant class. It was embraced and altered for white ballrooms. A similar phenomenon occurred in West Africa with the so-called highlife. The tango experienced compa¬ rable transmission in South America and entered New York ballrooms after being popularized in Paris. Twentieth-Century America. Early-twentieth-century ragtime dances, such as the one-step, maxixe, waltz, tango, and animal dances, allowed dance partners to break out of the counterclockwise line of dance and to improvise together anywhere on the dance floor. Championed by Irene Castle, women began to improvise their dance steps in animal dances: early jazz dances, animal dances such as the bear, the crab, and the turkey trot, included movements that mocked animals. The 1920s flapper era followed, in

which women asserted independence in their dress, their public habits, and their dancing—the Charleston, an aerobic dance of swift high kicks and bare rubbery knees, did not require a partner. A woman from the revue circuit, Elida Webb, is credited with introducing the Charleston. The 1920s-1930s also saw dance marathons, in which women danced solo or with a partner. Bystanders often noticed women for their strength and endurance in relation to men with whom they shared the floor. World War II coincided with the introduction of the Lindy hop and the jitterbug, both danced to big-band swing music and both originating as black dances. Men resumed the lead, lifting their partners, but women were able to improvise with the introduction of the swing-out, and both partners danced as equals. The export of American person¬ nel and culture during World War II spread swing dance across the globe. Though partner dancing continued into the 1950s, the decade also saw the advent of the twist and other partner-independent dances. Television quickly brought new dances to the masses. Social and tap-dancing schools sprang up around the United States, with women teaching their predominantly female student populations. In the late 1960s and 1970s social dance continued to be freed of partners and proscribed steps, with developments in rock and roll and disco. Hip-hop began in the 1970s as a predominantly men’s solo form. Contrary to the 1980s mass-media stereotype that hip-hop emphasized sexuality and choreographed rou¬ tines, hip-hop is based on freestyling with gender neutrality. Originating in the Bronx, dancers freestyle and freeze on the breaks in party music, lending them the names “breakboys” and “break-girls.” The movement stresses strength, style, power, and versatility. “B-girls” continue to dance the same movements as “b-boys” and to compete equally in battles. Breaking has become an international form, remaining relatively unchanged from country to country. As the majority of stage performers dancing social dances and in famous dancing couples, women have played a sig¬ nificant role in popularizing social dances. Euro-American popular dance has been exported throughout the world and adopted as a secular popular dance in many countries. [See also Performing Arts.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aldrich, Elizabeth. From the Ballroom to Flell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Uni¬ versity Press, 1991. Comprehensive work including the history, music, detailed movement description, and social implications of nineteenth-century social dance. Carter, Alexandra, ed. The Routledge Dance Studies Reader. Lon¬ don and New York: Routledge, 1998. A collection of essays that includes theories of dance in historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and analytical contexts. Dils, Ann, and Ann Cooper Albright. Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Middletown, Conn.:

DANCE: Modern and Professional Wesleyan University Press, 2001. A collection of essays covering dance history, theory, practice, world traditions, and global contexts. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Emery, Lynn Fauley. Black Dance from 1619 to Today. 2nd ed. London: Dance Books, 1988. Comprehensive reference work on black dance in America. Haskins, James. Black Dance in America: A History through Its People. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1990. Jonas, Gerald. Dancing: The Pleasure, Power, and Art of Move¬ ment. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Martin, Carol. Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. One of the few sources explicitly focused on dance mara¬ thons; also discusses women and gender. Parker, Derek, and Julia Parker. The Natural History of the Chorus Girl. Newton Abbot, U.K.: David and Charles, 1975. Richardson, Philip J. S. The Social Dances of the Nineteenth Cen¬ tury in England. London: H. Jenkins, 1960. Sterns, Marshall, and Jean Sterns. Jazz Dance: The Story of Ameri¬ can Vernacular Dance. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Tomko, Linda J. Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. A detailed and comprehensive work covering social and gender issues in artistic and social dance. Hannah

J.

Kosstrin

century the majority of ballet schools that provide the first training grounds for professional dancers are run by women. At the top echelon of the profession, the ballerina’s career still falls short of that of her male counterpart. She is feted by the public and valued by her company, but at the end of her performing career, she steps into secondary positions. Few women ballet dancers have become choreographers. Even though her major career was on Broadway, Agnes de Mille (1905-1993) choreographed a few ballets, among them Rodeo (1942) for Ballet Theatre. In 1940 she had created Black Ritual for an all-African American cast. Even more rarely have women dancers assumed artistic leadership positions in professional ballet companies. In Europe, where ballet is integrated into larger opera house structures, the outlook has been somewhat better. In North America, where ballet companies function independently, advances made by women in other professions have yet to make an impact on the career paths of female ballet dancers. Unless she starts her own company, a ballerina who hangs up her pointe shoes largely disappears from the public eye. No systematic study exists about the lack of women in artistic leadership positions in ballet. Speculations have included training that emphasizes docility and discipline over independent thought, women’s post-performance desire to focus on personal relationships, ballet’s inherent

Modern and Professional For much of the twentieth century, the women practitioners of ballet and modern dance—the two predominant types of Western concert dance—occupied entirely separate spheres defined by differences in training, perspectives, environments, and ambitions. Ballet grew up in the court cultures of Europe; modern dance is rooted in egalitarian impulses in the United States and in Germany. The ballet dancer worked with a codified vocabulary; the modern dancer created her own language. One was ensconced in the opera house; the other migrated from theater to theater. But by the beginning of the new millennium, the barriers between the two arts have begun to dissolve. Modern dance choreographers regularly create works for ballet companies, and ballet training has become a requirement for all stage dance. Women in Ballet. Classical ballet would not exist were it not for the women, both powerful and ordinary, who have been its backbone throughout history. Some were aristo¬ crats who made their impact through judicious use of their wealth; legions of women, often from modest circumstances, became professional dancers despite social condemnation. They revolutionized technique and added to the foundation of what has become a fiercely demanding, exceptionally refined artistic discipline. Many retired to teach, coach, and prepare the next generation. In the early twenty-first

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Art Nouveau Movement. Loie Fuller, late nineteenth century. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

4

DANCE: Modern and Professional

conservatism, and the absence of role models and mentor¬ ing opportunities. Ballet has its roots in the Renaissance entertainment of Italian courts, where men and women participated equally in elaborately costumed extravaganzas. Catherine de Medicis (1519-1589), the Italian-born queen of France, took the art with her to the French court. Performed by members of the royal entourage, the first ballet was commissioned by her: Le ballet comique de la reine (The Queen’s Dramatic Ballet). But already in 1572 four of her ladies-in-waiting had performed Le paradis d’amour (The Paradise of Love) for the wedding of one of the royal daughters. Professional training became essential as dancing became more elabor¬ ate with the inclusion of more intricate figures, turns, and leaps. For a time, professional and amateur dancers per¬ formed alongside each other. Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715), a formidable dancer, was partnered by ladies of the court as well as by at least one professional dancer, a Mademoiselle Vertpre. In 1669 the king founded the Academie Royale de Musique, today known as the Paris Opera, which began to train professional dancers as well as musicians. Because education at the academy was free, and a royal decree had emancipated women dancers from fathers or husbands, opportunities for economic independence and social mobility became a reality, sometimes with the aid of male patrons. Mademoiselle La Fontaine (1665-1738), appearing in Le triomphe de Vamour in 1681, became bal¬ let’s first prima ballerina; Franqoise Prevost (1680-1741) became its first female choreographer. Prevost created many dance roles for herself, among them a series of lovers of both sexes. Wealthy women, such as the Duchesse du Main and Madame de Pompadour, continued to support professional dance entertainments at their own courts. Though dancers strove for airy elegance, the period’s dress codes restricted expressive potential. Women dancers took the initiative to liberate their bodies, however modestly. Marie Salle (1707-1756), who also choreographed Handel operas in London, was the first to perform wigless, in a flowing white gown and shoes without heels. Marie Anne de Cupis de Camargo (1710-1770), who excelled in fast footwork, shortened her skirts to ankle length in order to show off her dancing feet. Marie-Madeleine Guimard (1743-1816), a statuesque dramatic dancer, shortened her skirt even further. Anna Heinel (1753-1808) designed her own heelless shoe in order to improve her ability to turn. The Romantic era (c. 1830) saw the ascent of the ballerina as the focal point of ballet. The advent of the blocked slipper, with its squared off and hardened tip, made toe dancing possible and de rigueur. Ironically, though the dancing be¬ came virtuosic and physically demanding, the dancers projected images of natural ease and delicate femininity. In reality these women faced the demands of everyday life. Some took lovers to support themselves and their families.

Some of the most prominent dancers took entrepreneurial control of their own careers, touring widely and cochoreo¬ graphing their owpi roles. Giovanna Baccelli (1753-1801) has been credited with being the first to dance on the tip of her toes, but it was the Italian-born Marie Taglioni (18041884) who integrated refined toe dancing (pointe work) with a delicate use of the upper body. With La Sylphide (1831) she came to epitomize the Romantic ballerina as a supernatural, quasi-transparent being, floating effortlessly through the air. Whereas Taglioni was gossamer, Carlotta Grisi (1819-1899), the first Giselle in the ballet of that name, was pert and vivacious. The Austrian-born Fanny Elssler (1810-1884), with a gift for drama, introduced national dances into ballet and became particularly famous in the United States. Among other boundary-stretching dancers was the Danish-born Lucile Grahn (1819-1907), who retired to Germany where she choreographed for Richard Wagner. Fanny Cerrito (1817-1909), prima ballerina at La Scala in Milan at the age of twenty-four, codesigned many of her own parts and became a great favorite of London audiences. The American Augusta Maywood (1825-1876) toured with her own ensemble throughout Europe. Suzanne Vaillande (1778-1826), who starred in Bird Catcher, the first ballet presented in the United States, left her husband and worked as an independent choreographer and set designer for close to twenty years. Feminist scholars have debated whether the early idealization of the ballerina, at a time when women dancers were socially ostracized, contributed to the infantilization of women. Some think that the Romantic ballerina was the product of the “male gaze.” Others have argued that she represents an image of unprecedented freedom, liberated from social conventions and everyday morality. Ballet in Russia owed its birth to women interested in dance ever since Tsarina Anna Ivanovna employed the French ballet master Jean-Baptiste Lande in 1734 to teach dance to her courtiers. He founded the Saint Petersburg Ballet—now the Kirov Ballet—in 1738. His successor, Franz Hilverding, hired on the recommendation of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, began to develop native Russian dancers. Catherine II (r. 1762-1796) founded the Directorate of Imperial Theaters in 1766 and the ballet school in 1773. Yet the influx of foreign ballet masters and ballerinas, primarily Italian—Pierina Legnani (18631923), the first to do thirty-two fouettes (whipping turns on one leg), Virginia Zucchi (1847-1930), and Carlotta Zambelli (1875-1968)—continued for many years. In 1901 the Russian ballerina Mathilda Kschessinskaya (1872-1971), through her influence at court, managed to stop the practice. Women began to exert an even stronger influence on ballet in the twentieth century. They founded many of today’s major

DANCE: Modern and Professional

companies, among them Sadler’s Wells/Royal Ballet (Ninette de Valois), Ballet Rambert/Rambert Dance Company (Marie Rambert), Ballet Theatre/American Ballet Theatre (Lucia Chase), National Ballet of Canada (Celia Franca), Boston Ballet (E. Virginia Williams), and Australian Ballet (Peggy van Pragh). Some women became great teachers, foremost among them Agrippina Vaganova (1879-1951), who systematized the teaching of classical ballet. Vera Volkova (1904-1974) introduced Vaganova’s teaching to the West, particularly to England and Denmark. Bronislava Nijinska, who early in her career had created major works for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, taught in California. Maria Tallchief, the first Native American ballerina, was her pupil. Women in Modern Dance. The beginning of the twentieth century was a unique moment in Western theater history: women created an entirely new art form. A variety of confluences made this possible. Few men danced professionally; women in female garb performed male roles in ballet. Physical education and gymnastics inspired a new awareness of the body. Early feminist thought encouraged women’s independence; progressive education fostered ideas of self-expression. The system by Francois Delsarte (1811-1871) for connecting specific emotions to specialized gestures in the theater had gained popularity among middle-class women. Neither Germany nor the United States—the two countries with the new art’s first practitioners—had indigenous ballet traditions. Three American women, working as solo artists, pio¬ neered modern dance. They made their impact abroad be¬ fore being accepted at home. Loie Fuller (1862-1928) danced in voluminous costumes, which she manipulated by means of rods and onto which she projected elaborate lighting effects of her own design. Inspired by Greek art, Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), the most influential of the three, embraced natural movement—running, walking, skipping—as spontaneous responses to nature, emotion, and music. Duncan, a social revolutionary and dance the¬ orist, toured widely and founded schools in Europe and Russia. Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968) integrated Asian influ¬ ences into glamorous evocations of the East in her dances; she became an important teacher (with her husband Ted Shawn) in America. Martha Graham (1894-1991) and Doris Humphrey (1895-1958), both pupils of St. Denis, developed the two strands that dominated modern dance through the 1950s. Unlike their predecessors, they crafted distinct techniques. Graham based hers on the contraction and release of muscular energy; Humphrey theorized hers on fall and recovery, the surrender to gravity and the regaining of the equilibrium. Graham’s repertoire encompassed an extraordinary range, with major works inspired by American themes and

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Greek mythology. Dramatic in intent, Graham’s dances are stark explorations of the human psyche. Until 1938 her ensemble consisted of women only; an early member, Anna Sokolow (1910-2000), became a choreographer of work committed to social change. Humphrey’s dances tended to originate in formal ideas—time, rhythm, design, and dynamics—which she choreographed into metaphors for natural processes or the individual’s relationship to society. Late in life she created work for the dance company of her pupil, Jose Limon. The anthropologist and dancer Katherine Dunham (19102006) pioneered the transformation of ritual and social dances from the Caribbean into highly effective theatrical entertainments both on the stage and in film. Pearl Primus (1919-1994) created choreography based on the African American experience; her programs also included dances that she had researched in Africa. In the 1960s women played prominent roles in what has become known as postmodern dance, which stripped dance of its theatrical trappings and investigated movement for its own sake. Among its most important practitioners were Yvonne Rainer, Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Laura Dean, Simone Forti, and Deborah Hay, most of whom performed atjudson Church in New York. Each of these artists explored distinct choreographic methods for their work. Judith Jamison, a muse to Alvin Ailey, became a choreographer in her own right and has directed the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company since 1990. Twyla Tharp, though of the same generation as the Judson artists, went her own way, creating choreography for a relaxed upper body and fiercely energized limbs. Drawing on popular dance forms and athletics as well as ballet, this versatile dance maker has successfully choreographed for her own ensemble, ballet companies, the musical theater, and films. Her greatest popular acclaim came with Push Comes to Shove for American Ballet Theater. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Urban Bush Women is an all¬ female ensemble that examines social issues from the perspective of African American women. Mixing text and found and choreographed movement with design, music, and folkloric material, the works are both free spirited and formally controlled. In Germany, Mary Wigman, a pupil of the dance theore¬ tician Rudolf Von Laban, shaped her dances as physical responses to personal introspection. In Ausdruckstanz (ex¬ pressionists dance), each dance grew from a seminal idea translated through the body into time and space. Wigman’s pieces often spoke about the darker side of human nature. Late in life she created movement choirs for professional and community performers. At her school in Dresden she taught other important modern dancers, among them Hanya Holm (1893-1992), who brought Wigman’s approach to the United States and then developed it in her teaching and

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DANCE: Modern and Professional

her own choreography. Wigman became a controversial figure through her association with the Third Reich. World War II arrested the development of modern dance in Germany and Austria. Modern dance did not put down permanent roots in Europe until the 1970s, when American companies started touring the Continent and young European dancers flocked to New York for study. Pina Bausch (b. 1940), the creator of Tanztheater, was a student of Kurt Jooss, a prominent modern choreographer in the 1930s. Though Bausch’s choreography has some precedents in expressionist theater, she works imagistically, coilaging music, elaborate scenery, text, and movement into often antagonistic encounters between the sexes. Earlier works were situated in a fantastical no-man’s-land; later ones have been inspired by specific locales from around the globe. Maguy Marin (b. 1951) has emerged as one of France’s most prominent choreographers, with work that frames its social criticism in sometimes poetically gentle, sometimes fiercely provocative language. The American transplant Carolyn Carlson pioneered modern dance in France. Additional French practitioners are Karine Saporta and Odile Duboc. Arguably Europe’s most influential choreographer in the early twenty-first century is Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (b. 1960), whose P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research & Training Studios) in Brussels enroll students from around the globe. The work for her Rosas dance ensemble, often choreographed to stridently contemporary scores and elegant videos, is as formally tight as it is refined and edgy. In the 1990s modern dance began to influence nonWestern choreographers who are creating contemporary forms from indigenous roots. Among them are Germaine Acogny (Senegal), Clara Andermatt (Portugal/Cape Verde), Chandralekah (India), Beatrice Kombe (Cote d’Ivoire), Anna Maria Stekelman (Argentina), and Wen Hui (China). Women as Observers. One of the more remarkable aspects of dance history is the literary contribution by twentieth-century women dancers and choreographers. Starting with Isadora Duncan, they have taken to the pen to explain their theories of the dance. Graham and Humphrey were articulate writers, as are Twyla Tharp and Judith Jamison. Wigman’s writing connects philosophy to dance. Many performers, Balanchine’s ballerinas among them, have also written autobiographies that not only humanize the artist but also contribute to an understanding of the environments in which these women developed their art. Since the 1960s, when dance criticism in the United States established itself as an independent discipline, women have been its most ardent practitioners, starting in New York but now extending across the country in both print and electronic media. Together with academic histor¬ ians, they are establishing an extensive record of dance.

[See also Performing Arts and biographies of women mentioned in this article.] '

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Jack. Ballet and Modern Dance: A Concise History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Book Company, 1992. Anderson, Jack. Dance. New York: Newsweek Books, 1974. With extensive and beautiful illustrations. Au, Susan. Ballet and Modem Dance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988. Bremser, Martha, ed. Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Succinct portraits and work list—about half of them women—with suggestions for additional reading. Cooper Albright, Ann, Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. “Techno Bodies: Muscling with Gender in Contemporary Dance” (pp. 28-55) discusses the mus¬ cular female body in the work of Elizabeth Streb and Louise Lecavalier. Daly, Ann. Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture. Mid¬ dletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. “Theorizing Gender” (pp. 277-338) discusses dance from a feminist perspective. Garafola, Lynn, ed. Rethinking the Sylph. Hanover, N.H.: Univer¬ sity Press of New England, 1997. A collection of essays that examine Romantic ballet from a variety of perspectives. Includes discussions of the feminization of ballet. Lee, Carol. Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Ends each chapter with a summary. Good glossary. Reynolds, Nancy, and Malcolm McCormick. No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2003. Immaculately researched, accessibly written. Includes chapters on dance in film and mu¬ sical theater. Theodores, Diana. First We Take Manhattan: Four American Women and the New York School of Dance Criticism. Amster¬ dam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. Tobias, Tobi. “Wonder Women.” http/Avww.artsjournal.com/tobias. Published originally in 2003 in Mirella Magazine. Refutes the idea of women in Romantic ballets as “frail, vulnerable creatures.” Rita Felciano

DANGAREMBGA, TSITSI (b. 1959), Zimbabwean writer. Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in the town of Mutoko in the British colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). During her early childhood she moved with her family to England, where both parents enrolled in master’s degree programs. In 1965, after this direct exposure to British education and culture, the family returned to Rhodesia, where Dangarembga received her primary and secondary education in schools whose curriculum was largely colonial in orientation. In 1977, Dangarembga returned to England to study for a degree in medicine at Cambridge University, but without

DAS, BINA

completing her studies she went back to Rhodesia just be¬ fore the country gained independence in 1980 and became known as Zimbabwe. She enrolled to study psychology at the University of Harare, where she also joined the drama club, and for a short time she worked as an advertising copywriter. During this restless period, she developed an interest in giving expression to her own thoughts and her experiences as a writer. Her play The Lost of the Soil was produced for the stage in 1983, and a play titled She No Longer Weeps was published in 1987; both dramas are written from a woman’s perspective. Dangarembga is best known, however, for her first novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), which won the African division of the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989. Some twenty years later the novel was still widely circu¬ lated, had been translated into twelve languages, and had become a part of the English-language university canon in gender, feminist, colonial, and postcolonial studies. Although Nervous Conditions is Dangarembga’s master¬ piece, the issues of colonial and racial oppression, identity, displacement, and instability that she explores so success¬ fully in that volume are first hinted at in her early narrative “The Letter” (1985), which won a Swedish International Development Authority Prize. Although some critics con¬ sider the story simplistic, others admire it as a foundational work for the fully developed narrative strategy that earned Dangarembga acclaim in Nervous Conditions. The split identity, the internal conflict that an individual experiences either under an oppressive racist regime (in the case of blackness) or within patriarchal society (in the case of women) is a matter that concerns Dangarembga even in this early narrative. In “The Letter,” Dangarembga grapples with the inner consciousness of her unnamed narrator, who is simply “a woman”—a daughter, mother, and wife belonging to a “community of women” and thus to a section of the society that is victimized. But multiple identities are woven into this early text as the narrator struggles both to fill the emotional gaps in her life and to define her sociopolitical space within the larger oppressive racist regime. The narrator in this story, who has betrayed her husband, herself has a certain restlessness, a “nervous condition,” conveyed in the way, for instance, that she “chatter[s] on and on” while her mother is “silent.” The narrator’s uneasiness is a signal of her nervous¬ ness at both the personal and political levels, and her often contradictory and shifting identities—as abandoned wife, unfaithful wife, and then devoted wife—constitute a narra¬ tive strategy that allows Dangarembga to examine the splits engendered in the female psyche under any oppressive institution. In 1990, Dangarembga published a volume of poetry, In a Voyage Around, but her career over the next decade was decidedly focused on the medium of film. Neria (1992),

7

about the rights of widows in contemporary Africa, was based on a story by Dangarembga and became the highestgrossing Zimbabwean film ever. She also worked on the feature film More Time (1994), whose story reflects her alarm about the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and cautions African women to fight the spread of the disease by protecting their bodies and taking control of their sexual lives. Her interest in film led to studies in film direction at the Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie in Berlin, and then to the 1996 project Everyone’s Child, which she cowrote and directed, thereby becoming the first black Zimbabwean woman to direct a feature film. Everyone’s Child highlights African cultural practices and values in the context of AIDS and “other contemporary pressures,” such as the economic survival of the family and the sustainability and reliability of social relationships. In the early 2000s, Dangarembga was living in Zimbabwe and managing her own production company, Nyerai Films. In 2002 she founded an international women’s film festival in Harare, and in 2006 she published a second novel, The Book of Not. [See also African Liberation and Nationalist Movements; Aidoo, Ama Ata; AIDS; and Southern Africa, subentry Twentieth Century.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boehmer, Elleke. “Versions of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga.” In Body, Sexuality, and Gender, vol. 1, edited by Flora Veit-Wild and Dirk Naguschewski, pp. 113-128. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Coundouriotis, Eleni. “Tsitsi Dangarembga.” In Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne, pp. 118-122. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. “The Letter.” In No Sweetness Here and Other Stories, edited by Ama Ata Aidoo, pp. 392-396. New York: Feminist Press, 1995. Nobantu

DAS,

BINA (1911-1986),

L.

Rasebotsa

prominent anti-imperial Indian nationalist known for her terrorist stance against the British. Born on 24 August 1911 into a family of Brahmos, a community pioneered by Ram Mohun Roy in 1829 on the basis of monotheism and liberal social values, both Bina and her elder sister Kalyani Das were from their youth taught principles of anti-imperialist nationalism. Their mother, Sarala Devi, was an active social worker on behalf of destitute women. Their father, Benimadhav Das, a renowned scholar, teacher, and nationalist, was the headmaster of Ravenshaw Collegiate School in Cuttack, Orissa.

8

DAS, BINA

Bina began life as an ardent follower of Mahatma Gandhi—she boycotted foreign goods, adopted the charka (spindle), spun her own clothes, and advocated khaddar or handspun cotton. As a member of the Chhatri Sangha (Girl Students Association) in Calcutta (now Kolkata), she met the revolutionary leader—later the founder of the Indian National Army—Subhas Chandra Bose (18971945). While in college she attended the 1928 Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress and joined the volunteers’ corps. She also protested the all-white Simon Commission sent by the Conservative British government in 1927-1928 to determine the trajectory of constitutional reform in India. In February 1932 in the convocation hall of the University of Calcutta, where she was being awarded her BA in English, Das attempted to assassinate the governor of Bengal, Stanley Jackson. Her fearless act earned her the title of Agni-Kanya (Daughter of Fire) from the nation¬ alists but imprisonment from the government. She was released in 1939, thanks to the tireless campaign by Mahatma Gandhi for amnesty to nationalist prisoners. Largely because of her earlier affiliation with the Jugantar Party, a secret revolutionary organization in east¬ ern Bengal, Das joined the Indian National Congress after her release from prison and was elected secretary of the South Calcutta Congress committee. In office during 1942 when the Congress launched its Quit India movement, she was arrested and imprisoned for three years. In the wake of the Hindu-Muslim riots in Noakhali in eastern Bengal in 1946, Das conducted relief activities and opened schools there under the leadership of Sucheta Kripilani. Between 1946 and 1951, Das was a member of the last legislative assembly of united Bengal (which after 1947 became West Bengal). Significantly, Indian independence also coincided with Das’s marriage to Jyotish Chandra Bhaumik, a college teacher, fellow revolutionary of the Jugantar Party, and the editor of the magazine called Forward. Das was also associated with the woman’s maga¬ zine Mandira; her literary talents are evident in her autobiographical writings Srinkhal Jhankar and Pitridhan. She remained a determined democrat for three decades after independence. As a member of the workers’ union of the daily Amrita Bazaar Patrika, she organized a memor¬ able strike in 1948. She participated in the liberation strug¬ gle of eastern Pakistan (currently Bangladesh) from its western wing. In 1975 she vehemently opposed the imposi¬ tion of national emergency by the Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi. Das even refused the pension allotted to “freedom fighters” by the Indian government, preferring to earn her living by teaching school, which she did through¬ out her life. Despite her importance in Indian nationalist politics, Bina Das renounced all political activity later in

her life, and she died anonymously in northern India on 26 December 1986. [See also Imperialism and Colonialism, subentry Anticolonial Protests; India; Kripilani, Sucheta; and Nationalism, subentry Nationalist Movements.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dasgupta, Kamala. Swadhinata Sangrame Banglar Nari. Calcutta, India: Basudhara Prakashani, 1970. Forbes, Geraldine. Women in Modern India. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mandal, Tirtha. Women Revolutionaries of Bengal, 1905-1939. Calcutta, India: Minerva, 1991. Sengupta, Subodhchandra, and Anjali Basu, eds. Sangshad Bangali Charitavidhan. Calcutta, India: Sahitya Sangshad, 1994. SWAPNA BANERJEE

DASHKOVA, PRINCESS EKATERINA ROMAN O VNA (1743-1810), director of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts in Saint Petersburg, founder and director of the Russian Academy, and memoirist. The third daugh¬ ter of Count Roman Vorontsov, Ekaterina Romanovna was born into one of the most prominent families in eighteenth-century Russia. Married at sixteen to Prince Mikhail Dashkov, the princess lost her husband in 1764 after five years of marriage and took on the task of rearing their two surviving children, Anastasia (1760-1830) and Pavel (1763-1807), while settling her husband’s debts and managing his estates and serfs. Although in her memoirs Dashkova claimed ignorance of the family finances as a bride, as a widow she quickly demonstrated her business acumen and ability for estate management. She later exhibited these same abilities to great effect in her role as director of the Academy of Sciences and Arts. By far the most significant figure in Dashkova’s life was Empress Catherine II (r. 1762-1796), whom Dashkova met in 1758 while Catherine was grand duchess and twice the age of her young admirer. According to Dashkova, their attraction was immediate and based on their mutual love of reading. Following the death of Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741-1761), who was succeeded by Catherine’s hus¬ band, Peter III, Dashkova was active in the movement to depose the unpopular emperor. Historians continue to debate the significance of Dashkova’s participation in the palace revolution that overthrew Peter in 1762 and brought Catherine to the throne; in her memoirs, however, Dashkova places herself at the center of the revolt. Catherine initially rewarded Dashkova’s loyalty with gifts of money and property. Within a short time, however, the relationship between the two women deteriorated—the result, according to Dashkova’s (largely male) detractors, of the princess’s excessive political aspirations and her desire to take credit for Catherine’s successful bid for power.

DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS

Following the death of her husband in 1764, Dashkova spent much of the next two decades in self-imposed exile from the Russian court. From 1769 to 1771, and again from 1775 to 1782, Dashkova traveled abroad and oversaw the education of her son at the University of Edinburgh. Iron¬ ically, despite her own dedication to intellectual pursuits, the princess exhibited little interest in the education of her daughter or, more generally, in the topic of female education. Dashkova’s role in the 1762 palace coup brought her notori¬ ety throughout Europe; as a result, during her travels she was received with considerable interest both by heads of state and by prominent figures of the Enlightenment, such as Diderot, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, and Adam Smith. Dashkova was not unique among eighteenth-century Russian noblewomen in her passion for foreign travel. Unlike her counterparts, however, the princess viewed her travels not simply as an opportunity for amusement or enlightenment but also as a form of cultural diplomacy. According to her memoirs, Dashkova used her encounters with European in¬ tellectuals to instruct them on the history and culture of her native land. Thus Dashkova promoted Russian culture abroad while acting as a purveyor of the European Enlight¬ enment at home. In 1783, soon after Dashkova returned to Russia, Catherine II appointed her director of the Academy of Sciences and Arts, which the previous director had left in financial disarray. Far from being a mere figurehead, Dashkova succeeded in restoring the fortunes of the academy. She also proposed the creation of an Academy of the Russian Language, which would oversee the compilation of the first Russian dictionary—a proposal that met with the empress’s approval and culminated in Dashkova’s appoint¬ ment as director of the new institution. In her role as director of both academies, Dashkova was instrumental in bringing Enlightenment ideas to Russia. Moreover, the princess wrote and published extensively, albeit anonymously; she translated works on education, travel, and agriculture and composed verse, essays, and several plays. The success of the Academy of Sciences and Arts under Dashkova’s leadership failed to deflect Catherine’s anger in 1793 when the academy published a play that the empress perceived as subversive. Dashkova requested a leave of absence from her role as director and left the academy in 1794. Catherine’s death in 1796 brought further misfortune: in order to punish Dashkova for participating in the downfall of his father, Emperor Paul exiled the princess to a remote estate in northern Russia. One year later, after Dashkova appealed for clemency on the grounds of ill health, Paul permitted her to return to Troitskoe, her estate near Moscow. Paul’s death and the accession of Alexander I to the throne in 1801 brought an end to Dashkova’s exile, but she chose to spend her remaining years at Troitskoe, managing her holdings and writing her celebrated memoirs.

9

Dashkova’s significance lies in her prominent role in the intellectual life of eighteenth-century Russia. She exempli¬ fied the Enlightenment ideal of the educated woman, or femme savante, and succeeded in uniting her passion for learning with her political ambitions through her work as director of two academies. Dashkova’s Memoirs remains an indispensable source both for the history of Russia under Catherine II and for the history of women in the political and cultural life of eighteenth-century Russia. [See also Catherine II of Russia; Enlightenment; and Russia and Soviet Union.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dashkova, E. R. The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova: Russia in the Time of Catherine the Great. Translated and edited by Kyril Fitzlyon, with an introduction by Jehanne M. Gheith. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Empress Catherine and Princess Dashkov. London: Chapman & Hall, 1935. Woronzoff-Dashkoff, A. “Disguise and Gender in Princess Dashkova’s Memoirs.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 33 (March 1991): 62-74. Michelle Lamarche Marrese

DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS. Founded in 1955 in San Francisco, California, and later generating chapters across the country and abroad, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was the first formal lesbian organization in the United States and is associated with the homophile movement that pre¬ ceded the late 1960s and 1970s gay liberation movement. World War II had marked a turning point in gay and lesbian culture in the United States, as young men and women left rural areas and small towns to serve in the military or wartime industries. Away from their families, many for the first time, thousands of women found camaraderie, free¬ dom, and strength with each other in the Women’s Auxil¬ iary Corps (WAC) or in factory jobs left vacant by men serving overseas. Some women also found love with one another. Lesbian bars sprang up in port cities during the war, and many women chose to remain in these new urban enclaves after the war ended in 1945. Though gay and lesbian communities continued to thrive in these urban spaces, they were increasingly pushed underground as the sexual freedom of wartime gave way to the growing conser¬ vatism and emphasis on conformity that characterized much of the postwar period. It was in this context that the Daughters of Bilitis was established. Seeking an alternative to the bars, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, along with three other lesbian couples, initially formed the Daughters of Bilitis as a social club, but it soon took on more explicitly political goals. Several of the working-class members wanted to maintain the organiza¬ tion’s original intent as a social outlet, and the group split

10

DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS

along class lines. The new political slant of the Daughters of Bilitis owed much to its members’ experience with the San Francisco branch of another gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, generally credited with starting the homophile movement of which the DOB was also a part. Spearheaded by Henry Hay in 1950 and modeled in structure after the Communist Party, of which Hay was a member, the Mattachine Society was initially quite radical in its militant tactics and conception of homosexuals as a cultural minority. Amid the growing conservative backlash and anti-Communist fervor of the 1950s, the organization faced frequent raids on its meetings, arrests of its members, and confiscation of its magazine, One, ultimately forcing the organization to take on a more accommodationist strategy. Adopting respectability as a political tactic won the society key allies and wider support. Central to the politics of the respectability, however, was the strict adherence to middleclass gender norms, and the society’s female members were required to wear skirts or dresses at public protests or gatherings. The Mattachine Society was largely maledominated, and women were often relegated to secondary positions within the organization. Although the DOB mod¬ eled much of its own structure, politics, and tactics on the Mattachine Society, with whom it maintained friendly relations and often strategically cooperated, it conceived of itself as addressing the double oppression that lesbians faced as both women and homosexuals. An explicitly feminist consciousness was part of the Daughters of Bilitis from its inception, and many of its members, including Martin and Lyon, were involved in activism around various women’s issues. The organization’s name was coded; it was meant to evoke association with long-standing women’s groups like the Daughters of the Revolution and also to offer anonymity by using a literary reference recognizable only to those in the know: Bilitis referred to a fictional companion of the famous Greek les¬ bian Sappho from an 1894 French poetry collection, Songs of Bilitis. However, like the Mattachine Society, the DOB also emphasized the adoption of traditional gender roles as essential to improving the image of the lesbian in mainstream society, one of its central goals. Toward this end the leadership, if not all the members, generally dis¬ associated from and often openly critiqued the lesbian bar culture, which was dominated by women in butch-femme roles that DOB leaders worried would foster negative stereotypes of lesbians, a fact that reinforced the primarily middle-class character of the DOB. The group’s publication, the Ladder, used similar rhetoric and imagery—uplifting the masses through respectable leadership—that characterized the black women’s club movement, another source of influence on the organization despite its own predominantly white leadership. Started in 1956 as a mimeographed newsletter, the Ladder allowed

the DOB to reach a much wider audience beyond those women willing or able to attend chapter meetings. In keep¬ ing with the anonymity in which the DOB was forced to operate, it was not until the 1960s that the Ladder featured a photograph of a real lesbian on its cover, but the publication nonetheless offered unprecedented lesbian visibility and was instrumental to the nascent lesbian consciousness of mid-century United States. Though its official membership was never large, the DOB remained influential through the 1950s and 1960s, but it eventually succumbed in the 1970s to conflict among the leadership, while its members split over whether to focus their support on the gay liberation movement or on the women’s liberation movement, both of which had often proved unresponsive to lesbians. Though there is no longer a national DOB, at least one local chapter remains, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [See also Gender Theory; International Lesbian and Gay Association; Sexuality; and Transgender/Transsexual.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Gallo, Marcia. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006. Rupp, Leila. A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Melissa

N.

Stein

DAVIS, ANGELA (b. 1944), social activist and educator. Angela Y. Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944. Her political involvement began at age fifteen, when she became active in a youth organization associated with the Communist Party. She attended Brandeis University, where she studied with the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, took her junior year in France at the Sorbonne, and returned to the United States to work with Marcuse at the University of California at San Diego. After a period of involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Davis worked with the Black Panther Party and the Com¬ munist Party. In 1969 she was removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party; her removal was led by Ronald Reagan, at the time governor of California. Davis’s long-standing commitment to prisoners’ rights dates back to her involvement in the Black Panther campaign to free a group of black activist prisoners known

DAY, DOROTHY

as the “Soledad Brothers,” after the California prison in which they were being held. In August 1970 she was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List on charges that she had conspired in the attempt by seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson—seeking to bring attention to dangerous prison conditions for his older brother, George Jackson, and the other Soledad Brothers—to take hostages at the Marin County courthouse. The confrontation resulted in the deaths of Jonathan, a judge, and two police officers, and subsequently Davis became the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground and culminated in one of the most famous political trials in late-twentieth-century U.S. history. During the sixteen months of her incarceration and trial, a massive international “Free Angela Davis” cam¬ paign was organized. She was acquitted of all charges in 1972. Davis teaches in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a staunch opponent of the death penalty, an advocate of prison aboli¬ tion, and a critic of racism and sexism in the criminal justice system. In 1998, Davis founded the human rights organiza¬ tion Critical Resistance, which addresses racial and gender bias and violence in mass incarceration in the United States. She has published numerous books, including an autobio¬ graphy (1974); a study of the women’s movement {Women, Race & Class, 1983); and an argument for ending the prison industrial complex {Are Prisons Obsolete?, 2003). [See also Civil Rights Movement.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aptheker, Bettina. The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. New York: International Publishers, 1975. James, Joy. “Revolutionary Icons and NeoSlave Narratives.” In Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. James, Joy, ed. Imprisoned Intellectuals. Boulder, Colo.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Perkins, Margo V. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Joy James

DAY, DOROTHY (1897-1980), journalist, author, and founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 8 November 1897. Drawn to radical social causes from an early age, Day went to prison in November 1917 for protesting women’s exclusion from the electorate. In contrast with many radicals, she was not an atheist but a Catholic. In 1924 Day began a four-year common-law marriage with Forster Batterham, and on 3 March 1927 she gave birth to Tamar Theresa Day. She arranged Tamar’s baptism in the Catholic Church, and on 28 December 1927 Day was herself baptized. She commenced a period in her life of trying to find a way to bring together her religious

11

faith and her radical social values. Late in 1932 Day met Peter Maurin, who gave her the idea of starting a monthly Catholic newspaper concerned with social issues. On 1 May 1933 the first copies of the Catholic Worker were handed out at Union Square in New York City. The publication grew in popularity, and by December 100,000 copies were being printed each month. Readers found a unique voice in the Catholic Worker. It expressed dissatis¬ faction with the social order and took the side of labor unions, but its vision of the ideal future challenged both urbanization and industrialism. The Catholic Worker challenged its readers to make a personal response. One of the proposals made in the first issue was that Christians should take care of those in need and not leave that respon¬ sibility to charitable agencies. The editors put their principles into practice. Day’s apartment became the first Catholic Worker house of hospitality, and by 1936 thirty-three Catholic Worker houses were spread across the United States. By the early twenty-first century there were several hundred. An outspoken pacifist, Day consistently opposed war throughout her life. Day was not, however, naive about Nazism. With the rise of Adolf Hitler, she expressed anxiety for the Jews and was among the founders of the Committee of Catholics to Fight Anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, she encouraged conscientious objection to war. Opposition to the war had nothing to do with sympathy for America’s enemies. The Catholic Worker movement chose to support “the works of mercy rather than the works of war.” During the Cold War, Day was arrested and several times was jailed for refusing to take shelter during civil defense drills. She described her civil disobedience as an act of penance for America’s use of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities. Active in the civil rights movement, Day in 1957 narrowly avoided being shot while acting as an unarmed guard at the entrance to a multiracial community in Georgia. On Day’s seventy-fifth birthday the Jesuit magazine America devoted a special issue to her, finding in her the individual who best exemplified “the aspiration and action of the American Catholic community during the past forty years.” Among those who visited Day when she was no longer able to travel was Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who had once pinned on Day’s dress the cross worn only by fully professed members of the Missionary Sisters of Charity. Long before her death in New York on 29 November 1980, Day was regarded by many as a saint. In 1998 the Archdiocese of New York initiated a process in Rome in hopes of Day’s eventual canonization. [See also Religions.]

Mother

Teresa;

Socialism;

and

World

12

DAY, DOROTHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coles, Robert. Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987. Cornell, Tom C., Robert Ellsberg, and Jim Forest, eds. A Penny a Copy: Readings from the Catholic Worker. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1995. Day, Dorothy. The Long Loneliness. Chicago: Saint Thomas More, 1993. “Dorothy Day Library.” The Catholic Worker Movement, http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/ Ellsberg, Robert, ed. Dorothy Day: Selected Writings. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1992. Forest, Jim. Love Is the Measure: A Biography of Dorothy Day. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1994. Miller, William D. Dorothy Day: A Biography. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982. Jim Forest

DAY CARE. See Children.

DEATH AND MOURNING This entry consists of two subentries: Overview and Comparative History Burial and Funeral Services

Overview and Comparative History Death and mourning are the one constant in every culture in every period. Death practices through the ages have reflected concern for both sanitation and cultural taboos, while mourning rituals protect and console people at the time of loss. Women have had a unique relationship with death. The high infant mortality rates for much of human history brought women into contact with death repeatedly. Women also faced death as a routine possibility every time they became pregnant. Death and mourning has been a constant backdrop to the history of women. Burial and Cremation. Customs for dealing with the human body after death were much the same in the ancient world as they have been throughout every other era, in that human remains (unlike other carcasses) have always been treated with specific care. Whether the bodies were burned, buried, or left in the open, survivors grappled with ideas about what it meant to be human. The limits of human existence were made evident by the deteriorating state of the corpse. Ancient people lacked the means to preserve intact bodies. In warm climates espe¬ cially, decomposition set in quickly, with the body emitting a stench by the fourth day. Accordingly, quick disposal of remains was needed for sanitary as well as aesthetic reasons.

Ways of physically removing the dead from the living have changed very little during the course of human history, with earth burial or cremation preferred in ancient times as the basic form of funeral. In Asia, followers of Zoroastrianism believed that preliminary exposure to flesh-eating animals in an open space was the only acceptable way of disposing of a body. No other means of disposal avoided desecrating the revered elements of fire, earth, and water. Subsequent collection of the bones was recommended but not required. Most other cultures sought to avoid animal intrusion. Near Eastern people were known to place bodies in a cave and close the opening with rocks to keep out carrion-eating animals. For Christians, the dismembering of bones or burning of bodies ran counter to the hope of the resurrec¬ tion of the flesh. They radically departed from Greek, Roman, and Zoroastrian beliefs by sanctifying human remains and building monuments over the burial sites of dead. Many ancient people, including the Japanese, asso¬ ciated death with pollution. Some cultures placed a taboo on handling things associated with the dead. Christians ignored the pollution taboo by burying the victims of plagues and burying the corpses of strangers. Meanwhile, Muslims avoided funerary monuments as a vain custom. They outlawed the pre-Islamic Arabian practice of animal sacrifice at the gravesite and preferred level graves. Jews have traditionally required the inhumation of their dead, to allow the corpse to return to the earth. Some cultures extensively prepared bodies, and burial was thus delayed until the death rituals required by tradi¬ tion were complete. Mummification was the preferred way of handling elite human remains in ancient Egypt, and all remains were mummified in some prehistoric American cultures; the ancient Chinchorro people of the region that is present-day Chile placed stylized masks on mummified remains of all members of their society, including babies. They kept the dead among the living for a period of time, perhaps as a comfort for the bereaved. In many places, corpses were washed and dressed, with women typically responsible for this duty. An English Book of Hours from the mid-fifteenth century depicts the work of women following a death: having witnessed a death, they prayed for the soul of the departed, washed the body, and prepared it for burial. The early modern English also delayed burial, but for public health reasons. During epidemics and plague, women of the lower classes examined bodies prior to burial for signs of disease. These female searchers of the dead commanded little respect or attention. The ancient practice of cremation was revived in western Europe only in the 1860s, when numerous groups of freethinkers began discussing it as a possible way of dealing with the dead. Catholic leaders at first viewed cremation as an expression of secularism and of an anti-Christian attitude disrespectful of the body, and the Catholic Church thus

DEATH AND MOURNING: Overview and Comparative History

13

Mummification. The five-thousand-year-old remains of a woman mummified in the black style (given a clay mask coated with black manganese) and surrounded by whalebone, El Morro, Arica, Chile, 1983. Philippe Plailly/Eurelios/Looi< at Sciences

had a ban on cremation until 1963. Meanwhile, techniques for the rarely used procedure of embalming improved dra¬ matically beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; the new technology allowed for elaboration on the custom of the wake, a vigil over the body that began as preventive measure performed so as not to bury the deceased prema¬ turely. Stories of people having been buried alive were not uncommon; thus family members and friends would take turns remaining in the room with the body to watch for any sign of life. In many societies, a person is not viewed simply as being either dead or alive; the states of death and life may be considered as an assortment of categories or gradations. The physical occurrence of death is in itself a process. Socially constructed rituals allow the living to readjust while the soul of the deceased is incorporated into the society of the dead. In some cultures, a person may be treated as alive when other cultures would view the indivi¬ dual as dead, as in the attitude toward the death of divine rulers in the Andes during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Each Inca ruler ensured that his or her property was retained by the estate of his or her descent group, and the body of the deceased ruler was prepared in a bundle of textiles. The ruler’s retainers continued to maintain the agricultural production of the estate in order to observe a cycle of sacrifices to “feed” the mummy bundle, which was ritually offered food and drink. Inca mummies were

considered able to preside over the marriage of their chil¬ dren or to contract a marriage, as when the Incan noble Rawa Ocllo married the mummy of the Inca ruler Wayna Capac to legitimate the claim of her children. Funerals and Other Rites of Mourning. The history of death involves not only the disposal of remains but the emotion of grief and the breaking of bonds between people. Mourning rituals provide people with a means to adjust to the death of a loved one. Mourning is work. It is a solemn period of adjustment to absence and change. Grief for the transition from life to death of a valued person and the continued solemnity of the bereaved over days or even weeks builds psychological pressure within the dispossessed. Because of the common recognition that the bereaved may become emotionally or psychologically disabled without a restoration of normalcy in the permanent absence of the deceased, friends and family members extend support and comfort in a variety of ways. While male and female corpses have been handled in similar ways across time and regions, cultural differences are found in mourning habits. In many parts of the world, mourning rituals form a sequence that may take place over a considerable period of time. These rituals are usually asso¬ ciated with culturally specific notions concerning rebirth, ancestral spirits, or the immortality of the soul. Many cultures designate different mourning roles to men and women, with women typically assigned a subordinate role.

14

DEATH AND MOURNING: Overview and Comparative History

Among the Native Americans of the Northeast wood¬ lands, great feasts were held to honor the deceased ances¬ tors. Among the native cultures of the Northwest, it was believed that the dead had their realm, or one of their realms, at the bottom of the sea. Other groups believed the spirits of their dead lived in the sky or in the ground. The conscious¬ ness of a supernatural world of spirits and gods led to tradi¬ tional rituals and elaborate ceremonies performed to honor the departed dead believed to exist in a parallel world. Many forms and interpretations of these ritual ceremonies con¬ tinue throughout the North American tribes of today. In many societies, the pollution of death is associated with women. Among Hindus, the death of a husband has traditionally resulted in a severe loss of status for widows. Historically, Hindu women have been blamed for the death of their mates. The combination of loss of status and blame prompted widows to commit sati (culturally mandated suicide) by throwing themselves on the burning funeral pyres of their husbands. In the modern era, sati has been outlawed in India, but there is anecdotal evidence that in some areas widows are still pressured by family to commit suicide. The modern style of mourning death in Hindu culture calls for female relatives of the deceased to take cleansing baths and change into funeral dresses, which are white saris. Most of the women, in particular the widow, will wear funeral whites until at least the first anniversary of the death. In keeping with Hindu tradition, the glass bangles of a deceased man’s widow are broken. The red sindoor (wedding mark) that a woman wears on the center parting of her hair beginning at the time of her marriage is wiped off, indicating an abrupt change in her status. Although not all Hindus generally are strict vegetarians, during the mourn¬ ing period great care is always taken to observe a rigorously vegetarian diet at home and outside. The family also ar¬ ranges a twelve-day religious ceremony at home, which involves a relay of priests staying at the house for all the days of the ceremony, reading from sacred texts, reciting holy verses from the Bhagavad Gita, and singing devotional songs of the Hindi saints Kabir and Ravidas to the accom¬ paniment of music. It is expected that all the members of the family of the deceased and their neighbors, friends, and relatives will participate in the meetings, which are held twice a day, at sunrise and at sunset. None of the women accompany the body to the crematorium. When the bier is carried from the home by the men of the family, the women gather for their last view of the deceased. The funeral pro¬ cession is an all-male affair. In some cultures, women are shut out of part of the process of death and mourning because they are viewed as too emotional to handle the news of an impending death. Japanese physicians have held that it is part of their obligation to determine whether a terminally ill patient

needs to know, would want to know, and could deal with the information. Gender considerations relate to a need for information. Terminally ill women are not told of their true diagnosis because of a fear that a lack of emotional control will worsen the patient’s medical condition and possibly prompt suicide. Female family members of a terminally ill patient are presumed to react to bad news with panic and hysteria instead of a male’s calm and grace. In Jewish tradition, no one is permitted to leave the room during the last moments of a person’s life. It is considered an act of great respect to watch over a person as his or her soul leaves this world to be with God. After death, the windows in a room- are opened so that the soul can leave the body and begin its journey to God. The body must then be cleansed and made pure, a rite that is usually performed by the chevrah kadisha (burial society). Members of the family do not participate in this ritual as it considered too painful for them to bear. Female members of the chevrah kadisha wash the corpses of women, and males, the corpses of men, to preserve the dignity and honor of the deceased. The corpse is then dressed in simple handmade white garments that symbolize purity, simplicity, and dignity. During the cleansing and preparation for a Jewish burial, the burial society members recite prayers asking God for forgiveness for any sins that the deceased may have committed and that she or he be granted eternal peace. Some Conservative and Reform Jewish women wear a tallith (prayer shawl) and, if the deceased wore one, at least one of the four fringes is cut off. The fringes serve as remin¬ ders of God’s commandments, and as the individual is dead, there is no need for a reminder. A woman may be buried with the tallith wrapped around her if the local rabbi approves. Burial takes place within twenty-four hours of the death. In Jewish tradition, it is preferable to give money to charity than to spend it on lavish coffins. For a period of seven days after the funeral, a family sits shivah. The family is not expected to perform daily tasks, including going to work. During shivah the mourners are not obliged to greet people when they come nor to act as hosts. The mourning family wears the clothes that were torn, as a tangible expression of grief, during the funeral. They do not bathe, groom, or use cosmetics, and all mirrors are covered up, since the mourners are not be concerned with vanity. Written records from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicate that most early North American funerals were held at home. In the Chesapeake region, bodies were often interred in home or plantation cemeteries. The pattern for the care of the dead was similar to patterns practiced in England. The corpse was washed, wrapped, and secured in a shroud of wool or linen. The body was laid out in the family’s dwelling, usually on a board in the parlor, while preparations for the funeral feast were made. Colonial American settlers continued European traditions in which

DEATH AND MOURNING: Burial and Funeral Services

food played an important role in relation to funerary ritual and celebration. Like the Europeans, Americans typically served cakes with cider or rum punch. The funerary rituals were social events, lasting from three days to a few weeks. This early American period became increasingly cul¬ turally diverse as new groups arrived from the Old World. The Shakers brought simple funeral services. The coffin consisted of unpainted pine boards and was plainly lined. At Shaker funeral services, hymns were sung and personal testimonies to the deceased were made by those in atten¬ dance. Amish women were usually buried in their bridal dresses, typically colored blue or purple. Funerals were con¬ ducted in the home without a eulogy, flower decorations, or other display. African American funerals differed according to regional and local customs. For slaves living on planta¬ tions, permission to conduct a funeral ceremony was required, but it was not always granted. Some owners provided slaves with their own cemetery. The graves were marked with posts and, as in Africa, decorated with the broken belongings of the deceased.

15

Burial and Funeral Services All societies hold mortuary rituals because the death of a human being is not just a biological fact but also a social and spiritual process involving the corpse, the deceased’s soul, and the bereaved relatives. Mortuary rituals enable the transition from corpse to decomposed remains, the soul’s passage to the afterworld, and the transformation of mourning relatives into full members of a restored society. The fate of the soul and the treatment of the dead reveal the predicament of the body and the status of the deceased. Whether or not people believe in a soul or a spiritual after¬ life, they all acknowledge the extinguishing of life’s breath and the obligation to provide ritual services to the dead. Funerals as Rites of Passage. Mortuary rituals are a universal phenomenon with a common structure, but they are characterized by great cultural variation. Rites of passage consist of three phases: a preliminary phase during

Modern funeral customs reflect technological advances as well as a greater emphasis upon individualism. The advent of inexpensive photography in the late nineteenth century allowed survivors to make a last image of the deceased, often babies too young to have posed for a formal portrait. By the twenty-first century, video cameras per¬ mitted the recording of funeral services for viewing by mourners unable to attend the ceremony. Funerals, coffins, and gravestones in Western cultures are as likely to reflect the hobbies and preferences of the deceased as the mandates of organized religion. [See also Widows and Widowhood and Widow Suicide.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Binski, Paul. Medieval Death: Ritual And Representation Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Becker, Lucinda M. Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003. Colman, Penny. Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Davies, Douglas J. A Brief History of Death. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. Field, David, Jenny Hockey, and Neil Small, eds. Death, Gender, and Ethnicity. London: Routledge, 1997. Kramer, Kenneth Paul. The Sacred Art of Dying: How World Religions. Understand Death. New York: Paulist Press, 1988. Long, Susan Orpett. Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005. Paxton, Frederick S. Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Samellas, Antigone. Death in the Eastern Mediterranean (50-600 a.d.): The Christianization of the East: An Interpretation. Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2002. Thursby, Jacqueline S. Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Caryn E. Neumann

Inca Burial. An Inca burial of a mummy, from Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva coronica, c. 1600. Courtesy of Asuncion Lavrin

16

DEATH AND MOURNING: Burial and Funeral Services

which the corpse is separated from the mourners, a liminal phase during which the deceased makes the transition from the world of the living to the world of the dead, and a postliminal phase that indicates the soul’s entry into the afterworld and the mourners’ reincorporation into society. Funerals are often gendered rituals with different roles, rules, taboos, and emotional manifestations for men and women. Even death itself may be gendered, as is the case with Western representations of death as either a man or a woman. Grief and Mourning. Mourning is the cultural translation of grief, and it varies from society to society. Cross-culturally, crying is a near-universal expression of bereavement (Balinese culture is a notable exception), but women generally cry more than men. Crying is a personal expression of grief, whereas wailing and lamenting are culturally prescribed ways of mourning. For example, funeral laments have been sung from classical to modern times by Greek women as a cultural means of channeling grief into acceptable mourning. Mourning practices can enable people even to cry at will if socially desired. Some anthropologists claim that not only mourning but also grief is culturally constructed. Purportedly, impoverished Brazilian women do not grieve over the death of babies born weak; they feel pity rather than sorrow. The complexities of gender, grief, and mourning are illustrated by the funeral practices of the Trobrianders, a tribe living on several islands off the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea and studied in depth in the early twentieth century by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. The Trobrianders have a matrilineal system in which people belong only to their mother’s descent group. A Trobriand wife announces her husband’s death with a heart-piercing cry. She immediately becomes the chief mourner because the deceased’s maternal kin are kept away from the corpse to prevent illness through contamination (obligations surrounding the death of a wife are less elaborate). The mortuary rites are performed by the deceased’s father, his children and wife, and her matrilineage. The man’s matrilineal kin do not wear special clothing, are calm, and seem almost indifferent, even though they may cry privately. But the people accompanying the widow in her mourning shave their heads and blacken their bodies with soot. The widow washes, dresses, caresses, and gently sways her husband’s body while wailing incessantly. The sons bury their father within hours of his death. A wake includes many villagers but excludes the deceased’s matri¬ lineal kin. After less than a day the body is exhumed to check for signs of sorcery and is then reburied. The widow is secluded inside her house and begins an extensive mourn¬ ing period, while her relatives observe certain mortuary practices. Separated from the community, the widow speaks only in whispers and may never leave her home.

These elaborate mourning practices are intended to show the widow’s strong bonds to her deceased husband and to convince the man’s relatives that she did not kill her husband with black magic. After six to twelve months the widow emerges from her home, taboos are lifted, and she is washed and dressed in new clothing. She is reincorporated into the community and can now marry again. Treatment of the Dead. The treatment of the dead varies greatly historically and cross-culturally. The bereaved may embrace, kiss, and caress the deceased, as occurs among the Trobrianders, but they may also remain far from the body, as is common in Western culture. Furthermore, the corpse may be buried, cremated, mummified, defleshed, or consumed. The physical proximity to the dead that characterized Europe until the Middle Ages became increasingly replaced by a concealment of the corpse as the acceptance of death turned into fear. Contemporary industrial societies, such as those in North America and Japan, have followed Europe in this distancing between deceased and bereaved by entrusting their dead to professional morticians. In addition, these societies have restricted mortuary rituals to a few days but have expanded the remembrance of the dead through personal mementos, oral culture, and annual commemorations. Death is prominently present in the arts, literature, the news media, museums, monuments, and memorials. The Western abhorrence of corpses contrasts with the mortuary cannibalism of tribal cultures in Melanesia and South America. Before endocannibalism was outlawed by the Brazilian authorities, the Wari’ Indians of western Amazonia used to divide bereaved relatives into two groups with different mortuary obligations. The spouse and the blood relatives of the deceased gathered around the corpse, wailing incessantly and hugging the body for days. The affines organized the funeral and prepared food, and the men eventually dismembered the body. The body parts were roasted, divided into small pieces, and then eaten by the affines. The Wari’ believed that the flesh embodied the deceased’s social relations and therefore required their consumption. Mortuary cannibalism was seen as an act of compassion for the bereaved spouse and consanguines because it helped to sever the ties of the living and the dead and marked the departure of the dead person’s spirit. Eating the bodily remains helped reproduce the community by reincorporating the embodied social ties. Many cultures in world history, notably in ancient China, Japan, Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, have been known to mum¬ mify their dead, either by natural means (hot desert sand, frozen soil, dry wind) or by artificial means (dehydration, smoke curing, embalming). The Egyptians mummified their high-ranking dead to reunify the person’s life force (ka) and personality (ba) with the restored and perfumed corpse. A burial site near the Peruvian coastal town of Paracas

DEBI, RASHSUNDARI contains more than four hundred mummified bodies interred in a seated position, dating back to 400 b.c.e. Mum¬ mification practices continue to this day as small numbers of wealthy individuals in the Western world preserve their bodies with cryonic techniques. Political Meaning of the Dead. The Wari’ belief that the human body incorporates social relations finds its analogy in the political meaning of bodies in contemporary Western society. The burial of presidents and royalty are public rituals of state because the deceased embodies the nation’s symbols. Likewise the burial of victims of state violence becomes collective manifestations of political resistance. The protests of Latin American mothers demanding to know the fate of their disappeared children is a demonstration of people’s need to recover, properly bury, and mourn their dead. Mortuary rituals are a cultural universal that reveal people’s resistance to accepting biological death as selfevident, as well as their desire to express grief in culturally prescribed ways of mourning, prolonging the departure from the dead through a process of phased transitions and invigorating the weakened community through collective practices of solidarity. [See also Widow Suicide and Widows and Widowhood.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aries, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. First published as L’homme devant la mort in 1977. Conklin, Beth A. Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Gennep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. First published as Les rites de passage in 1909. Hertz, Robert. Death and the Right Hand. Translated by Rodney and Claudia Needham. London: Cohen and West, 1960. First published as “La preeminence de la main droite: Etude sur la polarite religieuse” in Revue philosophique 39 (1909). Malinowski, Bronislaw. The Sexual Life of Savages in NorthWestern Melanesia. New York: Halcyon House, 1929. Robben, Antonius C. G. M., ed. Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Antonius

C. G. M.

Robben

DEBI, RASHSUNDARI (1809-c. 1899), author of the first published autobiography by a Bengali woman. Amar Jiban (My Life) might also be the first full-scale autobiog¬ raphy written in Bengali, a language spoken by more than 200 million people in present-day India and Bangladesh. Rashsundari Debi was born in a Hindu upper caste, landed family in colonial Bengal. Her marriage to an affluent land¬ lord was arranged when she was twelve years old. It was in

17

Bengal—at the time the major commercial, economic, edu¬ cational, and cultural center in India—that the “woman question” first surfaced in India. From the debate emerged a new generation of women known as bhadramahila (“re¬ spectable lady”), who were envisioned as embodying the combined virtues of a self-sacrificing Hindu woman and the helpmate role of the Victorian lady. The trajectory of Debi’s life, as she narrated it, is a spectacular example of not only the struggle and hardship of the early generation of bhadramahilas but also their attainments. More than its literary merit, the circumstances surrounding its writing make Amar Jiban significant. Debi had twelve children and assumed the responsibility of running a large, multigenerational household at age fourteen. She secretly taught herself to read at the age of twenty-five and to write at age fifty, defying social conventions and obstacles. She finished the first version of her autobiography in 1868, a year after she lost her husband. She added another section, and the enlarged version, with a preface written by the eminent literary figure Jyotirindranath Tagore, was pub¬ lished in 1897, when Debi was eighty-eight. The first part of Amar Jiban, following medieval religious literary tradition, consists of sixteen sections, each starting with short laudatory epigraphs invoking gods and god¬ desses. Brooding and introspective in style, revolving around themes of fear, obedience, pain, submission, and humility, it provides insights into Debi’s life and offers re¬ flections on contemporary social practices. The second part contains her eulogies to God and describes her spiritual yearnings and complete surrender to her Lord. Neither a rebel nor an iconoclast by her own admission, by learning to read and write the shy, modest, and humble Debi flouted the prevalent Hindu orthodox superstition that access by women to education and literacy would inevitably lead to their widowhood. Interestingly, Debi’s motivation to read and write was her quest for spiritua¬ lism—she wanted to read Chaitanya Bhagabat, the first Bengali biography of the medieval saint Lord Chaitanya, the ardent follower of Lord Krishna, whose mission was salvation of such marginalized social groups as women and the lower castes. One of the earliest autobiographies by a South Asian woman in the modern era, Amar Jiban was neither a confession in the Western autobiographical tradition nor a scathing social commentary based on the injustices she faced. Rather, as Debi described it, her story was a manifes¬ tation of the divine will, an expression of God’s miracles revealing a divine purpose. Nonetheless, her account attests to the unjust social conditions in which women lived in nineteenth-century India: early marriage, forcible sepa¬ ration from one’s natal family, adjusting to the unknown environment of the in-laws’ household, the risk to one’s health of repeated childbirth and heavy domestic labor,

18

DEBI, RASHSUNDARI

and no access to education or resources for individual betterment. Debi’s resistance to this system lay in her learning to read and write; her emancipation lay in the act of writing her own life. She is an outstanding example of how women in oppressive social conditions have defied formidable obstacles to attain their desired goals. [See also India and Literature, subentry Personal and Private Narratives.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Forbes, Geraldine. Women in Modem India. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Karlekar, Malavika. Voices from Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1991. Sarkar, Tanika. Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban: A Modern Autobiography. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999. Tharu, Sashi, and K. Lalita, eds. Women Writing in India: 600 b.c. to the Present. New York: Feminist Press, 1991. Swapna

M.

Banerjee

DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS AND RESO¬ LUTIONS. See Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.

DECLARATION ON THE ELIMINATION OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN. The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (DEVAW) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1993 as Resolution 48/104. DEV AW was the first international human rights instrument to be adopted by the United Nations that specifically addresses violence against women. Although not a binding treaty, it is applic¬ able to all members of the United Nations. Like other UN declarations, DEV AW increasingly is regarded as a source of international law. DEVAW recognizes that violence against women violates women’s rights and fundamental freedoms and poses an obstacle to women’s social, economic, and political equal¬ ity. It calls for states and the international community to work toward the eradication of violence against women. By using the term “violence against women,” the declara¬ tion addresses violence that is committed overwhelmingly by men against women. It defines the problem broadly and recognizes that it encompasses “gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women.” Accordingly, it includes violence that occurs primarily in the family, including battering, sexual abuse of female children, marital rape, dowry-related violence, female genital mutilation, and other traditional practices harmful to women, as well as violence committed in the community, such as rape,

sexual abuse, sexual harassment at work and in other institutions, trafficking in women, and forced prostitution. The declaration calls on states to enact structural reforms through a series of recommendations that include refraining from engaging in violence against women; refusing to invoke traditional customs or practices that countenance gender-based violence; either ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)—the international treaty binding states to advancing women’s equality—or rescinding reserva¬ tions previously associated with its ratification; using national legislation and sanctions to punish and redress acts of violence against women when they occur; using national plans of action to protect women against such violence; developing legal, political, administrative, and cultural mea¬ sures to protect women from violence; creating education programs designed to foster gender equality; working with a broad range of community partners to implement DEVAW; and adopting measures to facilitate and enhance the work of women’s movements and non-governmental organiza¬ tions dedicated to ending violence against women and advancing sex-based equality. The declaration also calls on the United Nations, through its agencies, to address the problem throughout all its operations. DEVAW is the product of years of advocacy by non¬ governmental organizations and women’s groups. In many countries, traditional attitudes and practices historically tolerated and even condoned violence against women. CEDAW, which was adopted in 1979, makes no explicit reference to violence against women. However, in 1982 the committee that monitors CEDAW recommended that all parties include in their periodic reports accounts of mea¬ sures that they have adopted to address the problem. In 1992 the committee adopted a more comprehensive recom¬ mendation enumerating steps that signator states should take to eliminate and address “gender-based violence.” However, not all states are party to CEDAW. In 1991 the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) recommended that the United Nations develop an international instrument addressing violence against women. Accordingly, the Economic and Social Coun¬ cil convened a meeting of experts that year in Vienna. Parti¬ cipants endorsed and drafted a declaration with the hope that it eventually would become a binding treaty on violence against women. During the following years, advocacy by non-governmental organizations and women’s groups helped build momentum for addressing violence against wo¬ men as an international human rights problem. A diverse group of advocates from all regions of the world worked diligently to ensure that the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna prioritized women’s human rights, including the issue of violence against women. The Declaration and Programme of Action confirmed at that

DEITIES: Goddesses

conference signaled the emerging consensus that violence against women was a human rights violation that reflected and perpetuated discrimination against women. The World Conference endorsed the draft of DEVAW, which the General Assembly adopted shortly thereafter. DEVAW makes a profound contribution to international human rights law by applying human rights principles to the realities of women’s lives. Nevertheless, it has been criticized for failing to address adequately the relationship between violence against women and other forms of in¬ equalities, such as those based on race and economics; for framing its directives as recommendations rather than as mandates; and for failing to require international standards that address the problem. Future advocacy will build on the declaration until violence against women in all its forms ceases to jeopardize women’s safety and equality. [See also Domestic Violence; Human Rights; and Rape.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, Penelope. “Globalization, Human Rights, and Critical Race Feminism: Voices from the Margins.” Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice 3 (Summer 2000): 373-401. Discussion of DEVAW in the context of critical race feminism. Charlesworth, Hilary. “ASIL Insight: The Declaration on the Elim¬ ination of All Forms of Violence against Women.” American Society of International Law Newsletter (June 1994). History of the declaration’s enactment and significance by a renowned international women’s human rights activist and scholar. Cook, Rebecca ]., ed. Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Compilation of articles addressing international human rights law and discrimination against women, with a focus on violence against women. Coomaraswamy, Radhika, and Lisa M. Kois. “Violence against Women.” In Women and International Human Rights Law, edited by Kelly D. Askin and Dorean M. Koenig, vol. 1, pp. 177-217. Ardsley, N.Y.: Transnational, 1999. Discussion of the declaration’s significance by a former United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women. Copelon, Rhonda. “International Human Rights Dimensions of Intimate Violence: Another Strand in the Dialectic of Feminist Lawmaking.” Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and Law 11 (2003): 865-876. History of international human rights advo¬ cacy to recognize violence against women. Peters, Julie, and Andrea Wolper, eds. Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 1995. Compilation of articles addressing international human rights law and discrimination against women, with emphasis on violence against women. Sullivan, Donna J. “Women’s Human Rights and the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights.” American Journal of International Law 88, no. 1 (1994): 152-167. History of advocacy efforts that culminated in the draft declaration. Thomas, Cheryl. “Domestic Violence.” In Women and Inter¬ national Human Rights Law, edited by Kelly D. Askin and Dorean M. Koenig, vol. 1, pp. 219-256. Ardsley, N.Y.: Trans¬ national, 1999. Traces the development of international human rights laws that address domestic violence. Julie Goldscheid

19

DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN. See Gouges, Olympe de.

DEITIES This entry consists of two subentries: Goddesses Goddess Myths

Goddesses The worship of goddesses has long been a global phenom¬ enon documented in a myriad of societies, both past and present. From Southeast Asia and Africa to Europe and the Americas, female deities have wielded their powers in both gentle and ruthless fashion—they are as equally capable of creating entire universes and succoring the sick as they are of decapitating their rivals and devouring young children. While goddesses have provided an age-old and important source of inspiration for worshippers, particularly women, the subject of goddess worship has often vexed scholars. Specialists debate precisely what a goddess is, how she differs from a god, whether her femininity is an essential part of her character, and how features that are attributed to female divinities possibly relate to traits of mortal women. Also unsettled is the question of when female deities were first worshipped in antiquity. Although scholars gen¬ erally accept that goddesses (with a small “g”)—often working in concert with male deities—were revered at least by 3500 b.c.e. in the Near East, there is no agreement on the emergence and evolution of a “Great Goddess,” an archetype of the female divine. Some writers argue that an all-embracing Great Goddess (with a capital “G”) was first recognized by the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe, approximately 40,000 years ago. Other specialists suggest that the notion of a Great Goddess of antiquity is a fiction of contemporary society, serving modern political and feminist agendas. Not surprisingly, efforts to categorize and (de) construct the histories of female deities have produced an enormous body of literature. Flawed as some of the literature is, taken in aggregate it does pose important questions about what place the feminine (as opposed to the masculine) had in early theological systems and what kinds of links can be posited between the concept of female divinity and the social roles and practices of women. Shared Traits, Past and Present. Female divinities are decidedly complex and have assumed countless guises and identities through time. Though diverse in character, they also share common traits worldwide and are often cast in

20

DEITIES: Goddesses

from the melding of a male deity and a female nymph, and Ardhanari-Ishvara, a Hindu deity known as “the Lord of both Male and Female,” is described as half man and half woman and is often depicted with a bare torso showing only

Taweret, Ancient Egyptian Goddess of Fertility. A statuette of Taweret, the goddess who assisted mothers during childbirth. Her front paws rest on a hieroglyphic sign reading sa or “protection,” c. 620 b.c.e. Egyptian Museum, Cairo/Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY

roles that were (and still are) distinctly different from those of male gods. Goddesses may work singly or in conjunction with com¬ panion deities, in many instances male consorts. The sexual and gendered identities of these deities, however, are not uniform. Sometimes their sexuality appears “conventional” (that is, their forms seem clearly female by Western standards); at other times they look decidedly ambiguous (that is, they have hermaphroditic or androgynous attributes). The Greek god-goddess Hermaphroditus, for example, exhibits both male and female sexual attributes, resulting

one female breast. The physical incarnations of goddesses vary in other ways as well. In their anthropomorphized forms they can be nude, seminude, or clothed in dazzling garments; crowned or adorned with specific attributes; clad in a mantle of serpents or a headdress of snakes; pregnant, giving birth, or holding a child; arrayed with multiple arms or heads; and standing, seated, or whirling in dance. Eastern goddesses are particularly lavish in their portrayals—Devi, an Indian goddess with many incarnations, is commonly represented with four faces, four arms, and a radiant diadem of shining colors, and Sarasvati, the many-armed goddess of fertility, prosperity, the arts, and learning, is recognized by her mount—a speckled peacock or swan—her fine dress, a crescent moon on her brow, and specific attributes (for example, manuscript, lyre, lotus) brandished by her multi¬ ple appendages. Alternately, goddesses might be personified as animals, hybrid creatures, or any number of natural symbols ranging from a watery mass to a rock. Ancient Egyptian goddesses, for example, are often depicted as ani¬ mal and human amalgams—Bastet, the goddess of home, pregnant women, and fire, is a cat-headed woman, and Sekhmet, an Egyptian warrior goddess, has the head of a lioness and the body of a woman and is said to exude a fiery glow from her body and the hot desert wind on her breath. Another popular Egyptian deity, Taweret, the patroness of childbirth, takes the form of a hippopotamus¬ headed pregnant female. Cult centers for goddesses were a regular feature of the ancient world and still exist in some countries. At least in antiquity, major goddesses often commanded impressive and multiple centers. The Greek goddess Hera, for example, had sanctuaries and temples throughout the Greek world. Other, sometimes “lesser” goddesses were modestly worshipped at home or at sacred places (for example, springs, caves, natural fissures) that were unela¬ borated by construction. Offerings were common, running the gamut from human and animal sacrifices, blood, wine, oil, first fruits, and harvests to an array of votive objects and relics. Viewed historically and somewhat reductively, god¬ desses have frequently been relegated by scholars and other writers to limited roles—creator, healer, consort, destroyer, and seductress. And while it is true that such underlying commonalities did (and still do) exist, the litera¬ ture tends to minimize the diversity embraced by female deities and underplay the fact that a single goddess could possess contradictory attributes. A warrior goddess, for example, could embody numerous other characteristics that

DEITIES: Goddesses

were unrelated to the notion of combat—Durga, the formidable warrior goddess of the Hindu pantheon, could litter a battlefield with severed limbs but also had close ties with motherhood and vegetal fertility. The powers of fertility and reproduction, be they celestial, human, or earthly, are traits assigned frequently to goddesses. Female divinities commonly appear in myths and stories as creators of the universe, either singly or in union with a male deity. The ancient Greeks describe Gaia as the Earth, who gave birth not only to the sky but also to a host of other important offspring; Dahomey myths in Africa recount stories of the goddess Mawu, who created the world, mountains, valleys, rivers, animals, and people; the Akkadian goddess Mami designed both men and women out of pieces of clay; the Sumerians credit the god¬ dess Nammu with giving birth to heaven and earth and then supervising the rest of creation; Nu Kwa, a Chinese goddess, carefully crafted a race of golden people; and one of the incarnations of the Indian goddess Devi keeps the world going—if she lets her eyes close for even a moment, the world will disappear.

21

human heads. Murdered as a baby, she exudes destruc¬ tive forces alongside her more creative roles. Both Oya, a goddess known from the Yoruba, and the Polynesian goddess Pele, the Volcano Goddess, possess dual sides: mother anddestroyer. More thoroughly sinister is the Aztec Tlillan, Snake Woman, who lived within the earth and demanded ongoing rations of “succulent” babies to guarantee rain and fertile fields. The role of goddess as seductress also appears to be universal, usually encompassing (at least from the male per¬ spective) threatening female elements that need to be tamed. Aphrodite has become the Western symbol of the temptress, and the Greek Sirens—half women, half birds (who, strictly speaking, were classed as nymphs, not goddesses)—lured men to their deaths through melodious song. The potential treachery inherent in seduction seems reserved for female deities; parallels for male gods as sexual tempter appear much less frequently and are cast slightly differently. Zeus, for example, is usually presented more as a philanderer than a seducer.

Closely related to the role of goddesses as creators of an overall universe are stories that link goddesses to earthly (and human) fertility. Metaphors of plowing and planting are often employed to underscore agricultural connections. In one of her incarnations, the Sumerian goddess Inanna (later transformed into the Babylonian Ishtar) is associated with images of plowed and irrigated fields; the connections among Demeter, Persephone, and earthly fruitfulness are well known; Chicomecoatl, the Great Corn Goddess of the Aztecs, watches over the harvest and women; and African myths are filled with references to goddesses who assist in fertility of all kinds. Images of goddesses as healer and as protector of animals are also universal and allied with the more nurturing aspects of the female nature. Healer goddesses abound both chronologically and geographically, some associated with the sanctity of water (for example, Celtic healer goddesses such as Sirona and Sulis, whose cults are located near springs). Goddesses in the guises of a “mistress of animals” and ruler of wild nature are a familiar trope found in the popular religions of Scandinavia, Siberia, the Caucasus, North America, Ireland, and Japan. The more destructive sides of female deities (reflecting the darker side of the feminine, sometimes associated with witchcraft) surface frequently. Athena, of course, is well known as the Greek goddess of warfare, as is Morrigan, the Irish goddess of battle and conflict. Morrigan is also a shapeshifter feared for her ability to change between human and animal incarnations (for example, a long black eel, dark raven, or sharp-toothed wolf) and from a vengeful crone to an enchanting young girl. The Hindu goddess Devi-Kali is depicted as the Black Goddess, arrayed in blood and

Aztec Agriculture Goddess. A sculpture of Chicomecoatl, a god¬ dess of sustenance, with amacalli headdress and holding two ears of maize, Mexico, c. 1500. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

22

DEITIES: Goddesses

The more threatening powers of goddesses are boldly underscored when female deities are pitted against their male counterparts, who are often called upon to contain a goddess’s lustful nature or avenging spirit. In one early and well-known myth, the Babylonian Tiamat, a great watery mass and primordial mother, mobilizes the forces of chaos in a conflict of wills during the early stages of the world. After unsuccessful negotiations, Tiamat and the god Marduk are pitched in armed battle; the victorious Marduk cleaves the goddess’s body in half, uses those pieces to form heaven and earth, and ultimately restores peace to the universe. The Great Goddess Debate. Although goddesses are most often associated with ancient polytheistic religions, these divine forms have not been sidelined in the modern world. One of the more interesting resurgences is the so-called Goddess movement embraced by numerous New Age adherents, some feminist writers, and Wicca followers (Wicca is a neo-pagan, earth-centered religion based on nature and benign witchcraft). While many scholars tend to dismiss the movement as trivial or even lunatic, the debates are highly instructive; they reflect important ideas and behaviors that are deeply embedded in the global politics of gender, particularly debates surrounding the origins of sexism, women’s repression, and modes of male and female power. The history of the modern Goddess movement is complex, with roots extending back at least to the nineteenth century. Johann Jakob Bachofen, a German jurist and classicist, first proposed the notion that human society was initially com¬ munal, then moved through a stage where women ruled supreme; this society was finally supplanted by a patriarchal society (Das Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, Germany, 1861). Bachofen’s thesis was further supported in Sir James Frazer’s influential work The Golden Bough (London, 1890, 1907-1915) and by the work of other important an¬ thropologists, such as E. B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, Lon¬ don, 1871) and L. H. Morgan (.Ancient Society, London, 1877). Nineteenth-century explorations into early religion perpetuated related ideas about female power in early soci¬ eties, viewed, however, through the lens of female god¬ desses as all-powerful divine archetypes. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century, though, that the rule of women in myth received significant play, to some degree in the writings of Joseph Campbell, a renown mythographer (for example, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first pub¬ lished in 1949), and more extensively in publications such as The Great Mother (Princeton, N.J., 1955) by Erich Neumann, a student of Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psych¬ iatrist who pioneered work on unconscious archetypes; The Eye Goddess (London, 1957) by O. G. S. Crawford, a well-respected British archaeologist; and The Cult of the Mother Goddess (London, 1959) by E. O. James.

The Goddess movement owes much to these earlier texts and has been refueled by the controversial works of the late Marija Gimbutas^ an archaeologist who began her career working in the prehistory of eastern Europe. According to Goddess advocates, early societies were largely matriar¬ chal, pacific, and egalitarian. Prehistoric cultures of Europe (beginning as early as 40,000 years ago) and later sites in the Mediterranean and the Near East (c. 7,000 to 5,000 years ago) serve as exemplars. Both the vast collection of female figurines discovered in those regions as well as later texts, which recount stories of the life-giving and nurturing powers of female deities, are employed to suggest an early worship of and belief in a primordial Goddess. This Goddess is seen as representing the more maternal, intui¬ tive, and “feminine” facet of humanity, as opposed to its rational, authoritarian, and aggressive “male” side. Equally important, this woman-centered religion is viewed as a direct reflection or expression of a harmonious society that valued spirituality, nature, and an egalitarian ideal. Even¬ tually, according to this scenario, parts of Europe and the Mediterranean experienced a fundamental theological and cultural reorientation: by the middle of the fourth millennium, these early matriarchal societies were trans¬ formed by mass migrations of warlike, male-dominated IndoEuropean pastoralists who brought with them patriarchal religions. Not all Goddess advocates, however, paint an uncompli¬ cated picture. Some suggest a more nuanced view that accommodates a complex primordial Goddess embodying evil and destructive aspects as well as more creative and healing facets. Indeed these authors recognize that this early Goddess probably had numerous faces—as virgin, mother, matron, and crone. Differing opinions notwith¬ standing, the Goddess proponents are all bound together by a common perspective: there was a time when women, nature, and earth were celebrated, when the biosphere was respected, not desecrated, and when authority and power were more evenly distributed between the sexes. The Goddess movement writers yearn for a return to this “paradise lost.” Those who oppose the Great Goddess model, many of whom reside in academia, charge the movement with reinventing a past based on unwarranted assumptions. They argue instead that there is no unassailable evidence that any of the early figurines represent goddesses, let alone an allencompassing Mother or Great Goddess. In addition, they maintain, it is risky to assign unitary significance to these early female images, which are often quite varied in form and sometimes have no sexual indicators. Other inferences are seen as equally misguided. For example, even if these anthropomorphic depictions did represent goddesses, it does not follow that the alleged central position of females

DEITIES: Goddesses

in the religious sphere necessarily reflected the elevated status of women in the social sphere; female power in the theological realm of many known societies coexists with the subordinate status of women. lust as disquieting to many academics is the fact that the Goddess proponents overlook an essentializing aspect of their thesis. The Goddess movement explicitly attributes high status and authority to women and their divine counterparts as primarily owing to a fact of nature—their reproductive capabilities. For many scholars, the continued promotion of such an idea locks women within domestic and child-rearing arenas, which most cultures view as insignificant and irrelevant to the process of cultural change. Thus defined, women are seen as controlling the small private ’ worlds of society, not the dominant and more powerful “public” spheres. The Goddess movement there¬ fore is said to cast women, almost unwittingly and paradoxi¬ cally, as cultural objects rather than as cultural agents. The debate between the Goddess proponents and the academic skeptics becomes heated precisely because so much seems to be at stake. The discourse is as much about the status and nature of female power in the modern world and the origins of sexism as it is about aspects of the femi¬ nine in ancient sacred spheres. Tensions arise along several axes, not least from a disagreement about what some scholars believe should be labeled “metaphor” as opposed to “reality.” Those who dismiss the Goddess movement would rather see the idea of a primal Goddess employed as a historical and even useful metaphor. Goddess devotees prefer to reify the myth, situating the Goddess and a pacifistic culture in actual time and space. Cast as reality, this paradise lost stands a better chance of being reclaimed;if it existed once, it can exist again. Whether a resolution between the two sides is possible remains to be seen. But perhaps agreement is not the goal. What may be more important is simply the continuing evolution of this vital discourse, however contentious. The controversies generated so far have encouraged writers, scholars, and feminists of all stripes to probe more deeply into the origins, growth, and structures of early religions, to explore how gender is defined in both the suprahuman and the human spheres, and to consider how modes of female and male power relate to one another. [See also Religion; Shamanism; Temple Women; and World Religions.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baring, Anne, and Jules Cashford. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London and New York: Viking Arcana, 1991. Mostly in the camp of metanarratives that seek to explain the ongoing evolution of the Great Goddess. The book focuses almost exclusively on Western traditions from prehistory to the modern age.

23

Billington, Sandra, and Miranda Green, eds. The Concept of the Goddess. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. An uneven but good collection of essays by academics on the concept of the Goddess. The geographic expanse is impressive and includes discussions of European, Celtic, Scandinavian, Norse, Roman, and Irish traditions as well as modern beliefs and practices in the Caucasus and Japan. Especially thoughtful is Juliette Wood’s discussion on the theoretical models that inform Goddess studies in New Age religion. Conkey, Margaret W., and Ruth E. Tringham. “Archaeology and the Goddess: Exploring the Contours of Feminist Archaeology.” In Feminisms in the Academy: Rethinking the Discipline, edited by Domna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Stewart, pp. 199-247. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Eller, Cynthia. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future. Boston: Beacon, 2000. An excellent, thoughtful, and critical analysis of the history of the idea of matriarchy. Gimbutas, Marija. Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 7000-3500 BC: Myths, Legends, and Cult Images. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. This and the following work are two of the now classic books that were quickly embraced by nonacademic Goddess writers to support the thesis that a belief in an all-encompassing Great Goddess existed in Neolithic Europe. The books are controversial and problematic but have been highly influential. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989. Goodison, Lucy, and Christine Morris, eds. Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. A clearly written and well-illustrated set of essays by archaeologists and historians who explore the question of whether the early existence of a Great Mother Goddess can be supported archaeologically. The civilizations covered include predynastic and dynastic Egypt, “Old Europe,” the Aegean, Malta, the Near East, Israel, and Turkey. Kinsley, David. The Goddesses’ Mirror: Visions of the Divine from East and West. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. An excellent and accessible comparative survey of ten goddesses from Eastern and Western cultures. The chapters cover both past and present traditions as well as evidence from elite and popular sources. Loraux, Nicole. “What Is a Goddess?” In From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints, edited by Paula Schmitt Pantel, pp. 11-44. Vol. 1 of A History of Women in the West, edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992. A provocative and well-framed discussion about some of the “big” questions surrounding the definition of a goddess. Although the author relies primarily on evidence from ancient Greece, the chapter explores much broader topics, particularly the roles of gender, maternity, and the feminine in religion. Meskell, Lynn. “Goddesses, Gimbutas, and ‘New Age’ Archae¬ ology.” Antiquity 69 (1995): 74-86. Stone, Merlin. When God Was a Woman. New York: Dial Press, 1976. One of the earlier “Goddess” books to gather together myths and artistic expressions of ancient goddesses and to discuss their implications for matriarchal and patriarchal modes of thought. Talalay, Lauren E. “A Feminist Boomerang: The Great Goddess of Greek Prehistory.” Gender and History 6 (1994): 165-183. Lauren E. Talalay

24

DEITIES: Goddess Myths

Goddess Myths Female divinities are prominent actors in a wide variety of traditional tales, conceptualized in both time-honored gender roles and roles that invert normal expectations of female behavior. Traditional tales can shift with time and telling, allowing multiple roles to the same goddess. Myths are traditional tales that serve to mediate between human beings and the unknown. They can explain the creation of the world, account for natural phenomena, and regulate the relationship between deities and human beings. Myths can also serve specific cultural functions: they justify the power structures of human societies, encourage a sense of group identity, and promote specific behavioral traits by advertising divine role models. Many

human societies acknowledge a large pantheon of de ities, female and male, and so it is no surprise that female deities, or goddesses, are featured prominently in a variety of myths. In some myths female divinities fill roles that replicate the traditional roles of human women, for exam¬ ple, they are wives and mothers, or are celebrated for typically feminine qualities such as submissiveness and nur¬ turing. In other myths female deities function in ways that invert the normal expectations of female roles, for example, they represent violence or death, or they are active in positions not traditionally considered feminine, such as warriors, hunters, and founders of ethnic groups. In almost every human culture myth develops within an oral tradition. Oral transmission of myth admits multiple

Bhadrakali. Bhadrakali, the goddess of both destruction and beneficence, is worshipped by Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. She stands upon a prostrate man, brandishing a variety of weapons, but in one of her eight hands she holds a lotus flower, a symbol of grace and purity, Basohli, India, c. 1665. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Purchase F1984.42

DEITIES: Goddess Myths

versions of a tale whose origins can rarely be pinpointed. This circumstance markedly skews our knowledge: myth in prehistory is closed to us, and even when a myth is committed to writing, leaving some enduring record of the tale, variations in oral traditions and popular culture con¬ tinue to circulate. Because of this, a given version of a myth often reflects the perspective of the appropriate role for a feminine actor at the time the myth was recorded in permanent form and may not fully indicate the multiple characters of a female divinity. Myth plays a more signifi¬ cant role in polytheistic religious systems based on tradi¬ tional practices than in monotheistic systems that derive their authority from a single text or prophet, such as Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam.

Goddess Myths and Traditional Female Roles. Female sexual and reproductive abilities formed the basis of several categories of myth. The female role in procreation is often recognized through creation stories. In some cases this is accomplished through the actions of individual goddesses, while in other traditions, the concept of the feminine is not personified as a discrete deity, but celebrated as a principle that contributes to the creation and to the world. In the Greek tradition, the world was originally an unformed mass (chaos) that was separated into earth, a goddess, and sky, a god. The union of these two produced the first race of superhuman beings, the Titans, who then created the Greek Olympian gods by normal sexual union. Hinduism records a number of myths of cosmogony, but in each the common theme is that the world begins through the sexual activity, either through incest or masturbation, of a powerful creator god, and the female element provides sexual stimulation and a womb, which can be viewed as earth. In Chinese mythology too the world begins as unformed chaos, shaped like an egg, which breaks open and separates into the constituent parts of the masculine yang, or sky, and the feminine yin, or earth. lapanese mythology described the original male and female gods Izanagi and Izanami; their union produces the goddess Amaterasu and her brother Susanowo. The union of these two deities produces further deities and eventually the imperial line of lapan. It is not inevitable that creation stories utilize a mother earth figure—in ancient Egypt, the earth was conceptualized as male. However, the notion that cosmogonic creation has its roots in gendered activity to which both female and male elements contribute seems very widespread. Other myths feature a goddess’s association with human sexuality and reproduction. The Greek divinity Aphrodite (Roman Venus) was celebrated for her ability to arouse erotic desire and ensure fertility. The intense power of erotic attraction could have consequences beyond a simple love affair: Aphrodite, for example, was considered to be a key cause of the Trojan War, an essential Greek legendary

25

tradition, in which the passion of the Trojan prince Paris for Helen, the wife of Menelaus of Sparta, ignited a ten-year conflict. An amusing reversal of this power was recounted in the legend of Aphrodite and Anchises. In this case it was the goddess herself who was seized with erotic desire for a mortal man, resulting in the birth of the Trojan hero Aeneas. In Hindu mythology erotic love formed a key element in the story of divine couples, such as Lakshmi, wife of Vishnu, and Parvarti, wife of Siva. Here eroticism serves to reinforce and celebrate the marriage bond, in contrast to the Greek Aphrodite whose erotic powers were often a disruptive influence leading to adultery. In the tradi¬ tion of ancient Mesopotamia, the important female divinity Inanna (later called Ishtar) could be a seductive force to benefit or harm humanity. The position of wife lay at the heart of many tales told about goddesses, although the personalities and social roles of divine wives vary greatly. In Hindu mythology, the wives Lakshmi and Parvarti serve as complements to their husbands and help tame the threatening imagery of their spouses into a more domestic form as husband and head of household. An even more intense version of the ideal wife is Sita, wife of Rama. She accompanies him through many trials and tribulations, takes all of his faults onto herself, and suffers ordeals to prove her chastity and faithfulness to him. The Egyptian goddess Isis is also famed for her devotion to her husband, Osiris: when Osiris is killed and dismembered by the evil god Seth, Isis gathers up the pieces, and eventually her devotion is able to resus¬ citate Osiris. In all of these myths, the goddess stands as a paradigm of proper wifely behavior to young women. In the Greek tradition the role of wife and matron is allotted to the goddess Hera, wife of the principal male Greek deity Zeus. Her image reveals both good and bad qualities. In early Greek epic she is presented primarily as a shrew and a nag, constantly angry with her husband for his frequent infidelities and regularly attempting to assert power over him. Although powerless to control her hus¬ band’s behavior, she used her divine authority to destroy her husband’s (usually unwilling) lovers. In Greek cult practice, however, she was a powerful figure, often wor¬ shipped in her own right, and her marriage to Zeus was held up as a model of the strong bond between husband and wife that forms the core of the household and the key stabilizing relationship in society. This role was empha¬ sized even more strongly in Hera’s Roman counterpart Juno, who was a patron of marriage and supported women in their role as matron of the household. In this case the goddess’s married state could be an empowering model for women. Beyond marriage, goddesses were renowned for their role as mother. The Egyptian goddess Isis was honored not only as a wife, but also as the mother of the god Horus. Her act of

26

DEITIES: Goddess Myths

Amaterasu, Shinto Goddess of the Sun. A nineteenth-century woodblock print by Utagawa ICunisada depicts Amaterasu shining light across the earth. According to Shinto myth, Amaterasu retired into a cave for a period of time, casting the earth in darkness. When she reemerged, she brought back the light by looking into a magical mirror (right). Victoria and Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY

nursing her son saved the weak child, and this maternal love and concern served as a metaphor not only of the devoted mother but also of the goddess’s concern and care for all humanity. Similarly the Chinese Buddhist goddess Kuan-yin is widely celebrated for her kindness and compas¬ sion to her human followers. Many tales were told about her ability to respond to prayers and her power to ensure ferti¬ lity and assist human women in childbirth. An important narrative myth connected with her, the legend of Miao Shan, seems an incongruous inversion of the goddess’s sphere of influence, since the legend tells of a royal princess who shuns an arranged marriage to live as a celibate nun. However, the princess retains her love and compassion for humanity and, after many trials, including death in some versions, she is transformed into Kuan-yin. A goddess can also be celebrated as the wife and mother of a mortal. In many traditions, this does not diminish her status, but makes her the mother of an important hero, one who often takes on a role as savior or founder; thus the goddess’s fertility gives a divine ancestor to a local champion or ethnic group. In the Hindu epic Mahabarata, the goddess DraupadT is married to all five Pandava brothers, and her divine powers eventually enable them to defeat evil and cause the world to be reincarnated in its present form. The Greek goddess Thetis, a minor deity of the sea, gains status through her marriage to the mortal Peleus: their son Achilles becomes the great Greek hero of the Trojan War.

An extension of the deity’s character as mother is the part played by a goddess in ensuring agricultural fertility. This was achieved in various ways. The Hindu goddess Sita, wife of Rama, was a symbol of agricultural fertility through her identity as wife and mother. Her name means “furrow,” or ploughed line, and the marriage of Rama and Sita comes to symbolize both sexual union and the fertility of the earth. In contrast, Demeter, the Greek goddess most closely associated with agricultural fertility, functions effectively without a male consort. Her closest relationship is with her daughter, Persephone, and the story of Persephone’s rape by and eventual marriage to the god of the underworld, Hades, and her annual return to her mother, are closely tied to the Greek view of the progression of the seasons and the return of agricultural fertility to a barren earth. A similar legend of withdrawal and return is connected with the Japanese goddess Amaterasu, also an independent figure. The goddess is the bringer of natural bounty, rice, and fish, to humankind, but when she was attacked by her brother Susanowo, she withdrew into a cave, causing the death of plants and animals. Only after she was lured out of the cave by a trick could light and fertility return to the earth.

Goddess Myths That Invert Traditional Female Roles. Goddesses can appear in myth as the polar opposite of the traditional nurturing female role. In Hindu tradition the goddess Kali is famed as a bloodthirsty deity associated with violence and death; she is normally shown wearing a necklace of human skulls. Despite her formidable

DEITIES: Goddess Myths

appearance, she can be helpful to humankind, since she is one of the few Hindu deities who defeats demons. In one story Durga is attacked by demons; she rubs her forehead and Kali springs out to defeat the demon. In another tradition, the goddess Parvarti is asked to fight a demon who cannot be killed by a male; she transforms herself into Kali, who sucks the blood from the demon’s body. Although she is a frightening figure, symbolizing blood and death, Kali is a necessary part of the world order, just as death is. This is perhaps the most extreme example of the destructive goddess, but it is not unique. In Greek tradition Persephone, daughter of the goddess Demeter, goddess of agricultural fertility, becomes queen of the dead. When Persephone is taken to the underworld to become the bride of Hades, the god of death, she is transformed into a frightening figure who is the opposite of the agricultural fertility and renewal that her mother represents. Female divinities could also be celebrated as figures of power whose bold and independent actions replicate expectations of masculine behavior. The Hindu goddess Durga is a multiple-armed warrior who saves the gods and the universe by defeating the buffalo-headed demon. Although beautiful, Durga has taken a vow of perpetual virginity; when the buffalo demon attempted to seduce her, she defeats and beheads him. Such a figure is reminis¬ cent of the Greek goddess Athena, also celebrated for her virginity. Athena too is a beautiful woman—her remark¬ able flashing eyes always excite attention—but she shows her independence from all masculine entanglements through her refusal to marry and her prowess in battle. Even her birth repudiates the female role in childbirth, since she comes into being, fully grown and fully armed, by springing forth from the head of her father, Zeus. She often comes to the aid of major heroes in Greek saga, such as Achilles, Odysseus, or Heracles, but she remains aloof from any entangling engagements, human or divine. Another inde¬ pendent goddess is the hunting goddess, a very widespread archetype that includes the Greek Artemis, the Caucasus Dali, and the Japanese Yamanokami. This figure, almost always a beautiful woman, protects the young animals in her domain but also guides the hunter in his pursuit of game. Several tales tell of the hunter’s need to propitiate this goddess, and the punishment inflicted on him if he does not do so. The paradoxical combination of seductive beauty and martial qualities has the effect of emphasizing femininity in the deity, yet containing the dangerously disruptive effects of sexuality.

Shifting Functions of Goddess Myths. Narrative tales often allow multiple readings, enabling the same deity to exemplify different roles. The legend of Demeter and the rape of her daughter offers a case in point. This myth was used to explain the change of the agricultural progression of seasons, from a season of barrenness to one of fertility,

27

and it also served to explain the foundation of Demeter’s principal ritual, the Eleusinian mysteries. Yet the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (composed during the eighth to the sixth centuries b.c.e.) recounts the tale from quite a different standpoint: this work stresses the close bond between mother and daughter and the social uprooting of the mother when her daughter is taken from her for a patrilocal mar¬ riage. The legend of Isis and Osiris offers another good example. The death of Osiris, the recovery of his body by Isis, and his eventual rebirth could be seen as symbolic of the natural cycle of life, death, and rebirth along the Nile River. During the early phases of Egyptian history the le¬ gend became closely associated with the divinized person of the Egyptian king, the pharaoh, and the narrative was used to explain the death and eventual rebirth of the king as a god. After Egypt lost its independence, the political overtones of Isis disappeared but the legend continued to have private meaning, since it promised salvation and rebirth for the goddess’s followers. The legend of Miao Shan and her evolution into the Chinese goddess Kuan-yin is particularly striking in this regard. The early versions of the story, developed under Buddhist influence, stress Miao Shan’s intense desire for a life of contemplation and with¬ drawal from the world, forgoing the traditional woman’s path of marriage and childbearing to follow a spiritual path, much as a Buddhist nun would. As the story develops, Miao Shan’s father, a king, tries hard to dissuade her from her choice of religious vocation; to do so, he cruelly mis¬ treats his daughter, whereupon he becomes gravely ill as a punishment. When Miao Shan learns of his illness, she sacrifices her eyes and limbs to save him. Thus she shows the filial piety and devotion to one’s parents that typify the established Confucian values of China, a circumstance that reconciles the Miao Shan figure with a more traditional Chinese view of appropriate female behavior. Thus the fluid character of myth allows goddesses to be conceptualized in a variety of guises and social roles, some closely associated with the roles of human women, and some not. Traditional tales could shift to exemplify different aspects of a goddess’s personality and power, reflecting the changing demands that people placed on a female deity. Even when the goddess is no longer an active part of a society’s religious practice, for example, in Greece or Egypt, the myths rarefy disappear altogether, signaling the continuing importance that female divinities had and con¬ tinue to have in human belief systems. [See also World Religions.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Billington, Sandra, and Miranda Green, eds. The Concept of the Goddess. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Translated by John Raffan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985.

28

DEITIES: Goddess Myths

Foley, Helene P., ed. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Kinsley, David. The Goddesses’ Mirror: Visions of the Divine from East and West. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Kinsley, David. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 Leeming, David. A Dictionary of Asian Mythology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Sandars, N. K., trans. Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1971. Werner, E. T. C. Myths and Legends of China. 1922. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1976. Lynn E. Roller

DELEDDA, GRAZIA (1871-1936), Italian novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926. Grazia Deledda did not actively participate in the Italian feminist movement, yet many of her novels reflect an acute awareness of women’s lives in late nineteenthcentury Italy, specifically the conflicts between insular traditions and changing gender roles. Born in the city of Nuoro, Sardinia, Deledda received an elementary school education supplemented by readings from her father’s library. Actively discouraged from writing professionally, from the age of seventeen Deledda sub¬ mitted works to women’s magazines under various pen names. Her work received critical attention by the turn of the century, and she published some of her best work between 1900 and 1915. Much of her work defies literary classification: it combines late Romanticism, folklore, and Italian verismo (realism) and decadentismo (decadence). At the time, many critics dismissed Deledda’s eclectic style for its failure to fit into any of the popular literary schools, although some admired her detailed observations of the life and customs of Sardinia. Many of her novels focused on the inevitable collision between the seemingly ancient tradi¬ tions of Sardinia and the demands of the modern Italian state—in particular, the conflict between individual desire and the social order. This framework enabled Deledda to examine ways of representing difference, transgression, and marginalization. Although Deledda attempted to explore these themes as specifically Sardinian issues, her novels frequently relate them to women’s roles within modern Italian society. Her work analyzes women from a socio-anthropological perspective—as in La madre (1920; English trans., The Mother, 1923) and Cenere (1904; English trans., Ashes, 2004)—or from an autobiographical one, as in La chiesa della solitudine (1936; English trans., The Church of Solitude, 2002) and Cosima (1937; English trans., 1988).

Female characters either are self-sacrificing for no tangible benefit or are transgressive rebels whose marginalization allows them a pertain freedom. In either case, many of Deledda’s heroines demonstrate how, women’s exclusion from an unjust society becomes the lesser of two evils. Feminist overtones in her work, along with Deledda’s ongoing commentary on gender issues, have received little critical attention, however, and for many critics Deledda is still not considered a major Italian literary figure. Although Deledda wished to create a characteristically Sardinian lit¬ erature, her work was recognized for its universal themes. She was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1926, the second Italian and the second woman to receive the honor. The ensuing publicity from this honor contrasted sharply with Deledda’s intensely private persona. Deledda shunned the limelight in favor of a private life in Rome with her family and her writing, a lifetime production of nearly fifty novels and many short stories. Her brief forays into feminist politics (regarding suffrage and divorce) ended in disaster; she was heavily criticized for speaking out for women’s rights. Her final autobiographical work, Cosima, vividly depicted the adversity and struggle that Deledda faced as a female author growing up in rural isolation and then com¬ peting in a mostly male world of literature. After a struggle against cancer, Deledda died in 1936; her personal and literary legacy has yet to be acknowledged sufficiently. However, her life and work clearly demonstrated an on¬ going conflict between writing and femininity, as well as her resistance to conform. [See also Italy and Literature.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amoia, Alba. Twentieth-Century Italian Women Writers: The Femi¬ nine Experience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. Balducci, Carolyn. A Self-Made Woman: Biography of Nobel-PrizeWinner Grazia Deledda. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Briziarelli, Susan. “Woman as Outlaw: Grazia Deledda and the Politics of Gender.” MLN 110 (January 1995): 20-31. Dolfi, Anna. Grazia Deledda. Milan: Mursia, 1979. Piano, Maria Giovanna. Onora la madre: Autorita femminile nella narrativa di Grazia Deledda. Turin, Italy: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1998. Carol Helstosky

DE MILLE, AGNES (1905-1993) dancer, choreog¬ rapher, director, and author. Agnes de Mille was born in New York City on 18 September 1905 to a distinguished family. Her grandfather, Henry George, was a renowned economist; his wife, Beatrice, became one of the first female theatrical agents in the United States. William Churchill deMille, Agnes’s father, was a well-regarded playwright and

DE MILLE, AGNES

director, and her uncle Cecil B. DeMille was the celebrated Hollywood director. Although the de Milles counted among their friends some of modern dance s most renowned female pioneers— including Ruth St. Dennis and Isadora Duncan—they did not encourage Agnes’s passion for ballet. As she stated wryly in her biography Dance to the Piper, “It was unusual for a daughter of such a household to choose dancing as a career. I was brought up ... a lady, and ladies, my father knew, did not dance ’ (1952, p. 9). She was already fourteen when she finally began formal lessons, and she had to con¬ tend with a short, thick-figured body that defied classical norms. Nonetheless, she persevered, dancing at every op¬ portunity and staging amateur performances. To pacify her family, de Mille enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles, majoring in English. She would later put this education to excellent use as one of the foremost writers and lecturers on dance. Through the 1920s and 1930s, de Mille struggled as an independent choreographer, presenting recitals in New York and Europe, many of which she produced and financed her¬ self. Critics praised her choreography, astute sense of comedy, and remarkable ability to create nuanced characters, but with no established American ballet company to turn to, options for showcasing her work were few. She faced disheartening setbacks, including a failed opportunity to choreograph her uncle Cecil’s Cleopatra in 1934: the two strong-willed artists clashed, and he fired her—a humiliation she never forgot or forgave. De Mille’s early short sketches, done in the 1920s, explore a range of themes that resonated throughout her more mature work. Her enduring interest in Americana, evident in her 1927 ballet ’49, later came to fruition in such fully realized masterpieces as her breakthrough ballet Rodeo (1942), done for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. A year after that popular classic, she transformed the Broad¬ way landscape forever with her dances for Oklahoma! (1943), ushering in the era of the ballet musical. At the time, the musical theater establishment was domi¬ nated by men accustomed to choosing female dancers for their looks (or their sexual availability) rather than their skills. De Mille insisted on trained dancers, frequently enraging producers, directors, and sometimes writers. Partly through her efforts, Broadway’s “dance directors” finally achieved the more exalted status of choreographers. And, although she was not the first to integrate movement and narrative into a cohesive whole (among others, George Balanchine had done so earlier), it was de Mille whose precedent finally stuck. With the success of Oklahoma!, followed by One Touch of Venus that same year, Bloomer Girl (1944), Carousel (1945), Brigadoon (1947), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), de Mille became one of musical theater’s most prominent figures.

29

Although vivid and fully realized, de Mille’s richly drawn female characters were not, in any modern sense, feminist. The feisty cowgirl in Rodeo, for example, ultimately aban¬ dons her riding gear for a dress in order to win her man. At the same time, she never quite fits in with the other simpering females of the dance and, in the end, forgoes the original object of her desire for someone as individual as she. Barbara Barker, in “Agnes de Mille’s Heroines of the Forties,” suggests that her heroines “struggle with problems central to de Mille’s life” (1989, p. 140). De Mille worked at a time when choreographers, even in the most classical companies, were searching to find a truly “American” style of ballet. A result of this quest was the creation of Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre) in 1940. De Mille was a founding member, despite an uneasy relationship with the company that persisted throughout her life. Nevertheless, the company not only took over Rodeo, as well as her earlier comic masterpiece Three Virgins and a Devil (1934), it commissioned (among others) her first ballet, Black Ritual (1940), which brought African American dancers to Ballet Theatre for the first time (her Four Marys in 1965 did so again); The Harvest According (1952); The Informer (1988); and The Other (1992), her final work. At the same time, she formed her own touring company in 1973, called the Heritage Dance Theatre. De Mille was a prolific writer who authored a series of autobiographies including Dance to the Piper (1951) and Reprieve (1981), about the debilitating stroke she suffered in 1975. She also wrote books on dance history and other subjects, including To a Young Dancer (1962), America Dances (1980), and a biography of the choreographer Martha Graham (1992). Agnes de Mille died on 7 October 1993 following a stroke.

[See also Dance.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barker, Barbara. “Agnes de Mille’s Heroines of the Forties.” In Society of Dance History Scholars, Proceedings, the 12th Annual Conference, 1989, pp. 140-147. Barker, Barbara. “Agnes de Mille, Liberated Expatriate, and the American Suite, 1938.” Dance Chronicle 19, no. 2 (1996)■ 113-150. de Mille, Agnes. And Promenade Home. New York: Little, Brown 1958. de Mille, Agnes. Dance to the Piper: Memoirs of the Ballet. London: H. Hamilton, 1951. de Mille, Agnes. Reprieve. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. de Mille, Agnes. Speak to Me, Dance with Me. New York: Little, Brown, 1973. de Mille, Agnes. Where the Wings Grow. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Easton, Carol. No Intermissions: The Life of Agnes de Mille. Boston: Little Brown, 1996. Karen Backstein

30

DEMOCRACY

DEMOCRACY. The term “democracy” derives from its Greek origins in demos (the people) and kratos (rule) and refers to a form of government based on rule by the people with popular sovereignty as its defining feature. A paradox in democracy between its ideological commitment to the people’s inclusion and the actual exclusion of many from the political arena becomes evident when looking at this governing system through a gendered lens. Women’s on¬ going local, national, and international struggles for free¬ dom, equality, and inclusion push democracies toward these goals that represent standards against which to meas¬ ure their development. Women effectively leverage political power by exposing this gap between democracy’s ideals and reality, transforming the meaning of popular sovereignty, citizenship, and democratic values to include diversity and tolerance. Women, rendered politically invisible through¬ out much of political history, now play a key role in it as symbols of democratic freedom and equality on a global stage where democracy overshadows alternative forms of government and extends into the process of democratiza¬ tion. Democracy, as women’s experience with it reveals, is a concept constantly under construction, reflecting a political system that should respond to dynamic historical contexts and pressures from different groups claiming their right to participate in governing. During the ancient and medieval periods, women, along¬ side democracy, lingered at the margins of political thinking that, nonetheless, foreshadowed how later democratic thinkers would justify women’s exclusion and others would contest it. The ancient Greeks, particularly Plato (427-347 b.c.e.) in the Republic, generally dismissed pure democracy as a viable governing system, arguing that the people’s dir¬ ect political participation includes too many competing interests that cause constant chaos and conflict. Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) established the social order required for stability, in part, by granting rational male citizens access to the polis (political community) and locating women, along with slaves and children, in the oikos (home). Women’s biological capacity to reproduce children, align¬ ing them with the physical world of nature, led the ancients to view women as unable to control their emotions suffi¬ ciently enough to exercise the reason and virtue necessary for political decision making. Sappho (b. between 630 and 612 b.c.e. and d. 570 b.c.e.), the ancient Greek lyric poet, provides a rare female voice from this period that focuses on the positive value of women, conveying a deep, even homo¬ erotic, love for them. Thinkers of the medieval period, extending from the Roman Empire’s collapse to the sixteenth century’s Refor¬ mation, linked women more explicitly with the chaos and disorder threatening efforts to consolidate territories into countries under one monarch authorized to rule by God.

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), a republican political thinker, depicted women in The Prince (1532) as represent¬ ing the uncontrollable forces of Fortune or chance that men and their virtues simply cannot contain. The French author Christine de Pizan (1364-1430), writing early in the fif¬ teenth century, challenged such medieval views in The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), where she creates an all-female utopian society in which women possess the reason and virtue empowering them to govern a peaceful, orderly community. The works of Sappho and de Pizan complicate general assumptions about women and their perceived absence during these early periods. The origins of Western political thought, nonetheless, provide the foun¬ dation for denying women participation in democracy based on their biology. The Enlightenment during the eighteenth century ush¬ ered in a revival of democratic thinking inspired by the social contract theorists Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who, despite their progressive ideas, main¬ tained the position that women lack the reason required of public life. The social contract theorists claimed that God grants all humans the capacity to reason, empowering the people to recognize that sacrificing some of their absolute freedom by consenting to a contract will better preserve them under a government based on their will. In contrast to the ancients, these modern thinkers extended reason to all people, a position requiring them to justify women’s political exclusion despite arguments for universal freedom and equality. John Locke in the Second Treatise of Govern¬ ment (1689) accomplished this by drawing a clear boundary between political power exercised in the public arena of governance and paternal power retained by the father who rules over the family and women. This division effectively curtailed women’s access to public life based on their phys¬ ical and emotional suitability for the domestic sphere. The British thinker Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) challenged the social contract theorists’ assumption that feminine sexuality defines women’s selfhood and contended that women possess the full capacity to cultivate reason and achieve equality with men. Feminist critics in the twentieth century identified sex, the act of procreation between a man and woman, as the basis upon which the social contract is built that locates gender inequality at the heart of the democratic enterprise as extending beyond the act of procreation between a man and a woman to establish the marriage contract that, as exemplified by the laws of coverture from the British com¬ mon law tradition, made women invisible in the eyes of the law, or civilly dead. Denying women access to political and economic rights locates gender inequality at the heart of the

DEMOCRACY

social contract and thus the democratic enterprise. This sexual contract justifying men’s dominion in and outside the home facilitated erecting a barrier between the malepublic and female-private spheres that indicates a broader problem with the Enlightenment’s dualistic way of thinking, which fosters the political invisibility of those relegated to private life. This dualism likewise extended to the racial divisions between Europeans and non-Europeans and between whites and nonwhites, divisions erected by colo¬ nial powers that used the social contract to justify “civiliz¬ ing” native people by delivering democracy and ending internal conflict, a process paralleling that of democratiza¬ tion in the twenty-first century. Thus sex and gender have intersected with race and class to create a crucial site of contestation between women and men and among women as they negotiate democracy’s meaning in a globalized world.

The Fight for Independence and Inclusion. Western democracy in the modern period grew out of revolutions such as the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-1799) that inaugurated an era when the people overthrew their monarchs to establish democratic rule and set the stage for women’s mobilization around their voting rights. The social contract tradition, which grants people the right to break the contract if their government jeopardizes their natural rights and no longer better preserves them, informed these democratic revolu¬ tions. Women joined these revolutionary efforts: in France, they manned the barricades in the streets of Paris; in the United States of America they raised money for George Washington’s army and dressed as men to join the forces fighting the British. Abigail Adams (1744-1818) wrote a letter to her husband, the future U.S. president John Adams, at the Second Continental Congress, which had convened to declare the American colonies’ independence from Great Britain in 1776; she declared that American men must “remember the ladies,” who would, otherwise, “foment” a rebellion—a reminder that even if “all men are created equal,” the colonists’ claims for independence excluded women, who were left to rely on men to represent their interests. In France, Olympe de Gouge (b. 1748) took a more public and aggressive stand in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen (1791), which vehemently proclaimed women’s equal rights. Gouge’s ideas proved so threatening to the revolutionaries led by Maximilien Robespierre that she was arrested and put to death on the guillotine in 1793. These revolutions, premised in freedom and independence, naturally inspired women to begin advocating for voting rights and gender equality as consis¬ tent with advancing the march toward democracy. Extending the right to vote to women represented a cri¬ tical step in achieving recognition of their autonomy to

31

make rational decisions and participate in the political are¬ na as citizens; it was a step that corresponds with a crucial stage in democratic development, when popular sover¬ eignty expands to include a greater portion of the people. In the United States, women began organizing for voting rights at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, where they signed the Declaration of Sentiments, a document that argued for women’s equality with men and demanded the right to vote. The Declaration was authored primarily by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and was modeled on the United States Declaration of Independence from the British. Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), who worked alongside Stanton, cast the first U.S. ballot by a woman in 1872, an action that led to her arrest and trial. Efforts by women to win the vote took place throughout western Europe during the late nineteenth century, spurred on in part by the English thinker John Stuart Mill’s publication of The Subjection of Women (1869). In France, Hubertine Auclert (1848-1914) led the women’s suffrage move¬ ment, founding the Rights of Women Society in 1876, which confronted extreme opposition from conservative religious forces. The approach of the twentieth century brought a shift in the tide of feminism that swept through many countries starting with New Zealand, the first country in the world to grant women unrestricted voting rights in 1893. Finland followed in granting women suffrage in 1906 and then Norway in 1913. British women won suffrage in 1918 (age restrictions were removed in 1928), the United States in 1920, and the French, a late European arrival, in 1944. This formal right, securing women’s citizenship and recognition of their full personhood as rational actors, made the malepublic and female-private boundary more permeable, open¬ ing the way to women’s inclusion in the political arena. The exclusive focus of First Wave feminists on winning the vote, however, came at the cost of sidelining women’s economic issues and excluding black women from participation in the movement. The mid-twentieth century, marked by World War II (1939-1945), brought women’s voting and equal rights to the global stage primarily through the United Nations, which was organized in 1945 by member states to resist threats to peace in the world. The United Nations in 1952 agreed to the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, entitling all women to the vote and to the right to stand for elected office. The U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1946, built on this and other con¬ ventions to create the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1963, with women from twenty-two nations (primarily in the global South and Eastern Europe) at the forefront of this effort. The CEDAW provided a tool for women to

32

DEMOCRACY

advance their struggles for voting rights and legal protec¬ tions in their respective countries. Its ratification by 169 nations by 2005 indicated international support for women’s suffrage that can be brought to bear in certain states. During the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991, when Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait triggered U.S. military interven¬ tion, international attention turned to Kuwait, where, much to the surprise of many Westerners, Muslim women fought for their right to vote. Kuwait’s newfound role in global politics put the country on the international radar screen. The world watched on 1 February 2000, when Kuwaiti women marched through the streets to registration centers where they demanded to be added to the voting rosters. Kuwaiti women won the right to vote in 2005, followed by the United Arab Emirates (2006) and Qatar (2007). Most women across the globe, with the exceptions of those in Bhutan, Brunei, and Saudi Arabia, now possess voting rights, indicating how women’s demand for sovereignty corresponds with the spread of democracy. The Push for Representation. Women further trans¬ formed democracy in the mid-twentieth century as the struggle for voting rights translated into the push for winning elective office amid broader societal changes that made women more viable political candidates. “Widow’s succession,” the process of a woman assuming her husband’s or father’s office after his death, represented women’s initial path to political leadership in many countries. Sirimavo Bandaranai (1916-2000) of Sri Lanka became the world’s first female prime minister in 1960 when she ran as the candidate of the Sri Lankan Freedom Party after her husband’s assassination. She won office in her own right in 1970, and her daughter President Chandrika Kumaratunga appointed her prime minister again in 1994. Three of the most prominent female heads of state in the twentieth century—Indira Gandhi (19171984), prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977; Golda Meir (1898-1978), prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974; and Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925), prime minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990—took the conventional route to national leadership by moving up through a series of elective offices with greater levels of political power. These prime ministers adopted aggressive leadership styles reflecting their ability to excel in the masculine political world, where they challenged gender stereotypes and helped to open the doors of politics to other women. In 2007, women representatives held 17 percent of the seats in legislative bodies worldwide, an indicator of their growing integration into formal political institutions. Three key factors facilitated these increases in women’s access to formal politics. First, societal changes that ensure women equal access to education and jobs in business, medicine, teaching, and the law have given them the experi¬ ence required for launching political careers and reflect

a basic recognition of gender equality needed by female candidates to gain electoral support in a given country. Second, manys countries have instituted quota systems that reserve a certain number of parliamentary or congressional seats for women. The African National Congress in 2004, for instance, enacted a 30 percent quota for female candi¬ dates, which moved South Africa’s global ranking in terms of the number of female representatives from 141st (in 1994) to 13th. Rwanda in September 2003 became the country closest to reaching equal numbers of male and female representatives in any national legislature after set¬ ting quotas for women in its new constitution. Those na¬ tions without quotas (such as the United States and Great Britain) lag behind Nordic and many sub-Saharan African countries in their proportions of female legislators. Third, feminist organizations have played an important part in improving political literacy among women and providing fund-raising to female candidates. The Network of Non¬ governmental Organizations of Trinidad and Tobago for the Advancement of Women, for example, developed a campaign for increasing women’s political literacy and em¬ powerment across the Caribbean that pragmatically teaches women how to build alliances, dress, speak, address an audience, work with the media, and target voter popula¬ tions. EMILY’S (Early Money Is Like Yeast) List in the United States offers funding directly to female candidates to jump-start their political campaigns for office. Despite these efforts and advances, fifteen countries—among them, Armenia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Niger¬ ia—remain without any female representatives. The issue of who speaks for whom within the political decision-making process has created deep divides among women, however, primarily along race and class lines. In the United States, one such fault line opened between black and white women in conjunction with the civil rights move¬ ment of the 1960s and 1970s. Black women charged the mainstream Second Wave feminist movement dominated by upper- and middle-class white women with marginaliz¬ ing issues of race, class, and sexual identity and rejected their claim to speak for all American women. Many, such as the black radical feminist Barbara Burris, associated black women’s struggle in the U.S. with that of Third World women’s against colonial rule, a position articulated in The Fourth World Manifesto (1973). Legacies of racial and eco¬ nomic conflict in individual countries have carried over into the transnational feminist movement, where represen¬ tatives from the industrialized global North have claimed to represent all women, an assumption rejected by those from the global South. The International Women’s Year gather¬ ing held in Mexico City in 1975 marked a key moment in revealing this divide, when, despite the conference’s aim to challenge male representation of women’s interests in governments and international institutions, a chasm

DEMOCRACY

33

opened between representatives from the North and South.

strong during the twentieth century), a shift that could

Northern feminists, focusing on women’s solidarity, ren¬

diminish the visibility of this crucial alternative to military

dered invisible the structural economic and political con¬

force, long held as a value of democratic regimes.

cerns about apartheid, colonialism, racism, and foreign

Democratic citizenship for women also challenges the

occupation crucial to those from the South. Mexican fem¬

conventional boundaries between church and state that

inists responded by convening a counter-congress that

were established during the Enlightenment to prevent the

drew extensive participation, highlighting a broader rejec¬

religious conflicts endemic to the medieval period and

tion of First World women as representing all women and

to ground government in human reason and science.

the diversity of “women’s” issues.

Women’s greater access to public life and political rights

Alongside these important conflicts, women’s increased

in many countries worldwide throughout the modern era

representation at national and international levels has led

has destabilized the traditional male-public and female-

to the expansion of political agendas to include issues criti¬

private spheres supported by conservative religious forces.

cal to women’s lives. Domestic violence, rape, honor kill¬

Fundamentalism, as a result, has spread in both Western

ings, veiling, sexual harassment, reproductive rights, sex

and non-Western states, generating a backlash against

trafficking, sterilization, and health care now receive global

women’s rights and political participation. Christian funda¬

attention. As female representation inches closer to reach¬

mentalists in the United States began mobilizing politically

ing a critical mass in legislatures worldwide, the presence of

in 1975, focusing on overturning abortion rights and rein¬

women in government could also reconfigure how demo¬

stating women’s conventional domestic role, and such

cratic institutions function in the future.

groups continue to represent a powerful political force.

Frontiers of Women’s Citizenship. Advances in the

The Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan known as the

twentieth century that gave women the right to vote and to

Taliban gained power with a regime (1996-2001) that,

hold elected office transformed democracy, closing the gap

under the threat of extreme punishment including death,

between the ideal of popular sovereignty and the reality of

forced women to wear the burqa (an outer garment that

women’s political exclusion, while raising new opportu¬

cloaks the entire body, worn by women in some Islamic

nities and challenges for women’s citizenship in response

traditions), denied them education, and forbade them to

to the contemporary forces of democratization and globaliza¬

leave their homes without a male relative or husband.

tion. Women’s citizenship in the twenty-first century is still

Organizations such as the Revolutionary Association of

expanding, no longer limited to the civilian realm but now

the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), established in 1977,

also including greater duties in the military, a traditionally

and the international network Women Living under Mus¬

masculine institution largely exclusive of women. Female

lim Laws* formed in 1984, struggle against fundamentalism

military service increasingly extends beyond medical and

as repressive of women and all people. Muslim women’s

administrative to combat positions in a world where the front

activism challenges Western assumptions about the clear

lines of battle are unpredictable and unstable.

divisions between church and state in Arab states that are

As Western democracies engage in military activity

moving toward instituting democratic reforms. Women

across the globe in conjunction with efforts to democratize

elected to the Iraqi National Assembly in 2005 were them¬

countries, the demand for female soldiers grows. In the

selves divided between secularists and those in the domin¬

United States, for example, 7,500 American women served,

ant Shiite alliance, which hopes to align Iraq with Islamic

mostly as nurses, in active war zones during the Vietnam

divine law, indicating the complexities that religion poses

War, while 41,000 were deployed in Iraq in Operations

for democratic transitions.

Desert Shield and Desert Storm in the Gulf War of 1990-

Democratization holds the potential to expand women’s

1991, and 160,000 were serving in U.S. troops in the war

rights further, though its association with Westernization

zones of Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s. One in ten

can redraw divisions between the North and South. Inter¬

U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in

national feminist activists and organizations strive to reach

2003 was a woman. At the beginning of the twenty-first

beyond this global boundary that fragmented the women’s

century, Israel had perhaps the world’s highest rate of

movement in the late twentieth century, advocating for

women serving in the military, at 32 percent, due to the

women’s rights as human rights. The social contract tradi¬

conscription of all men and women at the age of eighteen.

tion grounds democracy in a theory of human rights granted

Women as of 2005 constituted 21.7 percent of the military

to all people equally, a powerful political tool for extending

in South Africa, 6.2 percent in China, and 16.3 percent in

citizenship and legal protections to women and other eco¬

Canada, indicating their increased presence in this institu¬

nomically, socially, and politically vulnerable groups. The

tion across the globe. A broader implication for women’s

Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the

citizenship may be a growing distance between them and

United Nations in

their traditional association with peace politics (especially

women as entitled to secure the basic human rights of

1948, which explicitly includes all

34

DEMOCRACY

life, liberty, freedom from torture, and equal treatment under the law, lends global political weight to women’s activism nationally and internationally. Human rights, an approach revised to meet the demands of diversity, facil¬ itates women’s political organization globally by embra¬ cing difference as empowering transnational movements. Modern-day democracy functions in a web of global dynamics that require citizenship to be recast in terms of equality and respect for cultural diversity consistent with this feminist human rights perspective. Just as women’s early influence on democracy redefined popular sover¬ eignty, women’s participation on the international stage will play a crucial part in promoting equality amid demo¬ cratizing processes. Women’s fight for voting rights, elected representation, and now human rights captures this politi¬ cal concept’s quality as an ideological site for the contesta¬ tion, negotiation, and deliberation necessary to sustain democracy’s capacity to respond to ever-changing contexts and to fulfill its promise of freedom, equality, inclusion, tolerance, and diversity.

[See also Citizenship; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; International Woman Suffrage Alliance; International Women’s Year; Patriarchy, subentry Comparative History; Public/Private; Seneca Falls Convention of 1848; Sexuality, subentry Polit¬

critical race perspective highlighting the racial inequality embed¬ ded in democracy. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Explores multiple dimensions of feminism and politics in the Third World. Narayan, Uma. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1997. Collection of essays analyzing the relationship of feminism and Westerniza¬ tion to non-Western contexts that complicates boundaries between cultures. Okin, Susan Moller. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Central contribution to feminist political theory that identifies how justice in the family is required for democratic justice. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988. Feminist critique of the social contract tradition as one built on the sexual contract between a man and a woman that perpetuates gender inequality in democracy. Shanley, Mary Lyndon, and Carole Pateman. Feminist Interpre¬ tations and Political Theory. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Collection of feminist interpret¬ ations of major thinkers in the Western tradition ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Locke, Rousseau, and Foucault. Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1993. Feminist analysis of how care, traditionally associated with women in private life, holds transformative potential for democracy. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. Feminist analysis of gender as integral to nation¬ building in the context of developing countries. Jocelyn

ics; Status of Women, Contemporary; Suffrage; United

M.

Boryczka

Nations; White Terror; Women’s Liberation; and biograph¬

ical entries for persons mentioned in this article.]

DEMOGRAPHY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burn, Shawn Meghan. Women across Cultures: A Global Perspec¬ tive. 2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Overview of women’s impact on national and international politics from a global perspective. Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House, 1981. Ground-breaking critique of race and class divi¬ sions as characteristic of the women’s movement in the United States. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer¬ sity Press, 1981. Foundational argument in feminist political theory that identifies how the male-public and female-private shape Western political tradition. Enloe, Cynthia. Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Analysis of how globalization increasingly draws women into international militarization. Friedman, Marilyn, ed. Women and Citizenship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Articles examining how global forces redraft the future of women’s citizenship. Hawkesworth, Mary. Globalization and Feminist Activism. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Analysis of femi¬ nist activism in the international arena and its impact on globalization. Mills, Charles S. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer¬ sity Press, 1997. Critique of the social contract tradition from a

This entry consists of two subentries: Overview Comparative History

Overview Demography is the study of population statistics, their relationship to social systems and human ecology. Demog¬ raphy is concerned with three main variables: fertility (births), mortality (deaths), and migration (movement of people). Age-sex pyramids are used to visualize the effect of interaction between these dynamic variables and to make comparisons between populations and their subsets. The age-sex pyramid displays the proportion of individuals by sex within each age category. To compare populations, demographers assess relative mortality hazards and fertility rates per age category. It was once assumed that the age-sex pyramid primarily reflected relative mortality hazards. Survivorship curves, life tables, and statistics such as life expectancy at birth or mean age at death were commonly calculated from the age distribution and compared between

DEMOGRAPHY: Overview

populations. Recently it has been recognized that mortality is a diffuse process that occurs across the entire spectrum of ages and it appears to affect the shape of the pyramid secondarily. Fertility has a greater impact on the shape of

35

Biocultural Dimensions. Demography is a valuable, multidisciplinary tool for characterizing the synergistic relationships among human biology, social systems, and cultural features through time. Changes in fertility, mortal¬

the age pyramid because it occurs at a single moment in the

ity, and population growth rates represent biological

lifespan for everyone in the population and fertility rates

consequences of human interactions with ecological

determine the size of each cohort (a group of individuals in

environments. However, humans shape, modify, and

a population who are born and enter the population at the

interact with their environment. We can potentially

same time). Essentially, this fertility-centered approach to

redefine the concepts of marginal habitat, sustainability,

demography indicates that statistics such as mean age at

or carrying capacity in a given environment because

death actually reflect fertility more than mortality, although

human decisions are primarily influenced by local histor¬

at first this is counterintuitive.

ical, cultural, and social context. The strategies employed

Low pressure demographic profiles, with low to moder¬

by human communities, the dynamics of individual

ate fertility, low infant mortality hazards, and a positive

families, and the competence of individuals affect ecology,

population growth rate have been used as measures of

biology, fertility, and mortality. This diversity and plasticity

well-being,

overrides the usefulness of macroscopic predictive models,

resources,

or as

reflections

sociopolitical

of prosperity—abundant

stability,

and

even

“human

progress.” The classic demographic transition model—set

growth curves, and evolutionary demography formulas for humans.

out by Warren S. Thompson in 1929—suggests that prior

For example, many demographers, historians, anthropol¬

to the Industrial Revolution (Stage I), fertility and infant

ogists, and economists have looked at the relationship

mortality rates were high and held fairly constant. The

between population growth and large-scale changes in

transition model suggested that improvements in sanitation

subsistence, such as the transition to agriculture. The shift

and access to resources would initially be associated with

to farming is often associated with increased population

increased population density and higher population growth

growth rates, as a stimulus or a response to food production.

rates because of higher fertility combined with a reduction

However, demographic features—fertility, infant mortality

in infant and child mortality (Stage II). In Stage III, access

rates, life expectancy at birth, mortality hazards—cannot

to urban amenities, education, and contraceptive technol¬

be easily predicted by broad cultural or historical features.

ogy would result in declining birthrates such that the popu¬

For example, fertility can be suppressed in hunting and

lation growth rate stabilizes. Low fertility and infant

foraging communities in circumstances of undernutrition

mortality hazards have been the most recent trends in some

and high workloads, an increased prevalence of sterility,

techno-centric, industrialized nations like Italy and Japan (Stage IV).

reduced in agricultural populations because of nutritional

Population growth is not always cast in a positive

and lactational amenorrhea. Similarly, fertility can be stress and heavy workloads for women.

light, beginning with Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who

Historical demographers try to account for some of the

was the first to suggest that population growth could have

life history and sociocultural complexities of studying past

a negative impact on human communities. In his Essay

populations. For example, food insecurity in childhood has

on the Principle of Population (1798) he suggested that

implications for the entire lifespan of an individual—from

demographic characteristics of populations are heavily

infant mortality hazard, to potential postponement of

influenced by environmental circumstances and the limits

reproductive maturity, and reduced likelihood of successful

of natural resources. In effect, his thesis was that food and

gestation, parturition (birth), and lactation (breastfeeding).

other resources are limited by environmental carrying

These individual effects have profound generational affects

capacity. In a natural fertility population, growth eventu¬

on population demography. Sociocultural complexity is

ally results in competition for survival and increasing

more difficult to sort out and includes rising above ethno¬

mortality hazards. Along this line of reasoning, social

centric definitions of family, child care, feeding, sanitation,

stratification, global inequality, pestilence, and violence

health, hunger, and many other issues known to influence

are ‘natural’ consequences of competition for resources

fertility and infant mortality rates. In short, ecology, biology,

and function to limit human population growth. However,

life history, growth and development, culture, history,

historical demography conducted outside of the uniformi-

behavior, and demography are all interconnected and

tarian assumption of generalized models for population

require a high level of complexity in the analysis.

dynamics is a powerful tool for explicating particular re¬

Challenges for Historical Demography. Reconstruc¬

lationships among power, history, hegemony, and access

tions of demography for historical populations are

to basic resources and rights that occur within a particular

complicated by two major issues that often cannot be

context.

easily resolved: the high degree of mobility throughout

36

DEMOGRAPHY: Overview

human history and the lack of detailed reconstructions of total population size. The timing and degree of mobility in human groups is a complex issue, influenced by many factors, including geography, climate, resource availability, technology, social structures, and interaction within and between communities. Migration levels are difficult to estimate in a contemporary context, and the problem is compounded for past populations. In historical demography

Livi-Bacci, Massimo. A Concise History of World Population. 4th ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007. Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Edited by Gfeoffrey Gilbert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Thompson, Warren S. “Population.” American Journal of Sociology 34, no. 6 (1929): 959-975. United Nations Population Fund. State of World Population. New York: United Nations Population Fund, 2006. Available online at http://www.unfpa.org/.

the mobility problem is often handled using the assumption

Gwen Robbins

that one is dealing with a stable, closed population, where immigration and emigration are negligible or balanced. This assumption introduces an unknown level of error to the analysis. However, in the absence of a meaningful way to

Comparative History

measure migration rates, this assumption is unavoidable. The problem of total population size occurs because it is

Demography provides quantitative data about women over

necessary to have an empirical count of the total number of

the course of history and helps us understand the importance

people in the population to calculate accurate demographic

of demographic change in women’s lives. Demography pro¬

parameters. Again, even in a contemporary context we have

vides findings on fertility, age at menarche and menopause,

only estimates of the total number of people alive. When

marriage patterns, longevity, health, and other information

using census records, there are additional challenges. It is

that compose profiles of women in different parts of the

difficult to reconcile the methods used in different regions

world.

or through time. One must be fully aware of the local, histor¬

Population Size. It has been estimated that throughout

ical definition of “a person” and “a family” when examining

most of human history until the fifteenth century, total

demographic records. Research must consider ideological

fertility rates were around six children per woman. Total

or political issues and goals that may have affected the way

deaths are reckoned to have been four children per mother.

in which the census was conducted. The magnitude of in¬

The start of the population growth was neither universal

accuracy in any census grows as we move further back in

nor simultaneous. The first Chinese population increase

time. For example, there can be much variation in estimates

ran from 1750 to 1950, a period during which the popula¬

for population size only two hundred years ago.

tion nearly tripled from 225 million to 580 million. Subse¬

From an evolutionary perspective, differential fertility

quently, the population doubled to reach

1.2 billion

and mortality represent the principal way that natural

between 1950 and 2000. China’s growing population raised

selection acts upon populations. However, humans have a

anxieties in the 1960s, and the late 1970s saw the enforce¬

synergistic relationship with their ecological circumstances

ment there of population-control policies. With the intro¬

wherein cultural traditions, behavior, technology, and

duction of control measures like the one-child family policy

biological plasticity have shifted the meaning of concepts

in China, population policy became part of a national

such as carrying capacity. Demographic statistics still

agenda and even national ideology for the first time in

provide a crucial tool for assessing human populations in

history.

a historical framework, but only in recognition of the fun¬

Estimates suggest that the female population of Europe

damentally biocultural nature of human fertility, mortality,

grew steadily throughout the sixteenth century until a decline

and population growth rates. Our demographic parameters

in the second or third decade of the seventeenth century.

serve as reflections of biological issues within the larger

In 1500, Europe (not including Russia and the Ottoman

context of cross-cultural variation as different populations

Empire) had roughly over 30 million females; in 1600, the

adopt different identities in relation to, and strategies to

number was 39 million and had decreased to about 37 million

cope with, surviving and reproducing in different environ¬

in 1650. The highest population growth was in Great Britain,

mental circumstances.

the Low Countries, and the north of France. The female populations of Germany, Italy, and Spain not only increased

[See also Gender Preference in Children.]

at a lower rate during the 1600s but also decreased more strongly in the mid-seventeenth century. New food crops

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bogin, Barry. The Growth of Humanity. New York: Wiley-Liss, 2001. Haines, Michael, and Richard H. Steckel, eds. A Population History of North America. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

and a momentary decline in epidemic diseases prompted Europe’s female

population to

increase monumentally

between 1750 and 1800. In most European countries, the female population grew between 50 and 100 percent, giving rise to urbanization.

DEMOGRAPHY: Comparative History

Fertility. Within the context of urbanization, industrial¬ ization, and increased literacy, mortality rates in general and infant mortality (death among children younger than one year) in particular started to decline in Europe during

37

disapproved of, making childhood marriages common until the introduction of the Muslim Family Law in 1961 that set the minimum legal age at marriage for females at 16 years. The average age of menopause, the cessation of menstrua¬

the second half of the nineteenth century and continued to

tion due to permanent loss of ovarian function, shows

fall throughout the twentieth century. In the Netherlands,

considerable differences across female populations and time

infant mortality declined from about two hundred deaths

periods. In general, menopause occurs in women between

per thousand live births in the 1880s to just fifty in 1930.

45 and 50 years of age and, less frequently, between 50 and

More children stayed alive while the economic value

55 years. Research among American women born in the

of children declined and the costs of raising children

late 1910s shows that ages at natural menopause ranged

rose, prompting a desire for fewer children and a decline

from 36 to 60 years, with a median of 51 years. Research in

in fertility rates (rates regarding the ratio of live births in

the 1960s among Zulu women in Durban, South Africa,

an area to the population of that area). The conversion

showed that the mean age of menopause was 49.2 years.

from high to low birth and death rates is referred to as

The difference in age of the occurrences of menopause

the (first) demographic transition and has been observed

might be related to malnutrition.

in all industrial countries as part of their economic development.

Even before the introduction of contraceptives, fertility in western Europe was not unlimited during the period

In Asia (excluding the Middle East), the total fertility

between menarche and menopause. This part of the world

rate dropped from around 5.9 children per woman between

showed what John Hajnal called the “Western European

1950 and 1955 to 4.1 children between 1975 and 1980.

marriage pattern.” Fertility was regulated by late and non-

Leading this trend were Japan, Korea, Singapore, and

universal marriage and low levels of illegitimate childbirth.

Taiwan. In Korea, the average number of children per

Jan van Bavel showed that nineteenth-century working-

woman in the late 1950s was over 6; in the late 1980s the

class families in the Belgian city of Leuven controlled their

total fertility rate (TFR) went below the replacement level

fertility by increasing the length of the intervals between

(level of fertility at which a couple has enough children to

births for household economic reasons.

replace themselves) to reach 1.23 children per woman in

An understanding of this European check on population

between 2000 and 2005. In the West African countries of

growth was first introduced by the political economist

Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, and Burkina Faso, the

Thomas Malthus. In his influential 1798 essay “On the

TFR in that period was still over 6 children per woman.

Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improve¬

The idea that people in industrialized countries had full

ment of Society,” northwestern Europe and China were

control over fertility toward the end of the twentieth

presented as opposites where it concerned fertility behav¬

century led to the development of the theory of the so-called

ior. Europe was the example of the “preventive check” on

second demographic transition. According to this theory,

population growth: both “the progress of wealth and popu¬

the two-child-ideal resulting in fertility rates below replace¬

lation” were checked by the state of commerce. China, on

ment level causes a demographic imbalance that will gener¬

the other hand, was an example of the “positive check.”

ate new migration trends.

This meant that population growth exceeded the increase

The total fertility rate reached in a population is influenced by the age at menarche, the first menstruation. In industrial¬

of means of subsistence and was checked not by moral restraint but “wretchedness” like famine and infanticide.

ized countries, the average age at menarche has been

Malthus’s description of Chinese demography and in par¬

decreasing throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth

ticular his understanding of infanticide has been contested.

century. In Germany, it declined from 16.6 years in 1860 to

China counted 3 to 4 million people in the eighteenth, nine¬

14.6 in 1920, to 13.1 in 1950, to 12.5 in 1980. In Malaysia, the

teenth, and early twentieth centuries and 1.7 billion since

age at menarche fell 3.25 months per decade among women

1950. According to James Lee and Wang Feng, the Chinese

born between 1926 and 1961. Analyzed by ethnic group,

people proactively intervened with population size, just as

though, declines in age at first menstruation were significant

Europeans did, but in a different way. Infanticide and neglect

for Chinese and Indian women; the age at menarche for

were practiced to control not only the number but also the

Malays appeared to have hardly changed at all. Based on

sex of children. Ancestral worship, originating in the second

studies like these, age at menarche has been related to

and third millennia

diet but also to social factors like socioeconomic status.

in China. Hypergamy, the practice of selecting a spouse

Girls brought up in households of higher socioeconomic

of a higher socioeconomic position than oneself, caused

b.c.e.,

brought about son preference

ranking generally experience earlier menarche. Age at me¬

Chinese girls to be regarded as inferior and as an economic

narche is also related to age at first marriage. In Bangladesh, a

and emotional loss. During the early twentieth century, the

daughter’s marriage after her first menarche was generally

excess female and child mortality decreased dramatically.

38

DEMOGRAPHY: Comparative History

Sex ratios, however, continued to show a boy preference

average reached the age of twenty-five years. Roman slaves

in China.

had a life expectancy of five years less.

The male population excess in China resulted in an un¬

Important ipcreases in female life expectancy were made

balanced marriage market. Chinese females married univer¬

centuries later, and an average age of thirty years was

sally and early, but from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth

reached in England around 1800. A century later, women

century males showed the late and nonuniversal marriage

in Europe and the United States had a life expectancy of

pattern of the West. A third characteristic of China’s demo¬

about forty to fifty years. The increase in life expectancy

graphic history is that, unlike Malthus’s expectations, mar¬

accelerated during the twentieth century, particularly for

ital fertility was significantly lower and overall fertility was

women. In the Netherlands, life expectancy of women older

probably the same as in western Europe. To get the desired

than sixty-five nearly doubled between 1850 and 2000.

number and gender of children, and in particular the patri¬

Primarily responsible for the increase in life expectancy in

lineal male descendant, the Chinese developed practices

Western countries was the decline in death rates among

of fictive kinship through adoption and various forms of

infants.

marriage, like minor marriage. In Taiwan, female infants

Throughout history, women have probably always lived

or children who were adopted out had a higher mortality

longer than men in almost every part of the world. Women

than biological children. Comparing Taiwanese data with

generally have a higher life expectancy at birth than men,

those of the Netherlands, Theo Engelen and Arthur Wolf

although the contribution of specific causes of death to the

showed that high-pressure demographic regimes as exist in

sex differences varies between nations and population

Taiwan and low-pressure regimes as in the Netherlands

groups. Frans van Poppel has shown that in nineteenth-

showed many similarities. The contrast Malthus proposed

century Europe, the death risks for women aged between

between positive and preventative checks, therefore, needs

forty-five and seventy years were 10 to 30 percent lower

to be nuanced.

than those of men of the same age group. In the age group

Trends and levels of fertility, though seemingly similar,

of seventy to ninety years death rates showed similar sex

might have different social, economic, and cultural determi¬

differences. Epidemics like that of the global Spanish influ¬

nants. In sub-Saharan Africa, regions where the population

enza in 1918-1919 lead to an increase of the excess male

adheres to traditional belief systems have fertility rates

mortality.

as high as mostly Islamic areas. African religion focuses

Structural changes in the health difference between

on the reproduction of the lineage, with living descendants

women and men concerned the younger age group of six¬

ensuring the survival of ancestral spirits and the persistence

teen to twenty-six years from the 1950s onward. In the

of the lineage. High fertility is both virtuous and spiritually

1960s and 1970s, female death risks were two to three times

sanctioned, with intentional birth control viewed as mali¬

lower than those of men in this age group. It seemed that the

cious and childlessness as a punishment from vengeful

increase in motor vehicle accidents, other accidents, and

ancestors. Moral disapproval of low fertility is heightened

suicide leads to fewer fatalities among women than among

by pragmatic concern for disruption of the intergenerational

men. Similar sex differences in mortality were shown in the

wealth flows that typify sub-Saharan African societies.

United States, where homicide, motor vehicle accidents,

By contrast, the pronatalist influence of Islam is indirect.

and suicide accounted for 33 percent of the sex difference

Theological objections to birth control are absent, yet belief

among white adults, 36 percent among African Americans,

supports a strong code of ethics, morality, and behavior

and 52 percent among Latinos in 1997. Suicide in particular

subordinating women to men. Fertility is stimulated because

is sex specific: in the city of Belgrade, Serbia, in the period

women are married early and discouraged from higher

1997-2004 the sex ratio among those committing suicide

education and employment. Women necessarily favor high

was two males to one woman. The second largest contribu¬

fertility because the sons they bear are their best insurance

tor to the sex difference in causes of death for all American

against poverty in the case of divorce or abandonment. As

population groups in the 1990s was cardiovascular disease,

John and Pat Caldwell showed, the religious and cultural

followed by lung cancer. In Europe this trend started in the

motivations leading to similar high levels of fertility can

early 1950s when male excess mortality among those fifty-

differ greatly.

five years and older rose, particularly in Scandinavia. This

Mortality. Female life expectancy (longevity) at birth has

cohort pattern in lower health risks of women in this age

fluctuated but generally increased throughout history. It

group is associated with lower consumption of cigarettes

has been estimated that women living in hunter-gatherer

and, more generally, a healthier diet among women.

societies about 10,000 years

b.c.e.

had a life expectancy of

twenty-three years. Early farmers, living around 8000

In almost all Western countries in the late nineteenth

b.c.e.,

century, van Poppel states, girls from the age group fifteen

probably had an even lower life expectancy: sixteen to

to nineteen had a higher probability of dying from infectious

twenty years. Women living in the Roman Empire on

diseases like typhus, scarlet fever, whooping cough, cholera,

DEMOGRAPHY: Comparative History

39

and acute respiratory diseases than boys of the same age.

mothers had a higher neonatal death risk compared to

The chief cause of the excess mortality among girls was lung

children of nonteenage mothers. Sibling position, or birth

tuberculosis. The sex difference with regard to this cause of

order, has proven to be another important aspect of

death shows that boy preference is not an exclusively Chi¬

infant and child mortality, particularly for girls. Birth order

nese phenomenon. Female children’s excess mortality from

generally exhibits a J-shaped relationship with infant

lung tuberculosis shows that the welfare of girls was lower

mortality, showing higher death risks for firstborn children

than that of boys, that they received poorer nutrition and

and the highest parities. Data from a 1988 survey in the

less feeding and care. In addition, girls were more exposed

People’s Republic of China showed that childhood mortal¬

to infectious diseases than boys, as females were supposed

ity was linked with both the child’s gender and birth order.

to take care of the sick. Moreover, boys were more likely to

Among firstborn children the difference between male

be vaccinated than girls, as vaccination was linked with

and female childhood mortality did not appear to be statis¬

school attendance, which was lower among girls until the

tically significant, but female children between ages one

early twentieth century. It has also been suggested that sick

and five experienced higher mortality than male children.

girls were less likely to be taken to a physician or to a

Childhood mortality was slightly higher for children with

hospital than were sick boys. Several factors presumably

only older brothers than for those who had only older sisters,

ended the female children’s excess mortality: the strong

and it was highest for those who had both older brothers and

decrease in the incidence of infectious and parasitic disease,

sisters. Childhood mortality risks for both sexes decrease

an increase in incidence of causes of death disadvantageous

with the death of older siblings.

for males, social developments like the increase in school¬

Nuptiality. In some countries, birth order might have

ing and expansion of health care favoring the welfare of

affected women less than men in the past. Data from English

girls, and the emancipation of women resulting in expecta¬

vital statistics from between 1700 and 1750 indicated that

tions of a more equal treatment of girls.

there was no difference in nuptiality behavior between first-

Throughout history, maternal mortality has caused health

and later-born daughters. Far more first- than later-born

differences between the sexes for the age group twenty to

sons were married, however, and they generally married

twenty-five years. In the Netherlands in the late nineteenth

at an earlier age—as the system of inheritance prescribed

and early twentieth centuries, between 5 and 10 percent of

that the oldest male received the major proportion of any

all female deaths in this age group are ascribed to maternal

inheritance and therefore had the better access to the means

mortality. In the early twentieth century, the most common

of forming a household.

causes of maternal mortality were puerperal fever, toxemia,

For decades, the demographical discourse on nuptiality

and hemorrhage. Puerperal fever was probably everywhere

has focused on differences in the universality of marriage

the principal cause of puerperal deaths in the nineteenth

and ages at first marriage; but since the 1980s an increase in

century and the early decades of the twentieth century. In

cross-border marriages in Asia and Europe has drawn the

Taiwan between 1924 and 1934, 35 percent of all maternal

attention of scholars. In the United Kingdom, for example,

deaths resulted from puerperal fever, 39 percent from puerp¬

spouse migration constituted 40 percent of the gross foreign

eral hemorrhage, and 8 percent from toxemia. Both in the

inflow in 1989; six years later it had increased to almost 60

past and in the present day, maternal mortality is regarded as

percent of all migration to the United Kingdom. Similar

an important measure of the standard of living in societies.

developments were observed in the Netherlands: between

Maternal mortality risks increased with the number of

1997 and 2001 one out of three Dutch marriages involved at

pregnancies, particularly those experienced at a higher age.

least one migrant or a migrant’s descendant. Countries in

Extremely high parities, the number of live-born children a

East Asia showed similar trends. In Japan in 2000 cross-

woman has delivered, are associated with an increased risk of

border marriages represented 4.5 percent of the national

maternal mortality but also with mortality in general. Stephan

total. In Taiwan, 27.4 percent of all marriages registered in

Klasen showed that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

2002 concerned cross-border marriages; by 2003 it had risen

rural Germany the addition of a child increased the mother’s

to a third. Marriages between a foreign and local spouse in

mortality more than twice that of the father. Nonmaternal

South Korea made up 11 percent of the marriages in 2004

mortality among these women was explained by restrictions

and almost 14 percent of those in 2005.

on mobility; maternal depletion; competition for food, care,

Though showing similar sociodemographic aspects, the

and money; and an increased transmission of infectious

migration flows in Asia and Europe show different gender

diseases.

balances. In Europe, marriage migrants are from both sexes

Levels of infant mortality since the late twentieth century

(though females form the majority) and originate from var¬

have been associated with a variety of factors. Physiological

ious countries. In the case of the Netherlands, the most

maturity of the mother, however, has proven to affect infant

common countries of origin (Indonesia, Germany, Turkey,

mortality. In Bangladesh in the 1990s, children of teenage

Morocco, and Surinam) formed only 60 percent of the

40

DEMOGRAPHY: Comparative History

cross-border marriages. In Asia, however, cross-border weddings mainly concern female marriage migrants from Southeast Asia who marry men in East Asia. In Taiwan, brides from mainland China accounted for most of these marriages, followed by Vietnamese migrants. In Japan, the second largest group of migrant spouses originated from the Philippines. The majority of the cross-border marriages in Asia concern intermediated marriages: couples are introduced with the intention of marriage and have no courtship or a relatively short courtship. Media have been eager to blame local women, who are said to reject marriage and force men to look for a wife abroad, as the cause of the increase in cross-border marriages. Indeed, both in Asia and in the West demographic trends suggest that women increasingly are turning their backs on marriage. The age at first marriage for women rose from early to late twenties during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1971, 21 percent of Canadians aged twenty-five to twentynine had never been married; in 1991 that proportion had increased to 50 percent. During the same period, the propor¬ tion of never-married women increased both in Asia and in the West. In Thailand, for instance, the proportion of nevermarried women tripled between 1960 and 2000 from 3 to 9 percent. In the Philippines, the proportion rose from 5 to 20 percent in the same period. Many suggestions have been made regarding the cause of the downward nuptiality trend. Studies in Indonesia have shown that increasing education and labor opportunities stimulated Asian women to postpone or even abandon marriage. In other countries, like Japan, the double work¬ load for married women has been suggested as the cause of the increase in women remaining single. Gavin Jones has shown that the implications of the “flight from marriage” are considerable: for women’s place in the family and in society, for trends in fertility, and for the role of the family in care of the aged. Future demographics will show whether remaining single is the key to happiness—current data still indicate that survival chances of married women are higher than among those unmarried, divorced, and widowed. [See also Female Life Cycle; Fertility and Infertility; and Marriage.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bavel, Jan van. “Birth Spacing as a Family Strategy: Evidence from 19th Century Leuven, Belgium.” The History of the Family 8, no. 4 (2003): 585-604. Caldwell, John C., and Pat Caldwell. “The Cultural Context of High Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Population and Development Review 13, no. 3 (1987): 409-437. Engelen, Theo, and Arthur P. Wolf, eds. Marriage and the Family in Eurasia: Perspectives on the Hajnal Hypothesis. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2005. Gittins, Diana. Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure, 1900-39. London: Hutchinson, 1982.

Hajnal, John. “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective.” In Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, edited by D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, pp. 101-143. London: Arnold, 1963. Handwerker, W. Penn. Culture and Reproduction: An Anthropo¬ logical Critique of Demographic Transition Theory. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1986. Jones, Gavin W. “ The ‘Flight from Marriage’ in South-East and East Asia.” Journal of Comparative and Family Studies 36, no. 1 (Winter 2005). ICaa, Dirk J. van de. “Europe’s Second Demographic Transition.” Population Bulletin 42, no. 1 (1987): 1-59. Klasen, Stephan. “Marriage, Bargaining, and Intrahousehold Resource Allocation: Excess Female Mortality among Adults during Early German Development, 1740-1860.” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 2 (1998): 432-467. Klein, Herbert S. A Population History of the United States. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Lee, James Z., and Feng Wang. One Quarter of Humanity: Malthu¬ sian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Poppel, Frans van. “Long-term trends in relative health differences between men and women.” European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Biology 93, no. 2 (December 2000): 119-122. Schoonheim, Marloes. Mixing Ovaries and Rosaries: Catholic Religion and Reproduction in the Netherlands, 1870-1970. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2005. Tan Boon, Ann, Ramli Othman, William Butz, and Julie DaVanzo. “Age at Menarche in Peninsular Malaysia: Time Trends, Ethnic Differentials, and Association with Ages at Marriage and at First Birth.” Malaysian Journal of Reproductive Health 1, no. 2 (1983): 91-108. Watkins, Susan Cotts. From Provinces into Nations: Demographic Integration in Western Europe, 1870-1960. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Marloes Schoonheim

DENG YINGCHAO (1904-1992), Chinese women’s rights activist and Communist leader. Deng was born in Nanning, in southern China, but educated in Beijing and Tianjin. Her widowed mother supported them both by teaching. In the May Fourth Movement of 1919, Deng was a founding member of the Tianjin Women’s Patriotic Asso¬ ciation and the Awakening Society. She worked for women’s newspapers and campaigned for the equality of the sexes, equal pay, coeducation, free-choice marriage, and an end to concubinage and foot-binding. Deng joined the Communist Party in 1925 and soon afterward moved to Guangzhou to work for women’s orga¬ nizations under the United Front between the Nationalists and Communists. In the same year she married Zhou Enlai, whom she had known in the student movement in Tianjin. She lost the child she was carrying in 1926 when preparing to flee from Guangzhou. She did underground work in Shanghai from 1927 and attended the Communist Party Congress in Moscow in 1928. From 1932 she held various

DESAI, ANITA

posts in the short-lived Jiangxi Soviet Republic. Sick with tuberculosis, she was carried on a litter for the first four months of the twelve-month Long March in 1934-1935. From 1937 to 1946, the years of the second United Front, Deng divided her time between Yan’an, the Communist headquarters, where she worked in woman’s organizations, and the Communist representative offices in the Nationalist headquarters, where she worked under Zhou Enlai. In 1945 she was named as an alternate member of the Central Committee. In the civil war (1946-1949), she worked to promote women’s rights in the land-reform movement. From 1949 on, most of Deng’s time was devoted to the Women’s Federation, of which she was deputy chairman. She was an important member of the committee responsible for drafting the new Marriage Law, promulgated on 1 May 1950—a law that guaranteed women the rights for which she had worked so long. She was a pioneering advocate of contraception as a means of women’s advancement. After Zhou Enlai’s death in 1976, her positions included mem¬ bership in the Central Committee and the Politburo. In 1989 she was one of the senior figures consulted to legit¬ imize the armed suppression of the Tiananmen student movement. She is reported to have agreed on the grounds that a retreat would lead to a restoration of capitalism. She died in Beijing in 1992 at the age of 88. Like her husband, Zhou Enlai, Deng was useful to the party whenever diplomacy and an ability to work with people outside the Party were needed. Their marriage was regarded as a model, especially as they remained to¬ gether despite being childless. Deng was an important link between the women’s rights movement and the Communist movement in China. At times she criticized women’s rights activists for pursuing narrow feminist goals not linked to the socialist revolution or to class struggle. On other occasions she was able to use her considerable prestige as a veteran revolutionary to ensure that the Communist Party’s ideological commitment to women’s rights found expression in legislation and that the equality of the sexes always remained high on its agenda.

[See also China, subentry Modern Period.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gilmartin, Christina. Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. The best study of women activists and the communist movement in China in the 1920s. Wang Zheng. Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. A comprehensive study of the Chinese women’s movement in the 1920s that rescues noncommunist feminism from obscurity. Delia Davin

41

DESAI, ANITA (b. 1937), novelist and short-story writer, admired by readers of English, especially in Britain, India, and America. In certain respects the life of Anita Desai (nee Mazumdar) resembles the pattern of many other upper-middle-class Indian women: raised in Delhi, received a BA in English with honors at an elite college of Delhi University, married at the age of twenty to a business¬ man and moved to Bombay (now Mumbai), mother of two sons and two daughters, and a writer in her spare time. In most other regards, however, Desai has broken the mold of what it means to be a global citizen, moving quite seam¬ lessly between various cultures while developing a distinct¬ ive voice. Desai was born in the lovely Himalayan mountain area of Mussoorie, India (located in the state of Uttaranchal, formed in 2000), to a Bengali father and a German mother. Mussoorie has long been a cosmopolitan place, the home of a large missionary boarding school and favored by foreigners living in India. Desai was the baby of the family, with two older sisters and an older brother. As a child she spoke the local language, Hindi, and, at home, her mother tongue, German. She was formally educated in English, however, which became her medium of literary expres¬ sion. Carving out time from housework in order to write, Desai was one of the first women in India to gain an international reputation as a writer in English and to be widely published on several continents. She was first pub¬ lished in the 1960s, and from the late 1980s she began to teach in universities in Britain and the United States, where she has further developed an affinity for Mexican culture, which she finds similar to that of India. Desai’s best writing focuses on matters of her characters’ inner lives as they negotiate various realms of difference, be it tensions between the expectations of husbands and wives, relationships among siblings, life patterns of old age, women’s struggles against prescriptive gender roles, the birth pangs of nation building during India’s 1947 inde¬ pendence and partition, the relationship between geography and emotion, or the religious communalization of Indian languages—this last, In Custody (1984), being later made into a film by Ismail Merchant. Her writings include Cry, the Peacock (1963), Fire on the Mountain (1977), Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975), Games at Twilight and Other Stories (1978), Clear Light of Day (1980), Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), Fasting, Feasting (1999), and Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000), among many others. [See also India and Literature.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brians, Paul. Modern South Asian Literature in English. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.

42

DESAI, ANITA

Dharwadker, Aparna, and Vinay Dharwadker. “Language, Iden¬ tity, and Nation in Postcolonial Indian English Literature.” In English Postcoloniality: Literatures from around the World, edi¬ ted by Radhika Mohanram and Gita Rajan. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Jaggi, Maya. “A Passage from India.” Guardian, 19 June 1999. Newman, Judie. “History and Letters: Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay.” In Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott, edited by Michael Parker and Roger Starkey. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Anne Hardgrove

DESHMUKH, DURGABAI (1909-1981), Gandhian activist in the anticolonial movement, lawyer, member of the Constituent Assembly and the Planning Commission, and the architect of several social welfare programs of the central government of independent India. Durgabai Deshmukh was born on 15 July 1909 into a Brahman family in what is today the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Her given name was simply Durga, and bai was until recently a common suffix for women’s names in many parts of India. Although of reformist inclinations, her family arranged to have Durgabai married at the age of eight to a cousin, Subba Rao. Durgabai walked out of the marriage within a couple of years and entered public life early. At twelve, Deshmukh quit school to join the nationalist movement to boycott the English language and started the Balika Hindi Pathshala, a Hindi-medium school for girls in her hometown of Rajahmundry. The 1923 Congress session in nearby Kakinada drew her into the anticolonial boycott of British-manufactured cloth, to be replaced with handspun, handwoven (khaddar) cloth. She led the Salt Satyagraha—the civil disobedience against the salt tax—in her district in 1930, and she spent three spells of increasing severity in prison between 1930 and 1933. Matriculating at Benares Hindu University soon after her release from prison, Deshmukh obtained a BA and an MA in political science during the 1930s. In 1942 she obtained her law degree from Madras University and enrolled as an Advocate at the Madras High Court. In 1937, Deshmukh started the Andhra Mahila Sabha (Andhra Women’s Conference), an organization to gener¬ ate funds for and set up educational and vocational training facilities for women. The Mahila Sabha served as the foundation for many of Deshmukh’s welfare projects, which grew into a network of schools and hospitals over the next several decades. The Sabha attracted both funds and women volunteers from various social backgrounds. In 1946, Deshmukh was nominated to the Constituent Assem¬ bly, the body that had the task of drafting independent India’s constitution, and she served as the sole woman on its panel of chairmen. Unsuccessful in her bid for an elected

seat in Parliament in 1952, she was nominated to the Plan¬ ning Commission, where she helped design the national policy on social welfare. In 1953 she organized the Central Social Welfare Board to coordinate and fund both villagelevel development projects and also the education of women volunteers in villages for the projects’ implementation. Her main achievement was setting up durable institutional re¬ sources and generating funds for a variety of welfare projects. Between 1960 and 1962, Deshmukh served as the chair¬ man of the National Committee on Girls’ and Women’s Education, a position that made her responsible for obtain¬ ing funds for and publishing several reports on the state of national social welfare in India, such as the Encyclopedia of Social Services in India, the Report of the Commission on Child Care, the Grants in Aid Code Committee Report, and Social Legislation and Its Role in Social Welfare. She served as a delegate to the Second Commonwealth Educa¬ tion Conference. In 1963 she was a member of the Indian delegation to the World Food Congress in Washington, D.C., and in 1965 she was invited as a UNESCO expert to prepare the Draft Asian Model for Educational Develop¬ ment. The government of India awarded her the Padma Vibhushan (one of India’s highest civilian honors) for her contribution to public service. Durgabai remarried in 1953, this time by choice to the economist Chintaman Deshmukh (1896-1982), a man from Maharashtra who was at the time the governor of the Reserve Bank of India and who was later finance minister in Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet. Having severed relations early with her first husband, Durgabai nevertheless supported his widow Timmaiamma after his death, inviting Timmaiamma to come live in her own home with her and Chintaman and providing for her vocational training. Durgabai published a memoir, Chintaman and I (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1980), just a year before her death on 9 May 1981. [See also Imperialism and Anticolonial Protests; and India.]

Colonialism,

subentry

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ganguli, B. N., ed. Social Development: Essays in Honour of Smt. Durgabai Deshmukh. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers, 1977. See Tara Ali Baig, “Durgabai Deshmukh,” and Prodipto Roy, “The Humane Institutionalising of Social Needs.” Samanthakamani, Akkaraju. Durgabai Deshmukh: A Study in the Cause of Freedom, Constitution Framing, Women, and Social Welfare. Hyderabad, India: Literacy House, 2002. Prachi Deshpande

DEVI, BASANTI (1880-1974), prominent anti-imperial Indian nationalist, was born on 23 March 1880 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), the British imperial capital until 1911. Basanti Devi was raised in the northeastern state of Assam,

DIASPORAS: Overview

where her father, Baradanath Haidar, was the diwan, a financial minister under the colonial government. Educated in Kolkata, she was married at seventeen to the famous barrister and nationalist leader Chittaranjan Das (1870-1925), also popularly known as Deshbandhu, or “Friend of the Nation.” Basanti Devi worked alongside her husband in a complementary capacity that can be ap¬ preciated only in the context of her sole and full responsibil¬ ity for the management of a multigenerational, extended household and the raising of three children born between 1898 and 1901. From the early 1900s India’s struggle for liberation from British rule involved the increased participation of women. This was enabled as much by the nonviolent means of pro¬ test adopted by Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) as by the symbols around which a general anticolonial movement was organized. Thus, the adoption of khadi (homespun cotton) in place of British-manufactured cloth helped mobilize women during the Gandhian noncooperation movement of 1920-1922, just as the self-manufacture of salt would do in 1930. Basanti Devi was first arrested for her cham¬ pionship of homespun cotton in 1921, along with Urmila Devi, her husband’s sister, and another activist, Suniti Devi. Her arrest created a furor among the members of the Indian intelligentsia—mostly male nationalist leaders and lawyers—who appealed to the viceroy to India at that time, Rufus Isaacs, the marquess of Reading (1860-1935), and secured her release. When her husband and son were imprisoned in December 1921 for similar political actions, Basanti Devi became the president of the provincial congress in Bengal (1921-1922) and presided over the Bengal Pro¬ vincial Conference held in Chittagong 1922. This allowed her to voice her concern for rural advancement and the need for grassroots anticolonial politics. She also took upon her¬ self the task of editing her husband’s newspaper, the Banglar Katha (Bengal News). Her husband died suddenly in 1925, and this was followed by the premature death of her son Chiraranjan in 1926. Basanti Devi responded to these bereavements by dedi¬ cating herself ever more fully to social welfare activities. She cultivated her connections with eminent intellectuals and leaders such as Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945) and passionately cham¬ pioned art, literature, science, and drama. She traveled widely within the country promoting these fields, thus shap¬ ing them as cultural sites of anticolonial struggle. She also set a precedent in Bengali society when she conducted her daughter’s intercaste marriage according to strict Hindu rules. In 1959 the chief minister of the state of West Bengal established the Basanti Devi College for girls in Kolkata in her honor. Basanti Devi’s ability to weave the domestic and public domains of politics illustrates the importance of anticolonial

43

nationalism in the consolidation of feminism in the Third World. [See also Feminism; Imperialism and Colonialism; India; and South Asia, subentry Colonial Period.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Forbes, Geraldine. Women in Modern India. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books, 1986. Ramusack, Barbara. Women in Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Ray, Bharati. “The Freedom Movement and Feminist Consciousness in Bengal, 1905-1929.” In From the Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women, edited by Bharati Ray. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Sengupta, Subodhchandra, and Anjali Basu, eds. Sangshad Bangali Charitavidhan. Kolkata: Sahitya Sangshad, 1994. SWAPNA BANERJEE

DIASPORAS This entry consists of two subentries: Overview Comparative History

Overview Diasporas have emerged as a result of persecution and forced displacement in times of military conflicts, imperial policies, and—increasingly in more recent times—international trade and transport. Diasporas entail emotional and other forms of attachment to the homeland but also the ever¬ present challenge of assimilation. Diasporic women hold a central place in the preservation of their native cultures, which in turn causes friction within the domestic sphere and with the host community at large. For women, dia¬ sporic existence may represent cultural burdens or an opportunity for greater freedoms from the traditional, patriarchal constraints in the homeland. Characteristics and Categories. The term “diaspora” is derived from the Greek dia (through) and speirein (to sow, to disperse) and originally referred to the dispersion of the Greeks, Jews, and Armenians from their homelands in ancient times. The word connotes forced displacement of men, women, and children from a homeland to settlement in foreign lands. Robin Cohen has identified different cat¬ egories of diaspora, including, for example, victim diasporas (for example, Africans and Armenians), labor and imperial diasporas (for example, Indians and other peoples of the former British Empire), and trade diasporas (for example, Chinese and Lebanese). The word “diaspora” is distinguished from “migration” in that “diaspora” implies sedentariness and community

44

DIASPORAS: Overview

Cultural Conflict and Assimilation. French Muslim girls wearing head scarves in the colors of the French flag protest President Jacques Chirac’s proposal to ban the head scarf in schools, Bordeaux, France, January 2004. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau

formation. The two words can be particularly confusing because globalization derived from the modern tech¬ nologies of communication and transportation has greatly enhanced opportunities for mobility and facilitated the cul¬ tivation of transnational diasporic cultures. The diasporic community distinguishes itself by ties of historical memory to, and ethnic symbols of, the lost homeland but also devel¬ ops new habits of thought and constructs new institutions to assimilate into the dominant culture of the host society. The principal components of diaspora are the profound emotional, symbolic, and even institutional attachments to the homeland, which in the age of globalization tend to negate earlier assumptions regarding assimilation (such as the melting pot theory). The United Nations estimated in 2005 that in 1990 there were about 155 million migrants worldwide; that figure increased to more than 170 million in 2000 and to 190 million in 2005, constituting 3 percent of the global popula¬ tion. Women accounted for about 49.4 percent of global migrants between 1990 and 2005. The Interna¬ tional Organization for Migration notes that even though industrialization and economic development resulted in the migration of millions of people from less developed economies to more developed ones, economic decline experienced in the developed economies has not led to a movement of a large number of migrants back to their country of origin. Migration leads to sedentariness, which in turn leads to diasporization. Diasporas thus emerge in foreign lands for a variety of reasons and in different con¬ texts, including political and religious persecution, political violence and war, and forced expulsion and slavery, as well as voluntary departure for better opportunities. The histor¬ ical patterns of migration and the development of migrant

communities in foreign lands have become some of the most fundamental characteristics of the global political economy. As migrants settle and put roots down in seden¬ tary communities, they develop hybridities of old and new habits and institutions, which ineluctably become pre¬ disposed to diasporic permanence. The formation of diasporic identity includes the emula¬ tion or replication of homeland institutions, maintenance of community symbols of a distinct collective identity in the host land, the retention of collective memory of the home¬ land and continued support for it, and the narratives and the cultivation and perpetuation of the “myth of return.” Diaspora then implies reconfiguration of identity in a for¬ eign land, which in turn generates tensions between “being in one place physically—the place wher'e one lives and works—and thinking regularly of another place far away” (Safran, in Kokot, p. 12). The tension between host land and homeland is said to recede incrementally as the second and third generations identify more closely with the host dominant culture, and in some cases—contrary to the painful transplantation con¬ noted by the term “diaspora”—their assimilation into the host culture enables them to fare far better financially than if they had continued to reside in their homeland. The process of acculturation and assimilation is particularly difficult for first-generation immigrants, further exacerbated by the visibility of cultural and ethno-religious markers, which may render acceptance into the host culture difficult or impossible. In some culturally pluralistic societies, such as Canada, institutions are said to be relatively open to otherness (alterite). The Other is defined by the dominant culture of the autochthonous group and also by diasporic intercommunal and cross-cultural relations, the cultural boundaries accentuated by ethno-religious markers. These markers include, for example, the headscarf worn by Mus¬ lim women and the sari worn by Indian women, as well as the vermillion dot on Indian women’s foreheads; the dot has served as a target for white teenage gangs in the United States engaged in “dotbusting” (Safran, in Kokot, p. 23). In Western societies the headscarf has assumed wider symbolic significance for Arabs, Turks, and Kurds, whose legitimacy and desirability within the dominant cultures, particularly after 11 September 2001, have been repeatedly called into question. Double Disadvantage of Women. Of the various groups of migrants, women tend to feel most heavily the emotional and economic problems associated with diasporization. Boyd has stressed the “double disadvantage” syndrome whereby gender “adds another dimension to the stratifica¬ tion of immigrants” in a variety of milieus. Diasporic women experience both cultural prejudices and also exploitation in employment. The position of diasporic women in the labor force reflects “the combined impact

DIASPORAS: Overview

of sex and birthplace or the ‘double negative’ effect” (Boyd, pp. 1092-1093). From an economic perspective, diasporic communities create a “buffer against business cycles”—Konjunkturpuffer in Germany, applied to Turkish “guest workers”—by providing a pool of cheap labor that will forgo demands for higher wages in return for permis¬ sion to stay in the host country (Safran, in Kokot, pp. 19 and 22). In fact, the international division of labor has histori¬ cally depended on women laborers in textile factories, shoe¬ making sweatshops, and car and computer manufacturing assembly lines. Where cheap labor saturates demands for laborers, the unemployment level among diasporic women is usually higher than that among women of the autoch¬ thonous group. In Britain in the early 1980s, for example, the proportion of unemployed Asian women was twice as high as that of white women (Brah, pp. 49-50 and 179). The double disadvantage that women face is integral to the problems associated with diasporic neuroses, because women of “visible minorities” are relegated to permanent inequality. As interviews with Canadian-born Caribbean women have indicated, the “visibility” of the diasporic woman is “externally imposed,” constructed within the con¬ text of a society where not only does their race matter more than their national identity as Canadians, but also, and more important, their “visibility” and the extent to which the dominant group accepts them as true Canadians matters more than their national identity as Canadians (Olwig, in Kokot, pp. 59-63). In Australia, the definition of who qual¬ ifies as Australian includes the Irish Catholic, Scot, and Welsh, but not the Greek, Italian, Arab, Vietnamese, other Asians, and dark-skinned peoples—regardless of the length of their residency. Cultural contact zones thus become sites of turbulent “tensions of hybrid identity” (Gray, in Kokot, p. 47), of unsettledness and uneasiness, of feminist activism and alienation, that shape and define women’s diasporic sense of belonging. Role of Women. Diaspora is thus characterized by a profound uncertainty between the alien self and the host society. Moreover, diaspora also embodies certain properties characteristic of women. While a conceptualiza¬ tion of the diasporic man has historically stressed the romanticized masculine traits of exploration and adven¬ ture, the conceptualization of the diasporic woman has emphasized “continuity of ‘tradition’ and a bounded sense of community” (Gray, in Kokot, p. 34). As the collection of Jewish women’s prayers Seder tkhines u-vakoshes (Order of Supplications and Petitions), published in Germany in the seventeenth century, demonstrates, diasporic women have held a central place in the propagation and perpetu¬ ation of their native culture. Women are, in the words of one scholar, the “daughters of tradition” (Ghuman, p. 166). They are expected to assume the responsibilities for the transmission of culture from one generation to the next

45

and, indeed, physically to reproduce the nation. The dia¬ sporic woman’s body is thus considered to function as the vehicle for regenerating the diasporic identity. She bears the burden of cultural preservation, although she is also cognizant of the reality that it is virtually impossible to reproduce in diaspora the cultural authenticity left behind in the homeland. In diasporic communities the task involves more, how¬ ever, than the transmission and physical reproduction of culture; it also involves the preservation of culture, a responsibility that weighs heavily on women and often requires sacrifices in self-interests and careers. Immigrant women, especially those lacking education and skills, are less likely than men to assimilate into the host culture, because men are routinely active in various aspects of the dominant culture—for instance, through employment, education, or military service. Being less assimilated, women serve as the custodians of their native culture and language and socialize the youth through their culinary work, quilting, and other hobbies and habits. After successive generations, however, the cultural boundaries between the diasporic and host communities begin to blur, if not disappear. The first generation of immigrants suffers from the clash of double consciousness between the nostalgia of the past rooted in memories of the homeland and the daily reality of foreignness in the host land, although for women that nostalgia may be less pronounced. As second or third generations of diasporic communities become integrated into the culture and econ¬ omy of the host land they redefine their status and pur¬ pose with respect to the imagined homeland. They accept their presence in the host land as permanent, and accor¬ dingly—almost imperceptibly—they replace the myth of return with the reality of diasporic sedentariness and per¬ manence, which for some leads to total assimilation and de-diasporization. Where diasporic groups build cultural, educational, and religious centers to maintain the community and reaf¬ firm their ethnic identities, educated professional women play a crucial role as leaders, organizers, teachers, facilita¬ tors, and foot soldiers, and in so doing they protect their culture against the homogenizing and marginalizing effects of the dominant culture. Diasporic women of the middle and upper classes engage in the routine processes of cultur¬ al negotiation and renegotiation between their diasporic community and the host land. Their daily experiences of cultural negotiation clash directly with traditional images of diasporic women as vehicles of “cultural reproduction and maintenance” (Gray, in Kokot, p. 34). During the last third of the twentieth century or so, in European, Asian, and African societies, as well as in the Americas, women with professional skills became more than ever before a part of diasporic community elites and effective participants in

46

DIASPORAS: Overview

political, economic, and cultural circles. They constitute therefore an essential element in the organizational resources of what Armstrong called “mobilized diasporas” in the arenas of both commerce and politics. For women from patriarchal societies, the diasporic experience may also be a means to secure liberation from traditional, conservative regulations of gender behavior and association. In the case of Irish women migrating to the United States in the late nineteenth century, diasporization is said to have represented, among other things, rejection of family life and patriarchal values. Cultural distancing from the original ethnic identity becomes more pronounced as sons and daughters accept jobs in professional fields that have little connection to or association with the experiences of their parents. The “Gib-girl”—an Indian woman born at Gibraltar—moves away to a university in London, and in the process her native Indian identity becomes fused with her newly acquired identities as a university student and later as a professional. Assimilation by successive genera¬ tions leads to “the gradual degeneration of an imagined ‘original’ culture” (Gray, in Kokot, p. 45) as the diasporic community embraces the habits and values of the host country and redefines itself as a local community while experiencing the inevitable erosion of identity. In the United States, immigrant parents tend to insist that their children realize the American Dream. The trauma of migration places enormous pressure on the children to succeed in life so as to “give some meaning to their tragedy and offer reparation for their luck of being alive” (Hernandez, in McGoldrick, p. 182). In one study, a Salvadoran woman whose husband had abandoned the family after their arrival in New York City found it troubling that her rebellious daughter was not as obsessed with the American Dream as she was (Hernandez, in McGoldrick, p. 182). Assessment. Clearly, diaspora analyses need not remain—as is often the case in analyses stressing the push and pull of homeland-host land—confined to discourses on poor migrants, exiles, and refugees. Diaspora analyses can also integrate a multiplicity of qualities linking the individual with the host community. Globalization has markedly transformed the traditional conceptualization of diaspora. Whereas prior generations viewed migration as a permanent departure from the birthplace, more recent migrants tend to maintain closer relations with their place of origin because they can communicate and travel back and forth more easily. People more and more often cross boundaries historically determined by nation-states and cultures, while the sources and destinations of, and motivations for, migration have changed and multiplied. No longer can migrants be assumed to be “the poor and war-torn in search of a better life” (Tsolidis, p. 7). To be sure, the locality of the experiential and assimilative tendencies of identity still constitute important ingredients

in diasporas, but nevertheless there is growing fluidity of both spatial and cultural boundaries. The place of origin and the real and imagined relationship with it are central to understanding diasporic beliefs and behaviors. Thus diasporas are closely related to kin and community, and women’s diasporic identities and belongings biologi¬ cally and culturally sustain and reproduce both. There is a distinction between poor women whose limited skills con¬ fine them strictly to the role of biological and cultural repro¬ ducer and richer women who have advanced degrees and professional skills and whose contributions to the mainte¬ nance of the diaspora community extend beyond mere re¬ productive functions to involve community leadership through participation in the political, economic, and cultur¬ al life of the host country. First-generation diasporic women patrol the cultural boundaries at home by using their mother language and teaching it to their children. Second- or thirdgeneration women, however, continue to perform the same function but also tend to encourage their children to inte¬ grate into the local, dominant culture of the host land. [See also Migration and Stratification.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agnew, Vijay, ed. Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. A superb collection of papers on various aspects of diasporic cultures and problems of identity; see in particular Agnew’s article “The Quest for the Soul in the Diaspora” on pp. 268-290. Armstrong, John A. “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas.” Ameri¬ can Political Science Review 70, no. 2 (June 1976): 393-408. A seminal work on various dimensions of diaspora as proletarian and mobilized communities. Boyd, M. “At a Disadvantage: The Occupational Attainment of Foreign-born Women in Canada.” International Migration Review 18 (1984): 1091-1120. An informative analysis of the economic concerns among diasporic women in Canada. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. A classic work on the construction and reconstruction of subjectivity and gender within the context of class relations and nationalism in diasporas of the late twen¬ tieth century. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: Univer¬ sity of Washington Press, 1997. An important study that is rich in theoretical analyses and empirical data on various diasporas. Ghuman, Paul A. Singh. Double Loyalties: South Asian Adoles¬ cents in the West. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003. Based on extensive fieldwork, an original and innovative contribution to the study of diasporic studies and problems of cultural and identity clashes among second- and third-generation youth in the West. Hernandez, Miguel. “Central American Families.” In Ethnicity and Family Therapy, edited by Monica McGoldrick, Joe Giordano, and Nydia Garcia-Preto, pp. 178-191. 3rd ed. New York: Guil¬ ford Press, 2005. The volume is a massive undertaking in research in clinical approaches to emotional problems involving cultural diversity and development among ethnic groups of different national, racial, and religious backgrounds. Kokot, Waltraud, Khachig Tololyan, and Carolin Alfonso, eds. Diaspora, Identity, and Religion: New Directions in Theory and

DIASPORAS: Comparative History

Research. London: Routledge, 2004. One of the best anthologies on issues pertaining to diasporas and diaspora studies. See in particular Breda Gray, ‘“Too Close for Comfort’: Remembering the Forgotten Diaspora of Irish Women in England” (pp. 33-51); Karen Fog Olwig, “Place, Movement, and Identity: Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion in a Caribbean Family” (pp. 53-71); and William Safran, “Deconstructing and Comparing Diasporas” (pp. 9-29). Tsolidis, Georgina. Schooling, Diaspora, and Gender: Being Femi¬ nist and Being Different. Philadelphia: Open University, 2001. This study, based on interviews, focuses on the cultural difficul¬ ties experienced by diasporic women in Australian society. Umansky, Ellen M. “Spiritual Expressions: Jewish Women’s Reli¬ gious Lives in the United States in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, edited by Judith R. Baskin, pp. 337-364. 2d ed. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Extremely useful anthology on the history of Jewish women in the diaspora. Simon Payaslian

Comparative History The scholarship on the history of women from antiquity to the modern age has paid attention to their status as deter¬ mined by patriarchal, androcentric hierarchies of political and economic power, customs, and institutions. The litera¬ ture on women and diaspora has traditionally and generally tended to follow similar modes of analyses, although more recent works indicate that diasporic women have also held leading roles in maintaining the identity of their communities in foreign lands. The experiences of women in the diaspora reveal certain general historic patterns in matters pertaining to cultural and gender identities, as well as to diasporic women’s positive engagement in the community life of their host countries. The Origins of Diasporas. The Greek, Jewish, and Armenian diasporas are the earliest cases in Western historical memory. The Greek diaspora has its roots in the Greeks’ eastward imperial expansion to Asia Minor during the period 800-600 b.c.e. Accordingly, for contem¬ porary Greeks the term “diaspora” signified positive devel¬ opments such as military successes and settlements in conquered territories. Diaspora as victimhood emerged with the dispersal of the Jews from their homeland follow¬ ing the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonian army in 586 b.c.e. Another major wave of dis¬ persion from the Holy Land occurred after the Jews’ defeat by the Romans in 70 c.e. As a result of the wars for control over Judea, Jewish men and women were enslaved in dispersion. The first major wave of Armenian migration occurred during the reign of the Byzantine emperor Maurice (582-602 c.e.), which resulted in the formation of a diasporic community in Bulgaria. Relatively little is known about women in the ancient Greek and Armenian diasporas.

47

Jewish diasporic communities were founded in ancient Babylon, Smyrna, Alexandria, and parts of Europe. The status of Jewish women was determined by the Talmud and by diasporic cultures. Jewish women soon adopted the local cultural customs. In some cases, as in Egypt, certain Jewish women owned properties and participated in the commercial and financial affairs of the community. Though most Jewish women could not read, a small number received formal education in classical Greek and Latin in addition to training in the Jewish scriptures. Jewish women also con¬ tributed their energies and finances to maintaining their community identity. Sophia of Gortyn led the synagogue in Kissamos, Crete, in the fifth or fourth century b.c.e., and in Smyrna in the second century c.e. a Jewish woman, Rufina, served as the archisynagogos (head of a synagogue). Jewish women also served as “mothers of the synagogue” and as members of the councils of elders. In the Middle Ages most Jews lived in diasporic commu¬ nities in the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and other European societies. They were permitted a certain degree of autonomy in matters of community affairs so long as they paid taxes to the host government. Despite the difficulties posed by local Christian cultures, Jewish women were acculturated to European society, and some even lived prosperous lives. In England a wealthy Jewish woman referred to as Licoricia of Winchester engaged in a profitable business of money lending and contributed a considerable sum toward the construction of Westminster Abbey. The Iberian patriar¬ chal culture, on the other hand, severely limited the economic opportunities for Jewish women in the Sephardic diaspora, and neither the Muslim nor the post-Reconquista Christian societies could afford Jewish women such privileges, although some Jewish women were employed by the royal families in Castile and Aragon. Religious authorities in European societies insisted on preserving the cultural and religious boundaries between Jews and Christians, which in Spain degenerated into intense hostility toward Jews and, beginning in 1391, led to voluntary and forced conversions to Christianity (the conversos). Even¬ tually in 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain, and mass conversions occurred in Portugal in 1497; meanwhile the Inquisitions were begun, in 1478 in Spain and in 1536 in Portugal. In times of crises, such as during the Crusades beginning in 1096, many Jewish women worked for the pro¬ tection of their communities from physical and cultural dev¬ astation. The Crusaders in France and Germany demanded conversion to Christianity, but Jewish women resisted and instead often chose death over apostasy. Indeed, in Spain, Portugal, and other parts of Europe and their colonial terri¬ tories, such as Mexico, Jewish women played a central role in the perpetuation of Judaism. After the mass expulsion from Spain, for example, when the Jewish community could no longer provide teachers or books, education at home under

48

DIASPORAS: Comparative History

women’s tutelage remained the only institution. The Inquisi¬ tion had eliminated Jewish public religious and educational institutions led by men; in their stead, mothers assumed the responsibilities of transmission of traditions and rituals to their children. Asian and African Diasporas. Wang Gungwu, in his book China and the Chinese Overseas, identifies four gen¬ eral patterns of Chinese migration: coolies (Huagong), traders (Huashang), sojourners (Huaqiao), and remigrants (.Huayi). In East Asia, the Chinese diaspora emerged in the early fifteenth century when Zheng He, the renowned admiral of the Ming dynasty, led an imperial fleet of three hundred ships and twenty-eight thousand men on a series of expeditions beyond the South China Sea to Thailand, India, the Persian Gulf, and the eastern shores of Africa. Despite imperial opposition to such expeditions after 1433, Chinese merchants with their wives and children journeyed to the Philippines and Thailand to establish businesses and settle¬ ments. Between 1570 and 1600 the Chinese population in Manila increased to ten thousand, most of whom were en¬ gaged in commerce (in silk, textiles, porcelain, and so forth). In the nineteenth century, British colonial policy encour¬ aged Chinese merchants to settle in Singapore, as did French colonial policy in Indochina. At first the Chinese immi¬ grant communities were considered temporary “sojourners,” albeit with attachments to xiang (home), but gradually they evolved into diasporic communities and adapted to local customs and practices, although in some cases, as in Malaya, the dominant Muslim culture required adherence to its precepts. Chinese women gained little visibility in diasporic communities. They became more visible in public affairs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but particularly after 1937 when Ching Ling Soong, the widow of Sun Yat-sen (or Sun Yixian, 1866-1925), launched her charitable programs for women in Chinese diasporic communities (for example, the Los Angeles Nur¬ sery). In 1949 the Communist government in China estab¬ lished the All-China Women’s Federation to centralize programs for women and girls, and it later founded the Returned Overseas Chinese Federation and the Qiaoxin Gongcheng (Overseas Heart Project) to encourage cooper¬ ation between China and the diaspora in economic matters. In the early twenty-first century, the Chinese diasporic popu¬ lation numbers more than 22 million, spread throughout Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In China¬ towns and across the United States, in the late 1980s, by one estimate, five hundred garment factories employed twenty thousand Chinese women. The African experience of enslavement by Europeans serves as a paradigm of forced transfer of peoples from their homeland to foreign lands across oceans. The principal European powers—the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the

Dutch, the English, and the French—forcibly removed more than 12 million Africans to work in the sugarcane plantations and coffee- and cotton-growing industries in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States. The slave ships transplanted more men than women. The human cargo on one ship, for instance, included 700 slaves: 480 men and 220 women. They brought their traditions and beliefs with them into the New World. The abolition of slavery did not end forced displacement. In the first half of the nineteenth century thousands of Asians and Africans were removed from their homelands. The Indian population under British imperial control was severely affected by this policy. For example, more than 453,000 Indians were sent to Mauritius and about 143,000 Indians were sent to Trinidad between the 1830s and World War I. In nearly all cases, the Indian communities in foreign lands—which originated as communities of indentured laborers—evolved into diasporic communities. In Mauritius the Indian community in the early 1980s totaled about 623,000, and in Trinidad 421,000. In the formative stages of the Indian diaspora in Trinidad, most of the indentured women were poor, homeless prostitutes, divorcees, widows, and young girls. When Indian families were reconstituted, the patriarchal system provided the basis for reformulating the Indian community. As the British Empire expanded across Southeast Asia, and particularly in Australia and New Zealand, women’s organizations such as the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women played a leading role in facilitating the development of diaspora communities in the late 1860s. Beginning in the eighteenth century the East India Company imported a growing number of Asian women to England to be domestic servants or, in some cases, left them homeless in the streets. Over the years these women, along with new immigrants who were often brought to meet labor shortages, worked in the textile mills and in clothing, footwear, and various other industries that required few or no skills. Immigration of South Asian labor from the former colonies of Pakistan and India increased rapidly after the colonies’ post-World War II independence. Most immigrant women came from agricultural sectors and therefore pos¬ sessed little familiarity with industrial work. Even women from East Africa (for example, Kenya and Tanzania) who migrated from urban centers did not possess the skills neces¬ sary for successful employment. Their living and working conditions required profound psychological and cultural adjustments to the new environment, but in all cases— whether Indian, Kenyan, or Tanzanian—women as mothers and laborers sought to maintain the identities of their diasporic communities. Challenges of Modernization. Also in Victorian England, Jewish women writers—such as Charlotte Montefiore, Anna

DIASPORAS: Comparative History

Maria Goldsmid, Marion Moss Hartog, and Grace Aguilar— confronted by the challenges of Protestantism and moder¬ nization, emphasized the necessity of social and institutional reforms in Jewish community life but also insisted on maintaining their Jewish identity. English culture must accept them as Jews, they argued, rather than merely tolerating them. In her book The Spirit of Judaism (1842), Grace Aguilar (1816-1847), the leading theologian and spokesperson for the Jewish community in England, stressed the importance of positive relations between Jews and Christians but also stressed the importance of maintaining a clear separation between adherence to Jewish customs in the domestic sphere while speaking English and acting English in the public sphere. Speaking and acting English in public would enable Jewish women to gain access to educational and cultural institutions within Christian society at large, which in turn would translate into equality with Jewish men in the community and at home. Some Jewish men applauded Jewish women’s quest for education, but the issue caused deep divisions within the diaspora community because some viewed such funda¬ mental changes as not only altering relations between men and women but also potentially undermining the Jewish woman’s role in preserving Jewish culture at home. Leading Jewish women intellectuals, such as Marion Moss Hartog, publisher and editor of the short-lived Jewish Sabbath Journal (the first Jewish women’s journal in history), coun¬ tered that if women were expected to transmit their culture and values to their children, they themselves had to be educated and allowed to participate in the intellectual life within and beyond the Jewish community. Abraham Benisch, the chief rabbi of the British Empire, severely criti¬ cized Hartog’s journal as promoting “un-Jewish” doctrines (Galchinsky, in Baskin, pp. 212-213 and 217). Organizations and publications advocating activism on the part of Jewish women also appeared on the Continent some decades later, such as the Yiddish pamphlet Di moderne froyen bavegung (The Modern Women’s Movement), published in Warsaw by the Publishing House of the Jewish Women’s Association in Poland, and the journal Di Froy (The Woman), which advocated women’s activism in politics. In France, Jewish women established the Alliance Israelite Universelle in 1860 to regenerate Jewish culture and identity through modern coeducational schools. In Poland, Sarah Schenirer, of Hasidic parents, founded a study group for the purpose of educating Jewish women about the Torah; this was followed by her Beys Yaakov school for girls and the Orthodox Agudas Yisroel, a political group. Additional Beys Yaakov schools were subsequently created in other European countries inclu¬ ding Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Similarly in the United States, where Rebecca Gratz founded the Jewish

49

Sunday school, Jewish women responded to the challenges of industrialization and secularization by stressing religious education as a way of cultivating and maintaining the Jewish diasporic communities. The diasporic woman in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other Western countries found the more liberal cultural environment in the host land conducive to professional development, with the unpleasant conse¬ quence that the husband often viewed her pursuit of a career as undermining his traditional authority at home. Women in increasing numbers, having attained financial security, challenged their status as defined by patriarchal ascription, which led to religious, cultural, and ideological clashes between traditional practices and modernization cum secularization. Kate Simon, in her Bronx Primitive (1982), masterfully depicted the clash through her depic¬ tion of her mother. During prayer, Simon writes, “my mother took off her headcloth, blew out the candles, and, turning to my astonished father, said—in Polish, which we still spoke sometimes—‘No more. I never believed it, I don’t now. And I don’t have to do it to please my mother, or anyone, here.’” Similarly, interviews of some Chinese women in Canada—the destination of more than thirty-three thousand Chinese immigrants from the People’s Republic of China in 2002—have indicated deep marital frictions as a result of employment and unemployment problems. A woman earning a higher salary than her husband challenges Chinese patriarchal traditions and may lead to the dis¬ solution of her family. One Chinese woman commented: You see, when I’m in China, I always obey him, but here when he says something, I don’t agree with him .... [W]e quarrel about everything. And he said Canada is not good, it’s cold, the house is small. And when we go swim, he says this is not a good swimming pool, [it’s] so small.... He complained about everything [here in Canada]. I prepare a dish, and he said it’s not as good as what he eats at home .... He’s the kind of person who always thinks he’s the man; being a Chinese man means you should have a [better] position than a woman. If I find a job and he couldn’t find a job, he could not bear that, you know, so he’s afraid of that (Sakamoto and Zhou, in Agnew, pp. 215-216).

In both quotations the word “here” is of great significance, because it represents the juxtaposition of the traditional patriarchal past (laden with cultural and religious restric¬ tions) with the secularization of modernity in the diaspora that is seen as offering opportunities to transform the self. Thus diasporic life may offer certain opportunities to women whose options otherwise would remain limited in their homeland, but culturally more flexible societies also challenge the fundamental values transposed into the diasporic community. For a woman, earning an income, especially if her salary is higher than her husband’s, causes

50

DIASPORAS: Comparative History

Night Classes for Immigrants. Girls from immigrant families of all nationalities attend school at night after working all day, Boston, 1909. Photograph by Lewis Hine. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

friction between her and her husband and raises a host of questions about role reversal at home. Difficulties in accul¬ turation and loss of gender-based power for men easily cause tensions within the diasporic family. Men more frequently and nostalgically idealize their homeland, while diasporic women feel less constrained by customary regula¬ tions, and even though they feel the pains of homesickness they prefer not to return to the homeland. Whether in France, England, Australia, the United States, or other host lands, the gender-ethnicity nexus is further amplified parti¬ cularly when diasporic women are considered the physical and iconic bearers of ethnic identity. In eastern Europe the number of Albanian, Greek, Turkish, and Kurdish diasporic communities has been augmented as a result of political and economic uncertainties and difficulties, as in the case of the mass migration of about 300,000 Turks from Bulgaria in the late 1980s, followed by another wave of mass migration that resulted from the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the accompanying bloodshed. Ethnic Croats, Bosnians, and other groups from the region migrated to Germany, Italy, the United States, and Canada. In East and Southeast Asia, however, the primary motivation for migra¬ tion within and beyond the region has been mainly economic, as employers in the newly industrializing economies, such as those of Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand, sought to attract a larger labor force. Both Malaysia and Thailand have been plagued by pro¬ blems of international human trafficking and other illegal

activities involving women from as far away as the former Soviet republic of Armenia, who are exploited as cheap laborers in sweatshops and as prostitutes. In 1994, when the Malaysian government intensified its campaign against illegal workers in the ethnic communities, violation of the human rights of 1,200 Filipinas in Kuala Lumpur caused a diplomatic crisis with the Philippines. In most cases, such migrant communities lead to the formation of diasporic communities in the host country, even if the host country (as in the case of Malaysia) has a record of turbulent relationships with outside ethnic groups. The “Perpetually Transient.” In some societies the cultural chasm between the dominant culture in the host land and the culture in the immigrant communities seems to be unbridgeable, especially in times of heightened xenopho¬ bic rhetoric and policies, as witnessed in the Western world during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The British experience has shown that racial boundaries also demarcate the hierarchies of diasporic boundaries. The experiences of Irish and Afro-Caribbean or South Asian women in Britain have been quite different, because in the cultural hierarchy white Irishwomen are seen in a relatively more positive light than their darkskinned Afro-Caribbean or South Asian counterparts. As Georgina Tsolidis has pointed out, in Australia, for example, where “the concept of ethnicity has been used to exclude Australian ethnic minorities from ‘legitimate Australianness’ and often, the economic and social power

DIASPORAS: Comparative History

associated with it,” ethnic communities remain “perpe¬ tually transient” relative to the real Australians; this is shown by such exclamations as, “Go back to where you came from!” (Tsolidis, pp. 6 and 14). In the United States, Ron Kelley writes, while Muslim men can more easily blend into American culture, Muslim women wearing veils attract attention and can be “potential scapegoats for international tensions and negative stereo¬ types about Islam. Clearly it sometimes takes courage for a woman to so publicly advocate her faith” (Kelley, in Haddad and Smith, p. 148). In some instances, however, Muslim women wearing the hijab have been the target of harassment by members of their own community, as in the case of Iranian women in the Los Angeles area, who chose to wear the veil but were attacked by pro-Shah groups. Wearing the veil may be seen by some as not only devout adherence to Islam but also a political statement against U.S. policy toward Iran. Generations of immigrants suffer from the difficulties associated with diasporic double consciousness between nostalgia of the past rooted in memories of the homeland and the daily reality of foreignness in the host land. “A longing for the ‘good old days,’ can be read as ‘a search for belonging’ as well as an attempt to minimize the impact of ‘many bereavements’ ” (Sugiman, in Agnew, p. 64). In Leena Dhingra’s novel Amritvela (1988), the protagonist, an Indian woman residing in Britain, finds herself unable to maintain multiple ethnic identities. She fits into neither British nor Indian culture. She writes that, on a plane half¬ way to India, “I feel myself to be suspended between two cultures. This is where I belong, the halfway mark. Here in the middle of nowhere.” In extreme cases, such bereave¬ ment may lead to dysfunctional relationships, various forms of social paralysis, and even suicide. In fact, in Britain the suicide rate among South Asian women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four is three times the national average, and that of South Asian women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four is twice the national average. Failure to adjust to the mainstream culture can lead to severe emotional crises for members of family, the practice of honor killing being an extreme example of such a crisis. Often developed within the tradition of arranged marriages, honor killing remains a common practice in some diasporic communities. In England, hundreds of Asian women have been victims of honor killing. For example, in 1998, Rukhsana Naz, a teenage girl in Derby, England, was murdered by her mother and brother after they learned of her extramarital affair and pregnancy. In July 2006, Samaira Nazir, who had decided to marry the man she loved instead of the man chosen by her parents, was stabbed by her brother and cousin. Another girl, Shazia Qayum, became suicidal after she informed her mother of her decision not to marry the man chosen for her. Shazia sought the help of an Asian

51

women’s organization, Karma Nirvana, founded by Jasvinder Sanghera, for victims of similar domestic violence, although the group has experienced opposition from the Asian communities. In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century in South Africa, where most Indian women were brought as a support system for their male compatriots ser¬ ving as indentured laborers, Indian women were exploited for their labor as well as for sexual pleasure. It was not coinci¬ dental, therefore, that Mahatma Gandhi’s calls for passive resistance in South Africa found considerable support among Indian women, as evidenced by the formation of the Trans¬ vaal Indian Women’s Association to save the honor of Indian women. Several years later, in 1938, the Indian Women’s League was founded to empower Indian women, which in the long run—especially in the 1980s and 1990s—enabled them to gain access to education and become doctors, judges, lawyers, and business executives, thereby competing with men in South Africa. South Asian women in Canada and the United States have experienced considerable obstacles of race and gender pre¬ judices, where traditional family practices further restrict their mobility and confine them to family relationships. Some gain little familiarity with the outside world—the foreign envir¬ onment—and their knowledge of the host culture and cus¬ toms is derived mostly from their children and from watching television. In Canada in 2001 more than 2 million women, or 14 percent of the total population of women, identified them¬ selves as belonging to a “visible minority” group, with Chinese (26 percent), South Asian (22 percent), and black (17 per¬ cent) women constituting the largest groups among “visible minorities.” Filipinas accounted for 9 percent of the female visible minority group, and Latin American, Southeast Asian, Arab, Korean, and Japanese women each accounted for 5 percent or less. Chinese and Korean women tend to speak their native languages at home. About 67 percent of Chinese women, 66 percent of Korean women, and 62 percent South¬ east Asian women spoke “a language other than English or French in their home.” Some diasporic communities have made adjustments to the local cultures in various aspects of life—for example, educational institutions and religious practices—which are inevitably mediated by Western value systems. The more traditionalist among the diasporic men and women per¬ ceive this as debasing their cultural authenticity. Hindu women’s stri-dharma (duty, law, religion), for example, continues to demand adherence to the principles of family honor and moral stability, while at the same time the pro¬ fessional status and economic gains that Hindu women have attained benefit both them and their homeland. In fact, in recent years greater attention has been paid to the role of diasporic women and diasporic communities in general in cultivating closer relations with, and contributing

52

DIASPORAS: Comparative History

Diaspora. Two immigrant women in Saint Lawrence Market, Toronto, Ontario, October 1914. Boyd/Library and Archives Canada,

John

PA-061303

to economic development in, their respective homelands. Extensive networks of communication and the facility of frequent travel by air in the age of globalization have encour¬ aged closer contacts with the homeland than was possible in the mid-twentieth century and earlier. Changing Roles of Diasporic Women. After World War II, decolonization in Africa and Asia led to political upheavals in a number of newly independent countries, each with similar experiences of a long and troubled legacy of European colonialism. Eritrea had experienced the double colonialisms of Italy and subsequently of Ethiopia before it gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993. The Eritrean community in Canada has been since the 1970s home to refugees fleeing bloodshed. In the meantime, Eritrean women extended enormous material and moral support from Canada to their male and female compatriots who were engaged in the war of liberation from Ethiopia. In support of their homeland, Eritrean women took part in public demonstrations and cultivated a sense of community between the diasporic community and Eritrea. Yet though they showed great respect toward women’s participation in the military conflict in the homeland and financial contribution from Canada, Eritrean men both at home and in Canada nevertheless viewed women’s contribution in the diaspora as well as on the battlefield as a mere aberration. Men clearly outnumbered women in official representation of the Eritrean community in Canada, such as in lobbying Ottawa. Further, Eritrean women found themselves in the unenvi¬ able situation of holding menial jobs to support their families when the income earned by their husbands proved insufficient, although most Eritrean men had high levels of

education. Interviews with Eritrean women in Canada have indicated that they have little desire to establish permanent communities in Canada, but after years of bloodshed in the homeland Eritreans are more likely to turn Canada into their permanent homeland. “A telling moment came for some parents who took their families back for a visit: their children asked when they could return home—to Canada” (Metsuoka and Sorenson, in Agnew, pp. 155-157 and 164-165). Despite the difficulties confronted, ethnic women entre¬ preneurs have registered major advances in recent years. In the United States, previous generations were urged to attend college to achieve the American Dream, but chronic corporate layoffs have convinced many Asian women to rely on self-employment. Accordingly, the number of businesses owned by Asian women rose by 69 percent between 1997 and 2004—by 40.6 percent between 2002 and 2003. In com¬ parison, during that same period (1997-2004) the national figure for self-employed women increased by 8.3 percent. Particularly indicative of changing women’s roles is the extent to which they have been involved in mobilizing financial resources in the diasporic communities for the economic benefit of the homeland. Financial remittances have complemented official development assistance pro¬ vided by the wealthier countries, and professionals with advanced college training returning to their homeland and contributing to the “brain gain” in technical knowledge are soon expected to reverse the “brain drain” experienced in the past decades in the Middle East, the People’s Republic of China, Singapore, India, and the Philippines. The African Union has shown particular interest in this issue, especially considering that the African diaspora includes an estimated

DIASPORAS: Comparative History

10 million emigrants and more than 200 million descendants of slaves in the Americas. Diasporas in the age of globalization enable developing countries to pursue closer relations with their communities abroad. Diasporic communities extend philanthropic sup¬ port to their homeland, and countries such as China, India, Nigeria, Eritrea, and Senegal have established plans to in¬ tegrate their diasporic communities into national economic development programs, ranging from project-specific pro¬ grams to agencies to promote advanced technologies. The Chinese community in the United States increased from 300,000 in 1960 to more than 3 million in 2000, and a larger number of Chinese Americans are financially successful today than ever before. The increase in their numbers and their improved financial situation, combined with the economic reforms in China since the late 1970s and the Chinese government’s closer relations with the dia¬ sporic communities—through such organizations as the 1990 Institute Dragon Fund and the All-China Women’s Federation—has led to higher remittances to China, which between 1999 and 2003 averaged about $0.7 billion per year. In the case of the Indian community, that figure was $9.9 billion, despite diasporic skepticism toward In¬ dian organizations. In both cases the actual totals may be even- higher, because remittances from illegal immi¬ grants do not appear in official data. Diasporic women are active in the organization of fund¬ raising events and serve as leaders of philanthropic organi¬ zations for the benefit of their diasporic communities, although it is reported that women—unlike men, who give for political reasons at different levels of government—tend to give to societies that they know personally. Lata Krishnan, president of the Indian America Foundation, has raised $150,000 for victims of domestic violence in the $an Francisco area; she reportedly commented, “I am driven by personal and emotional connections. When you meet an abused woman you want to make a difference in her life” (Taplin, in Geithner, p. 360). Further, diasporic women with a college education are more frequently involved in organizational decision-making processes as equals with men than they are in their home¬ land. While men and women of Asian, African, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern descent have experienced prejudices in the United States, women especially tend to be “more appreciative of the opportunities American society offers them. When [Chinese women] give, they tend to donate to foundations and organizations of their own choice rather than merely follow decisions made by their male counter¬ parts.” Some middle-class Indian women in the United Sates donate generously to the Ramakrishna and Chinmaya missions that operate orphanages, hospitals, and schools in India. In the African diasporic communities in the Americas, women activists such as Michele Stephenson of

53

the United States, director of Faces of Change and winner of the award for best film directed by a woman of color at the African Diaspora Film Festival in 2005, and the Brazilian actress Maria Ceiqa of the film Daughters of the Wind have sought to cultivate and perpetuate African culture through art. Thus the traditional image of diasporic women as mere reproducers of native culture must be transformed to encom¬ pass their successes as leaders in the cultural, commercial, and political mobilization of their diasporic communities. Of course not all women become a part of the diasporic elite in their community. Such successes by women in the diaspora are generally limited to the wealthy and the educated. Women who lack such opportunities and skills are likely to remain at a disadvantage—isolated and alienated in the diasporic community. The more successful diasporic women thus facilitate the conquest of political and economic spaces within the host land. In fact, in some cases the diasporic existence itself provides previously unknown opportunities for education and social mobility. [See also Migration and Stratification.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agnew, Vijay, ed. Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. A superb collection of papers on various aspects of diasporic cultures and problems of identity. See in particular Agnew’s article “The Quest for the Soul in the Diaspora,” pp. 268-290; Atsuko Metsuoka and John Sorenson, “Ghosts and Shadows: Memory and Resilience among the Eritrean Diaspora,” pp. 151-170; Izumi Sakamoto and Yanqiu Rachel Zhou, “Gendered Nostalgia: The Experience of New Chinese Skilled Immigrants in Canada,” pp. 209-229; and Pamela Sugiman, “Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese-Canadian Women’s Life Stories,” pp. 48-80. Baskin, Judith R., ed. Jewish Women in Historical Perspective. 2nd ed. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1998. By far the most useful anthology on the history of Jewish women in the diaspora. See in particular Michael Galchinsky, “Engender¬ ing Liberal Jews: Jewish Women in Victorian England,” pp. 208-226; Ross S. Kraemer, “Jewish Women in the Diaspora World of Late Antiquity,” pp. 46-72; Renee Levine Melammed, “Sephardi Women in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ” pp. 128-149; and Ellen M. Umansky, “Spiritual Expressions: Jewish Women’s Religious Lives in the United States in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” pp. 337-363. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. A classic work on the construction and reconstruction of subjectivity and gender within the context of class relations and nationalism in diasporas of the late twentieth century. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: Univer¬ sity of Washington Press, 1997. An important study that is rich in theoretical analyses and empirical data on various diasporas. Croucher, Sheila L. Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Little¬ field, 2004. Examines the extent to which traditional national identities have evolved in diasporas as a result of globalization,

54

DIASPORAS: Comparative History

as well as globalization’s ramifications for host societies and international relations. Geithner, Peter F., Paula D. Johnson, Lincoln C. Chen, eds. Dias¬ pora Philanthropy and Equitable Development in China and India. Cambridge, Mass.: Global Equity Initiative, Asia Center, Harvard University, 2004. Collection of papers that examine the relationship between Chinese and Indian diasporic communities and their efforts to contribute to the economic development of their homelands through various forms of philanthropic initia¬ tives. See Shahnaz Taplin, “Gender Differences,” comments, p. 360. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, and Jane Idleman Smith, eds. Muslim Communities in North America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Provides rare coverage of Muslim communities in the United States and Canada that are often ignored in dias¬ pora studies. See in particular Ron Kelley, “Muslims in Los Angeles,” pp. 135-167. Hussain, Yasmin. Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture, and Ethnicity. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. Examines prob¬ lems of diaspora identity and hybridity in cultural studies and advocates sociological analyses of concrete diasporic experi¬ ences of women as opposed to theoretical debates. Jacobsen, Knut A., and P. Pratap Kumar, eds. South Asians in the Diaspora: Histories and Religious Traditions. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004. An excellent anthology on the relationship between Eastern religions and cultures in Western and South African societies. See in particular Anna Lindberg, “Transformation of Marriage Patterns in the Kerala Diaspora in U.S.,” pp. 203-219 Tsolidis, Georgina. Schooling, Diaspora, and Gender: Being Femi¬ nist and Being Different. Philadelphia: Open University, 2001. This study, based on interviews, focuses on the cultural difficulties experienced by diasporic women in Australian society. Wang, Gungwu. China and the Chinese Overseas. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991. A significant and original contri¬ bution to diaspora and transnational studies; integrates cultural and economic developments in China and the West into a comprehensive analysis. Simon Payaslian

DICKINSON, EMILY (1830-1886), American poet and letter writer. The daughter of Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson became one of America’s most important poets, and her work was a predecessor of American modernist poetry. Her poetry is characterized by common (hymn) meter, unconventional use of capitalization, irregular “slant” rhyme, and cryptic punctuation. Significantly, Dickinson wrote more than a thousand letters, many of which contain poetry fragments. In conjunction with the poetry, the letters constitute a codex to her unconventional poetic idiom, written in similarly idiosyncratic orthography and deploying a private poetic language. The body of Dickinson’s work was virtually unknown in her lifetime; after her death 1,789 poems were found in manuscript. Through her family connections, however, she knew or corresponded with important public intellectuals

of her day, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an abolitionist and essayist, and Helen Hunt Jackson, author of Ramona (1884) and a proponent of Native Americans’ rights. It was Higginson to whom Dickinson wrote in 1861 seeking a reader for her poetry; “Are you too deeply occupied, to say if my Verse is alive?” Although in this letter she posed as an apprentice, Dickinson was already a mature poet who had written more than three hundred poems. Her timid questioning appeared to reflect a literary persona more than a poet’s voice. With a lack of vision, Higginson suggested that Dickinson adopt Walt Whitman’s forms of free verse or write prose. She rejected his suggestions but continued the correspondence until her death. Despite her unconventional style, Dickinson was the heir of American transcendentalism. She had been introduced to Ralph Waldo Emerson at her family’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, and she read extensively in the literature of the day. She found inspiration in the writing of the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and in that of the seventeenth-century philosopher Sir Thomas Browne, author of Religio Medici (1642). These influences shaped her exploration of what she called “storm subjects.” Critics and readers find in Dickinson’s poetry a sometimes morbid, sometimes mystic, sometimes whimsical voice. Though she wrote during the American Civil War and experienced the narrow confines of elite women’s lives, there is little overtly political content in her poetry. Rather, it is in her position as a poet on the circumference, on the outside looking in, in between life and death, that Dickinson appears most radical. Her poetry—“My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” “I had been hungry, all the Years,” and “I dwell in Possibility— / a fairer House than Prose”— startles the reader with new and powerful meanings. The rediscovery of Dickinson as an American poet began in the 1950s when Thomas H. Johnson reexamined her manuscripts, restoring many of the poems to their original orthography and punctuation and deleting rhymes that early editors had imposed on her work. Johnson assembled complete variorum editions of Dickinson’s poetry and extensive correspondence. Dickinson has since gained widespread scholarly attention from feminist scholars. There is a growing body of criticism on Dickinson’s unique prosody, her literary development and specialized idiom, and her life. These prolific studies suggest that Dickinson will have continuing influence on writers and literature worldwide. [See also Literature and Transcendentalism.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Reading edition. Edited by R. W. Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2005.

DICTATORSHIP AND SINGLE-PARTY STATES

Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Random House, 2001. Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. Elizabeth Faue

DICTATORSHIP AND SINGLE-PARTY STATES. By definition, dictatorships exercise extreme and extensive control over people’s lives and actions. They exert their authority through the diverse mechanisms of repression, fear, co-optation, acceptance, and approval. Single-party states both rely on and repress women, and they frequently employ gender-based appeals to justify their seizure of power, define their enemies, legitimize their rule, and im¬ plement their programs. Just as it is a mistake to think that everyone rejects dictatorial power, it is equally a mistake to believe that single-party states successfully dominate all those who are under their rule. Women are less frequently associated with dictatorships than men are, even though they both help to make them possible and contribute to their demise. Ideas and practices of gender are central to authoritarian governments, which typically enforce rigid ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman. To illustrate women’s relationships to single¬ party states and how dictatorial governments employ gender to further their goals, this essay examines twentieth-century fascist dictatorships in Europe and military regimes in Latin America. Fascist States. Fascist governments came to power in Italy, Spain, and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. They pledged to eliminate Communism, independent labor movements, attacks on the Catholic Church (in Spain), Jews (in Germany), and challenges posed by women who rejected the belief that motherhood and domesticity defined them and their social roles. Fascism promised to build a unified nation and a strong state, under the rule of men. Men ran the political parties, the state bureaucracy, the economic and financial institu¬ tions, and the military. Women reproduced the nation and maintained the family, which is why fascism exalted motherhood and attempted to control women’s sexuality by, among other policies, outlawing abortion. To further marshal women’s energies in the service of the state, these regimes established separate and subservient women’s organizations. These groups served a variety of critical func¬ tions, ranging from indoctrinating other women to caring for the wounded, implementing the government’s economic programs, policing their communities, and providing a warm, comforting, and profascist home for their families. Women in Nazi Germany joined sewing circles where they studied Hitler’s Mein Kampf and also denounced people

55

they believed to be Jews or anti-Nazi; in Fascist Italy the Mussolini regime exhorted women to have more babies and to align their purchases and household management with government policy. During the Spanish civil war, women who supported General Francisco Franco made uniforms for the fascist forces and served as nurses on the front lines. Although these governments commanded obedience through coercive policies that ranged from the loss of jobs, public humiliation, and ostracism to imprisonment, torture, and murder, they did not rule through repression alone. Many women supported these dictatorships because they agreed with the dictatorship’s ideas and actions. They, too, feared Communism and rejected feminism; they abhorred the New Woman who demanded equality, sexual liberty, and the ability to control her own body. They acquiesced to or outright supported their governments’ repressive measures against Communists and other leftists, Jews, and any other person their state determined was the enemy. However, other women fought against fascism. In all three countries, women joined resistance movements and fought to end fascist rule. Working clandestinely, they courageously published and distributed antifascist leaflets, hid members of the opposition, and carried out military attacks. Many of them fell victim to repression and were subjected to cruel tortures, imprisonment, deportation to death camps, and murder. Lisa Fittko was part of the antifascist resistance. A German Jewish leftist, she fled Nazi Germany in 1933 when the Gestapo was closing in on her. Eventually she made it to France where she bravely helped transport a hundred refugees across the Pyrenees to Spain. Like many others in the antifascist resistance, she risked her life to save the lives of others; unlike many others, she survived. Military Dictatorships. Backed by the U.S. government, military dictatorships seized control in much of South America during the 1960s and 1970s. In the name of fighting Communism and supporting democracy, the dictatorships declared a state of siege and shut down parliament and most political parties, imposed censorship, and arrested, imprisoned, tortured, caused to disappear, and murdered those they deemed their political opponents. They also proclaimed essentialist ideas about gender. In Brazil and Chile, conservative women called on military forces to intervene and overthrow the democratically elected governments of Joao Goulart and Salvador Allende. Decrying what they claimed were Goulart’s attempts to secularize Brazil and convert it into a Communist state, hundreds of thousands of Brazilian women marched in towns and cities throughout the country, rosaries in hand, to demand an end to his rule. In April 1964 the Brazilian armed forces overthrew Goulart, established military rule, and lauded the brave women who had demonstrated against the president.

56

DICTATORSHIP AND SINGLE-PARTY STATES

In Chile, tens of thousands of women marched against the government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973); instead of carrying rosaries they banged empty pots and pans to symbolize that they lacked food as a result, they claimed, of government policies. In a clear demonstration of gender stereotypes, they threw feathers and corn at members of the armed forces, insinuating that they were chicken, not real men, because they had not overthrown Allende. Once the military men took power on 11 September 1973, they, like their Brazilian counterparts, praised the efforts of the courageous women who had called upon them to act. In both cases women performed gendered acts to convince the male military to violate its own rules and seize control. Once in power, the military governments of Brazil and Chile, along with those of Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia, which also experienced dictatorships in these years, enforced rigid ideas about gender that clearly demarcated separate spheres and roles for men and women. As in fascist Europe, men were the political and military figures, while women were mothers and housewives whose main function was to maintain the family and support the men who ran the country. As in Europe, South American women also resisted the authoritarian governments. Because men had been more politically active than women in these countries, they also accounted for a larger number of the victims of military repression. Consequently, women led the majority of human rights committees that emerged to defend the victims of the dictatorships. In Argentina, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo was the first group to protest the disappearance of their children and military repression. In Chile, women regularly visited the political prisoners, brought them food and clean clothing, and worked to secure their release. Other women participated in the armed resistance movements against the dictatorships. When captured, the military dictatorships unleashed the full scale of its fury against them, subjecting them to gendered humiliations and torture. Misogynist military personnel routinely referred to captured women as whores and loose women; they subjected them to multiple rapes and other sexual abuses. Exploiting and mocking their gendered identities as mothers, torturers in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil tortured female prisoners’ children in front of them, hop¬ ing to break the mother’s determination to remain silent. Women played significant roles in bringing to power and upholding dictatorships and one-party states, as the examples of fascist Europe and military regimes in South America illustrate. They were also active in opposing them and contributed to their weakening. Women on both sides of the political spectrum fought in the name of or in opposi¬ tion to progressive ideals about women and gender rela¬ tions. Thus ideas about masculinity and femininity infused

dictatorial rule and one-party states, both buttressing and challenging them. [See also Abortion; Antifeminism; Argentina;Brazil; Cen¬ tral American Countries; Chile; Communism; Fascism; Germany; Italy; Military; Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo; and Spain and Portugal.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 19221945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Enders, Victoria. ‘“And we ate up the world’: Memories of the Seccion Femenina.” In Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World, edited by Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Fittko, Lisa. Escape through the Pyrenees. Translated by David Koblick. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991. Kaplan, Temma. Taking Back the Streets: Wdmen, Youth, and Direct Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. Power, Margaret. Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964-1973. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Margaret Power

DIDO. In the absence of any Carthaginian mythological texts, our knowledge Dido, the queen and legendary founder of Carthage, is based on ancient Greek and Roman literary and artistic sources, most famously the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil (70-19 b.c.e.). The Greek historian Timaeus (c. 350-c. 260 b.c.e.), our earliest source for the legend, records that Dido, also called Elissa in Phoenician, was the founder of Carthage and the sister of Pygmalion, the king of Tyre. After her brother killed her husband she fled with the latter’s wealth and a company of Tyrian citizens to Libya where, after many hardships and wanderings, she founded the city of Carthage. When her citizens pressured her to accept an offer of marriage from a local Libyan king, she killed herself by throwing herself on a pyre in order to maintain the vow of chastity she had sworn to her dead husband. Timaeus’s account survives in a catalogue of heroines who saved their fatherlands by deception, and deception figures largely in Virgil’s Dido narrative in the Aeneid, a political epic relating the founda¬ tion of Rome by Aeneas (a survivor of the Trojan War and the putative ancestor of fulius Caesar) that offers, in mytho¬ logical form, an explanation for the historical enmity be¬ tween Rome and Carthage. In Virgil’s epic, the Roman gods make Dido hospitable to the Trojans, shipwrecked in her territory, but Venus fears “typical” Carthaginian double¬ dealing, evident already in Dido’s flight from Tyre after the bloody family feud that would also have recalled for con¬ temporary Roman readers the struggle between Cleopatra

DING LING

VII (r. 51-30 b.c.e.) and her brothers over rule of Egypt (settled by Julius Caesar [100-44 b.c.e.] in favor of Cleo¬ patra in 47 b.c.e.). As a result of Venus’s machinations, Dido (like Circe, Medea, and Ariadne, the barbarian princesses and tragic heroines of the fabled East, as well as the histor¬ ical Cleopatra) falls in love with Aeneas (modeled on Odys¬ seus, Jason, and Theseus, the heroes of classical epic, as well as the historical Mark Antony [c. 83-30 b.c.e.]) at a sump¬ tuous (Epicurean) banquet. Despite swearing a solemn oath not to remarry, she celebrates with Aeneas what she calls a marriage but Virgil characterizes as a moral failing, accord¬ ing to the Roman cultural ideal of female chastity expressed in the term uniuira, “once-married woman.” When Aeneas, on the bidding of the gods, resolves to leave Dido, her love turns to hatred and she kills herself with his sword on a pyre, cursing him and his descendents and calling for an avenger—Roman readers would have recognized a refer¬ ence to Hannibal (247-183 b.c.e.), the Carthaginian general during the Second Punic War—and eternal enmity between the two peoples. Within a generation of the appearance of the Aeneid, Roman literature (for example, Ovid’s Heroides 7, a fictional letter from Dido on her death¬ bed to Aeneas) and art (such as domestic mosaics and wall paintings as well as later manuscript illustrations) bear witness, to the popularity of Virgil’s Dido narrative. Early Christian writers, especially the North Africans, defend the Carthaginian queen’s chastity against Virgil’s “calumnies,” but the renown of the Aeneid was such that the Virgilian version of the legend inspired countless authors, artists, and musicians in medieval and early modern Europe.

57

Ding Ling (born Jiang Bingzhi) grew up in Hunan province under the influence of her rather unconventional widowed mother, but she was eventually forced to flee to the semicolonial treaty-port city of Shanghai in 1920 to avoid a marriage arranged by an uncle. In Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city, Ding Ling’s own noncon¬ formist spirit was fueled by her radical teachers at the People’s Girls School and her association with aspiring modern-style writers and artists such as Shen Congwen and Hu Yepin, the left-wing poet whom she married in 1925. In her earliest fiction, Ding Ling gave a boldly inti¬ mate, if decidedly ambivalent, voice to “new women” protagonists who struggle to redefine their gendered selves after breaking from the established Confucian scripts that governed them. For instance, “Shafei niishi de riji” (1928; English trans., “Miss Sophie’s Diary,” 1985), now regarded as a feminist classic of modern Chinese literature, traces the internal turmoil of a female narrator who battles deeply ingrained moral inhibitions and erotic desires while leading a precarious urban existence. Other contemporary women

[See also Cleopatra and Europe, subentries Ancient Greece and Roman Empire.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Desmond, Marilynn. Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Hexter, Ralph. “Sidonian Dido.” In Innovations of Antiquity, edited by Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden, pp. 332-384. New York: Routledge, 1992. Keith, A. M. Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Monti, Richard C. The Dido Episode and the Aeneid: Roman Social and Political Values in the Epic. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981. A. M.

Keith

DIET. See Health.

DING LING (1904-1986), feminist and Marxist Chinese writer. With a highly public literary career that spanned more than half a century, Ding Ling remains one of the most significant yet controversial women writers of modern China.

Ding Ling. In her Beijing apartment, 1979. A. Gibbs

Courtesy of Donald

58

DING LING

writers of the modern literary scene—Feng Yuanjun, Lu Yin, and Bai Wei, for instance—also portrayed the vicissi¬ tudes of their modern heroines’ emancipatory quests from a feminist perspective, but the perceived candor of Ding Ling’s short story, and also its shock value, captured unprecedented public attention and firmly established Ding Ling’s reputation as the quintessential new-woman author of the day. In the early 1930s the nation’s political strife struck a personal blow when Ding Ling’s husband was executed for his involvement in underground communist activities. Ding Ling herself then joined the Chinese Communist Party and participated in its affiliated cultural organizations, including the League of Left-Wing Writers. As a result, her narrative style, like that of many contemporary fiction writers, underwent a marked transformation. She aban¬ doned the individualized subjective point of view that had until then characterized her fiction and, in works like “Shui” (1931; English trans., “The Flood,” 1937), experi¬ mented with proletarian fiction techniques to grapple with the nature of collective identity, in this case a rural commu¬ nity beset by catastrophic flooding in northern China in 1931. Ding Ling’s activism in revolutionary causes increas¬ ingly put her own life in jeopardy, and in 1933 she was in fact detained by Nationalist Party (Guomindang) police and placed under house arrest in Nanjing. The experience does not seem to have shaken her political convictions, however, and having escaped her captors in 1936, she headed straight to Yan’an, the Communist Party headquar¬ ters in Shaanxi Province in the years prior to and during the Sino-Japanese War. Already a budding celebrity, Ding Ling quickly rose to become one of the most influential figures in Yan’an cultural circles and served, for instance, as the director of the Chinese Literature and Arts Associa¬ tion and as editor of the literary supplement of the Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily). Though deeply committed to the Communist cause and the anti-Japanese resistance, Ding Ling also struggled personally during these years with the precept that art should be subordinated to revolutionary needs, as ulti¬ mately defined by the party. She objected to certain aspects of life at Yan’an, including the ways in which unequal gender relations persisted within the revolutionary commu¬ nity. Her short but pointed essay “Sanbajie you gan” (1942; English trans., “Thoughts on March 8,” 1989), which lays out a view critical of the sexual discrimination that revolu¬ tionary women faced from their comrades, along with several short stories set in liberated zones under Commu¬ nist control, were condemned as dissident works, and she was publicly reprimanded by the party. Though Ding Ling published some reportage and drama toward the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, her next major literary project, her first full-length novel, Taiyang zhao zai Sangganhe

shang (1948; English trans., The Sun Shines over the Sangkan River, 1954), was not completed until the eve of the Communist Party victory. The novel narrates the complex process and far-reaching effects of land reform in a typical village in the Chinese countryside in the late 1940s. Awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize for Literature in 1951, it is considered one of the finest examples of Chinese socialist-realist fiction. It is also a work in which Ding Ling is inexplicably silent on questions of gender, despite the fact that the radical restructuring of the rural economy during this era clearly impacted women’s lives in significant ways. It is uncertain whether Ding Ling actually abandoned her feminist roots at this point, as some have suggested, since in 1957 she was officially purged from the party during the Anti-rightist Movement and exiled to a state farm in north¬ eastern China. During the Cultural Revolution she was again targeted for attack, and her manuscripts were confis¬ cated and subsequently lost. Ding Ling did not resume publishing until her return to Beijing in 1979, when her name was officially cleared and her party membership restored. Despite the political persecution she suffered after 1949, she remained a staunch supporter of the Communist Party until her death in 1986. [See also China, subentry Modern Period.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ding Ling. I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling. Edited by Tani Barlow and Gary Bjorge. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Representative translations of Ding Ling’s work from all periods, with a thoughtful introduction placing Ding Ling in historical and theoretical frameworks. Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei. Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narra¬ tive in Modern Chinese Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Examines the transformation of Ding Ling’s narrative style as a reflection of her evolving ideological concerns. Zhang, Jingyuan. “Feminism and Revolution: The Work and Life of Ding Ling.” In Columbia Companion to Modem East Asian Literature, edited by Joshua Mostow, Kirk A. Denton, Bruce Fulton, and Sharalyn Orbaugh, pp. 395-400. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Amy D. Dooling

DISABILITY This entry consists of two subentries: Overview Comparative History

Overview Disability is not a condition that adheres to specific bodies. Rather, it exists in the interface between the body and the environment. The environment is a broad concept

DISABILITY: Overview encompassing historical, architectural, structural, eco¬ nomic, political, and cultural contexts. Thus definitions of disability are variable across time and space, giving rise to myriad disability experiences and identities. Moreover, as with other social categories, intersecting affiliations (such as those between disability and gender, class, ethnicity, or geographic location) add complexity to the analysis. Some scholars make a distinction between disability as culturally constructed and impairment as biological, but others sug¬ gest that such a distinction is spurious because biological states are always mediated by culture and may become catalysts for identity formation. Feminism, Representation, and Disability. Rosemarie Garland Thomson has observed that feminist and disability studies have much in common. Both reject inherent notions of bodily inferiority; both explore the variant cultural meanings and images that shape our understand¬ ing of specific bodies; both evaluate the imposition of societal norms and its implications for the surveillance,

Disability Rights. Bangladeshi garment workers disabled in work¬ place accidents attend a rally demanding government assistance, Dhaka, March 2006. REUTERS/Mohammad Shahidullah

59

colonization, and rehabilitation of specific bodies; and both consider bodies as sites of political struggle and political empowerment. Although women’s bodies and disabled bodies have both been construed as flawed and deviating from “normal,” feminists themselves have sometimes disavowed any con¬ nection to disabled women. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder contend that such a disavowal is not uncommon in critical race theory or feminist theory because groups that have been subordinated, in part, by ideological assertions of defective biology may reject the label of disability without interrogating disability as a cultural construction. Widely circulating depictions of disabled women as icons of dependency, incompetence, vulnerability, pity, and sickli¬ ness reinforce this distancing process and make disabled females more susceptible to medical intervention, societal guidance, and reformation. Gender and Sexuality. Abby Wilkerson has pointed out that granting or denying people sexual agency is a political act and that sexual agency and political agency work in tandem. In many societies disabled women are considered to be either asexual or suffering from an unbridled sexuality. These images have had serious ramifications for disabled women, including the withholding of support and information that would facilitate an exploration of sexuality and sexual identity, lack of birth-control and family-planning counseling, enforced sterilization, violation of reproductive rights, and lack of attention to abuse, rape, and domestic violence. Women with intellectual disabilities have been the most frequent subjects of reproductive surveillance and control. Because they are often viewed as childlike and incapable of making decisions, proper parenting has been thought of as being outside their grasp. A study of these women in Iceland and Australia showed that the women were caught between their own desire to have a child and their parents’ concerns that their daughters not perpetuate their condi¬ tions or burden them with the upbringing of their daughters’ children. The concerns of parents, service providers, and medical personnel often override legislation that suppos¬ edly safeguards these women’s autonomy over their bodies and their reproductive choices. Women who are labeled mentally ill may be rendered voiceless and invisible in regard to sexual exploitation and abuse. Given the frequent conflation of women with mad¬ ness, the social erasure of these violations may be magnified in such cases, even though erasure has been confronted by many women faced with similar circumstances. A woman in Delhi who was diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and placed in a state-subsidized hospital attempted to lodge a complaint about mistreatment by her husband and mother-in-law, but she was ignored because her statements were attributed to her “deranged” mental condition. Here

60

DISABILITY: Overview

the patriarchal structures of the state and the domestic spheres reinforced this woman’s status as persona non grata. Disabled women marry later, have higher divorce rates, and are more likely never to have married than their non¬ disabled counterparts. Although many nondisabled women have striven to break away from the singular status of wife and/or mother, some disabled women resent having been denied the status entirely. But cross-cultural data indicate that relational possibilities need not be viewed so categori¬ cally. In Uganda, for example, blind women are generally considered inappropriate wives for sighted men. However, they are thought of as appropriate lovers because marriage has more of a public dimension whereas sexual affairs are categorized as private; thus many blind women find satis¬ faction as lovers and mothers. Despite negative representations, expectations, and restrictions, many disabled women have embraced positive self-images. Indeed, disabled women’s subjective experi¬ ences of their own bodies may defy the projections of the unknowledgeable able-bodied. For instance, Gelya Frank described her life-history research with an American woman who was born a double amputee. She imagined that this woman would perceive her own body as afflicted by “lack” or “deficit”; instead Frank discovered that the woman experienced her body as whole, leading the res¬ earcher to view the woman as a Venus de Milo. Disabled women may be more likely than nondisabled women to discover novel avenues of gender performance as well. Since disability, femininity, and passivity are conflated, disabled women may be caught between a gender ideology that encourages female docility and a lived reality that necessitates assertiveness and self-advocacy. Catherine Kudlick recounted how her own gendered fears of risk taking were challenged by her participation in a program run by a school for the blind that required students to develop cane travel skills in harrying conditions. She learned that assuming the risks of “gender play” and freeing herself from the constraints of normative gender expecta¬ tions ultimately allowed her to forge a new sense of safety and gendered possibilities and concluded that gender fluid¬ ity holds liberating potential for disabled and nondisabled alike. Some disabled lesbians have also experienced marginali¬ zation and devised individual and group strategies for resisting multiple systems of oppression. In heterosexual contexts their identity as lesbians or their choice of lesbian relationships may be assumed to be inauthentic and a last resort, whereas in gay and lesbian arenas they may find themselves excluded by appearance norms, concerns about sexual performance, or inability to communicate cultural cues that signal shared membership. Disabled lesbians may face architectural barriers or lack material capital, prevent¬ ing their entrance into lesbian spaces. Disabled gays and

lesbians in London have challenged this exclusion by ap¬ pearing in gay pride parades and creating their own support and information organizations and networks. Given the wide range of bodies and sexualities that are not accorded public recognition, the importance of coalition building as a strategy to challenge, transform, and broaden acceptable forms of sexual expression cannot be overestimated. Economic Status and Work. Not surprisingly, factors that contribute to the economic and work status of disabled women in the minority world (the industrialized West) differ significantly from those in the majority world. Of course, industrialized countries themselves lack uni¬ formity because each has its own civil rights legislation, cultures of work, social benefits, and health-care insurance and delivery systems. These countries can be divided into two broad categories: one including those that have quotas and reserved employment (e.g., Germany) and the other containing countries with antidiscrimination laws (Great Britain, the United States, and Canada). In the United States working-age disabled women generally do not attain the same educational, occupational, or income levels that nondisabled women or disabled men do. The 2000 census indicated that 73.9 percent of disabled women were unemployed, compared with 24.7 percent of nondis¬ abled women, and that, of disabled women who were employed, median salaries were 13 percent below those of nondisabled women. Not surprisingly, disabled women of color have the highest rates of unemployment. Additionally, employed disabled women are more likely than employed disabled men to be concentrated in part-time unskilled and service-sector jobs. Women’s job success depends on a range of factors such as social class, familial and social support, access to trans¬ portation, attitudes of employers and fellow employees, the specificity of work tasks, the degree of control over time and space requirements in the work environment, and whether the type of employment is unionized or in the public or private sector. Women are often blamed for on-the-job injuries, even those attributable to poorly designed work environments. Moreover, although a higher social standing may confer greater opportunities for educational and occu¬ pational achievement, white-collar professions may place stringent demands on speed and visible work performance, undermining the assumed advantages of class position. Another factor that contributes to disabled women’s success in the workplace is self-identity, a matter that is always subject to reformulation. Interviews with workingage women in the United States revealed that those with congenital or early-childhood disabilities were more likely to perceive disability as integral to their identities than women who had progressive conditions or sudden-onset disability. In a study of working women with multiple sclerosis in Vancouver, British Columbia, the women were

DISABILITY: Overview seen to struggle with the pros and cons of revealing their changing conditions to employers and employees. Disabled women face the possibility of workplace dis¬ crimination due to gender and disability, but most assert that disability generally trumps gender in such arenas. Work¬ places are changeable and contestable sites, even within the context of late-capitalist labor and power relations. Whether a woman chooses to challenge work cultures, relations, or arrangements may depend on her generational standing with regard to employment-based antidiscrimination legislation such as the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. It may also be influenced by financial or status concerns or the development of a politicized identity. In the majority world, the status of disabled people may be exacerbated by overall levels of poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment, as well as by lack of protective legisla¬ tion or absence of social services or social benefits. The insecurity of this situation is no doubt compounded by the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that demand the reduction or elimination of economic or social supports in exchange for loan repayments and debt reduction. Hence, disabled people often find themselves in sheltered workshops or self-employed. In these circumstances, disabled women are at a particu¬ lar disadvantage, especially since the feminization of pov¬ erty has been a growing trend. There may be a cultural expectation for disabled women to stay at home and be cared for by their families, their mobility may be consid¬ ered less important than that of disabled men, and they may face more obstacles forging relationships that facil¬ itate job opportunities. Some urban women launch busi¬ nesses from their homes, but this may not be feasible in rural areas where domestic economies are being replaced by modernization projects that are more frequently tar¬ geted to men than to women. The issue of mobility is not that transparent. Matthew Kohrman, in his research on disability advocacy in con¬ temporary China, has established a connection between constructions of masculinity, notions of speed representa¬ tive of modernity, and the increasing emphasis on privatiza¬ tion and neoliberal market ideology in the post-Maoist era. Moving quickly through public space is an important facet of masculine role performance—distributing motor¬ ized tricycles to physically disabled men has been a means of restoring the masculinity of the individual and the state. Disabled male bodies are perceived as a threat to the state’s desires to approximate the trappings of First World status. Women, on the other hand, are not seen with these tricycles as a result of both bureaucratic exclusion and greater con¬ cern about being subjected to stares in nondomestic arenas, a concern potentially magnified by the objectifying images

61

of women in Chinese consumer culture. In tandem with these vehicles, the China Disabled Peoples’ Federation has extended more support to physically disabled men than to women in the area of entrepreneurial development and affirmative action. The federation’s officials perceive women as more difficult to converse with and less incom¬ petent than men, and therefore poor subjects to invest in for the purpose of showcasing their reforms. Activism and Social Movements. In the United States, disabled women’s political actions conform to patterns that are somewhat dissimilar to those for disabled men. They are less likely to attend political meetings but are as likely to vote. If disabled women experience discrimination and decide to report it, they are more likely than disabled men to follow up with another course of action. Disabled women who have attended disability consciousness-raising groups are as likely as disabled men to engage in disability activism. Activism may pose specific challenges for the disabled. In 1985 a women’s activist group, the Disabled Women’s Network (DAWN), was formed in Canada. In order to formulate broad-based objectives, the organizers made an effort to invite women who had originally been excluded from the women’s movement (people of color, immigrants, lesbians). Nevertheless, its members were faced with multiple constraints, such as lack of transportation, inability to afford the cost of conferences, inaccessibility of places in which to meet and at which to stage protests, and uneven access to computer technology. In addition to being excluded from the women’s move¬ ment, certain groups have been marginalized within the disability-rights movement, both within the United States and globally. In the United States and Great Britain, the movements have been dominated by white men, mainly wheelchair users (much as in China, where men with mobility impairments dominate disability-advocacy pro¬ grams). The movement agendas have focused primarily on work-related issues, putting concerns about sexuality, reproduction, and parenting on the back burner. People of color have been underrepresented in organizational and decision-making contexts as well. Although these patterns are gradually changing, they remain points of contention. Additional topics of discussion include where people with chronic illness, including HIV/AIDS, fit into disability agendas and analyses. The patterns of disenfranchisement within this disability-rights movement are not unlike those of other civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. One of the benefits of globalization has been the circula¬ tion of information about global disability activism so that disabled activists can learn from one another and form coalitions. Such activism is often underreported, perhaps because of stereotypes that equate activism with fitness and the majority world with dependency and the passiveness

62

DISABILITY: Overview

associated with femininity. Vera Chouinard has pointed out, though, that it is not only majority-world activism that may go unrecognized; disabled activists in late-industrial socie¬ ties also may be denied a voice, because their bodies are often seen as lacking or contaminating corporate capital, undermining corporate power, efficiency, and profitability. Since the 1980s, disabled women from around the globe have begun to address their omission from human rights conventions, international bodies, and nongovernmental organizations. For example, although there was no mention of disabled women at the 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), in the mid-1980s, at a World Council meeting of Disabled Peoples International, women called for greater representation. In 1995, at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, women from several deaf, blind, and mobility-impaired groups gathered to address their issues despite the inaccessibility of the con¬ ference grounds. Since then there have been increasing efforts to support disabled women’s self-advocacy, to have disability platforms formulated within human-rights frame¬ works instead of social-welfare ones, and to include dis¬ abled women’s issues in international treaties formulated by the United Nations. There is also concern that a single article referencing disabled women in the United Nations Comprehensive and Integral International Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities may not be sufficient to safe¬ guard or promote disabled women’s rights; it has been recommended that disabled women’s issues be integrated into many facets of the convention. Although international approaches to human rights can be enormously helpful in establishing dialogues with nation-states and enforcing regulations and principles, it is also essential that grassroots endeavors by disabled women be identified, acknowledged, and validated to underscore the importance of fostering participatory democracy. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Asch, Adrienne, and Michelle Fine. “Introduction: Beyond Pedestals.” In Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics, edited by Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch, pp. 1-37. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Seminal in having launched discussions and further research on women and disability. Butler, Ruth. “Double the Trouble or Twice the Fun? Disabled Bodies in the Gay Community.” In Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of Illness, Impairment, and Disability, edited by Ruth Butler and Hester Parr, pp. 203-220. London: Routledge, 1999. Articles written by cultural geographers examining the intersections of time, space, and body issues in theoretical and ethnographic fashion. See also Vera Chouinard’s “Body Politics: Disabled Women’s Activism in Canada and Beyond,” pp. 269-294, and Isabel Dyck’s “Body Troubles: Women, the Workplace and Negotiations of a Disabled Identity,” pp. 119-137.

Das, Veena, and Renu Addlakha. “Disability and Domestic Citi¬ zenship: Voice, Gender, and the Making of the Subject. Public Culture 13 (2001): 511-531. All the articles employ disability criticism to explore experiences of embodiment that are influ¬ enced by various public spheres. Finger, Anne. “Claiming All of Our Bodies: Reproductive Rights and Disability.” In With the Power of Each Breath: A Disabled Women’s Anthology, edited by Susan E. Browne, Debra Connors, and Nanci Stern, pp. 292-307. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Cleis Press, 1985. Finger has been a vocal and significant spokesper¬ son for disabled women’s reproductive-rights issues. Frank, Gelya. Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America. Berke¬ ley: University of California Press, 2000. Its strength lies in the historical and cultural analysis of a disabled woman’s life story and in the sections in which she speaks for herself. The psycho¬ analytical section reflects the author’s preoccupations more than those of the field subject. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transform¬ ing Feminist Theory.” In Gendering Disability, edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchinson, pp. 73-103. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. The author, a key figure in women’s and disability studies, discusses how each field can enhance the other, as well as what they have in common. Johnson, Kelley, Rannveig Traustadottir, Lyn Harrison, Lynne Hillier, and Hanna Bjorg Sigurjonsdottir. “The Possibility of Choice: Women with Intellectual Disabilities Talk about Having Children.” In Disability and the Life Course: Global Perspec¬ tives, edited by Mark Priestley, pp. 206-218. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kohrman, Matthew. Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. A fascinating theoretical and ethnographic account of the Chinese government’s initiatives to establish policies, programs, and benefits for the country’s disabled population and the impact on those affected. Kudlick, Catherine. “The Blind Man’s Harley: White Canes and Gender Identity in America.” Signs: Journal of Women in Cul¬ ture and Society 30 (2005): 1589-1606. An insightful and humorous article about the author’s experience as a student at the Colorado Center for the Blind. Mason, Mary Grimley. Working Against Odds: Stories of Disabled Women’s Work Lives. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. “Introduction: Disability Studies and the Double Bind of Representation.” In The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, edited by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, pp. 1-31. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. A significant volume on historical and literary discourses, edited by influential scholars in disability studies. Sentumbwe, Nayinda. “Sighted Lovers and Blind Husbands: Experiences of Blind Women in Uganda.” In Disability and Culture, edited by Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds White, pp. 159-173. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. An important anthropological collection focusing on cultural constructions of personhood and disability. Wilkerson, Abby. “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency.” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 14 (2002), 33-57. A thoughtful analysis of intersecting elements of disability studies and queer theory. The entire volume is devoted to feminist disability studies. SUMI COLLIGAN

DISABILITY: Comparative History

Comparative History Historical research on women and disability is most developed for recent times in North America and western Europe. But even here, because historical research on women is relatively new and disability is just beginning to receive attention, information about women and disability remains limited. As in the early days of women’s history, the basic facts still need to be uncovered, and the most funda¬ mental stories still need to be told, particularly when look¬ ing beyond political activism in the late-twentieth-century white urban United States. Historians working in this field must rely on detective skills and guesswork sometimes to discover new sources but more often to reread familiar documents in new ways. Religious, medical, and legal texts offer a good starting point, but political tracts, fiction, insti¬ tutional records, private correspondence, charity appeals, and artistic representations can all yield fruitful points of entry to disability and its complex relationship to women’s experiences and issues. A few generalities apply across times and places. Though social class played an important role in determining the disability experience for everyone, links between poverty and disability were much more interconnected for women. In patriarchal societies that already placed women in an inferior position, women with disabilities faced even greater economic and social challenges than did their able-bodied sisters. Disability adversely affected not only one’s marriage prospects but also the ability to work. Additionally, even with the breakdown of traditional family structures in modern times, women have borne the brunt of caretaking responsibilities for people with disabilities and aging rela¬ tives. Though active at the ground level, women have largely been excluded from the influential social and political positions of designing and implementing policies devoted to dealing with their own or others’ disabilities. Even so, preliminary evidence suggests that women have approached disability creatively, using it to challenge existing stereotypes and hierarchies. Far from being the definitive word on women and disability, the following describes but four regions of the world and should be read as suggestions for approaching the subject in many other times and places. Africa. Africa is a vast and richly diverse continent with a long and complex history, and much of what is known about disability there is localized and somewhat recent. Despite the large numbers of disabled women and girls in the early twenty-first century, the period before the nineteenth century remains obscured. Nonetheless, drawing from the few available studies and the deeper knowledge of related topics, there are some features to pursue to generalize cautiously about women and disability in modem African history. Women’s fertility, which historically structured many aspects of African social, symbolic, and creative life, was

63

at the heart of one of the most pervasive forms of disability across the continent both past and present: infertility. Though some women historically found ways to subvert the stigma of infertility, either through claims to spiritual power or practices of child fostering, experiences of female infertility in Africa illustrate how social life is shaped by particular, privileged biological capacities. Throughout Africa, infertility subjected women to the potential of social ostracism and foreclosed certain social, political, and economic opportunities that women accessed through marriage and motherhood. Evidence suggests that the prevalence of infertility was heightened starting in the late nineteenth century after colonial regimes introduced syphilitic and other infections into African populations and also after the tumultuous end of the slave trade and the beginnings of imperial conquest degraded local nutrition and health. In many parts of Africa, only women were held liable when a union failed to produce children, making infertility a particularly female form of disability. The experience of infertility as disability is powerfully evoked and subjected to rigorous critique in classic works of fiction by prominent African authors like the Nigerians Flora Nwapa (1931-1993) and Buchi Emecheta (b. 1944). Though women were more vulnerable to particular forms of disability, such as infertility, they were spared some of the more brutal and often disabling work of late-nineteenthcentury and twentieth-century European colonial labor regimes—mining, soldiering, and rubber collection. Yet as the primary food producers in many parts of Africa and in their roles as mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters, women were particularly impacted by disability within the family or broader community. In addition to their already substantial labor obligations, women were expected to provide daily care for those debilitated relatives who required it, and they were often held personally responsible for disabilities in their children. For those who were impaired in some way, disabilities did not automatically disqualify African women from marriage, motherhood, or work. Physical disabilities were not neces¬ sarily seen to detract from female sexuality or attractiveness, and many visibly disabled women married and became mothers (a notable exception to this was the problem of vesico-vaginal fistula). Many disabled women also persisted in their agricultural and domestic responsibilities, which were not necessarily compromised by their physical impair¬ ments. In the early twentieth century in Bechuanaland (now Botswana), a woman with a clubfoot nonetheless walked many miles a day carrying firewood, grain, or water on her head. In the 1950s also in Bechuanaland, when tuberculosis of the bones and joints had become a signifi¬ cant health problem, women with collapsed spines strapped pieces of motor tires on their knees to continue farming

64

DISABILITY: Comparative History

their fields. Relatives might carry them in wheelbarrows to church or other important events. Even when impairments were grounds for segregation in one of the scattered colonial-era institutions, work contin¬ ued. In 1945 residents of a leprosy treatment center in colonial Bamako (Mali) staged a revolt against an oppres¬ sive workload and other harsh conditions. French colonial authorities crushed the rebellion, but their brutality in doing so further contributed to an emergent collective identity around leprosy that crossed gender and ethnic lines. In some African cities, where many employers refused to employ women with obvious physical disabilities and where in the late twentieth century unemployment rates among all groups rose to incredibly high levels, women with obvious disabilities also turned to begging in the streets for survival. A collective identity around disability more broadly has arisen with greater vibrancy in postcolonial Africa. A burgeoning activist movement for disability rights has taken hold, in which women agitate both as disabled persons and as relatives (particularly mothers and grandmothers) of disabled persons. In some places many women are disabled through the predations of modern wars, with their accom¬ panying landmine explosions and terrorizing amputations, or struggles for political independence, as in apartheid South Africa, where many Africans were disabled through police violence. There the politics of disability and gender merge with a larger politics of human rights, peace, and political self-determination. Women from these movements have increasingly begun to network with their disabled women counterparts in national, regional, and interna¬ tional arenas. Their accomplishments are not small. Through the tireless activism of South Africans with disabilities, South Africa became the first nation to enshrine disability rights in its 1996 constitution. Europe. Historians know so little about disability in Europe that it is both impossible and deceptively easy to generalize, particularly when adding in the variable of women. The little that is known comes mostly from western Europe—Britain and France—with occasional forays into Germany and Scandinavia. But abundant printed and archival sources exist to bring forth this important story for the entire Continent and to draw out revealing religious, class, ethnic, and national variations. Europe’s constant wars and epidemics and the rise of industrial capitalism shaped gender roles at the same time that they provided a constant supply of disabled people that inspired reflection and commentary. Disability and women in Western thought. The complex intellectual relationship between women and disability in the West can be traced through both medical and religious writings. Aristotle’s influential Generation of Animals (350 b.c.e.) made explicit for the first time a hierarchy with the human male occupying the top. Descending the

hierarchy, one came upon women, whom the father of tax onomy saw as the first step along the road to deformity. Aristotle believed that nature always strives toward perfec¬ tion by creating the male as the most complete, the most formed, the best endowed to enable procreation. Men were seen as the active agents, with women serving as passive storage vessels for the male seed. If all went well, a boy was born, but if something went wrong, such as a lack of heat within the female body holding the sperm, a girl emerged as the product of a failed generative event not fully carried to its natural conclusion. Throughout her life this being was seen in terms of “defect,” “lack,” or “imperfection” for falling short of manhood. Some translations of Aristotle describe the woman as a “deformed” or “monstrous” version of the male. Despite the greater nuance and sophistication that medical breakthroughs brought to understanding the human body, the notion of women’s inherently more prob¬ lematic physicality continued to shape prevailing social, cultural, and political ideas about her general incapacity well into the twentieth century. Religious writings have also presented close links between women and disability. Greek myths routinely por¬ trayed women as loathsome monsters and terrifying mon¬ sters as females. The emergence and eventual dominance of Christianity offered other opportunities to draw connec¬ tions, particularly through the special role that the New Testament accorded to suffering that privileged the weak and less fortunate. Such beliefs helped strengthen existing gender and class hierarchies; through acts of charity one demonstrated one’s greater proximity to God. Linked as they were, womanhood and disability shared the ambiguous status of being simultaneously considered threatening and helpless, as a social and economic burden, and as an opportunity to show one’s humanity. Moreover the theo¬ logical writings of influential scholastics, such as Saint Augustine (354-430) and Thomas Aquinas (c. 12251274), depicted women as far less able to transcend their physical bodies and therefore much more tightly linked to the physical realm in general. In a world beset by debili¬ tating illnesses, disfiguring conditions, and phenomena such as witchcraft—a world where the spiritual was more highly valued than the physical—such a close association between women and their bodies further strengthened the idea that being female was tantamount to having a disability. Just as the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment offered the tools and the motivation for thinkers to reap¬ praise the role of women, they provided the intellectual underpinnings for new, contradictory views of disability and associations between it and womanhood. On the one hand, the male-dominated systematization of human knowledge created categories of “normal” and “abnormal” that could be applied to physical, intellectual, moral, and

DISABILITY: Comparative History

other attributes. Within such a schema, the human male now explicitly “white” thanks to regular encounters with the non-European world—still occupied the top rank. But new characteristics, such as rationality, competence, strength, and fitness, could be measured and defined according to numeric criteria determined by male scientists claiming objectivity. With the full backing of science, respected doctors, such as Jean-Martin Charcot (18251893) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), equated woman¬ hood and disability by framing forms of mental illness, such as hysteria and neurasthenia, as inherently female. On the other hand, Enlightenment legacies promoted values of human rights and equality that challenged physical and intellectual hierarchies. Such ideas opened the door for women to seek greater parity with men and for a more humane treatment of the disabled; by the end of the twentieth century these strands came together as calls for disability rights by disabled men and women. At the same time medical writings influenced by the Enlightenment helped decouple women from long-standing Aristotelian associations with disability by presenting the differences between the sexes as natural and valuable. Though many commentators continued to link women and monstrosity, a growing chorus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries decried the association as demeaning. British women’s rights advocates such as John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) claimed that women were wrongly “disabled” because they lacked the right to vote, with fem¬ inists making the point that only “imbeciles, madmen, and criminals” lacked this right. With women’s greater engagement in intellectual discourse in the second half of the twentieth century, writers such as Simone de Beau¬ voir (1908-1986), Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), and others offered tools for new, more nuanced ways of thinking about the relationship. Disability and women in daily life. Poverty rolls and records describing the canonization of saints offer glimpses into the premodern period. Poor nutrition and living conditions created tight links among poverty, disability, and womanhood; raising children could exacerbate poverty, poverty bred disability, and disability virtually eliminated employment prospects. A physical disability such as blindness cast a number of fortunate women as members of “the deserving poor” in a Christian society that viewed physical disabilities as worthy of charity. When stigma or hardship prevented members of the family or local community from stepping in, disabled women were thrown into dilapidated institutions that did little more than house indigents. Future research into the witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century will surely reveal that an unusual physical and or mental condition easily led to accusations. The small number of women lucky enough to be born into the upper classes received care from family

65

or a local convent, with a few, such as the blind singer Maria-Theresia von Paradis (1759-1824), achieving some fame. With the advent of capitalism and modern urban society, disabled women simultaneously faced greater restrictions and greater opportunities. Demands of industrial labor increased the number of women with disabilities either through accidents or through long, repetitive working hours. British novelists in particular seized upon female disability as evidence of modernity’s neglect. In the portraits of blind, deaf, invalid, and mad women that writers invoked to achieve sentimental effect, one also finds glimpses of women defying gender and marriage conventions by living independent lives. Though women with disabilities were seen as unfit for marriage, some did in fact marry; others remained at home or thrived in alternative support networks, such as convents and residential schools. By the twentieth century the contradictory possibilities only increased. In the drive to achieve maximum racial purity and economic productivity, the Nazi regime imposed mandatory sterilization of some women with disabilities. With the rise of the social welfare state in the aftermath of the two world wars, material conditions improved somewhat, but disabled women continued to face greater hardships than disabled men, who, especially when they were veterans, enjoyed better benefits and social acceptance. In the 1990s a number of disabled women’s associations appeared, but because of limited personal and organizational resources, they have been short-lived, and their influence remains small. Disability also directly affected the daily lives of all women as caretakers throughout European history. Though no accurate data exist for rates of disability in the European population prior to the twentieth century, the chances of encountering some form of impairment at home were prob¬ ably high, irrespective of social class. Wives, mothers, sisters, servants, religious women, midwives, social reformers, nurses, teachers, and social workers looked after both men and women with disabilities in the absence of government services. The Middle East. Like Africa and Europe, the Middle East is a diverse region comprising many religions, languages, political situations, ethnicities, and cultures. Each of these unique circumstances affects the way women with disabilities experience their lives. Moreover the area as a whole underwent significant changes from the mid¬ twentieth century to the twenty-first century from the effects of colonialism, persistent Western and Eastern oil interests, nationalist movements, globalization, and the rise of Islamic movements, to name a few factors. Economic status is uneven, and extreme disparities exist within countries. As in other parts of the world, political conflicts, a large number of refugees, migrant labor, and a relatively

66

DISABILITY: Comparative History

young, regional population make citizens of the Middle East vulnerable to different disabilities. Disability and Islam. Although many religions make up Middle Eastern populations, the majority of people are Muslim. In all legal schools of Islam, healing the sick has historically been considered one of the highest forms of serving Allah (God), second only to performing religious rituals. Despite medicine’s high place in Arab Islamic culture, the Quran itself rarely speaks directly about disability for men or for women. Some exceptions include statements that the ill, lame, or blind are not inherently at fault for their disabilities. Prophetic medicine—medical advice derived from the sayings of the prophet Muhammad or his companions—makes up a less formalized set of precepts on medicine and disability in Islamic culture. According to this set of medical ideas, disability has a redemptive quality: God inflicts illness and disability to test a person’s strength and to restore his or her faith in the wonders of Allah. Although the Quran and prophetic medicine deal with disability, Islam primarily mentions it indirectly in nonsacred texts treating the historical devel¬ opment of Muslim political expansion and rule. Much of the discussion about disability and disease is contained in the writings of Islamic physicians, like the Al Hawi fi l-tibb (All-inclusive Work on Medicine) by Al-Razi (Rhazes; 865925). This text included sections on eye diseases, hereditary diseases, and diseases affecting women. Other discussions about disability in late-medieval Islamic texts focus on issues like mental illness and disabilities of an orthopedic nature, especially in their relation to war or punishment. Such discussions include women as caretakers for wounded soldiers or for anyone disabled from fighting in wars, indicating that women sometimes fought in battle during this time. Little secondary writing about disability exists for the period from the height of Ottoman rule (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) to the empire’s fall (1922). During the colonial period of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Western powers concentrated on addressing the problems of infectious diseases in their Middle Eastern colonies. Issues like leprosy, syphilis, blind¬ ness, and mental illness remained primary topics of concern for the colonial rulers and increasingly became part of the health agendas of various emerging Arab nationalist movements. Disability and women in the twenty-first century. There are many different kinds of and reasons for disabilities among women in the Middle East in the early twenty-first century. Each bears its own social, religious, and individual meaning depending upon the historical, national, and political context: from infertility to landmine injuries, from deafness to polio, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS. A 2005 report by the World Bank notes that “high rates of birth-related

disabilities and consanguinity, communicable and chronic diseases, weak access to and availability of health services, poor nutritipn, accidents and violence are important determinants contributing to current levels of disability in the region.” Blindness, mental illness, and mobility impairments still exist, but chronic and lifestyle illnesses have also become prevalent. Meanwhile political instability has brought a rise in depression and other mental health issues. Although the epidemiological profile of disability in the Middle East has shifted since the medieval period, the experience of disability and impairment remains central to the realities of both men and women. Even for the early twenty-first century, little is published on disability and women in the Middle East that is accessible to a wide audience. The few reports by non-governmental organizations, civil organizations, United Nations agencies, and donors are frequently written for internal use and seldom provide gender analysis. Data on a variety of health topics, including women’s health and disabilities, are not consistently gathered, nor are the data always reliable. Official definitions of “disability” vary by country. In Egypt the term is frequently tied to “those people in need of rehabilitation services” rather than understood as a concept of sociocultural identity. Because of this official definition, in 2002 most of the country’s estimated 2 million people with disabilities (3.5 percent of the population) consisted of those with mobility and mental impairments. In contrast, Saudi Arabia defines disability in relation to formal employment, even though efforts to employ disabled people are recognized as insufficient. And because many women work in the informal sector, their rates of occupa¬ tional disability commonly go unreported, a fact that likely applies to the approximately 30 million disabled people in the Middle East region as a whole. Disability rights have gained policy attention in some places. Perhaps because of the protracted conflict in the area and its disability consequences, the Palestine National Authority instituted a Disability Law in August 1999 that commits to upholding the dignity of disabled individuals (protecting them from violence, discrimination, and exploi¬ tation), to guaranteeing services for people with disabilities, and to espousing for them the same rights as those for other citizens. Special consideration is given to people—mostly men—disabled from their role in “resisting the occupa¬ tion.” Saudi Arabia claims on the basis of its Islamic legal system to uphold the rights of disabled individuals. In both theory and practice disabled women remain isolated from groups that might help improve their situa¬ tions. Although Middle Eastern women have historically participated in political struggles and pushed for change, women’s movements in the region have not thoroughly addressed the issue of gender and disability, nor have they fully incorporated disabled women into their memberships.

DISABILITY: Comparative History

And the dynamic male-dominated disability movements in countries like Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Palestine, and Egypt have excluded disabled women. Moreover, as a rule, disability lobby groups in the region have not adopted gender-sensitive advocacy positions and have not yet fully interrogated the intersections between gender and disability. Rehabilitation methods often fail to be tailored to gendered expectations about work and family. Where gender norms do influence medical services, as in Saudi Arabia, rehabilitation facilities are separated by sex, and women do not receive full vocational rehabilitation services because of the assumption that they will not or are not fit to work. Traditional gender roles and existing gender disparities in many parts of the region complicate the experiences of women with disabilities. Although exceptions exist, research shows that, as in other areas of the world, disabled Middle Eastern women are worse off than their able-bodied counterparts in all aspects of their lives. Disability rein¬ forces and exacerbates gender inequalities. Women with disabilities suffer from incomplete inclusion in social and political life. Their prospects for marriage are significantly curtailed, and unequal education between the sexes (excluding university level) and accessibility issues surrounding transportation, medical care, and work are problematic. The latter has caused inadequate care that has been shown to produce higher mortality rates for disabled girls than for boys. One study shows parents’ skepticism regarding the life chances of their disabled children, especially girls. Upper-class disabled girls posed an exception: some reported having opportunities to study abroad or start their own businesses. Moreover, as one woman from Yemen claimed, she could engage in a variety of experiences because her parents did not believe that, because of her impairment, her safety or honor were at risk. The future offers some hope. For the first time in June 2005 the World Bank explicitly recognized the necessity of integrating people with disabilities into social and econom¬ ic activities to enhance the region’s social and economic development in the face of globalization. Seen as a benefit for individuals themselves and for their families and communities, the full inclusion of women with disabilities not only could challenge the shame surrounding disability in the region but also could help transform larger gender relations. The United States. Because of the strength of the disability rights movements in the United States and Great Britain, disability studies in those countries are relatively advanced. Nevertheless, the history of disability remains largely unexplored territory, and the gendered dimension of that history is even more so. Enough has been done, however, to suggest that gender and disability have interacted throughout American history in significant ways.

67

The issue of hereditary disability has long had a powerful impact on women as mothers. From colonial America through at least the nineteenth century, disabilities present at birth were commonly attributed to misdeeds understood as sin on the part of the mother or to “maternal impres¬ sions,” disturbing sights and experiences that were suppo¬ sedly transmitted to the womb with direct effects on the child’s body. During the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many social problems were attrib¬ uted to “feebleminded” and “licentious” women. Most of the schools established earlier in the century to educate children with cognitive disabilities gradually came to be more custodial than educational, a shift that had a greater impact on women than on men. Disabled women were frequently described as unsuited for marriage and mother¬ hood. In the early twenty-first century disabled women still marry less often than both nondisabled women and disabled men. In the 1927 case Buck v. Bell the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that forced eugenic sterilization was not a violation of Americans’ constitutional rights. Twentyseven states eventually enacted laws permitting the steril¬ ization of what were termed “undesirables,” most of them women who were disabled or were said to be disabled. Some of these laws persisted into the 1970s. When the federal government began in the late nine¬ teenth and early twentieth century to regulate immigration into the United States, one of the primary aims was the exclusion of what were termed “defectives.” Disabled im¬ migrants in some cases were admitted if family members could post bonds guaranteeing that they would not become public charges. Women, like disabled people, were consid¬ ered perpetual dependents. The combination of being disabled and female made it even less likely that an immi¬ grant would be admitted. Womanhood was itself often defined in terms of disabil¬ ity. During the debate over woman suffrage, opponents pointed to the physical frailty, irrationality, and emo¬ tional instability of women as justification for the denial of equal rights. Mental impairments were said to render them incapable of contributing to intellectual or political life, while physical and psychological weaknesses made them unlikely to withstand the rigors of either. Like that of disabled people, women’s social position in the nine¬ teenth century and early twentieth century was treated as a medical problem that necessitated separate and special care. Those who wrote with acknowledged author¬ ity on the “woman question” were physicians. In 1883 the physician Edward Clarke, for example, maintained that overuse of the brain among young women was re¬ sponsible for the “numberless pale, weak, neuralgic, dys¬ peptic, hysterical, menorraghic, dysmenorrhoeic girls and women” of America. Beyond keeping women out of

68

DISABILITY: Comparative History

politics, their prescription was special education suited to women’s needs. Disability figured also in feminist arguments for equality. Rather than challenge the notion that disability justified political inequality, suffragists typically maintained that women did not have the disabilities attributed to them and therefore deserved the rights of citizenship. Suffrage rheto¬ ric was replete with references to the abilities of women intended to counter the imputations of female inferiority. In 1869, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) asked why women were “thrust outside the pale of political consider¬ ation with minors, paupers, lunatics, traitors, [and] idiots.” Literary depictions of young female characters in extremis—captured by Indians, abandoned at birth, dying, or disabled—who overcame their plight or more often were rescued from it were a staple of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. The sentimental poetry of Lydia Huntley Sigourney (“the sweet singer of Hartford,” 1791-1865) about Alice Cogswell (1805-1830), a young deaf girl, and Julia Brace (1807-1884), a deaf-blind woman, both of Hart¬ ford, Connecticut, popularized romantic notions about the vulnerable innocence of disabled girls while at the same time encouraging public support for their educations. Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876), director of the New England Asylum for the Blind, sought out Brace for an experiment in educating a person uncorrupted by worldly experience, but he rejected her when he found that at twenty-seven she was neither as pristine nor as childlike as Sigourney’s sentimental portrait suggested. Howe eventually discovered a more promising subject, a seven-year-old girl living nearby, Laura Bridgman (18291889), and made her famous as the first known deaf-blind person to be educated. A succession of philosophers, scholars, and writers came to gaze upon Bridgman during the 1840s. Her attraction rested in part on the intensifica¬ tion by deafness and blindness of attributes considered ideally feminine—purity, innocence, and chaste with¬ drawal from a rough-edged world. Nevertheless, Bridgman demonstrated that deaf-blindness was no bar to education and a rich life. Helen Keller (1880-1968) benefited and suffered from a similar romanticization of her femininity and disability. Though Keller became best known as an advocate for blind people, her early writings also commented on broad political issues and the political disabilities imposed upon women. Popular accounts have usually omitted Keller’s engagement in political controversy in part because it does not fit comfortably with the Keller legend. Keller’s views were discounted by many of her contemporaries, who refused to accept that a woman with her disabilities could independently hold such unorthodox political opinions and who accused her friends and allies of exploiting her sup¬ posed naivete to advance their own political causes. Keller’s

political ideas were formed in good part by her experiences as a disabled woman, but her ability to express them was stifled by sentimentalized notions of femininity and disability. Though Keller’s education is usually depicted as an individual accomplishment, it was very much a social achievement. A century-long experiment in public education reached its fruition in the progressive education movement, in which female reformers played a prominent role and which established the principle that all children should have the benefit of education. Moreover the methods of her teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy (1866-1936), herself visually impaired, were derived from techniques developed largely by female teachers in schools for deaf children and blind children. Disabled women, with limited opportunities for employ¬ ment and living in a nation without a well-developed social welfare system, have been especially dependent upon family support. Many twentieth-century social programs were limited to family breadwinners, defined as “able-bodied men.” Both women and disabled men have faced obstacles accessing programs. Worker compensation programs begun in the early twentieth century often did not cover the kinds of work in which women chiefly engaged. New Deal programs explicitly excluded disabled people and women. In addition, because women have typically carried greater responsibility for the care of dependents, they have been disproportionately affected by disability in the family. Many disabled women have been leaders in the struggle to improve the lives of disabled people. From Dorothea Dix (1802-1887), who liberated disabled people from poorhouses and jails, and Sylvia Flexer Bassoff (1915-1993?), president of the League of the Physically Handicapped in the 1930s, to Mary Switzer (1900-1971), director of the U.S. Office of Vocational Rehabilitation in the 1950s, and Judy Heumann (b. 1947), who combined a career as an activist with prominent positions in government and non¬ governmental organizations, women have been intellectual and political leaders in the long disability rights movement. Though the important influence of gender in reform move¬ ments has received much attention, an exploration of the influence of disability on social activists and reformers, such as Harriet Tubman (1820-1913), Jane Addams (18601935), and Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), awaits enterpris¬ ing scholars. [See also Dix, Dorothea; Fertility and Infertility; Human Rights; Keller, Helen; and Kristeva, Julia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abel, Emily K. Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850-1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Abu-Habib, Lina. Gender and Disability: Women’s Experiences in the Middle East. Oxford: Oxfam, 1997. One of the only works in

DISEASE AND ILLNESSES

English dedicated entirely to the issue of women and disability in the Middle East. Baynton, Douglas C. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History. In The Nezv Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, pp. 33-57. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Borsay, Anne. Disability and Social Policy in Britain since 1750. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood: A Novel. New York: G. Braziller, 1979. One of Nigeria’s foremost authors addresses in part the social trauma of female infertility in Africa. Farmer, Sharon. Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Feminist Disability Studies: A Review Essay.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 1557-1587. Gitter, Elizabeth. The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura

Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. Husson, Therese-Adele. Reflections: The Life and Writings of a

Young Blind Woman in Post-Revolutionary France. Translated by Catherine Kudlick and Zina Weygand. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Klages, Mary. Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Livingston, Julie. Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Nielsen, Kim E. The Radical Lives of Helen Keller. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Nwapa,- Flora. Efuru. London: Heinemann, 1966. One of the earliest and most significant feminist African novels grappling in part with the stigma of female infertility and the possibilities for female self-determination. Silla, Eric. People Are Not the Same: Leprosy and Identity in Twen¬ tieth Century Mali. Portsmouth, N.J.: Heinemann, 1998. Stoddard Holmes, Martha. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disabil¬ ity in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Sufian, Sandy. “Middle East and the Rise of Islam.” In Encyclope¬ dia of Disability, edited by Gary L. Albrecht, pp. 1092-1096. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2006. World Bank, Human Development Department, Middle East and North Africa Region. “A Note on Disability Issue in the Middle East and North Africa.” 30 June 2005. Catherine J. Kudlick, Julie Livingston, Sandy Sufian, and Douglas C. Baynton

DISEASE AND ILLNESSES. For more than fifty years researchers have examined the many fundamental causal links among subsistence patterns, demographic trends, socioeconomic changes, and environmental shifts that di¬ rectly and indirectly affect disease and mortality patterns. A three-stage model has been developed that identifies an initial hunting-and-gathering era beginning approximately 600,000 years ago. At that time, even though infectious diseases were infrequent, death rates were extremely high and life was short, perhaps only twenty to twenty-five

69

years. The era of agriculture emerged about eight thousand years ago with its secure food supply that created densely populated urban areas providing ideal conditions for the emergence and spread of many human infections. The result was high mortality rates from communicable diseases and a life expectancy at birth of between thirty and forty years. During the third era, that of industrialization, there was a steep decline of infectious diseases, and life expec¬ tancy rose to forty-six to forty-eight years. We are now well into a fourth era, that of rapid globaliza¬ tion, which has brought major changes in the environment, lifestyle, diet, and health. Life expectancy in the first decade of the twenty-first century varies greatly: people in developed nations enjoy a seventy- to seventy-five-year life¬ time, whereas people in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, can expect only thirty-four to thirty-seven years. Among the causes is the HIV/AIDS epidemic together with other communicable diseases.

Communicable Diseases. Infectious or communicable diseases are caused by the entry into the body of funguses, viruses, prions, and helminthic parasites together with their components and toxins. Scientists believe that because many communicable diseases are preventable they can be eradicated. Because nearly 90 percent of the world’s disease burden occurs in developing countries, where only 10 percent of the annual health expenditures are allocated, private foundations including the Carter Center, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation focus their philanthropy on disease eradication in these countries. Beginning in 1986 the Carter Center helped Pakistan and several other Asian and African nations to eradicate guinea worm disease by promoting sources of safe drinking water in rural communities. With help from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF, the Carter Center is now concentrating its efforts in Sudan, Ghana, and Mali, which have the heaviest burden of guinea worm disease. Though this effort to eradicate a single painful communicable disease is commendable, there has been an overall rise in infectious diseases worldwide since the late 1980s. A growing proportion of the poor in developing nations are at risk of being debilitated and dying from new drugresistant strains of malaria and tuberculosis, as well as from a group of reemerging diseases including meningitis, Rift Valley fever, and yellow fever. Previously unknown in¬ fections including hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS have become serious threats to world health. Hepatitis C was first identi¬ fied in 1989, and by the early twenty-first century it was the most common cause of posttransfusion hepatitis, affecting 3 percent of the world’s population. However, it is the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) leading to AIDS that is the worst communicable disease in all of human history.

70

DISEASE AND ILLNESSES

In the early twenty-first century it was the fourth leading cause of death worldwide and the leading cause of death in Africa. There are countries in Asia and eastern Europe that are now showing a rapid increase in HIV/AIDS prevalence. The number of women with HIV and AIDS has been increasing steadily. The fastest rate of infection is among teenage girls, who are infected by older men either through their early marriages or through prostitution. By the begin¬ ning of 2006, 17.5 million women worldwide were infected with HIV. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2000 and 2004 the estimated number of AIDS cases in the United States increased 10 percent among females and 7 percent among males. Worldwide, more than 90 percent of all HIV infections resulted from heterosexual intercourse. Though both men and women suffer, women also experience gender-specific diseases including vaginal yeast infections, severe pelvic inflammatory disease, and an increased risk of precancerous changes in the cervix resulting in increased rates of cervical cancer. The high death rate from HIV/AIDS among women is devastating because of the important role that women play in family survival and community development. Health Transitions. Epidemiologists note that as human populations progress from high to low mortality levels worldwide, they experience a shift in disease patterns and the major causes of illness. One hypothesis is that infectious diseases combined with reproductive-health problems pre¬ dominate in high-mortality populations and that degenerative chronic diseases predominate in low-mortality populations. An early model hypothesized an important “epidemiologic transition” that outpaced public health policy. According to this model, the probable causes of mortality shifted from infectious diseases in the age of “pestilence and famine” to noncommunicable diseases during the age of “degenerative and man-made diseases” (Omran). Among the most impor¬ tant causes of this transition were improvements in health care that led to increased child survival and diminished maternal mortality and morbidity. In a number of developing countries, however, age-specific mortality rates have actually been rising rather than falling, probably owing to rapid health-care changes. As a result of this controversy a broader notion of “health transition” (Caldwell) was theorized to account for the response of public health care to long-term changes. This was necessary because the epidemiological transition theory of unidirec¬ tional change masked what were perceived as heterogeneity in the pace and quality of the transition in various settings worldwide, as well as many “counter transitions” (Gaylin and Kates). Because of changes in the environment, lifestyle, and diet, together with aging, major noncommunicable diseases have been adding exponentially to the worldwide burden of disease.

By the early 1990s it was clear that a dramatic shift in the causes of illness and death that developed countries had been experiencing for nearly thirty years was now occur¬ ring in developing countries. Four-fifths of the world’s popu¬ lation lived in developing countries and in areas where noncommunicable diseases were rapidly replacing commu¬ nicable diseases and malnutrition as the leading causes of disability and premature death. By 2001 cardiovascular disease killed nearly three times as many people in develop¬ ing countries as did AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. There has been an emphasis on physical health, resulting in a neglect of mental health. Yet there is documentation that depression is now the fourth leading cause of the global disease burden.- Projections to the year 2020 indicate that depression may soon become the single leading cause of noncommunicable disease and illness worldwide. Noncommunicable Diseases. In 1999 the National Institutes of Health, the World Bank, and the WHO declared that the recent rapid rise of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) was a major health challenge to global development. The initial reluctance of these organizations to shift resources from communicable to noncommunicable diseases was doubtless due to the ongoing devastation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Although the incidence of noncommunicable diseases in developing countries has been rising rapidly, accounting for nearly one-half of all deaths, their effects still pale in comparison with those of HIV/AIDS. Researchers hypothesize that noncommunicable illnesses in both devel¬ oped and developing nations alike will soon rise to more than 70 percent of all illnesses. This will prove especially devastating to developing nations because there continues to be an unequal distribution of disease burden and health expenditure. Whereas infectious diseases were once the most common ailments and leading causes of death worldwide, today most diseases are noncommunicable, chronic diseases. Prominent noncommunicable diseases include cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and depression. These illnesses are individualistic and do not spread to others, but they cause a great deal of suffering, disability, and death. After World War II, lifestyles, environments, and diets changed enormously. There were exponential increases in the production and use of synthetic organic chemicals— solvents, cleaning agents, and pesticides—that found their way into indoor environments. Because most peo¬ ple now spend 90 percent of their time indoors in tightly sealed homes, automobiles, schools, and office buildings, they are continually exposed to these dangerous chemi¬ cals. The ability to metabolize and detoxify such chemicals depends upon the presence of various genes. Two examples are PON1, which produces an enzyme that detoxifies

DISEASE AND ILLNESSES organophosphate pesticides, and CYP2D6, which is essential for the metabolism and detoxification of many prescrip¬ tion drugs, including antidepressants, codeine, and ampheta¬ mines as well as environmental chemicals. Individuals differ enormously in their ability to detoxify these chemicals, which cause various autoimmune diseases. Geographic location is another factor. The rates of incidence for multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, and type 1 diabetes, for example, are high¬ est in northern Europe and fall almost to zero toward the equator. When the National Institutes of Health established the Autoimmune Diseases Coordinating Committee in 1998 to support basic preclinical and clinical research, it was publicly acknowledged that this family of nearly eighty interrelated diseases disproportionately affected women and minorities. The following year, when a $40 million appropria¬ tion was approved, autoimmune diseases were found to be important underlying causes in more common illnesses such as heart disease, which has become the leading killer of older women. It is well known that many autoimmune illnesses and diseases share common preventable risk factors, including tobacco use, high alcohol consumption, raised blood pressure, sedentary lifestyle, and obesity. There is grow¬ ing evidence that food addiction to com, wheat, milk, and eggs among women may be caused by their exposure to such environmental toxicants as pesticides, diesel exhaust, candles, and fragrances. The Gender Gap in the Disease Burden. In industrial¬ ized countries at the beginning of the twentieth century, gender differences in cardiovascular mortality did not exist; they emerged later. Because women’s increasing suscept¬ ibility to chronic lifestyle conditions, such as hypertension and cardiac disease, is closely related to obesity and smoking, they have recently become a cause for alarm. In 1997 the WHO put out Fact Sheet 176, which noted that the greatest public health opportunity to prevent noncommunicable diseases was to stop the rise in smoking among young women in developing countries. The WHO found that smokingrelated illness had become the leading preventable cause of death; smokers on average live from 6.5 (males) to 5.7 (females) fewer years than those who never smoked. It is estimated that there are more than 200 million female smokers in the world, and deaths from the use of tobacco are rapidly increasing among women. Scientists estimate that by the year 2020 the number of deaths among women attributable to smoking will double, to more than a million each year. In a session entitled “Gender and Noncommuni¬ cable Diseases” at the Conference of the Global Forum for Health Research held in Tanzania in 2002, it was reported that because women die faster than men from smokingrelated diseases, lung cancer had already begun to outstrip breast cancer as the major cause of cancer death in women.

71

With the decrease in smoking in developed countries, the tobacco industry now targets young women in developing countries. Also worrying is the increasing gender gap in life expec¬ tancy. The majority of the world’s elderly are women, experiencing greater disease burdens than men in terms of disability, morbidity, and poverty. Although gender differences in mortality are still poorly understood, it is clear that cardiovascular diseases are central. The fact that the gap is larger in eastern Europe, with its relatively low overall life expectancy, and smaller in western Europe, with its relatively high life expectancy, suggests that the differences are not necessarily biological. Instead, they reflect the social environment, including such risk factors as smoking, alcohol consumption, diet, and psycho¬ social factors. Moreover, although there are marked gender differences in the functioning of nonreproductive tissues, especially in the immune system, gender has only recently become an important variable in clinical and experimental studies. Although individual autoimmune diseases are rare and not well known, taken together as a group these illnesses and syndromes are now the third-largest category of disease, after heart disease and cancer. Because between 75 and 90 percent of sufferers from autoimmune diseases are women, these diseases are a major women’s health concern worldwide. Autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, rheu¬ matoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and thyroid¬ itis, affect more than 8.5 million people in the United States. Because most of these diseases primarily affect women, they have decreased female life expectancy. From childhood until old age women have heightened immune responses to foreign antigens as well as to self-antigens. Only after the age of seventy do men in any number begin to display such immune responses. Many of these autoimmune diseases differ remarkably in their clinical presentation between women and men. The onset of symptoms in multiple sclerosis is earlier for women than for men, but men tend to exhibit a more severe and progressive disease course. With lupus, women show symp¬ toms during childbearing years, whereas men manifest the disease much later in life. Gender differences in the course of autoimmune diseases have implications for medical treat¬ ment, most importantly in the timing of the initial treatment. There are also many gender-specific effects in response to therapy, and a key question is whether sex hormones can be used by both women and men to treat autoimmune diseases. Thus although gender differences in autoimmune disease are recognized, sexual dimorphism in the immune response and the importance of sex hormones need a great deal of further research.

72

DISEASE AND ILLNESSES

Both genetic predisposition and hormones play central roles in the gender gap in autoimmune diseases. Environ¬ mental differences, including access to health care through affordable health insurance, rather than simple biological differences appear to be the main cause of this discrepancy. Scientists have documented lower rates of coronary artery bypass surgery, cardiac catheterization, angioplasty, and transplantation among women than among men. Mortality rates from coronary artery disease have increased among diabetic women while they have decreased among diabetic men. A clustering of these factors significantly increases the risk of morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular disease, which today kills more women over age sixty-five than all types of cancers combined. The WHO defines “health” as much more than the absence of disease; it is considered a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. In recent years women’s health has attracted attention in clinical medicine, social science, and public health circles. At first the scope of women’s health was confined—in terms of Western biomedical and public health concerns—to international family-planning initiatives and hormone replacement ther¬ apy. In 1999 the National Institutes of Health published a research agenda for women’s health research. It recom¬ mended that biomedical and behavioral research be expand¬ ed to ensure emphasis on those conditions and diseases unique to, or more prevalent in, women of all age-groups, as well as those for which the interventions are different or the health risks greater for women than for men. [See also AIDS; Demography; Healing and Medicine; and Health.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashford, Nicholas A., and Claudia S. Miller. Chemical Exposures: Low Levels and High Stakes. 2d ed. New York: Wiley Inter¬ science, 2001. An award-winning book that proposes a theory of disease-toxicant-induced loss of tolerance that has wideranging implications for medicine, public health, and environ¬ mental policy. Caldwell, John D., ed. What We Know about Health Transition: The Cultural, Social, and Behavioral Determinants of Health. 2 vols. Canberra: Health Transition Center, Australian National University, 1990. Gaylin, Daniel S., and James Kates. “Refocusing the Lens: Epide¬ miologic Transition Theory, Mortality Differentials, and the AIDS Pandemic.” Social Science and Medicine 44 (1997): 609-621. Hartigan, Pamela. “Communicable Diseases, Gender, and Equity in Health.” Harvard Center for Population and Development Stud¬ ies, Working Paper 99.08, July 1999. http://www.globalhealth. harvard.edu/hcpds/wpweb/gender/hartigan.html. This impor¬ tant working paper provides an excellent framework for thinking about gender and communicable disease. Murray, Christopher J. L., and Alan D. Lopez, eds. Global Burden of Disease: A Comprehensive Assessment of Mortality and Disability from Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors in 1990

and Projected to 2020. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard School of Public Health, 1996. Provides epidemiological estimates for major health conditions, including the technical bases and moral implications of incorporating social, physical, and mental disabilities in health assessments. Omran, Abdel. “(The Epidemiologic Transition: A Theory of the Epidemiology of Population Change.” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1971): 509-538. Barbara Tedlock

DIVERS. Until recently, women’s contributions to fisheries have been mainly in processing and distribution of the catch. As harvesters they have been largely confined to gathering shellfish and seaweed on beaches and in shallow lagoons. However, in parts of Japan and Korea female divers—called ama in Japan and haenyo in Korea—have 'played a major role in gathering food at considerable depths, and the Korean divers also occasionally spear fish, octopus, and other forms of marine life. Female divers have been attended by romantic lore in both countries. They are frequently portrayed as erotic young maidens diving for pearls, and pictures of young women wearing thin white blouses adorn many tourist pamphlets and posters. But the realities are quite different. Most of the divers are quite old (on the Korean island Jeju [cheju] 83 percent were more than sixty years old in 2002), they wear black wet suits, and they dive not for pearls but for shellfish, sea slugs, and seaweed. Being the main breadwinners in their households, divers have also been perceived as strong, tough, and independent women. Soonhee Kim has noted that local women divers’ associa¬ tions established in each haenyo village in Jeju have become an important source of social capital and that the divers play a central role in resource management. Gwi-Sook Gwon, on the other hand, points out that the Jeju divers have always been oppressed by economic systems run by men, and D. P. Martinez argues that the important eco¬ nomic role played by female divers has not improved their status in Japan. History. Diving has a long history in Japan and Korea. It has been suggested that the skills originated in Jeju Island (southwest of the Korean peninsula) about fifteen hundred years ago and spread from there to Japan, although archaeological sites in Japan indicate a longer history. Both men and women clearly dived in these early years, and historical studies of divers are complicated by the ambiguity of the terms ama and haenyo themselves. Ama, for example, is written in a number of ways, and it often had the broader meaning of “fisherman” in general. However, several poems from Manybshu (compiled in the mid-eighth century) depict romantic images of female divers, whereas Sei Shonagon—one of the famous female writers at the

DIVERS

73

marine products had in Japan been important merchandise since the medieval period (1185-1573), and feudal lords competed for access to abalone. The lords tried to attract divers to their domains by granting fishing rights and land in return for noshi. The best-documented case is the invitation from the lord in Kanazawa to female divers from Kanezaki in Fukuoka to settle at Wajima and Hegurajima on Noto peninsula in the late sixteenth century. Throughout the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) female divers and their families migrated over long distances, often living on board the vessels during the season. The competition became fiercer in the eighteenth century when the central government imposed quotas of abalone on the domains in an attempt to increase exports to China and thereby improve the balance of trade. Korean Jeju islanders, on the other hand, remained largely outside the market economy until Japan’s occupation in 1910, but the haenyo responded quickly to new economic oppor¬ tunities both as commodity producers and as wage laborers. Many of the Jeju divers started to perform seasonal migra¬ tions like their Japanese colleagues, some even going to Japan to dive.

Contemporary Divers. Two divers—mother and daughter—are towed alongside the boat between fishing grounds, Kanezaki, Japan, 1983. Courtesy of Anne Kalland

Japanese court around 1000 c.e.—describes their hard work in more realistic terms. In Korea there seems to have been an early division of labor between women who collected seaweed and men who dived for abalone. When the men stopped diving in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—allegedly because of government regulations—diving was monopolized by women. In Japan female divers dominated along the coasts from Fukuoka in the southwest to Chiba and Sado Island in the northeast. Beyond these areas male divers seem to have been in the majority. Several Japanese provinces sent abalone as tribute to the capital in the tenth century, and the community of Kuzaki still sends dried abalone (noshi) to the important Ise Shrine. The mollusk was also an important tribute in Korea, along with brown algae and squid. But there were considerable differences between the two countries. Unlike in Korea,

Modern Divers. Basically there are two categories of female divers: those operating from shore and those operating from boats. Although they may collect seaweed together, there is usually a sharp division based on skill between the two types. Divers start their career working from shore, and only after years of training do some improve their skill to the point where they may safely dive from boats, which is more attractive because shellfish populations tend to be denser in deeper water. Heavy weights help the diver make a fast dive, and the skipper—usually her hus¬ band—helps pull her back to the surface and the boat by a rope attached to her waist. A trained diver can go down to about fifteen to twenty meters, and one dive lasts from thirty seconds to a couple of minutes. The diver uses a knife to dislocate shells from rocks, and an empty abalone shell may be used as a marker if she wants to return to the same spot. The empty shell may also function as a sign of temporary ownership; a diver can lay claim to a whole area by leaving her empty shell there. The abalone shells are stored aboard the boats. Those who operate from land collect abalone shells in small nets attached to floats. Traditionally divers dived dressed only in loincloths, and loss of body heat was a major problem. The abalone season started in spring when the water was still cool, but chilling of the body was a major problem even during the summer. The boats were therefore equipped with braziers, and the work was interrupted by periods of rest that enabled the divers to warm themselves. Divers operating from land gathered around fireplaces on shore. Over the last hundred years innovations have considerably improved working

74

DIVERS

conditions. Goggles, and later face masks, have made underwater visibility better, and fins have accelerated the divers’ speed. Most important, the introduction of the wet suit in the 1960s and 1970s helped divers keep warm and improved their efficiency to such an extent that strict time regulations have been imposed by local fishing cooperatives in order to conserve the resources. Today the divers meet after work at small huts, where they can shower, warm themselves, have a meal, and entertain one another. The time spent in the huts, where men have no access, is highly cherished by the divers. A popular view shared by many of the divers is that women are more tolerant of cold than men are, but with the introduction of the wet suit women lost this advantage. The wet suit has therefore been cited as the cause of a trend in Japan of male divers replacing female ones. But there has been a rapid decline in the number of women divers even where they have not been replaced by men; moreover, the trend started long before the innovation of the wet suit. Arne Kalland has related the trend to a contradiction between training a daughter to become a diver and sending her away in marriage—training a son keeps the knowledge within the virilocal household. Others have pointed out that marriage arrangements have been flexible, that knowledge may pass from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law, and that the number of female divers has dwindled as many kinds of work outside the fisheries have become available.

DIVORCE This entry consists of two subentries: Overview Comparative'History

Overview Divorce is the process that dissolves a marriage and, in principle, permits the former wife and husband to enter new marriages. Historically, the vast majority of marriages have involved one women and one man; same-sex mar¬ riages, which have recently been permitted in some coun¬ tries, are the rare exceptions. Women have experienced the various stages of divorce in ways quite different than men. Divorce generally results from the failure of a marriage to meet the expectations of one or both spouses. In some cases there may be matrimonial faults, such as adultery or deser¬ tion, but in others—called no-fault divorce—one spouse or both is simply so dissatisfied with the marriage that they wish to have it dissolved. Over time, expectations of mar¬ riage have changed, and it is arguable that at any given time women’s expectations have differed from men’s. Because

[See also Fisheries; Japan; and Korea.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gwon, Gwi-Sook. “Changing Labor Processes of Women’s Work: The Haenyo of Jeju Island.” Korean Studies 29 (2005): 114-136. Focuses on how the work of the Jeju divers has been appropriated. Hong, Suk Ki, and Hermann Rahn. “The Diving Women of Korea and Japan.” Scientific American (May 1967): 34-43. An early physiological study of female divers that discusses their adapta¬ tion to the work environment. Kalland, Arne. Fishing Villages in Tokugawa Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1995. Chapter 11 outlines the history of female divers in northern Kyushu, Japan. Kim, Soonhee. “Jeju Island Women Divers’ Association in South Korea: A Source of Social Capital.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 9, no. 1 (2003): 37-59. In a discussion of their associ¬ ations, the author argues that the Jeju divers enjoy considerable influence. Maraini, Fosco. The Island of the Fisherwomen. Translated by Eric Mosbacher. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962. This ethnography has—with its large photos of nude divers at Hegurajima, Japan—greatly influenced popular imagination since its publication. Martinez, D. P. Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village: The Making and Becoming of Person and Place. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. By far the most comprehensive study on Japanese ama available in English. Arne Kalland

Islam and Divorce. Abu Said and a woman being granted a divorce, Arab manuscript, 1200-1300 c.e. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris/Snark/Art Resource, NY

DIVORCE: Overview

women have historically been more dependent than men in economic and other terms, it is arguable that they tended to tolerate adverse conditions longer and therefore considered divorce less readily than men. Women who did wish to divorce often found themselves faced with divorce laws that made it more difficult for them than for men to divorce. Divorce laws have varied from place to place and from period to period, but the added obstacles confronting women seeking divorce often included a narrow range of grounds. Many divorce laws, for example, made a single act of adultery by a married woman an adequate ground for her husband to obtain a divorce, but the laws required a woman to prove her husband guilty of aggravated adultery. That could mean the husband’s com¬ mitting adultery in the family home, entering into a long¬ term adulterous relationship, or committing an offense such as violence or desertion in addition to adultery. To the extent that the grounds for divorce enabled women and men to access divorce, a more restrictive range available to women meant that women had more pro¬ blems terminating a marriage. This was particularly impor¬ tant in societies where women could not simply leave their husbands without approval by a court. A married woman could desert her husband, just as many husbands deserted their wives, but desertion was a much more risky step for a woman to take, given a solitary woman’s social vulnerability. Divorce procedures themselves have also often been deterrents to women who wanted their marriages dissolved. Divorces could be not only expensive and demand a com¬ plicated legal procedure—something that might also deter married men—but also often required the petitioning spouse to provide details, in open court, of the circumstances that gave rise to the divorce petition. Mindful of the embarrassment that these proceedings could cause, legis¬ lators during the French Revolution included a category of divorce for reason of “incompatibility” so that spouses could maintain some privacy. In the calculation of whether or not to undertake a divorce, women have had to assess the probable effects of divorce on their standard of living and quality of life and on important questions such as the custody of children. One of the most important considerations here is the property and financial settlement following divorce. Although the arrangements set out in most legal codes in modern West¬ ern societies are the most equitable at any time in history, many women still experience a marked decline in their standard of living following divorce. To some extent this is a result of many women’s having to reenter the paid workforce after divorce. Although married women’s participation in the labor force is currently high, many interrupt or abandon their careers in order to have and to raise children. When they reenter the labor force,

75

where women generally earn less than men, they find that they have lost ground. Following divorce, these inferior incomes often become the mainstay of their survival. In many jurisdictions the authorities have found it difficult to ensure that former husbands comply with alimony and child-support payments, especially when the man involved has remarried and has another family to support. If this is so in modern Western society, the prospects of divorce in earlier times must have been that much more dire. Married women in early modern Europe who won¬ dered what life would be like if they could escape an intol¬ erable marriage had only to look at the masses of poor widows and their children who made up a large proportion of the indigent population. Women who left their husbands, informally by desertion or formally by divorce or another legal process, such as a separation, could expect a similar fate, given laws that effectively precluded a married woman from owning her own property. During the nineteenth century, however, laws were passed to give married women the right to own property and to keep their earnings. This gave them a measure of independence that probably contributed in a greater will¬ ingness to undertake divorce proceedings. At the same time, women were given greater rights in respect to their children. It had been a principle of European law that the father had ultimate authority over his children, and under this principle a woman who sought a divorce faced the possibility that she would not only leave her husband but also have to give up her children. The divorce law of the French Revolution broke with this prin¬ ciple by specifying that if a couple could not agree amicably on child custody arrangements, the mother would look after daughters and the father would look after sons. During the nineteenth century, legislation and court decisions began to recognize the rights of mothers. As the ideologies of femininity and domesticity evolved, women were argued to have natural skills to care for and raise children, and in many jurisdictions the courts began to give women preference in terms of child custody. This was an ambiguous improvement insofar as there was not the same care taken to ensure that fathers provided financial support for the children. Residence has also been an issue facing women involved in divorce because in most cases it is the wife, not the husband, who must leave the matrimonial home. Studies have shown that women often had to leave their homes and abandon their possessions during divorce proceedings and find temporary accommodation with friends or family. Finally, until quite recently, divorce has been socially stigmatized. Divorce was widely regarded as a failure, and the parties involved were considered morally suspect. Women often shouldered more of the moral blame because it was thought that women had an intrinsic commitment to

76

DIVORCE: Overview

marriage and the family. To this extent, it was argued, mar¬ ried women ought to be flexible and understanding in the face of matrimonial adversity and in dealing with any con¬ ditions they encountered. If a marriage “failed,” the failure was the woman’s. In general terms the historical relationship between women and divorce has been problematic. Women have frequently found marriages intolerable, but divorce was not available or the terms of the prevailing divorce law were too restrictive. Beyond that, a nexus of cultural and material considerations all but ruled out divorce as an option for many women. Over time, the liberalization of divorce laws, legal reforms such as those affecting married women’s prop¬ erty rights, and the advent of social support and welfare systems have collectively eroded the barriers to divorce. The coming of mass divorce in Western societies from the 1970s has weakened the social stigma that for centuries was attached to divorce and particularly to divorced women. In a number of other societies, however, including nineteenthcentury Japan and Southeast Asia as well as the medieval and early modern Middle East, divorce was commonplace and little stigmatized. Indeed, it is only in recent times that divorce rates have fallen in these regions and the stigma attached to divorce increased. But over time and space, women have continued to be more adversely affected than men by divorce. [See also Adultery; Christianity; Codes of Law and Laws; Domestic Violence; Family; Islam; and Marriage.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Phillips, Roderick. Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society. Combridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Weitzman, Lenore J. The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America. New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1985. Roderick Phillips

Comparative History Divorce is the dissolution of a marriage. In principle, it returns the former wife and husband to the status of being unmarried and enables each of them to marry again, al¬ though laws and customs might limit or prohibit remarriage by one or both of the former spouses under certain circum¬ stances. Insofar as it dissolves a marriage, divorce is differ¬ ent from two apparently similar processes: separation and annulment. Separation permits a couple to live separately and independently but does not enable either of them to remarry while the other is still alive, because in law they remain married to each other. Instead of dissolving an exist¬ ing marriage, an annulment is a declaration that a specific

marriage never existed at all in legal terms because of some intrinsic fault. A common ground for annulment is the discovery that two people who had married were so closely related, by blood or marriage, that they would have been barred from marriage. Implications for Women. Divorce has historically been important to women because, except in cases of same-sex marriages involving men, a married woman is always implicated in a divorce, as petitioner, copetitioner, or plaintiff. In all cases, divorce has had implications for women that reflect their social and economic positions in society. Historically, women have often been prevented from accessing divorce. Even when women have had access, many laws have made it easier for men to divorce, even though women have been more likely to experience domestic violence, sexual infidelity, and desertion. Women have also had to confront major issues following divorce. They include finding a new residence, making an independent living, and often taking sole care of any chil¬ dren their dissolved marriage might have produced. These and other issues also affect men, but the different positions of women and men have meant that the resolution of these issues has usually been gendered. Beyond its immediate implications for women, divorce has also been used as an instrument of social regulation. Because marriage and the family have historically been regarded as institutions that guarantee social stability, con¬ flict within marriage and marriage “breakdown”—a rela¬ tively modern term—have been understood as symptoms of social instability. Conservatives have tended to view ris¬ ing rates of divorce with alarm, not only for their implica¬ tions for the social order but also because marriage has been understood as an institution where gendered power and patriarchy are expressed most clearly and directly. Because divorce laws and practices, as well as social behavior related to divorce, are generally indicative of the social, economic, and political relationships between women and men, the history of divorce and the history of women are intimately intertwined. Rome, Christianity, and Islam. Some form of divorce has existed almost as long as some form of marriage. Customary forms of marriage, whether or not accompanied by elaborate rituals, have generally allowed for the dissolution of relationships, and in many ancient cultures, religious doctrine regulated divorce. Among the Jews before the Common (Christian) Era, divorce was permitted on the ground that it was better for a couple to terminate their marriage than to live their lives in bitterness and conflict. A husband could divorce his wife on a range of grounds, but a woman could initiate a divorce only when her husband agreed to grant her a get, effectively granting permission for his wife to divorce him. Although a husband could, in principle, refuse his wife a get, he could be compelled by a

DIVORCE: Comparative History

rabbinical court to grant her one. It is apparent that women had to clear more obstacles than men in order to divorce. Classical societies also knew divorce. It seems to have been quite common in ancient Greece, and it was recog¬ nized in Roman law. In the early Roman Republic the most common form of divorce was mutual consent, but repudia¬ tion for just cause was also enough to end a marriage be¬ cause a marriage required the consent of both spouses in order to continue. In the later republic the law even per¬ mitted repudiation without just cause, although this sort of divorce was socially stigmatized. Restrictions on divorce entered the Roman Empire dur¬ ing the Christian period. The emperor Constantine (r. 306337) permitted a husband to divorce his wife if she was guilty of adultery, procuring for prostitution, or poisoning. A wife could divorce her husband if he was guilty of homi¬ cide, poisoning, or violating graves. Either could divorce the other for lesser offenses, too, but in such cases the spouses were forbidden to remarry, either forever or until they had waited a long period of time. Under the Byzantine emperor Justinian (r. 527-565) divorce law changed yet again. Now a husband could repudiate his wife for a single act of adul¬ tery, whereas a wife could repudiate her husband only if he took a concubine, a permanent sexual partner. Christian doctrines of divorce departed dramatically from Jewish and Roman practices, both of which allowed divorce in a broad range of circumstances. The New Testament was ambiguous and either allowed divorce in a single case—adultery by the wife—or did not allow it at all. The key text was Matthew 5:32: “Whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.” The passage can be inter¬ preted as allowing a man to repudiate his wife for sexual infidelity, but it left open the question of whether the parties could marry again. If they could, it was a divorce; if they could not, it was a separation. This ambiguity set the stage for a vigorous debate within the early church, with some church fathers and councils allowing divorce, but most disallowing it. The Council of Vannes (465), for example, allowed divorce and remarriage for reason of adultery. The position that the New Testament effectively permitted separation, not divorce, was held by many fathers, including Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, and many councils. By the end of the first millennium, however, the canon law of the church had settled defini¬ tively against divorce. The only remedies available to married couples were separation and annulment, and neither was easy to obtain. Judges on the church courts attempted to keep marriages intact as often as possible and demanded rigorous proof before they would annul them. Separations were rarely granted, but when they were, the most common ground was adultery.

77

The Islamic legal tradition, which developed after the rise of Islam in the seventh century and has continued to shape the rules and practices of divorce in Muslim com¬ munities, accepted divorce as a permissible although not necessarily desirable remedy for a failed marriage. Men were privileged in that they could repudiate their wives unilaterally (talaq) and extrajudicially, although they did incur financial obligations toward their divorced wives and full responsibility for child support. Women could sue for divorce in court (faskh) on limited grounds—such as a husband’s impotence or desertion-—or attempt to negotiate a divorce in return for some form of compensation (khulc), most commonly a waiver of payment of the balance of their dower. Divorce was, by all accounts, widely practiced and socially accepted in the medieval and early modern Middle East, not just among the majority Muslim community but also among Christians and Jews. Divorced men and women were not stigmatized, and they often remarried. In the modern period the rates of divorce in the region have declined. Early Modern Europe. Divorce did not appear in European legal codes until the sixteenth century, during the Protestant Reformation. Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin broke with the church’s ban on divorce and argued that it should be available, at the very least in cases of adultery. They made no distinction between adultery by the wife and adultery by the husband, and the laws of divorce that were enacted in those parts of Europe where the Reformation took hold—Scotland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and parts of Germany and Switzerland— tended not to privilege adulterous men or women. This is notable in that it runs against the grain of the prevailing double standard of sexual morality, which held women to quite different standards of sexual behavior than men. Protestant divorce laws generally extended their grounds beyond adultery, however. Desertion was commonly in¬ cluded, often on the ground that a husband or wife who deserted the other was almost certain to commit adultery eventually. Some reformers took the view that if adultery was a ground for divorce, then any offense more serious than adultery, such as witchcraft, should also be a ground. In practice, it is probable that the judges who heard petitions for divorce in early modern Europe were likely to consider adultery by a woman to be more serious than adultery by a man, and the double standard is found in a number of laws in the period, whether or not they were strictly divorce laws. The 1650 Adultery Act in England prescribed the death penalty for both a married woman who committed adultery and her accomplice. But a married man who committed adultery was put to death only if he was adulterous with a married woman. If he committed adultery with an unmarried women or with a woman whom he believed was unmarried (a useful defense), a

78

DIVORCE: Comparative History

married man was sentenced to the relatively light punish¬ ment of three months in jail. Similarly, church laws and customary laws that regulated separations tended to treat women’s adultery more ser¬ iously. The customary law of Normandy, for example, held that a man could obtain a separation for reason of his wife’s adultery regardless of the circumstances in which it occurred. A married woman, on the other hand, could win a separation from her adulterous husband only if he com¬ mitted adultery in their home. By doing so, the law argued, a husband had so outraged his wife’s sensibilities that she was entitled to a separation. This made the husband’s offense less about sex than about honor. In the case of a married woman’s adultery, the issue was about honor, to be sure, but it was also about sex and the potential of a wife’s adultery to lead to pregnancy and confusion as to the paternity of a child. There was a fear that a woman’s adultery could result in her husband’s mistakenly raising another man’s child and of the child illicitly inheriting family property. Divorce laws were enacted throughout much of Europe in the early modern period. England was the only Protestant country not to legalize divorce in the sixteenth century, even though the English Reformation occurred largely over a matrimonial issue—the wish of Henry VIII to annul his marriage so as to remarry. When divorce did become avail¬ able in England in the 1670s, the instrument used was a private act of Parliament, meaning that anyone who wanted to get a divorce had to obtain an act dissolving that parti¬ cular marriage. Only 325 such divorces were obtained be¬ tween 1670 and 1857, when the first English law was passed allowing courts to dissolve marriages. Of those, a mere four (1 percent) were obtained by women. All the divorces obtained by husbands were justified by adultery on the part of the wife. These divorces were preceded by a separation in a church court and a civil suit for criminal conversation (illicit sexual intercourse) in the civil courts, by which the aggrieved husband could be awarded monetary damages against his adulterous wife’s accomplice. The many fewer divorces successfully obtained by women showed that the husband had to be guilty not only of adul¬ tery but of other matrimonial offenses as well. This distinc¬ tion was entrenched in England’s first divorce law, the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act. It enabled married men to divorce their wives for reason of adultery but required women to prove their husbands guilty of aggravated adultery, which meant adultery made worse by behavior such as incest, violence, or desertion. English women were not put on an equal footing in respect of divorce until 1923. Yet although divorce was relatively late in England, it was quickly legalized in Britain’s colonies in North America from the early 1600s. Massachusetts, for example, allowed divorce from 1629. Although the grounds were not set out at first, the early divorces were granted for reason of the

wife’s adultery, violence on the part of the husband, and desertion. Divorces were rare, numbering only forty-four between 1636 and 1690. They were scarcely more numer¬ ous in colonial Connecticut (forty between 1655 and 1699), even though that colony’s divorce provisions were more liberal. Divorces were granted there for reasons such as adultery, desertion, impotence, and refusal to have sexual intercourse. In general, divorce in colonial America and early modern Europe was difficult to obtain, as were separations and annulments. There were variations among states and colo¬ nies, often reflecting the terms of divorce laws in force, and there were changes over time. The number of divorces rose everywhere during the late 1700s. In Massachusetts there were sixty-one divorces (thirty-seven sought by women) between 1775 and 1786, compared to twenty-four between 1765 and 1774. In England, divorces by' private act of Parliament never numbered more than fifteen a decade through to 1770, but thereafter they rose substantially. There were thirty-two in the 1770s and forty-two in the 1790s. Even statistics like these show how rare divorce was in the European and Atlantic worlds. Nearly all marriages lasted until one of the spouses died. Because of late ages of marriage and relatively low life expectancy, most marriages lasted only between fifteen and twenty years, a much short¬ er period than the potential fifty-five to sixty years in mod¬ ern Western societies. Even a decade or two was too long for some men and women, however, and with divorce all but impossible to obtain, some adopted other strategies. Some couples simply separated without seeking permis¬ sion from the authorities. How common this was is un¬ known, but cases turn up in historical records from time to time. English bishops periodically toured their sees to investigate the state of morality, and occasionally married couples were brought before them and charged with illicitly living separately. In such cases they were ordered to resume living together, no matter what the reasons that had driven them to separate. Many men deserted their wives and families, some of them migrating to New World colonies where they tried to pass themselves off as single. The court records in the British American colonies, as in Portugal’s colonies in Brazil, show cases of men convicted of bigamy, having married in the colonies before being discovered to have been married already. Men were more likely than women to desert their spouses and families because they were more mobile and had better chances of social survival. Single women were socially vulnerable and unlikely to be able to find work. Other divorce-like expedients were more dramatic and drastic. One was spouse murder, a significant category of homicide in early modern Europe. Others were probably

DIVORCE: Comparative History

less effective. Women who wanted to get rid of their hus¬ bands could pray to Saint Uncumber (Sainte Liverade in France), the unofficial patron saint of unhappily married women. If she answered their prayers, Saint Uncumber would ride in on her horse and snatch the offending hus¬ band away, and for this reason a woman desperate to be rid of her husband would not only pray but leave an offering of fodder for Saint Uncumber’s horse. French Revolution and After. The major break with the early modern European pattern of divorce came with the French Revolution of 1789. In 1792 divorce was legalized for the first time in France, and women were given equal access to it. The grounds included mutual consent and a series of matrimonial offenses, and they also enabled either the wife or the husband to obtain a divorce simply by alleging that they were incompatible. The specific grounds for divorce included insanity, violence, immorality, deser¬ tion, and long-term absence. Divorces under the 1792 law were rapid, especially if the couple agreed to divorce and had no dependent children. If there were children, the divorce took longer and there were mandatory attempts to reconcile the parties. This was an important law for women insofar as it en¬ abled them to escape from intolerable marriages. The law provided for the better-off spouse to pay alimony to the other, and it made provision for the custody and support of children. Young children were to be entrusted to their mothers, but once they reached the age of seven, boys were to be looked after by their fathers. The only article of the 1792 divorce law that placed women in an unequal position was the specification that a woman who was divorced by her husband for dissolute morals would lose her rights to the property she brought to the marriage. In all other cases women regained their property intact and were essentially restored to the single status they had enjoyed before marriage. Not only was the divorce law of the French Revolution a dramatic departure from the established course of European law, but it also proved popular enough to result in thousands of divorces. During the life of the 1792 law, which was repealed in 1803, there were more than a thousand divorces in the Norman city of Rouen and perhaps as many as twenty thousand in France’s nine largest cities combined. The law was clearly an advantage to women, and it rep¬ resented an attempt by France’s revolutionary legislators to improve conditions for women within the family, even though these legislators continued to exclude women from public life. In all French cities, some three-quarters of divorce petitions were filed by women, a pattern that reflected the greater likelihood of women to be deserted, to be assaulted, and generally to experience more dissatis¬ faction within marriage. The high proportion of petitions by women also reflected that divorce during the Revolution

79

was inexpensive and, for the most part, did not require women to abandon their property or children. This liberal divorce law was replaced by legislation that became part of the Napoleonic Code. This law lased until 1816, when divorce was once again abolished in France until it was legalized again in 1884. Napoleonic family law restored the husband to a privileged position and made divorce more difficult, particularly for women. Though women could be divorced for simple adultery, men could be divorced only if they committed adultery in the family dwelling. The number of divorces in France fell dramatically in the Napoleonic period, and, in a reversal of the revolutionary pattern, most of the peti¬ tioners were men. France ran against the trend in divorce law during the nine¬ teenth century, however. Throughout the Western world— Europe, North America, Australasia, South Africa—and in countries like Japan, divorce was legalized, and existing laws were gradually liberalized. An important factor was the secularization of family law during the 1800s. In country after country, family matters came under the jurisdiction of civil courts, and even though religion remained a potent social force, secular ideas of marriage began to predominate. Marriage was increasingly viewed as a contract that could be broken when one of the parties failed to observe its terms. In many jurisdictions—in many American states, for example—the number of grounds for divorce expanded dramatically in the nineteenth century. In 1804, Ohio rec¬ ognized four grounds for divorce, but that had increased to ten by mid-century. In addition, the definition of existing grounds was expanded so as to encompass an increasing range of circumstances. In this respect, no ground was more important than cruelty. For centuries, European law had embodied the principle of “moderate correction,” which enabled a husband to beat his wife with impunity so long as he did so for good cause—to “correct” her—and in moderation. “Moderation” meant that a man could not assault his wife with a deadly weapon or beat her to the point of drawing blood or putting her life in danger. The right was long considered an essential part of married man’s ability to govern his household. Over time, however, violence of this sort fell out of favor among social commentators (and, later, jurists), who argued that the male head of household ought to be able to maintain control by other than violent means. As ideas of romantic love and domesticity evolved, violence was increasingly viewed as incompatible with marriage. The divorce law of the French Revolution made violence a ground for divorce, and many women detailed episodes of ill treatment in order to free themselves from violent hus¬ bands. Violence became increasingly common as a ground in nineteenth-century divorce laws, partly in response to

80

DIVORCE: Comparative History

developing ideas of femininity; women, especially middleand upper-class women, were viewed as fragile and in need of protection from abusive husbands. There was a fine line between defending women and challenging the authority of married men, but in this case the lawmakers generally opted for a paternalistic rather than a patriarchal approach, and they came down on the side of protecting women. During the 1800s the definition of cruelty was treated by the courts and legislators with some elasticity. Cruelty was no longer defined solely in terms of physical violence. Mental cruelty and verbal violence began to be included, too, on the ground that women (again, middle-class and better-off women) were so sensitive that harsh, abusive words were as hurtful to them as a severe beating might be to a woman of the lower classes. Shifting definitions such as these contributed to a general widening of the grounds for divorce, and in turn contributed to an increase in divorce rates throughout the Western world at the end of the nine¬ teenth century. No-Fault Divorce. The next great break in the long-term history of divorce was the introduction of no-fault divorce in the West from the 1960s. An increasingly socialscientific approach to social relationships, together with increasing pressure on divorce courts and a belief that many divorce petitions were collusive, led legislators in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere to attempt to remove the concept of fault from divorce cases. Instead of one of the parties having to prove the other guilty of a matrimonial offense, such as adultery, the laws established criteria for demonstrating that a marriage had irretrievably broken down. These criteria were generally specified periods of living separately. In many jurisdictions a couple who could show that they had lived apart for two years was entitled to a divorce. The introduction of no-fault divorce reinforced an exist¬ ing increase in the number of divorces, and divorce rates rose rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s before leveling off. The consequences of mass divorce for women were serious. In most cases divorced women—many of whom had dependent children—suffered a loss in income and living standards, whereas divorced men generally fared better than when they were married. Divorce thus con¬ tributed to the prominence of unmarried women and their children among the poorest households in many Western countries. [See also Adultery; Christianity; Codes of Law and Laws; Domestic Violence; Family; Islam; and Marriage.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Phillips, Roderick. Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Riley, Glenda. Divorce: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Seymour, Mark. Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860-1974. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Stone, Lawrence. Road to Divorce: England, 1530-1987. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Weitzman, Leno^e J. The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America. New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1985. Roderick Phillips

DIX, DOROTHEA (1802-1887), American social re¬ former. Born in Hampden, Maine, Dix spent her childhood in several New England locations and settled as a young adult in Boston.- There she participated enthusiastically in the liberal transformation of the Puritan tradition and became in her twenties a member of the family circle of the leading Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing. Dix taught school for many years and wrote several devo¬ tional and children’s books before finding her vocation in the early 1840s as an advocate for the founding and funding of state mental hospitals devoted to the therapy known as the moral treatment. Drawing on her extensive surveys of the condition of the insane poor, her appeals to legislatures contributed to the establishment of public asylums in at least eight states as well as Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. She also received widespread acclaim for her book on the penitentiary movement, Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline (1845). From 1848 to 1854 she championed federal legislation to finance state mental hospitals through land grants, a campaign that ended when President Franklin Pierce in 1854 vetoed the measure gen¬ erally called “Miss Dix’s bill.” Her lobbying activities in Congress and in states across the country made Dix as active in legislative politics as any American woman of the nineteenth century, though she remained wary of innov¬ ation in gender roles and quietly opposed woman suffrage. After the defeat of her land bill, Dix traveled to England, where she had developed a close relationship with the prominent family of William and Elizabeth Rathbone dur¬ ing a long visit to Liverpool in 1836-1837. Her second trip abroad soon opened a new field in her work for the insane, and she traveled widely in Great Britain and on the Con¬ tinent from 1854 to 1856 to promote the moral treatment and examine mental hospitals and other public institutions. At the outset of the Civil War, the War Department cre¬ ated for Dix the post of superintendent of women nurses for the Union army. The appointment reflected her Washington connections, her experience with medical institutions, and her reputation as a humanitarian comparable to Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), whose success in the Crimean War she sought to emulate Her view of the sectional conflict informed by her Whig conservatism and her

DOLL’S HOUSE, A

intersectional travels, Dix aimed to demonstrate a calm benevolence that would contrast with the political agitation that she blamed for dividing the nation. Instead, her Civil War experience was a crushing disappointment. Army physicians fiercely resisted her authority, and her distrust of organizations thwarted potentially valuable alliances with the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Woman’s Central Association of Relief. The personification of middleclass voluntarism, Dix took little interest in nursing as an emerging field of women’s waged labor. Meanwhile, she found herself in the unpopular position of barring women from working in hospitals as independent volunteers. The War Department substantially undercut her office in 1863 by limiting her authority to appoint women nurses, but Dix continued to serve through the end of the war. She then resumed her crusade to promote treatment of mental illness in accordance with the policies of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane until the decline of her health forced her retirement. Throughout her career, her successes and her failures dramatically illustrated the adaptability and the limitations of the thoroughly conventional ideals she so vigorously worked to realize. [See also Civil War, subentry United States; and Disease and Illnesses.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Thomas J. Dorothea Dix, New England Reformer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Gollaher, David. Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix. New York: The Free Press, 1995. Thomas

J.

Brown

DOLL’S HOUSE, A. Et Dukkehjem (A Doll’s House), by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), dramatized the life of the writer Laura Petersen Kieler. Kieler forged documents to save her sick husband, but he demanded a legal separation, took custody of the children, and had her committed to an asylum. In the play, Ibsen’s heroine, Nora, leaves her husband and children, goes in search of an education, and embodies the struggle for subjective freedom associated with the First Wave of the European women’s movement. The shock when Nora slammed shut her doll’s house door reverberated throughout Europe and around the world. After the first production in Copenhagen in 1879, Ibsen agreed to write an alternative ending for Germany: Nora’s husband forces her to look at their sleeping children, and she stays. Although bowdlerized versions with happy endings appeared in America (The Child Wife, 1882) and Britain (The Breaking of a Butterfly, 1884), the original ending was championed by activists including the Russian Bolshevik

81

Alexandra Kollontai, the American anarch-communist Emma Goldman, and the British Socialist Eleanor Marx. A Doll’s House became the most performed play on the planet in the first half of the twentieth century as women dealt with the global changes associated with modernity. In 1911, in the same month that the play opened in Tokyo, the feminist magazine Seito (Bluestocking) appeared and was derisively nicknamed in the popular media a nursery school for the education of Japanese Noras; in 1924, Beijing warlords banned the play for undermining the moral integrity of China. A 1940s Argentine film version, framed as flashback, ends with an emancipated Nora returning home (directed by Ernesto Arancibia, 1943); a 1990s film version from the Islamic Republic of Iran has Sara/Nora leaving her husband and defying custody laws by taking her daughter (directed by Dariush Mehrjui, 1994). In the latest Berlin Schaubtihne production, Nora shoots her husband, and he dies floating in a giant aquarium (directed by Thomas Ostermeier, 2003). Nora’s fate has provoked rewritings, critical speculations, and dramatic sequels for more than a century. The most fantastical, written by Tanaka Chigaku in 1924, has Nora training as a pilot in Paris, promoting world peace by flying from Italy to East Asia, and reuniting with her pacifist husband. Extraordinary women have acted Nora; they have chal¬ lenged the arts industry as directors and producers and have rocked society as political rebels. From 1889 to 1891 the English Ibsenite actress-manager Janet Achurch promoted and performed the play throughout Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. In 1907/1908, two celebrated Russians played Nora in New York: Vera Kommisarzhevsky, the ori¬ ginator of the Moscow symbolist theater, and Alla Nazimova, the flamboyant bisexual Hollywood star who in 1921 made one of the seven silent film versions of the play. Fifty years later, Hollywood cast Jane Fonda as Nora, no doubt be¬ cause of her infamy as Hanoi Jane, the anti-Vietnam War activist (directed by Joseph Losey, 1973). The actor and director Mai Zetterling and the actor and UNICEF ambas¬ sador Liv Ullman were both famous Noras, but the most notorious of all was Jiang Qing (Lan Ping), the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong and member of the Gang of Four, who played the role in 1935—a year known in Shanghai theater as the “Year of Nora.” [See also Performing Arts, subentry Drama and Theater Arts; Feminism; Scandinavia; and biographies of women mentioned in this article.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Holledge, Julie, and Joanne Tompkins. Women’s Intercultural Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Templeton, Joan. Ibsen’s Women. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Julie Holledge

82

DOMESTICITY

DOMESTICITY. “Domesticity” is the shorthand often used by historians to refer to an idealized conception of family life, homemaking, and the role of women within the household. It initially emerged among the European bour¬ geoisie during the eighteenth century and became central to Western notions of private life and gender roles by the early nineteenth century. The roots of this ideology were bound up with the creation of a notional and inherently masculine “public sphere” dur¬ ing the Enlightenment. This public sphere had an implied counterpart, the private or domestic sphere, assigned to women. The idea of a domestic sphere that was separate from the world of work and public affairs was also linked to the increasing reorganization of the workplace that was part and parcel of industrial capitalism. Before industrializa¬ tion most forms of production were carried out within the household (either on a peasant holding or within an arti¬ san’s or merchant’s family-owned business). Although their tasks varied dramatically depending on their social status, women had almost always combined the physical care of their families (cooking, making clothes, and the like) with income-producing activities (working in artisans’ shops, merchants’ businesses, or agriculture). Domesticity, Industrialization, and Class Formation. Industrialization led to an enormous expansion in the number of men employed in administrative, civil service, management, professional, and other white-collar positions. The wives and daughters of such men were increasingly

removed from wage-earning work (or could earn money only in limited ways) and were generally expected to devote themselves full-time to housekeeping, social engagements, and child-rearing, with the help of at least one servant. The withdrawal of women from their families’ businesses among the European bourgeoisie meant that by the mid-nineteenth century women from differing income levels within the bourgeoisie increasingly had more homogeneous “job descriptions” than had their grandmothers, and that their working lives converged into the role of the bourgeois lady and housewife. This was true only for the urban bourgeoisie, however; farmers’ wives continued as active economic partners on their families’ holdings, since much of agricultural work was defined as “women’s work.” The majority of urban working-class wives were also expected to contribute to their households’ incomes. The removal of income-producing work from the house¬ hold, and the separation of the public sphere from the private, domestic sphere were thus still more prescriptive than descriptive for much of the population. But this development was linked to important shifts in Western notions of gender and gender roles, which became domi¬ nant in Western popular cultures. Men, who were seen as destined for the workplace and public sphere in this schema, were perceived as innately more active, bold, aggressive, independent, and capable of rational thought. Women, who were allegedly best suited to the domestic sphere, were seen as being comparatively passive, dependent,

Home Economics Class. Cooking school at State Normal College, Natchitoches, Louisiana, early twentieth century. Wittemann Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

DOMESTICITY emotional, more religious, intuitive, and nurturing. These gender roles constituted a core element of domesticity ideology. The styles of household management and family life that were associated with domesticity ideology became central to the creation and maintenance of bourgeois class identity and class boundaries within Western cultures. Specific aspects of housekeeping became markers of class and respectability’ within communities: floors and furniture, which housewives (or their servants) frequently scrubbed and polished; clothes that were clean, starched, and ironed; fixed mealtimes and schedules for family members (espe¬ cially children, who were to be closely supervised); and a household management that allowed a family to live within its means and put aside regular savings. Thrifty housekeep¬ ing, and the small savings it entailed, could help a family save money for a daughter’s dowry—crucial for marriage among this class in most cultures—or a son’s school fees, or to provide capital for a family business. This style of house¬ keeping also helped build the “moral community” of the bourgeoisie, bridging income differences within the bour¬ geoisie and enforcing class boundaries between the middle strata and the working poor who were below them. The assumption that the bourgeoisie embodied the well-ordered domestic life was widely shared among this class; this consensus underwrote the bourgeoisie’s claims to moral superiority over both the European aristocracy and the working classes. Rooms such as the parlor and kitchen were depicted as sites where a bourgeois housewife’s cleanliness, diligence, skills, and order were on display. The kitchen was to be spotless and gleaming after every meal; visitors who glanced into it should see a shining stove, floor, and set of pans. In many European cultures the linen cabinet, which contained the wife’s trousseau, was an important symbol of a wellordered domestic sphere. It was expected to be full of snowwhite linens, pressed and precisely stacked. The parlor was to be outfitted with items that showed the family’s good taste and respectable circumstances and the housewife’s care for her family: a piano, carefully dusted knickknacks, hand-crocheted doilies, comfortable rugs, solid furniture, and perhaps even a watercolor or drawing produced by the wife or a daughter. Besides the daily round of sweeping, straightening, dusting, polishing, and cooking, at least once a week bourgeois house¬ wives in many regions had a weekly laundry day and a special cleaning day, when floors were polished or waxed and extra chores done. Saturday mornings were also often days devoted to heavy cleaning. On Saturday afternoons housewives might prepare “better” weekend foods or cook a roast or other special meal for Sunday; “Sunday dinner” was the most important meal of the week for bourgeois families in many cultures.

83

Domesticity, Sentimentality, and Familial Relation¬ ships. The bourgeois housewife was expected to spend much of her time overseeing the household’s shopping and consumption. But domesticity ideology also assumed that she was responsible for supervising her children’s moral and intellectual development, ensuring her husband’s comfort, maintaining the family’s network of social con¬ nections, and engaging in charitable and community welfare work. In a well-ordered bourgeois household, the wife saw to it that children did their schoolwork, said their prayers, had lessons, and engaged in well-supervised play. Holidays were another key element of domestic life. The celebration of Christmas, with a variety of culturally specific rituals, practices, and symbols, took on great im¬ portance in many parts of the Western world during the nineteenth century. Elaborate meals with special holiday dishes were prepared. The new Christmas practices were supported and spread by the same structural shifts that had made possible the broader culture of bourgeois domesticity of which Christmas was such an important part: the rise of print culture; the growth of consumer culture, which fostered the many products associated with the holiday; the expansion of the bourgeoisie; and the sentimental, even sacralized notions of the home and family life that Christ¬ mas reinforced. Although sentimental depictions of domesticity that presented family life in quasi-sacred terms peaked at Christ¬ mastime, an emphasis on the moral and sacred qualities of the home and family was present in celebrations of domes¬ ticity throughout the year. This derived in part from the changes in gender roles that had accompanied industriali¬ zation. Within this framework, women were generally seen as more nurturing, virtuous, and pious than men, and the home (where women set the tone) was seen as a refuge from the harsher, competitive, and sometimes morally dubious public sphere. Within this haven from a heartless world, mothers were seen as being particularly charged with the moral and religious oversight of their children. They were often depicted in popular culture as working in tandem with their children’s guardian angel to watch over their children; sometimes they were even portrayed as guardian angels themselves. In many cultures the woman of the house might be referred to in terms that reflected this sacralization of family relationships and the home, for example, the “priest¬ ess of the hearth” (in German-speaking Europe) or “the Angel in the House” (the title of an immensely popular nineteenth-century English poem by Coventry Patmore). The home itself was seen as a space in which the values of peace, harmony, affection, and mutual support were sup¬ posed to predominate, in contrast to the marketplace. The Emergence of Domestic Science Instruction. The keys to the bourgeois model of domesticity—particularly pragmatic information about how to clean, cook, and

84

DOMESTICITY

celebrate holidays—were acquired not only through advice literature and training in the home and neighborhood but increasingly, starting in the late nineteenth century, in formal domestic-science education. Across Europe and America the trend of home economics instruction (both in popular private courses and as a mandatory part of the public school curriculum) was unmistakable. In the decades before World War I young women from better-off families were often sent to the household of a relative or friend for domestic training or spent a year at boarding schools that specialized in teaching home economics to bourgeois girls. Bourgeois women’s organizations and employers offered evening courses in the domestic arts for working-class women; the classes frequently were oversubscribed. After 1900 many local and provincial authorities across the Western world began to introduce courses—sometimes mandatory—in cooking, cleaning, infant care, general household management, knitting, and various types of sew¬ ing. In Munich, for example, an eighth grade was added to girls’ schools in 1896 and made mandatory in 1913; much of the curriculum for the additional year was devoted to various aspects of domestic science. In Britain, women’s organizations founded “mothers’ schools” in the late nine¬ teenth century to teach infant care, nutrition, cooking, and cleaning to working-class mothers in order to reduce infant mortality rates. Domesticity and European Imperialism. Domesticity ideology was present in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western discussions of national character, as well as being important in class formation and identity. Household objects such as a linen cabinet, filled with neatly stacked, pristine linens (in northern Europe), a teakettle (in Britain), a homemade quilt (in the United States), a samovar (in Russia), or a Nativity creche (in Italy) could serve as domestic symbols of national identity. Other elements of the home, such as textile patterns and furniture styles, and domestic customs and holiday traditions, were ways in which the nation was expressed within the domestic sphere. The clothing, foods, and folk customs of ordinary women were thus used by nationalists to demonstrate the essential unity and authenticity of the nation. Because of their roles as mothers and teachers of their children, women were enlisted by nationalist scholars during this period, because they allegedly helped to preserve linguistic traditions and thus the “mother tongue” that formed the essence of national identity. Historians have examined how mothers on the periphery of the Russian Empire, for example, were targeted by nationalists who wanted these women to support their efforts to protect the local languages against Russification. Women’s work, along with the domestic objects and practices associated with women (such as the English after¬ noon tea), thus served as focal points for the articulation of

often cliche aspects of national identity within Europe. But they could do so in colonial contexts as well. In European imperialist imagery and rhetoric, colonial housewives (and their practices of domesticity) helped to reproduce the colonizers’ identity and underwrite their hegemony over “primitive” cultures, even though many of the customs and objects that were central to European bourgeois domesticity (e.g., tea rituals or porcelain dishes) in fact originated outside the West. But what was simply bourgeois at home often embodied national or racial identity abroad. Whether they were Bantu, Burmese, or Javanese, nonWestern peoples conquered by Europeans were invariably described as ill-clad, dirty, and malodorous (at least until they came under the control of whites); their homes were often described as being infested with vermin, and their per¬ sonal hygiene and table manners were usually depicted as atrocious. European colonial female authors, for example, described African homes as “huts,” “molehills,” or “hovels” that lacked the doors, windows, and separate rooms for the variety of activities that characterized European homes.

Domestic Ideology and Imperialism. Woman cooking over an open fire, Delena, Papua New Guinea, c. 1905-1915. This image was first printed by H. M. Dauncey, an English missionary, in an attempt to show how primitive and unclean living conditions were in the Caribbean and to arouse support for his civilizing mission. London Missionary Society/Council for World Mission Archive

DOMESTICITY Taken collectively, these accounts—published in Eur¬ opean magazines, newspapers, and novels—presented me¬ tropolitan readers with before-and-after portrayals that showed the impact of a proper domesticity in maintaining racial and national identities. European bachelors who were sent abroad as colonizers, for example, in George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934), were shown living with (and often like) natives, in distressing disorder, their connection to their home cultures slowly unraveling. When the European female narrator entered the story, readers saw the colony through her eyes and were introduced to local agricultural practices and terrains, local cuisines, and the economic value of the colony. The housewife then worked to establish metropolitan domestic symbols and practices in the colo¬ nial household: clean linens, the Sunday cake or afternoon tea, and orderly housekeeping. She thus “Europeanized” the household within a colonial context—demarcating col¬ onists from the colonized, linking housework to empire building, and enlisting metropolitan women’s support for imperialism. Her presence might also “save” European men from sexual contact or even intermarriage with “native” women, thus helping to reduce the number of mixedblood mestizo children (who were increasingly stigmatized by the late nineteenth century, even in colonies where they had previously been tolerated by European authorities). In the best-selling novel Peter Moor’s Journey to South¬ west Africa, one of the most popular German novels of the late nineteenth century, the narrator links the domesticity of the homeland with that of the colony in emotion-laden descriptions of German housewives’ care of their families. The character Peter says that, after he has told his mother that he is leaving home to join the navy, “she went quietly into the kitchen and said nothing more about it to me. In the fall [before he departed] she gave me a set of linens, every¬ thing pure, clean, and mended, as was proper.” He contrasts this cleanliness and supply of appropriate linens with the filth and partial nudity of the Africans he later encounters in the colony. When, after weeks of fighting Africans in the desert, his patrol comes across a German settler family, their farm is depicted as a sort of domestic paradise: “There, in the shadow of the veranda, stood a German woman . . . how we rejoiced to see her bright, clean dress, and her pure, friendly face.” Descriptions of domesticity abroad—which focused on the housekeeping of colonial subjects, who were invariably described as having private lives and households that were far inferior to that of the colonizing nation—abounded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in both scholarly and popular publications. These descriptions were probably largely imaginary, telling us more about Eur¬ opean stereotypes than about the actual housekeeping of non-Europeans. Metropolitan bourgeois writers doubtless overlooked, for example, the housekeeping of poor and

85

rural women of their own culture (who lacked the servants, time for housework, and running water that many bour¬ geois urban housewives had) and instead usually insisted blithely that the household management of women in their nation surpassed that of other cultures (particularly non-Western cultures) across the board. Domesticity ideology initially emerged within a small segment of the western European population (the urban bourgeoisie) in the eighteenth century and played a crucial role in bourgeois class formation, underwriting and justify¬ ing changes in the sexual division of labor within that social group. By the twentieth century it had become the foun¬ dation for idealized notions about “proper” gender roles and household management in popular culture across the Western world, and played an important role in European national, racial, and colonial identities. Domesticity has thus proved to be a durable and influential source of ideas about what constitutes the ideal family life, essentialized gender roles, and the division between what is “public” and what is “private.” It also formed the basis for European assumptions about national and imperial identity, proving that it is often the most banal, cliched, and mundane symbols and practices that are the most powerful, in structuring both personal and communal identities. [See also Agriculture, subentry Peasantry; Home Eco¬ nomics; and Household, subentry Production.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bourke, Joanna. Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland, 1890-1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modem Zimbabwe. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Staler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Hansen, Karen Tranberg, ed. African Encounters with Domesticity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Palmer, Phyllis. Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Reagin, Nancy R. Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973. Smith, Bonnie G. Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. Nancy Reagin

86

DOMESTIC SERVICE: Paid Work

DOMESTIC SERVICE This entry consists of two subentries: Paid Work Unpaid Housework and Family Labor

Paid Work Domestic service as paid work can be broadly defined as employment of nonfamily members for executing vari¬ ous kinds of household tasks such as washing, cleaning, cooking, personal care, taking care of children and the elderly, gardening, and so on, to ensure proper upkeep of the home, public institutions, or businesses, such as hotels, boardinghouses, or dormitories. Domestic service, paid or unpaid, has been performed since antiquity by lower social groups, such as women and children, across any geopolit¬ ical locale. The nature and character of domestic service, however, changed over the centuries. What began as slave labor in ancient Greece and Rome took the form of serfdom in medieval Europe and was later replaced by indentured laborers and black slaves in colonial and pre-Civil War America. In contrast to slavery and serfdom, domestic ser¬ vice is a modern form of labor in which workers are paid wages in cash or kind or both, although with very little protection or benefits that come with other forms of mod¬ ern employment. Domestic service as paid work for men and women reached its apex in Victorian (1837-1901) and Edwardian (1901-1910) England and during the Gilded Age (18781889) in the United States. From the 1920s onward the importance of domestic service declined in the Western world with new technological innovations and a leveling of socioeconomic and cultural status among different demographic sections. But domestic service came to occupy a very significant place in the economy of developing coun¬ tries, in Latin America, Africa, China, India, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and elsewhere. Because the household is its primary arena, domestic service is often considered women’s work. But studies of societies of northwestern Europe and the United States indicate that by the end of the 1700s domestic service involved a transition from male to female. For example, Venice and Florence in Italy witnessed a rise of male mem¬ bers in the domestic workforce from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, largely because of the aristocratic preference for male servants. In France the feminization of domestic service can be traced to the middle of the eigh¬ teenth century, reaching its peak, almost 82 percent, by 1900. The same is true of England, where women per¬ formed 50 percent of domestic service throughout the eigh¬ teenth century, but by the end of the nineteenth century,

90 percent of domestic servants were women. In Spain, too, the trend was similar, although slower. Germany, Belgium, Russia, and Ireland all displayed similar trends of rising numbers in female domestics in the nineteenth century. In the United States there was a preponderance of male servants emigrating from Germany and Ireland in the eight¬ eenth century, but women came to constitute more than 80 percent of the domestic workforce between 1870 and 1930. The feminization of domestic service in the United States is attributed to early capitalism and a decline in indentured servitude. Canada also witnessed a similar process, with women making up more than 80 percent of domestic ser¬ vice in Montreal and Quebec City by the end of the nine¬ teenth century. The situation was similar in Japan; women’s participation in domestic service increased significantly over the period from 1686 to the 1860s in Osaka. In Tokugawa Japan (1603-1867), a young woman and her family from the countryside perceived domestic service in an urban house¬ hold as an advantageous occupation, not only for the wages earned, but mainly to prepare the girl for marriage. Domes¬ tic service constituted one of the top four nonagricultural occupations that attracted large numbers of women in Japan from the early 1900s to the late 1930s. The countries of Latin America also witnessed a nearly complete femi¬ nization of the service in the course of the late twentieth century. Unlike the countries mentioned above, where live-in domestic service was women’s primary occupational domain for almost two centuries, domestic service in Africa or colonial India was very much a man’s occupation, and women had a rather belated entry. In Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Kenya, men dominated the field of domestic employ¬ ment up until the 1970s; women outnumbered men from the 1980s onward. In India up until 1930, males out¬ numbered females as domestic workers in all the major cities. From the 1930s Bengal, with Calcutta (now Kolkata) as its leading urban center, employed the highest number of domestic workers in colonial India; more than 70 percent of its workforce was women. By 1980 women came to constitute 90 percent of the domestics in the cities of India, and the trend toward feminization of the service continued into the twenty-first century. Domestic Service and Upward Mobility. Throughout the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth, as industrialization undermined household production and eliminated women’s economic role at home, domestic service in the urban economy became the main source of women’s wage income in Europe and North America until new avenues of employment opened up in other fields. In France and England, women employed in domestic service were mainly unmarried, and the majority of them left domestic service after

DOMESTIC SERVICE: Paid Work

marriage. In eighteenth-century France, women from the lower classes entered domestic service to earn dowry money, with the objective of eventually becoming the mistress of their own household, no matter how poor. Thus scholars have described domestic service as a “bridging occupation” that facilitated a nineteenth-century French or English woman’s transition from country to city life, from the values of the working class to those of the middle classes. This idea of “upward mobility” that holds domestic service as a transient phase for future development in the life cycle of a wage-earning woman seems to hold true for contemporary Latin American women as well. Most servants in Latin America are young migrant women from the countryside who move up through a series of better¬ paying service jobs, most commonly ending as street vendors, an occupation that frees women from the social stigma of being a domestic. However, in spite of the large number of women working as servants, domestic service is declining as a major occupational source in most Latin American cities. In contrast to eighteenth-century France, nineteenthcentury England or Japan, and twenty-first-century Latin America, women in domestic service in colonial Bengal,

87

India, were mostly, if not all, married. The upward-mobility thesis did not hold true for women domestics in India for a variety of cultural and socioeconomic factors. Given the caste restrictions and prevalent cultural ideologies, not every woman could enter domestic service in an urban household. Women belonging to different castes and religious persuasions had to seek employment in casteand gender-specific occupations. In colonial India, women entered domestic service not to achieve a higher social status but rather as helpless women abandoned by families, seeking food and shelter in a secure urban environment. A majority of them hailed from the countryside, and some went back home once or twice a year. Hiring younger women mostly as part-time maids was a much later and more recent phenomenon in Indian society, dating from the second half of the twentieth century. Comparable traits to those of the countries mentioned above can be identified only among the current generations of female domestics in India. A late-twentieth-century study revealed that lowercaste women employees engaged in domestic service in Delhi considered their work as status-enhancing for three primary reasons: clean working conditions, convenient working hours, and association with middle- or upper-class mistresses.

Colonialism and Domestic Service. George Clive and his family, accompanied by their Indian servant. A painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, c. 1765-1766. Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY

88

DOMESTIC SERVICE: Paid Work

domestic service and its similar jobs, such as laundry work, were the only avenues upward for black women in the North, Chicanas in the Southwest, and Japanese American women in northern California. For racial-ethnic women, domestic service thus became a long-term solution rather than a temporary expedient, thereby reinforcing their

Child Care. A white child is fed by his black nanny, Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), 1964.

akg-images

Likewise, studies of the Hong Kong region clearly indi¬ cate no possibility of upward mobility for the menial women situated in the multigenerational, hierarchical households of late imperial China (1900-1940). Researches on domes¬ tic service in countries of South and East Africa also under¬ mine the upward-mobility theory by focusing on issues of race, gender, and ethnicity as chronic factors in determining people’s role in the economy and hence in production. The continued presence of black American and other minority women in domestic service in the United States reveals that the upward-mobility thesis ignores the critical role that race and ethnicity play in structuring relations of production. In the United States, rampant discrimination in the labor market and deep-seated historical factors such as slavery made domestic service a viable occupational domain for minority women, namely black women and new immigrants from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Scholars observe that as domestic slavery was replaced by contractual servitude and as the live-in system gave way to day work, black women continued to perform domestic service in the United States. It is also important to recognize the differential experi¬ ences of women belonging to distinct racial and ethnic groups. Daughters of European migrants used domestic service as a transient phase to move up to the advanced sectors of the labor force, but migrant women of color, subjected to institutionalized racism and gender discrimina¬ tion, were barred from upward mobility through a denial of basic legal and political rights. Other than agriculture,

degradation and subordination. Domestic service for women was not necessarily dictated by poverty, the economic structure of receiving societies, the preference or prejudice of employers, demographic variables, or stages in women’s life cycles. Though secondgeneration immigrants, who often constituted the racialethnic groups, most often chose not to follow the profession of their mothers, those who chose domestic service per¬ sisted not because of failure but because of success, because the earlier generation had made the profession more acces¬ sible and amenable through mechanisms 'of information, assistance, and selection. This process led to the formation of ethnic niches among domestic workers. Global Trends. Domestic service as paid work for women is not just dependent on internal national inequal¬ ities in certain regions but has become a global phenom¬ enon, spreading into relatively egalitarian societies such as those of northwestern Europe. It has now acquired an international dimension though transnational migration and the expansion of the global capitalist economy. Employing servants is no longer a prerogative of the elites or the very rich but has become a popular practice adopted by the expanding middle class and the aspiring working classes, who hire women domestics to help with housework for a variety of reasons. Hiring domestics has become a marker of status and bourgeois lifestyle among the upwardly mobile classes. Fueled by the global movement of labor and capital, the economies and political systems of many nation-states actively champion a middle-class culture with a wider consumption base dependent upon hired domestic help. Among the transnational migrant workers, the most widespread group is composed of Filipina domestic work¬ ers, who resided in more than a hundred and sixty countries in 2001. Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Japan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Singapore, and Taiwan are the major employers of Filipino women workers. The Gulf countries in the Middle East, such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, have the largest con¬ centration of migrant women domestics coming from the South and Southeast Asian countries of India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. From the 1980s Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea also became major destinations for women domestics from South and Southeast Asia. In 2005, Singapore employed approximately a hundred and fifty thousand women from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka as domestic maids. According to government statistics, more than 70 percent of the migrant labor force from Sri

DOMESTIC SERVICE: Unpaid Household and Family Labor

Lanka is composed of women, who face high unemployment rates and other types of difficulties, as well as abuse, at home. Sri Lankan women cater to the rising demand for domestic helpers in the Middle East, Singapore, Hong Kong, Greece, and other European countries. A significant number of Muslim Indonesian women serve in Malaysia and the Middle East because of their shared Muslim or Malay back¬ ground. High levels of dispersion are also common among Ecuadorian and Peruvian domestic workers, who are found in large numbers in New York, Rome, Sydney, Madrid, Tokyo, and Tel Aviv. Brazilians are common in Lisbon and northern New Jersey, while Central Americans serve in dif¬ ferent parts of California and in pockets of Washington, D.C. Domestic service is a relationship marked by wage rela¬ tion as well as a highly personal one, which is historically and culturally specific, thus defying the notion of the private domestic and the public sphere. Though the actors are driven by new political-economic forces, the core of the relationship remains embedded in notions of hierarchy, dependency, and power and not in notions of democratic egalitarianism. The coordinates of capital-labor relations, such as state power, wage structure, market imperfections, technology, elements of discipline, and control, all have a bearing on the relationship, but they all work imprecisely because of the very nature of the service. Women domestics are routinely subject to exploitation, violence, and abuse, including delayed, irregular, or non¬ payment of wages; illegal deductions or unfair charges on damaged properties; total absence of regulation on working hours and conditions, often resulting in long working hours in subhuman conditions and with no extra payment or incentive; physical assaults, corporal punishment, sexual harassment, and rape; and a lack of protection, health care facilities, or other kinds of benefits. Migrant women in a transnational locale are even more vulnerable to exploitation because of the live-in nature of the occupation. Regulations concerning immigration subject these women further to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. One of the least regulated sectors, women workers in some instances have begun to mobilize, and state interventions are taking place; labor unions, women activists, non-governmental organizations, and human rights groups are stepping for¬ ward to protect the rights of domestic workers, though often with ambiguous effects. Domestic service, as a major form of modern occupa¬ tion for women in today’s world, lies at the intersection of the local and the global, involving unequal developments and worldwide restructuring of a transnational system of care contingent upon transferring care resources among nations and regions. Integral to the new international divi¬ sion of labor (NIDL) and based on the restructuring of reproduction, current domestic service needs to be under¬ stood as a manifestation of the influence of global capital

89

acrossnational borders that binds women in a series of interdependent yet unequal relationships based on na¬ tional, social, economic, and racial hierarchies. [See also Class; Indentured Servitude; and Personal Services.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Kathleen, and Sara Dickey. Home and Hegemony: Domes¬ tic Service and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Chaney, Elsa M., and Mary Garcia Castro, eds. Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Chang, Grace. Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Hochschild, eds. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. Meldrum, Tim. Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750: Life and Work in the London Household. New York: Pearson, 2000. Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Sutherland, Daniel E. Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Swapna

M.

Banerjee

Unpaid Household and Family Labor Domestic work as women’s unpaid labor in the household refers to a spectrum of services that include reproduction, geriatric care, child care, cooking, gardening, house cleaning, and laundry. Domestic work usually is neither quantified in economic terms nor considered part of the gross domestic product of nations. Societal restriction of the domestic sphere to the privacy of the home separates domesticity from public life, and concomitantly there is an absence of public policy addressing the services and needs of domesticity. The separ¬ ation of spheres often receives historical and religious sanc¬ tion, although careful study of Greco-Roman antiquity and European medieval histories does not support a rigid separ¬ ation from economic production. In the early twenty-first century in many lesser developed countries, the separation of domesticity from public life does not always translate into economic unrelatedness. The ques¬ tion of the maternal efficacy of the working mother presup¬ poses a belated entry of women into the paid labor force, which is a feature of technologically advanced societies. There are countries in which the dominant issue is the impact of national economic policies upon the domestic roles and responsibilities of women. In both contexts consideration must be given to location (urban or rural), class, and educa¬ tion in the valuation of domestic labor. The status of unpaid

90

DOMESTIC SERVICE: Unpaid Household and Family Labor

female domestic labor at various periods in history, the gendering of domestic roles, the impact of public policies on the gendering of responsibilities, and the impact of public policies on the choices that women can make are all modern issues. Historical Overview. In Athens in the late fifth century b.c.e. urbanization meant that women’s activities moved indoors, were less visible, and were less valued. Though women of all social classes worked indoors, the tasks they performed, either as household necessities or for their own diversion, were extended by lower-class women as profes¬ sional occupations. In antiquity the work of the home represented exchangeable labor. Strict divisions between the public and the private as gendered spheres of economic functioning were not applicable to all classes of a society. In European medieval households rural women and the wives of urban craftsmen used their household labor to contribute to the income of the family. In regions north of the Alps wives of artisans employed their household skills in textile and commodity trading. In the seventh-century double monasteries of Ireland, nuns contributed to their own main¬ tenance and thus reduced household expenses by providing daily domestic services. These images of female domestic labor in antiquity and medieval times challenge the neces¬ sity of the separation of middle- and upper-class domesticity and economic productivity as well as economic policies that ignore the relationship as a historically young and imposed standardized household pattern. Global Issues. The former East Germany, the former West Germany, and the United States, as technologically advanced societies, provide comparable paradigms for assessing the impact of national policies on women’s preferences and resources. In East Germany, socialist policies required and supported women’s employment. West Germany promulgated a male breadwinner model, and U.S. policy was silent on the private sphere. A study that compared these three countries found that, although relative resources altered the division of domestic labor across the three regions, women still spent more time in domestic tasks than men. There was a similar finding in Israel, though with different influences stemming from Islamic and Jewish traditions. A comparative study of educated Jewish and Arab Muslim Israelis considered the idea that the massive entry of women into the labor market and alternative earning pat¬ terns would be reflected in altered patterns of social and domestic support. However, research and analysis con¬ cluded the contrary. Situations in which the wife earned more did not necessarily translate into less housework for the woman in the household. However, where the extended family gave more support, concomitantly there was a greater contribution to household tasks by men. Tradition contin¬ ued to play a dominant role in determining gender roles in

the household in the Israeli study. Traditional gendering of household duties may also account for the findings in East Germany, West Germany, and the United States. The interest in the impact of women’s entry into the labor force that rejects the conditions of the middle-class and upper-middle-class sectors of societies, combined with the lesser interest in the social and economic conditions of lower-class women with respect to household labor, obscures the situation of women across the African conti¬ nent. Analyses focusing on the impact of economic liberal¬ ization policies on women’s unpaid domestic work in parts of Africa conclude that women bear the consequences of structural adjustment policies (SAPs). Women’s domestic labors contribute to food production and water and fire¬ wood provision. The labor intensiveness of these activities prevents engagement in political action and limits women’s capacities to expand economic opportunities. The limitation of capacity in particular reflects the dependent relationship between domestic and international economic policies. The negative impact of SAPs were seen in reduced earnings, increased food prices, decreases in subsistence agriculture (where women were traders), and reduction in governmental social spending. Women therefore had to undertake additional responsibilities to safeguard the health, welfare, and education of the family. As currencies devalue, women become more deprived and burdened. It has been noted that SAPs and dominant economic agendas assume the unlimited availability of women’s time and unpaid labor. Women become the invisible resource that sustains the efficiency of the market and provide a solution to the shortfall in social services. For these women, domestic labor is fundamentally the cost of being alive. It is their economic capacity. For two-thirds of the world, women’s entering the labor force is a nonissue. Their domestic work is part of the national labor force. There critical issues must include the domestic impact of international economic policies and underdevelopment on domestic arrangements and practices. Caribbean studies on women, work, and gender also tend toward contextualizing women’s issues in extra-regional processes and the global economy but also include national economic policy shifts. In Barbados the government respond¬ ed to the neoliberal expansion of the global economy by participating in a new regional trading bloc, the Caribbean Single Market Economy. This response provided a further spur to existing entrepreneurship. In Barbados, of the 23 percent of the adult population that is married, 60 percent of couples were joint business entrepreneurs. Tensions over the division of household labor developed along traditional gender lines, but it remained the woman’s role to manage the household despite her equal involvement in entrepreneurship. Successful entrepreneurial women allocated their responsibilities to employed workers, who keep the domestic

DOMESTIC SERVICE: Unpaid Household and Family Labor

sphere running smoothly. Entrepreneurial and marital success is predicated on labor force domestic helpers. The response to the encroachments of macroeconomic policies resulted in changes in the configuration of family life and gendered participation in national entrepreneurship, bring¬ ing new meaning to long-standing cultural traditions dating back to colonial plantation slavery. The external forces of economic neoliberalism had a transformative impact upon the dynamics of family life and the development of newer patterns of household maintenance. In Puerto Rico, where there is no definitive relationship between specific family patterns and welfare dependency, surveys found that mothers on welfare deliberately exercised the rights of motherhood, domestic work, and kinship obligations into which they were socialized. They intentionally opted to do women’s work in preference to factory work or labor force domestic work, which they found discriminatory and exploitative. Their view was that the welfare benefits they received were proper compensa¬ tion for the work they did at home. These mothers under¬ stood that there is a relationship between international and national policies and their domestic labor. They grasped that their housework contributed to the economic well¬ being of the country. They intuited that welfare benefits should be regarded as one recognition of their contribution to their nation’s well-being and its ability to compete in the global marketplace, with acknowledgment that the women’s unpaid work in the household was the most basic unit of national economic productivity. Assessment. Omitted from this depiction are the meaning and impact of the camaraderie, companionship, and solidarity and their opposites that arose from situations in which domestic labor was a collective effort and not confined to the singularity of a particular wife in her own private domain, as was the case in ancient, medieval, and some multigenerational families. These sketches illustrate that throughout history there have been different configura¬ tions of the household for labor. Where the household was the basic economic unit, women’s unpaid domestic labor counted as contributing to the cumulative economic pro¬ duction of the family, household labor was a social occupa¬ tion, and social class and geographical location impacted the shape and value of domestic labor. These factors influenced women’s personal, economic, and social lives in different ways and invite exploration of the construction of gender relationships. Further, they bring into sharper focus the place of domestic labor in traditional societies in contrast to cosmopolitan societies and suggest that issues for women in the developing world may be different from those of women in more technologically advanced societies. In the final analysis, unpaid domestic work remains the purview of women. Tasks are gendered according to the ways a society perceives and allocates roles based on a

91

binary notion of gender. Some tasks therefore are peculiarly male, and others are peculiarly female. Accordingly modern and historical constructions of household gender roles are divided along male and female lines with an assumption that women ought to be the primary or sole practitioners of the domestic arts. Much research tends to focus on changing patterns in domestic sharing where more women are entering the paid labor force, the impact of female bread¬ winning on patterns of domestic hierarchies and pertinent attitudes, and the happiness of women with their roles, especially where women also work outside the home. Stu¬ dies also focus on couples with a substantive investment in the status quo, whether by dint of education or professional attainment. Thus there is a bias toward a gentrified database, where the separation of domestic labor from national econ¬ omy and the gender binary shows most markedly. Newer lines of thought explore the consequences of public policy and international market activities on the domestic labor experiences of women in different parts of the world. This direction differs from measurements of the proportionate relationships between male and female contributions to domestic labor when the woman enters the external labor force. There is a dearth of studies on the impact of the isolationist tendencies of the nuclear family, the role of religion in reinforcing traditional stereotypes, analyses of the significance of domestic labor for national economies, the impact of women’s entry into or continua¬ tion in the paid labor force, and the relationship among poverty, unpaid domestic labor, and national economies, especially given that the presence of women in the paid labor force has been an unrelenting reality in familial gender hier¬ archies among the lower-middle and poorer classes. How women relate to each other when one of them is paid for domestic labor and the issue of sexual harassment by the male head of the household are social and domestic dy¬ namics that need further investigation. There is also a need to understand and articulate more clearly the entrenched assumptions of the proprietary role of men in relation to women and how these assumptions are played out in mar¬ riage and in household work, with due sensitivity to differing cultural and religious traditions. It would be illuminating to study same-sex, single-parent, and agricultural households. Additionally there is an increasing number of women and men whose offices are in their homes and men who opt to be househusbands and play the female-gendered roles. These things all suggest that in the technologically devel¬ oped world the gender binaries with respect to domestic roles are unstable. They challenge historical assumptions and invite new efforts to develop assessment criteria for and reconstruct the history of domesticity and gender with nontraditional lenses. [See also Domesticity; Gender Roles; and Marriage.]

92

DOMESTIC SERVICE: Unpaid Household and Family Labor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beneria, Lourdes, ed. Women and Development: The Sexual Division of Labor in Rural Societies. New York: Praeger, 1985. A study prepared for the International Labour Office within the framework of the World Employment Programme. Blau, Francine D., Marianne A. Ferber, and Anne E. Winkler. The Economics of Women, Men, and Work. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002. A seminal work on the interplay of gender, race, and neoclassical economic theory, focusing mainly on the United States with limited attention to developing countries and a few European countries. Blossfeld, Hans-Peter, ed. A Cross-National Comparative Approach to Couples’ Careers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. A comparative discussion of the intersection of social class and gender and their inequities in double-income families, with focus limited to selected European countries and China. Bunnell, JoLene B., and Ivan F. Beutler. “The Domestic Puzzle: Meaning and Emotion.” Journal of Extension 37, no. 5 (October 1999). Gauthier, Anne Helene. The State and the Family: A Comparative Analysis of Family Policies in Industrialized Countries. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. A theme-based comparative study of the interplay between demographic changes and family policies in twenty-two countries over a century. Hakim, Catherine. Models of the Family in Modern Societies: Ideals and Realities. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003. A study of the relatedness of personal preference and national policy as reflected in the lifestyle choices of families in Britain and Spain. Hakim, Catherine. Work-Lifestyle Choices in the Twenty-first Cen¬ tury: Preference Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Proposes a new theory for explaining and predicting patterns of women’s choices between family work and market work. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, ed. Silences of the Middle Ages. Vol. 2 of A History of Women in the West, edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Twelve historians from different countries examine gender relationships from the end of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Italian Renaissance through the social conditions and daily experiences of women. Kulik, Liat, and Faisal Rayyan. “Wage-earning Patterns, Perceived Division of Domestic Labor, and Social Support: A Comparative Analysis of Educated Jewish and Arab-Muslim Israelis.” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research (January 2003). Lopez Springfield, Consuelo. Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. A helpful general introduction to issues confronting women from different islands of the Caribbean; note especially the section “Women and Work.” Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. A comprehensive, seminal study spanning fifteen hundred years of Greek and Roman history in which the author explores the lives of ancient women with sensitivity to class and demographics. Prince Cooke, Lynn. “Policy, Preferences, and Patriarchy: The Division of Domestic Labor in East Germany, West Germany, and the United States.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society 13, no. 1 (2007): 117-143. Schmitt Pantel, Pauline, ed. From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints. Vol. 1 of A History of Women in the West, edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Two thousand years of women’s history in Greece and

Rome are thoroughly described in essays whose sources include literary and artifactual evidence. Thomas-Emeagwali, Gloria, ed. Women Pay the Price: Structural Adjustment in Africa and the Caribbean. Trenton, N.J.. Africa World, 1994. Tsikata, Dzodzi, and Joanna Kerr. Demanding Dignity: Women Confronting''Reforms in Africa. Ottawa, Ontario: North-South Institute; Accra North, Ghana: Third World Network-Africa, 2000. Althea Spencer Miller

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE This entry consists of two subentries: Overview Comparative History

Overview Domestic violence against women is only one type of abuse that women suffer. The common term “domestic violence” is imprecise and covers a wide variety of phenom¬ ena. Psychological research, mostly focusing on advanced industrialized countries (such as the United States, Canada, and Britain), has described two distinct types of “domestic violence”: one that appears to be perpetrated by men and women equally (called “common couple violence”) and one that appears to be perpetrated disproportionately by men against women (“patriarchal terrorism”). Common couple violence, which consists of nonrepeated incidents of violence that are not severe and do not cause injury, tend to be associated with poor relationship skills. Patriarchal terrorism, on the other hand, is motivated by a desire to control and dominate one’s partner and is accompanied by an ideology of patriarchal control (for example, the belief that women ought to sexually serve men, cook their food, and the like, and if they do not comply, men have the right to physically punish them). Patriarchal terrorism—the type of domestic violence that is most likely to result in injury or death—is what most feminists and others are referring to when they use the term “domestic violence against women”: violence that is driven by a traditional gender ideology and is inflicted on women because they are women. The term “domestic violence against women” brings to mind stereotypical images of the “battered wife.” But such violence against women can also occur in same-sex relationships or in less formal heterosexual relationships (dating or common-law relationships). Besides physical bat¬ tery, domestic violence against women often also includes sexual and emotional abuse. More generally, research in other national and cultural contexts suggests that other forms of aggression might be called domestic violence

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Overview

93

International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Female protesters hold large paper dolls displaying names of women murdered by their partners, Seville, Spain, November 2004. REUTERS/Marcelo Del Pozo

against women. For example, Indian feminists have argued that the phenomenon of dowry death in India—the burning of a bride by a husband or in-laws in order to extort dowry money.from her family or to permit the husband to marry a more lucrative spouse—is best understood as a form of domestic violence. Violence against Women Worldwide: Extent and Causes. There is mounting evidence that violence against women in the form of sexual assault and wife battering occurs everywhere in the world. Numerous studies have established the existence and seriousness of the problem in countries as diverse as Norway, Japan, Papua New Guinea, and Poland. For example, in 1993 a comprehensive national study (using random-sampling techniques and legal definitions) found that about half of all Canadian women were victims of violence, with 39 percent reporting sexual assault and 34 percent reporting physical assault (some women were subject to both forms of violence). National studies in the United States and Belgium revealed similar levels of violence. Although better information is needed, there are sufficient data to establish that it is a serious problem. Although violence against women is seen in all races and classes, women of marginalized races, castes, or ethnic groups are probably subject to more sexual and domestic assaults than are white women. In addition, poverty is asso¬ ciated with higher rates of violence. In the United States, for example, low-income women are three times more likely to be raped than middle-income women, and very poor women (with a household income of less than $7,500) are

seven times more likely to be subject to sexual assault than women in middle-income ($35,000-$50,000) households. Welfare dependency is also associated with higher rates of violence. Intimate violence has devastating consequences for the victims and their families. It can cause severe injuries (and sometimes death) and other short- and long-term physical and emotional problems, including depression, suicidal ten¬ dencies, and low self-esteem, as well as difficulties with employment. But violence against women harms people even beyond the immediate victims. All women are ex¬ pected to alter their behavior to minimize risk; they are advised to seek male escorts for routine business, to avoid working late, to vary their daily routines and routes for exercise and errands, and to avoid drawing public attention to themselves or putting themselves in private spaces with men, even men they know well. Thus, violence against women restricts the ability of all women to act as free, autonomous individuals. International experts on violence note that violence against women is a deeply rooted societal and even global problem, not simply attributable to factors such as alcohol use and mental illness. According to the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (1993), this form of aggression is “a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women” and “one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men.” Indeed, cross-cultural studies have found that economic inequality between women and

94

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Overview

men; cultural patterns of conflict resolution through vio¬ lence; cultural norms of male dominance, toughness, and honor; and male economic and decision-making author¬ ity in the family are the best predictors of high levels of violence against women. Emergence of Domestic Violence as a Political Issue. Domestic violence against women has become a familiar public issue in some places. In the United States, Canada, and many other countries, official days or months to promote awareness of the problem are observed, and there are even campaigns by major retailers to raise money for anti-domestic violence causes. It is easy to forget that it was not until the mid-1990s that mainstream human rights groups recognized rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment as violations of women’s human rights. Indeed, before the 1990s few governments took any action to protect women from violence, and people who tried to raise awareness of the seldom-discussed issue were perceived as radical feminists of the most extreme variety. Although women have long experienced and criticized rape, wife abuse, and similar forms of violence, it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that activists began using the term “violence against women.” For example, in 1967 Canadian women’s groups used it when criticizing a government report on the status of women for failing to address the issue. In 1971 the first shelter for battered women opened in London. Although in most places it is recognized that rape and wife beating occur, it takes women’s movements to publi¬ cize the extent of these offenses and to make the case for public responsibility for protecting women’s human rights. As a result, policies on violence are always traced to pres¬ sure by an organized women’s group. For example, in both India and the United States, initial awareness of domestic violence against women as a social problem was primarily a result of the actions of the anti-dowry violence movement in India and the battered-women’s movement in the United States. In both cases these movements challenged the idea that the family was a private sphere, separate from state interests, and that women’s interests were identical to those of their families. In both countries movements demanded and obtained changes in police practices as well as reforms that criminalized domestic violence against women. Similarly, public attention to the problem in Sweden, Norway, and Canada was driven primarily by indepen¬ dent Women’s organizations. In all the Andean countries women’s groups have been agitating since at least the mid1980s for the adoption of laws to address domestic violence. In the Caribbean region women’s organizations have pressed for the elimination of violence and for the provision of services to victims. In short, it is the actions of women’s movements that set in motion the wheels of government response. Feminist activists are responsible for developing

the very concept of violence against women, and it is diffi¬ cult to imagine that the issue would have become a public one had the women’s movement not transformed what had previously been seen as a private matter. This does not mean that having an active women’s move¬ ment ensures a responsive government. The women’s orga¬ nizations need partners inside government who can translate political pressure into good government policies. But in most places women’s movements seem to be a necessary condition for meaningful government action on violence against women. How Governments Can Address Domestic Violence. Governments and women’s groups from 180 countries signed the Beijing Declaration from the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1994, affirming that violence against women constitutes a violation of women’s human rights. Going beyond mere recognition of the problem, most democratic governments have now promised to take action. Governments can address this deeply rooted, pervasive problem through several areas of policy action. These include legal reforms; public-education initiatives; and pro¬ grams for providing emergency housing, shelters, and crisis centers and training for service providers and professionals who help victims. In the area of legal reform, attempts to address violence against women under the rubric of more general laws against violence or assault have generally been unsuccessful. For example, a law with language detailing that rape within marriage is a crime is often required before courts will even consider spousal rape a possibility. Lawenforcement officials have tended to see the sexual assault and beating of wives as a private affair or perhaps even a male prerogative. Emergency housing and financial assis¬ tance are also important. Before a woman can separate from an abusive partner, she may require access to safe

Women’s Shelters. A victim of domestic violence shows her head wound patched up with tape in a women’s shelter, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, October 2005. REUTERS/David Gray

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Overview

housing, child care, and access to education, job training, and other tools for attaining economic self-sufficiency. In most places victims of sexual assault and domestic violence are not adequately protected from further physical and emotional violations in retaliatory attacks by their original abusers. Some women are even vulnerable to a second violation from the very police who are supposed to protect them; custodial rape is a serious problem in many countries, such as India and Brazil. Canada, Israel, and other countries have developed special training programs for police. Costa Rica, Colombia, and India have estab¬ lished women’s police stations or special units of women police officers. Social workers, lawyers, judges, and others interacting with victims have become more effective after receiving training on the dynamics of violence against women. Governments can also initiate public education and awareness programs, including broad-based media cam¬ paigns and workplace and school programs. National public education programs (such as those in Australia) appear to have some effect on the attitudes of both men and women toward wife battering. If effective, they may influence citi¬ zens to consider wife battering unacceptable. Similarly, school violence-prevention programs have successfully changed children’s and young adults’ attitudes. Addressing Violence against Women of Color. The limited services that exist for women victims of violence tend to be modeled on the experiences and needs of more privileged women, such as women of the dominant racial, ethnic, or class group. Although these services fall short of meeting the needs of even these relatively privileged women, it is important to note that different problems and barriers confront the most marginalized women. For example, women’s shelters in the United States tend to be located in white neighborhoods, making it more difficult for women of color to access them. Women of color often require types of assistance that white women need less frequently, including assistance in securing housing. Women of the dominant ethnicity may also find it easier to access services provided in their own commu¬ nities or native languages. Indeed, some U.S. shelters have reportedly made English proficiency a precondition for access. In predominantly anglophone countries (Canada, United States, Australia, Britain, New Zealand) language barriers also obstruct the ability of health-care providers, legal advocates, and other service providers to help women for whom English is not a first language. In Canada, Australia, Britain, and the United States, women of color have written extensively about the racist attitudes and cultural insensitivity they encounter in their dealings with shelter workers, police, health-care providers, and others who assume that their victimization is a result of their membership in a “backward” or traditional cultural

95

group. They also face sexism and resistance to the acknowl¬ edgment of violence within their own communities. These conflicts have motivated women of color to establish their own organizations to address violence against women. Although most governments do not address the distinc¬ tive problems confronted by women of color, some govern¬ ments (e.g., in the United States, Australia, and Canada) are adopting measures that specifically seek to remove obstacles that prevent women of color from accessing services provided by groups dominated by white women. These include bilingual telephone hotlines; shelters located in communities of color; trained interpreters for women in shelters, health-care facilities, and criminal justice settings; legal advocacy in immigration matters; and public infor¬ mation and outreach programs. Thus, examining whether governments adopt policies targeted to women of color is an important part of assessing government response to violence against women. Policy Responsiveness Worldwide. As of 1974 most democratic governments had not taken nationwide action to address violence against women. Only the Canadian government had undertaken any such reforms. By 1994 nearly all continuously democratic governments had made some progress, typically adopting two or three of the types of measures described above. Canada and Australia adopted the most comprehensive policies, and the United States, Costa Rica, France, Ireland, Israel, and New Zealand developed extensive policies. The governments of Canada and Australia were among the first to address the problem, having adopted many mea¬ sures in the mid-1980s, whereas many other governments, such as those of Ireland and Austria, only began to deal with these issues in the 1990s. France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom made an early start on enacting reforms but stalled after the early 1980s. The U.S. government was one of the first to respond, beginning in 1978, but no further policy development took place at a federal level until 1994. At the other end of the spectrum, by 1994 four stable democratic countries—Botswana, Italy, Nauru, and Venezuela—had not adopted even a single policy measure to address violence against women. Why did the governments of Australia and Canada respond earlier and more comprehensively to violence against women? Research suggests that a strong, indepen¬ dent women’s movement is critical for putting violence against women on the public agenda. But many factors have frustrated efforts by women’s movements to obtain compre¬ hensive, well-designed policies. Allies inside government, especially in the form of a well-resourced and positioned women’s bureau or commission, can make the difference between a partial, late, or spotty response and a more com¬ prehensive, coordinated, and timely one. Where women’s movements can draw on and partner with government

96

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Overview

agencies promoting the status of women, a better policy on violence against women is likely.

statistics are often called the “dark figures” by historians). An analysis of violence, then, typically emerges through inference based on those cases brought on which some

[See also Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women; Dowry; and Feminism.]

legal action was taken. Historians \generally agree that criminalized domestic violence is often simply an exaggerated form of socially normative behavior, rather than a behavior that runs con¬ trary to those norms. Thus because women have in many cultures been perceived as less valuable than men, violence against them has been tolerated, even if there were limits

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bart, Pauline B., and Eileen Gail Moran, eds. Violence against Women: The Bloody Footprints. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993. Brasileiro, Ana Maria, ed. Women against Violence: Breaking the Silence; Reflecting on Experience in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: United Nations Development Fund for Women, 1997. Chalk, Rosemary, and Patricia King, eds. Violence in Families: Assessing Prevention and Treatment Programs. Committee on the Assessment of Family Violence Interventions, Board on Children, Youth, and Families, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1998. Connors, Jane Frances. Violence against Women in the Family. United Nations document ST/CSDHA/2. Vienna: United Nations Centre for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs, 1989. Davies, Miranda, ed. Women and Violence: Realities and Responses Worldwide. London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1994. Elman, R. Amy. Sexual Subordination and State Intervention: Comparing Sweden and the United States. Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1996. Fineman, Martha, and Roxanne Mykitiuk, eds. The Public Nature of Private Violence: The Discovery of Domestic Abuse. New York: Routledge, 1994. Heise, Lori L., with Jacqueline Pitanguy and Adrienne Germain. Violence against Women: The Hidden Health Burden. World Bank Discussion Papers. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1994. Krishnaraj, Maithreyi, ed. Women and Violence: A Country Report. Sponsored by UNESCO. Bombay, India: SNDT Women’s University, Research Centre for Women’s Studies, 1991. Levinson, David. Family Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1989. United Nations. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women. A/RES/48/104. 85th Plenary Meeting, 20 December 1993. Weldon, S. Laurel. Protest, Policy, and the Problem of Violence against Women: A Cross-National Comparison. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. S. Laurel Weldon

placed on such violence. Even with these similarities it is difficult to make general global claims about domestic violence because cultures have defined domestic violence in many different and context-dependent ways. Some legal definitions of domestic violence have included verbal abuse (cruel, violent, or threatening language) and moral offenses (such as cursing a Muslim woman’s religion), or they have identified a variety of family members, from children to grandparents, within the compass of the term. These definitions, and even the kinds of language used to name domestic violence, evolve and change as cultures do. Additionally, the scholar¬ ship has been dominated by the Anglo-European context, with few book-length studies on the history of domestic violence in other parts of the world. This discussion will attend primarily to legally criminalized violence in the framework of marriage, maintaining an awareness of the foregoing limitations. Right to Discipline versus Excessive Violence. A persistent cross-cultural trend in the historical record of domestic violence is a social belief that a husband has the right to discipline his wife physically. Though the limits of this right were consistently under debate, records from

Comparative History Records of domestic violence exist in virtually every nation for which we have a legal history, and it is typically through legal documents that scholars have investigated the prob¬ lem. This historical record renders the experience of the majority of assaulted women relatively invisible, because it is likely that the vast majority of cases remained unreported or unprosecuted as a result of fear or intimidation (these

Domestic Violence Activists. Women’s rights activists from the Joint Action Committee hold a protest against domestic violence, Islamabad, Pakistan, February 2003. REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Comparative History

as far back as ancient Rome indicate the legality of wife beating and murder. To exercise this right with impunity, a man had to be able to justify his actions as an appropriate response to a wife’s violations. English court records from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century reveal, for example, that although women sought the assistance of the courts even for relatively minor beatings, “correction” of a wife was perceived as normative and appropriate by both men and women. Famously characterized in the so-called rule of thumb that referred to a husband’s right to chastise his wife with a rod the thickness of his thumb, assaults on wives were not only customary but often more severe than the violence perpetrated on strangers in the same culture. Courts typically found in favor of a wife only in cases of extraordinary violence. When the violence was deemed excessive, however, they might not only punish a husband but also demand maintenance for a wife. This pattern held true globally. From sixteenth-century Germany to nineteenth-century Peru, corporal punishment of women was legally permitted, and divorce based on cruelty was possible only in cases of severe physical abuse. Throughout the long history of India, it was considered socially and spiritually appropriate for a husband to mete out physical punishment to his wife, and through the nineteenth century, beating one’s wife was not considered a crime. Still, even in heavily patriarchal contexts such as this one, women could appeal to the court for their husbands to be fined if the abuse was extreme or unjustified. In the Ottoman Empire, which covered much of the Islamic world from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century, separation was possible for a wife who was being beaten by her husband, but the courts did not necessarily assist in a divorce case without additional abuses, such as a husband’s blasphemy. In spite of the limited support they received, women did use the courts as a means to secure separation and divorce from their husbands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in cases in which the vio¬ lence was extreme. What constituted “extreme” abuse differed from culture to culture, but abuse that seriously threatened or terminated life, permanently damaged one of the senses (sight, hear¬ ing), seriously impaired a woman’s mobility, prevented her from working, or, in some cases, caused miscarriage was considered legitimate for legal intervention. Globally, even courts that recognized domestic violence as a crime have often regarded abuse with less severe consequences as out¬ side their purview, describing such abuse as a private family matter not appropriate for the courts—a perspective that has perhaps been one of the greatest barriers to legal relief for victims of family violence. Moreover, even permanently disabling or murderous violence was sometimes considered a private matter if a wife’s perceived social transgression, such as adultery, was seen as provoking the violence.

97

A wife’s alleged adultery has been accepted as legal jus¬ tification for the most violent cases of domestic abuse, including murder, all over the world and across history— from seventeenth-century Mexico to eighteenth-century Scotland to modern-day Kenya, the United States, and Russia. Studies of such records, however, sometimes reveal that vicious assaults are in fact triggered by a woman’s failure to provide for the husband’s immediate needs or by a husband’s sense that his authority had been challenged, rather than the heat-of-passion defense that often charac¬ terizes the defense of extreme violence in adultery cases. In fact, such acts of violence are often premeditated or are part of a longer pattern of violence. Even in those cases that are a response to immediate provocation, however, the legal and social acceptability of the heat-of-passion defense reveals an underlying affirmation of a husband’s absolute authority over his wife. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, most Western nations had rejected the notion that husbands have the legal right to beat their wives. In contemporary Zambia, Russia, and Pakistan, however, provocation is still seen as a legal defense for battering, even if the battering leads to death. Human rights organizations and non¬ governmental organizations (NGOs) are actively employed in addressing these issues globally. Still, most NGOs suggest that upward of half of all women have been battered in intimate relationships. “Proper” Patriarchal Authority. Rather than under¬ mining patriarchy, the courts often historically stepped into family relations to reassert “proper” male authority when the husband had “misused” his power. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the English Court of Chancery appealed to notions of chivalry—if the husband could not properly care for his wife, the court would fill his place—a belief that reinforces male authority and was still being offered as a legal justification in feminist anti-domestic-violence campaigns in the nineteenth century. The historian Frances Dolan has suggested that even as laws began more consistently to recognize male violence as problematic, patriarchal structures were shored up. As political authority was critiqued during the seventeenth century, male authority in the household became increas¬ ingly significant, and only excessive male violence was con¬ demned and read as tyrannical or improper patriarchal behavior. These men, it was reasoned, had abused their rightful power. This argument about proper patriarchal power still dominates anti-domestic-violence action today in courts in which women do not have equal legal status. Social Limitations on Legal Recourse. Even in those cultures in which women have historically had access to the courts, it has not always been possible to seek legal remedies for domestic violence. Studies have noted that victims of domestic violence in highly patriarchal contexts

98

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Comparative History

sometimes commit suicide, which indicates that the courts are not a sufficient recourse for relief or that the social cost was so high that legal recourse was not an option. For example, social expectations of womanhood might make the mere admission of violence a perceived admission of a woman’s failure. Studies of Chinese legal structures from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries suggest that when courts prioritized legal principles, patriarchal obedience reigned chief among them, and absolute and unreserved obedience to a hus¬ band (or other patriarch) was perceived as a woman’s chief virtue. Violence served as evidence of her failure to submit to her husband’s authority. The historian Elizabeth Pleck has demonstrated that by the nineteenth century the more passive and genteel the victim—and, ironically, the more supportive she was of her husband—the more likely the courts were to find in her favor. Of course, this made it enormously difficult for a wife to report violence in the first place and to win her case. Moreover, in part because of an ideology of separate spheres, social codes from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries often required a wife to seek help from her family rather than from the courts, unless the violence was life threatening, in order that she might maintain her reputation and her husband’s. A wife’s larger familial or social context might also play a role in the social or legal evaluation of domestic violence. A couple’s perceived pro¬ fessional or personal reputation—whether he provided adequate financial support for the household and whether she was a good housekeeper—might determine the out¬ come of a case, rather than the bare facts of family vio¬ lence. Even the perceived reputation of the community in which the violence took place might feature crucially in the legal outcome (was it a “nice neighborhood”?). Though tolerance for domestic violence decreased signifi¬ cantly over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, many of these patterns continued to be true—even in progressive courts. Economic Limitations on Legal Recourse. Economic structures have often made remaining in an abusive relationship the only option for victims of domestic violence. Studies the world over have suggested that the vast majority of women through the nineteenth century, even those who brought violent husbands to court, likely stayed with abusers in part because of their economic dependence on male providers. Moreover, the social stigma attached to domestic violence or the termination of a marriage might have made earning an income more difficult for a woman in the wake of legal action. It is no surprise that historically women have tended to endure abuse for a long time before seeking remedy in the courts and have tended to see marriage as their only real means to economic survival.

Moreover, a woman’s social status might dramatically impact her legal success. Courts throughout history have typically tolerated more violence against working-class women than against the wealthy. Sixteenth-century Egyptian women of th^ working class, for example, were simply expected to experience more domestic violence, and thus such violence was tolerated by the courts. Laws addressing violence have often been written to address the social and legal circumstances of women in the upper classes, even when domestic violence was being depicted as lar¬ gely a working-class phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century in England, it was impossible for a working-class woman to appeal to the courts for a divorce, even in situations of the most egregious violence, because of the extraordinary cost of bringing suit, and even when the laws (and courts) were restructured to admit their cases, higher levels of violence were deemed tolerable in working-class homes. Women in poverty and women in rural areas have tended, and still tend, to have the least access to legal recourse when they are victims of violence. This is in part because the economic costs often rise for women who are away from city centers and who may have to travel to seek assistance. Moreover, social attitudes in rural areas tend to be more conservative. Though police action might seem a recourse in these areas, studies have shown that even when dealing with manifestly illegal acts, the police have often been reluctant to provide protection. There are few re¬ corded cases of police interfering even when the woman was being beaten publicly. The historian Sarah C. Chambers has illustrated the limits of sanctions in nineteenth-century Peru, for example, where the police sometimes refused to arrest batterers, admonishing women for their part in precipitating the violence; a parallel pattern existed in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Similar patterns continued to prevail into the twenty-first century, even as, globally, the legality and limits of domestic violence have been debated. Role of Religion. Religious institutions have also, in some cases, encouraged domestic violence by reinfor¬ cing patriarchal models for marriage. Judeo-Christian scriptures have legislated a woman’s subservience, and Quranic principles gave husbands the right to discipline a disobedient or recalcitrant wife. Though the earliest Hindu records do not authorize wife beating, Hinduism suggests that a woman’s value depends upon her service to her husband; consequently, a perceived failure on her part has often served to justify abuse. In Buddhist cultures, women often believe that they must endure domestic violence according to their karma. In some cultures, women have turned to the church, even stretching interpretation of scriptures or traditions to resist domestic violence.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Comparative History

However, even when religious discourse was used histori¬ cally as a way to censure violent husbands, it typically did not question patriarchal authority. Indeed, a religious (and cultural) belief in the preservation of marriage has been key in the way that the seriousness of domestic violence has been minimalized across the centuries. Though religious authorities might intervene at the wife’s request to encou¬ rage a husband to moderate violence, they would typically encourage a woman to remain in a marriage, sometimes demanding that she return to the home if she had fled for her safety. Religious communities have generally been supportive of separation only when violence put a wife’s life in danger. Social and Legal Change. Patriarchal values, however, have long existed in a climate of debate about what constitutes inappropriate violence. By the seventeenth century the first laws were being passed in America to limit a husband’s right to beat his wife, and by the nineteenth century such violence was considered beyond the scope of a husband’s rights. The historical record demonstrates an increasing (if uneven) global reduction in the tolerance of domestic violence, as well as an increasing awareness of emotional and sexual abuse as forms of domestic violence. Across Europe, courts gradually became more explicit in their limitations on what was considered reasonable applications of chastisement—or conversely, what was considered unreasonable violence—in the home, and in general violence was not tolerated if it was random, unchecked, or interpreted as purposeless. European con¬ structions of masculinity also made male violence increas¬ ingly unacceptable starting in the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century, definitions of unacceptable violence broadened and began to include verbal cruelty. Factors that seem to have helped foster this broadened definition in Europe and in the colonies were notions of bourgeois respectability and a new belief in companionate marriage—that is, a love match, as opposed to marriage arranged for larger economic or social purposes. Violence became increasingly associated with the working class, and those in the middle and upper classes were chary of being marked by such an association. However, these same structures—respectability and companionate marriage— simultaneously strengthened privacy rights, making the courts, the police, and the community more reluctant to intervene in the home. Even working-class women, who in the nineteenth century were moving out of public work spaces and into the domestic, were living more socially secluded lives. The growing privacy of the domestic space (and the isolation of rural homes) made it increasingly difficult to introduce any legal or social sanction of violence. Neighbors and public officials in late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century Peru rarely intervened in cases that occurred behind closed

99

doors. In eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century Tunis, 95 percent of domestic violence cases originated in rural, village, or tribal areas, and in these places, battering was a fact of everyday life for wives. In the mid-nineteenth century, even the safeguards that had been present in the possibility of a husband’s exposure in more densely populated towns eroded, and working-class women were disproportionately affected by the increased privatization of violence because of the misery that the laboring classes already suffered. Postcolonial Communities. Though Western people often saw themselves as introducing civilization into other nations, especially when they developed social programs or passed laws that limited domestic violence, the violence may have been, in part, a product of their presence. New relationships with the Western world often upset economic and political balances in non-Western countries or offered conflicting social notions of family life, and these factors sometimes increased violence in the home. Even in communities where domestic violence was believed to have been nonexistent prior to the intrusion of Western culture (such as among the San, or Bushmen, of southern Africa), domestic violence now occurs. Moreover, in many cases traditional structures that had provided support networks for women were disrupted by an imperial presence. Similarly, some scholars have argued that it has become more difficult for Muslim women to seek redress for violence in the current climate of Western anti-Islamic sentiment and cultural retrenchment than it was during the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, however, the work of activists for women’s rights often produced local legislation that crim¬ inalized violence against women. A number of African countries, Australia, and India all experienced a transfor¬ mation of legal structures in response to imperial activity from the nineteenth century onward. The transformation typically appeared in the gradual granting of legal protection to the women in the commu¬ nity, with the benefits of colonial legislation often accruing to immigrant Western women first. Domestic violence in native communities and violence against nonwhite women was considered more tolerable than violence against whites by whites. Scholars such as Durba Ghosh have argued that early laws criminalizing violence against native women of¬ ten simply increased the legitimacy and appearance of the court’s fairness, without actually finding in favor of and providing benefits to victims. Still, the generally increasing global intolerance for violence against women is linked with new notions of civility and gender equality for which activists fought. Social and Feminist Resistance. Women have long resisted domestic violence both individually and as part of political movements. Though it is difficult to generalize

100

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Comparative History

about the patterns of resistance because of the widely different contexts in which they occur, the patterns appear in virtually every culture. In Puerto Rico, for example, as early as the nineteenth century, there were numbers of women who chose not to marry; rather, in defiance of social and religious strictures they would simply cohabitate with their male partners, avoiding the legal bonds that made leav¬ ing a violent relationship difficult. In many places women sometimes simply deserted their husbands—even when the

to address the repercussions of spousal abuse and worked to educate their communities to eliminate any social

law strictly prohibited this. To resist or escape domestic violence, women might seek support from their families or community. The intervention of neighbors and friends, and especially the support of other sympathetic women, was often key in limiting marital vio¬ lence. In addition, by the early nineteenth century, public shaming rituals—such as charivari (or “shivaree”), which involved parading batterers through town to the sound of banging pots, pans, and the like, while the offending parties were physically and verbally chastised—had developed and offered communities ways to resist violence outside the legal system. Sometimes a cultural dialogue expressed in fiction, poetry, and visual art voiced resistance to domes¬ tic violence before the courts did, and such literature or art may have helped shift social understanding that both encouraged political resistance and discouraged domestic

Chambers, Sarah C. ‘“To the company of a man like my husband, no law can compel me’: The Limits of Sanctions against Wife Beating in Arequipa, Peru, 1780-1850.” Journal of Womens History 11 (1999): 31-52. Cubano-Iguina, Astrid. “Legal Constructions of Gender and Violence against Women in Puerto Rico under Spanish Rule, 1860-1895.” Law and History Review 22 (Spring 2004): 531-564. Daniels, Christine, and Michael V. Kennedy, eds. Over the Thresh¬ old: Intimate Violence in Early America. New York: Routledge, 1999. A collection with a range of essays on the history of domestic violence in the United States. Dolan, Frances. Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. Examines the role of violence in the family, includ¬ ing murder. Feldhaus, Anne, ed. Images of Women in Maharashtrian Society. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. An edited collection that addresses a broad range of historical issues relat¬ ing to family violence in India. Finlay, Henry. “Lawmaking in the Shadow of the Empire: Divorce in Colonial Australia.” Journal of Family History 24 (1999): 74-109. Foyster, Elizabeth. Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1875. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005. An exhaustive study that looks at the shifting understanding of domestic violence through the nineteenth century. Ghosh, Durba. “Household Crimes and Domestic Order: Keeping the Peace in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1770-C.1840.” Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004): 599-623. Heike, Becker. “The Least Sexist Society? Perspectives on Gender, Change, and Violence among Southern African San.” Journal of South African Studies 29 (2003): 5-23. Largueche, Dalenda. “Confined, Battered, and Repudiated Women in Tunis since the Eighteenth Century.” In Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Modern History, edited by Amira El Azhary Sonbol, pp. 259-276. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Phoofolo, Pule. “Female Extramarital Relationships and Their Regulation in Early Colonial Thembuland, South Africa, 1875-95.” Journal of Family History 30 (2005): 3-47. Pleck, Elizabeth. Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Domestic Violence from Colonial Times to the Present. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Singha, Radhika. A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1998. A rich study of notions of crime in India through the nineteenth century. Sonbol, Amira El Azhary, ed. Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996. A broad study of the Ottoman Empire, with several essays that consider domestic violence.

violence. Since the eighteenth century in Europe, feminist activists have written and agitated politically against domestic violence. By the nineteenth century in the Western world, what has been called the First Wave of feminist activists were actively working to address a range of diverse issues, including married women’s rights to property and economic self-sufficiency—factors that were intimately linked to a woman’s ability to leave a violent relation¬ ship. These activists also focused directly on condemning and addressing domestic violence itself. Women have been organizing internationally to address such concerns since 1915. In the 1960s and 1970s Second Wave femin¬ ists generated powerful advocacy movements concerned with responding to and preventing domestic violence, at the same time further raising cultural awareness of its prevalence. Since the late twentieth century, arguments for women’s rights as human rights have dominated campaigns to end domestic violence, particularly among NGOs and human rights groups. This work drew new attention interna¬ tionally to violence against women in the family. Region¬ ally, activists have often focused on the desperate need for women’s economic self-sufficiency, without which women have fewer options for avoiding or escaping domes¬ tic violence. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, domestic violence remained an ongoing and pervasive problem worldwide, although activists globally continued

tolerance for it. [See also Adultery; Codes of Law and Laws; Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women; Divorce; Feminism; Human Rights; Imperialism and Colonialism, subentry Modern Period; Patriarchy; Rape; and Violence.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

DOMOSTROI

Terraciano, Kevin. “Crime and Culture in Colonial Mexico: The Case of the Mixtec Murder Note.” Ethnohistory 45 (Autumn 1998): 709-745. Tromp, Marlene. The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. A study of the impact of fiction on legislation regarding domestic violence. Marlene Tromp

DOMNA, JULIA (167?-217

Syrian-born wife of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, mother of the emperor Caracalla and his brother Geta. Julia Domna was famous among Roman empresses not only for the sensational story of her fratricidal son but for her own qualities of cultivation and intelligence. Whether this information is true in any historically reliable sense is unclear because so little literary evidence remains from her own time, and later material is notoriously unreliable. According to writers, she had a literary salon and brought famous philosophers and orators to the court. Her son Caracalla is said to have murdered Geta, his brother and co-heir to the throne, even as Geta was clinging to his mother for rescue. Geta’s portraits were destroyed and his name erased from public inscriptions, and Caracalla ruled alone from 211 until his own murder in 217. What role Julia Domna played, if any, remains a mystery. The more reliable evidence for Julia Domna comes in the form of inscriptions and the visual arts. There are more portraits of her than of any other Roman empress except Livia; they depict her strong features, magnificent thick eyebrows, and densely coiffed hair so that she is immedi¬ ately recognizable in a way unusual among the bland and idealized images of empresses. The portraits of Julia Domna occur not only as statues and busts on bases with honorific inscriptions, often set up to thank her for good deeds done for a town or an official, but also on coins (alone and with her sons) and as a participant on public monuments. Chief among these are numerous arches set up by town officials and corporate groups in Rome, Asia Minor, and especially North Africa. Although Julia Domna herself came from one of the most important priestly families in Roman Syria, her husband was a native of Leptis Magna in the African province of Tripolitania, and he seems to have been respon¬ sible for lavish civic gifts to communities from western Algeria to eastern Libya. Julia Domna’s name and statues were regularly part of the monuments set up in thanks to the imperial family, and her image is a frequent and noticeable part of the sculpted reliefs from the Severan family arch at Leptis Magna. Her consistent representation as a necessary element of dynastic propaganda—as well as a recognizable and important imperial personage in her own right—thus emerges from both art and inscriptions. She received c.e.),

101

honors, recorded in texts and inscriptions, that were unpre¬ cedented in their lavishness. Although earlier empresses had occasionally been referred to as mater patriae, “mother of the homeland,” Julia Domna was called “mother of the Senate” and “mother of the army camps” as well. Although Julia Domna is reported to have committed suicide after Caracalla’s murder, her relatives carried on the dynasty. Her sister’s daughters both bore sons, Elagabalus becoming emperor from 218-222, and Alexander Severus from 222-235. Although the emperors carried the family name created by Septimius Severus, the dynasty was Julia Domna’s. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ghedini, Francesca. Giulia Domna tra oriente e occidente: le fonti archeologiche. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1984. Hemelrijk, Emily. Matrona Docta: Educated Women in the Roman Elite from Cornelia to Julia Domna. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Levick, Barbara. Julia Domna, Syrian Empress. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Natalie Kampen

DOMOSTROI. The advice book known as Domostroi (literally, “household order”) is often attributed to the priest Silvester (d. c. 1566), who served in the Moscow Kremlin and for a time was close to Tsar Ivan IV (the “Terrible,” r. 1533-1584). Aimed at an upper-class audience, the work survives in some forty-three manuscript copies, in long and short versions with textual variations, and several later printed editions, the first of which appeared in 1849 under the title Domostroi blagoveshchenskogo popa Sil’vestra (Domostroi of the Priest Silvester of the Annunciation Cathedral). Most historians now dispute Silvester’s overall authorship, which rests mainly on the inclusion of an epistle to his son, although evidently the text was the work of a male author. Domostroi is a compilation that contains much borrowed material, possibly from Polish-Lithuanian domestic books, and copious quotations from the Bible and from Byzantine church fathers. Domostroi contains advice for both men and women, but it is in relation to women that modern historians have often discussed it, to corroborate the received wisdom (based largely on the reports of western European travelers) that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Russian women were kept in a state of near slavery. Certainly Domostroi admonishes husbands to discipline their wives—“What¬ ever her husband orders, she must accept with love; she must fulfil his every command”—and sanctions domestic violence, albeit within limits. Yet few of its strictures on women are specifically Russian. These include advice to women to refrain from drunkenness, lewd behavior, and provocative dress; to confine their conversation to needle¬ work and domestic affairs; and never to be idle.

102

DOMOSTROI

Domostroi also provides scant evidence for the common belief that Muscovite elite women were kept in seclusion in quarters known as the terem. This idea derives primarily from the accounts of Western travelers, who generally encountered only the all-male court social elite and were kept well apart from women. Female seclusion was clearly an ideal rather than a reality, developed as a sign of exclu¬ sivity in the tsar’s household in the seventeenth century but hardly practicable in the boyar (noble) and merchant households at which Domostroi was aimed. As elsewhere in Europe, in Russia there were distinct male and female spheres, public and private. God in his heaven, the tsar on his throne, and the father as master of his household are the models that inform the Domostroi’s approach to the ideal household. Though never deviating from this patriarchal structure, Domostroi nevertheless allows women a large measure of authority within the domestic sphere. A wife was the “sovereign mistress” of her home, and her contribution to domestic order was deemed vital, from ensuring full cupboards to disciplining the servants and children. It is in domestic advice that Domostroi best reflects sixteenth-century Russian realities—for example, in lists of “the foodstuffs that people put on the table throughout the year,” differen¬ tiated by periods of fasting and feasting. The Domostroi devotes considerable attention to advice on pickling, salt¬ ing, smoking and curing, baking and brewing, dressmaking and laundry, domestic utensils, cultivating a kitchen garden, keeping livestock, disposing of household waste, amassing a dowry, and organizing a wedding (a mother’s prime duties). “If you produce everything at home . . . you will celebrate your good fortune everyday.” Such “good fortune” was a religious, not a secular, con¬ cept. An orderly and prosperous household was pleasing to God and relied for its preservation on God’s pleasure. As Silvester’s advice to his son states, “if a man does not follow the recommendations in this document, if he does not teach his wife to do likewise, does not structure his household in accordance with God’s will, does not care for his soul or teach his servants, he will be destroyed now and forever, His house will also be destroyed.” The world of Domostroi is a premodern one, where sick¬ ness and disease are punishments caused by God’s wrath, where demons appear at the sound of “filthy or scurrilous conversation,” and where angels hover over the wellstocked table. It is a monastic world structured around religious observance—church attendance, household prayers, keeping fasts, sexual abstinence—in which the sacred and the worldly are inextricably intertwined. It presents an ideal that could hardly have been possible in real, everyday life. Yet the text maintained its popularity well into the nineteenth century, long after the Russian elite became more Westernized.

[See also Christianity; Domesticity; Domestic Violence, subentry Comparative History; and Russia and Soviet Union.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Domostroi po spisku Imperatorskogo Obshchestva Istorii i Drevnostei Rossiiskikh (1882). Reprinted with an introduction by W. F. Ryan. Letchworth, U.K.: Bradda Books, 1971. Pouncy, Carolyn J., ed. and trans. The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995. Quotations are taken from this translation. Lindsey Hughes

DOUBLE STANDARD The “double standard” refers to an unequal application of various norms, principles, or criteria to men and women. This relative difference in how men and women are socially evaluated and recognized suggests that men and women are held to separate codes of morality and of acceptable or appropriate behavior. Dif¬ ferences in the standards to which males and females are held has been one societal method of regulating the two genders, often in terms of dominance and subordination. The early treatment of children within educational and domestic settings suggests disparate values, attitudes, and appropriate modes of behavior instilled in males and females. For instance, boys may receive more attention in school as children, and, during adulthood, men in the professions are taught to equate success with masculine abilities. Girls may internalize failure as children, and, as adults, women are taught to believe that success under¬ cuts a feminine-gendered identity. While gendered double standards operate in many social institutions, including professional workplaces, education, and the home, the primary example of gender disparity is the double standard for sexuality. In Britain and the United States, the historical ideal defining a proper woman entailed piety, chastity, and virginity until marriage, and this ideal contributed to re¬ stricting female sexuality to within wedlock. The Victorian concept of a fallen woman implied that a sexual “fall”—a transgression against a puritanical standard—amounted to a moral failure for a woman. Public attitudes toward pros¬ titution and prostitutes, exemplars of fallen woman, demon¬ strate how sex outside of marriage marked women more than men as deviant. In Britain, the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869 were ostensibly measures to curtail the spread of venereal disease among men in the British military. As men in the armed forces were prohibited from marrying and Victorian codes of morality foreclosed homosexual activity, officials devised a strategy for protecting the health of sol¬ diers and sailors by targeting female prostitutes, rather than

DOUBLE STANDARD

their male patrons. The law permitted the arrest and physi¬ cal inspection of women found in vicinities where sex was suspected of being trafficked between prostitutes and mili¬ tary men. But while the law ostensibly sought to discover and detain prostitutes affected with venereal disease, there was no measure in place for distinguishing between prosti¬ tutes and women not engaged in prostitution. The law thus profoundly violated women’s bodies, irrespective of illicit sexual activity. The movement protesting the laws, in which Josephine Butler was a key figure, led to the Contagious Diseases Act being repealed in 1886. In the United States, the anarchist Emma Goldman argued in 1911 that the double standard inherent in the view of prostitution as a moral issue failed to recognize how society at large, rather than the economically vulner¬ able women condemned for moral indecency, was respon¬ sible for such activity. Goldman equated the illicit trafficking of sex with the “responsible” institution of marriage, suggesting that both were similar forms of exchange. While a woman marrying for economic security was sancti¬ fied by law and public opinion, her exchange of sex for money outside of wedlock was denied. According to Gold¬ man, codes regulating the moral meaning of female sexual¬ ity did not extend to a critique of how men were culpable for perpetuating prostitution and provided no rationale for protecting women from the routine violence of police and prison authorities. The sexual and moral double standard was a focus in cri¬ tiques of gendered roles in the last half of the twentieth century. In the 1950s, the sociologist Ira Reiss initiated an empirical focus on how the double standard influenced the attitudes of men and women toward premarital sexual activity. While women have conventionally been encouraged to relegate their sexuality strictly to the space of marriage, men, conversely, have been encouraged to have multiple sexual partners prior to marriage. Such a double standard both reinforced and obscured a dichotomy of “good” and “bad” female gender roles, as it implied that women were not available for premarital sex while it also indicated that some women must be accessible for premarital hetero¬ sexual intercourse. While some promiscuous women were suitable as sex partners, a different set of women were virgins and therefore suitable partners for marriage. In a larger global context, female genital surgery is a prevalent and controversial set of cultural practices that occurs in many places, including several African countries, particularly in the northern and sub-Saharan regions. While surgeries differ in various societies and range in severity, they can entail either the partial or entire removal of the clitoris, sometimes with the additional removal of other genitalia and the suturing of the remaining skin. Although these surgeries have been referred to as “female circum¬ cision,” this term incorrectly suggests that its physical

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application is synonymous with the removal of a male’s foreskin. As the societies in which female genital surgeries take place are varied and multiple, so are the purposes for conducting the surgeries; for some, the practice may be understood as a rite of passage, or a way to emphasize the physical differences between the sexes, or a religious obliga¬ tion. The phenomenon of female genital surgery has pre¬ sented a major challenge to critics across the globe. Some Western feminists in the late decades of the twentieth cen¬ tury, notably including Alice Walker, have adamantly con¬ demned the surgeries as a violent approach to curtailing female sexuality and controlling female bodies; the oftenused term for these surgeries, “female genital mutilation,” stresses this perspective. However, other feminist critics have emphasized the dangers and limits of applying a Wes¬ tern set of experiences and standards to women with other cultural references; this tendency privileges Western or white experience over others and ignores the complexities of non-Western customs and subjectivities. Also, a “double standard” in which there is an unequal application of cul¬ tural critique between Western and non-Western women overlooks how processes of globalization and transnation¬ alism make it difficult to generalize about our differences, and what our differences mean. [See also Butler, Josephine; Gender Preference in Children; Gender Roles; Gender Theory; Goldman, Emma; Prostitution; and Sexuality, subentry Sexual Identity.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gamble, Sarah. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Post¬ feminism. New York: Routledge, 2001. Goldman, Emma. “The Traffic in Women.” In her Anarchism and Other Essays, 2d rev. ed., pp. 183-200. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911. Jasso, Guillermina, and Murray Webster Jr. “Double Standards in Just Earnings for Male and Female Workers.” Social Psychology Quarterly 60, no. 1 (March 1997): 66-78. Kunzel, Regina G. Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 18901945. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Milhausen, Robin R., and Edward S. Herold. “Does the Sexual Double Standard Still Exist? Perceptions of University Women.” journal of Sex Research 36, no. 4 (November 1999): 361-368. Obermeyer, Carla Makhlouf, and Robert F. Reynolds. “Female Genital Surgeries, Reproductive Health, and Sexuality: A Review of the Evidence.” Reproductive Health Matters 7, no. 3 (May 1999): 112-120. Reiss, Ira L. “The Double Standard in Premarital Sexual Inter¬ course: A Neglected Concept.” Social Forces 34, no. 3 (March 1956): 224-230. Valian, Virginia. Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Walley, Christine J. “Searching for ‘Voices’: Feminism, Anthropol¬ ogy, and the Global Debate over Female Genital Operations.” Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 3 (August 1997): 405-438. Habiba Ibrahim

104

DOWER SYSTEMS

DOWER SYSTEMS. The

etymology of the word “dower”—Anglo-French dozvarie, meaning “marriage portion” (about 1330), related to Sanskrit dadati, Greek didonai, and Latin donare meaning “to give”—signals its centrality in systems of human exchange. Anthropologists have argued that dower systems mark fundamental cultural activities of marriage and gift-giving: following Marcel Mauss’s contention that gift exchange is one of the primary axes of social relations, Claude Levi-Strauss suggested that marriage payments are one of the primary sites of gift¬ giving, by which cultures set into motion the exogenous exchange of women and thereby cement social relations between communities (categories of exogeneity and its obverse, incest, rest on particularities of a given culture). Feminist scholars since the 1980s have critiqued the cultural dynamism and subjectivity assigned to women in these characterizations. Gayle Rubin took issue in 1984 with Levi-Strauss’s delineation of marriage as the site where the gifts of women traveling in one direction and bride-wealth traveling in a counter direction helped cement intergenerational exchange, arguing that this view posits a trafficking cycle where human culture is founded upon the transfer of mute, acquiescent women as goods equiva¬ lent to bride-wealth. Other researchers have interrogated classic definitions of dowry and bride-wealth to emphasize the ways in which they negated women’s interests, negotia¬ tions, and labor. Ethnographers have also charted trans¬ formations in meanings of marriage payments in changing conditions of political economy, including socioeconomic stratification and consumption practices, such as women’s active and contradictory positioning in welcoming marriage payments. Types of Marriage Payments. In classic anthropological formulations, the three primary categories of marriage payments are dowry, bride-wealth, and bride service. Of the 563 societies listed in George Peter Murdock’s 1981 Atlas of World Cultures, 24, or 4 percent, are associated with dowry systems; 226, or about 40 percent, with bride¬ wealth; and 63, or 11 percent, with bride service. In the broadest formulation, “bride-wealth” refers to transfers of resources from grooms’ to brides’ families, and “dowry” to transfers of resources from brides’ to grooms’ families. The direction and significance of marriage payments vary widely, depending upon political economy and the modes of sustenance, residence, inheritance, and gendered division of labor. Bride-wealth, the most widely practiced form of transaction—and the most common form of transaction in large areas of Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean region—has conventionally been associated with societies that practice horticulture or pastoralism, who do not have accumulated wealth and have no complicated social strata, and where labor rather than land is a prized resource.

Correlations with cultures of patrilineal descent, disinheri¬ tance of daughters from patrilineal distribution of wealth, and polygyny have often been used to depict these transac¬ tions as “sales” of women, but feminist anthropologists have applied more complex interpretations to these issues. Ester Boserup claims that these systems mark a high value assigned to women’s labor, and Laurel Bossen, in her 1988 essay “Toward a Theory of Marriage: The Economic Anthropology of Marriage Transactions,” points to a com¬ plicated series of transfers of labor and sexual and repro¬ ductive rights to argue that bride-wealth may alternatively represent generational control, or strategies to acquire labor, and that women have the potential to resist and disrupt these exchanges. Other scholars have argued, to the contrary, that women in bride-wealth systems may have tenuous claims to either natal or affinal property and that they have the right to maintenance in exchange for labor only as long as they are working. Bride service, referring to labor donated by prospective grooms over a certain time as a condition of marriage, may be seen as a subcategory of bride-wealth. Reported in native cultures of South and North America and in Africa, and found in “foraging and extensive farming systems” with “little private property or stratification” (Bossen, p. 128), it is marked by the donation of men’s labor and uxorilocal residence (post-marital habitation with wife’s family). Other subcategories of bride-wealth include the Germa¬ nic “bride-price” (practiced between the fifth and eleventh centuries) paid by groom to bride for her economic security, and the mahr, the Islamic concept of an amount paid to the bride by the groom and his family, often of two kinds, that at the time of marriage (“prompt” mahr) and that at the time of divorce (“deferred” mahr). It is considered to be a sacred debt associated with marriage, although it may be ritually “forgiven,” and it is strongly encoded into most modern-day Islamic legal systems. Not¬ ably, the money goes to the bride and not to her family, making it a form of individual property rather than a community transaction. Dowry may be associated with only 4 percent of world societies, according to Murdock, but it has been practiced in some of the most densely populated parts of the world in Europe and Asia. In such contexts, the customary correla¬ tion is with “complex, stratified societies” and higher social strata, often among cultures with “plow agriculture, mono¬ gamous marriage and bilateral kinship” (Bossen, p. 138). Payments coming from the groom’s family to the bride (rather than to her family) are sometimes designated “indirect dowry,” but given the direction of these payments the prac¬ tices are best classified as forms of bride-wealth. Some anthropologists have denoted gifts to grooms’ families rather than to the bride as a subcategory, occasionally called “bridegroom-price.”

DOWER SYSTEMS

The Significance of Dower Transactions. Theoretical debates about whether dowry is a marker of status, or token of exchange or connection to a particular commu¬ nity, or alternatively, whether it is a form of premortem inheritance, rely on varied and contradictory evidence. In 1973, Jack Goody and Stanley J. Tambiah famously claimed for Europe and Asia that dowry is a form of “bilateral transmission” or “diverging devolution”; that is, settling property on daughters at the time of marriage is a contribution from the natal family to the conjugal property fund. They contrasted this with bride-wealth as a “circulat¬ ing fund that enables the [bride’s male kin] to secure their own wives” (Tambiah, p. 419). If such claims are true, then ancient Hindu notions of stridhan (women’s wealth) and European trousseaus could be seen to empower women within marriage. But as with European dowries, dowries elsewhere—in Brazil, for example—died out in response to widespread economic changes: the family stopped being a locus of production, the development of private entrepre¬ neurship made men rely less on their families and on mar¬ riage for capital, dowries and other land assets were seen as hindrances to the need for rapidly circulating capital—and women’s position came to be far more dependent on hus¬ bands’ income, to their detriment. However, some North Indian Hindu dowries, which involve large payments to the groom and his family with a small sum for the bride’s use (and over which she often has little control) complicate Goody and Tambiah’s theory, leading Tambiah to reformu¬ late this as a system where dowry goes toward enhancing the bride’s affinal in-laws’ joint family fund, which eventu¬ ally contributes substantially to the conjugal fund for all her husbands’ brothers. Contrasting theories posit that dowry is a strategy to secure symbolic capital, such as by enacting hypergamous (higher rank) marriages for women and thus enabling a woman’s natal kin to improve their status through alliance, or that it is a chance to enhance a woman’s reproductive success in the marriage competition, or that it is an opportunity for the families to display their wealth to secure social advantages. A pejorative alternative version of this perspective (for example, from Boserup) is that dowry may be seen as a payoff to affinal groups to accept economically unproductive members. North Indian Hindu marriages have often come to serve as exemplars of corruption and violence in this respect, given their associations with impoverishing, exorbitant payments and even the deaths of women whose in-laws sought unend¬ ing amounts after the wedding (commonly conflated with domestic violence accounts). In this version, too, changing market forces seem signifi¬ cant. There is evidence that the extreme devaluation of women reflected in some modern-day Indian practices of dowry and female infanticide may be traced back to

105

colonial inventions such as the private ownership of land with preferential male heirs and the creation of lucrative monied jobs for men such as in the military, which deprived women of customary use rights to land and gave them little access to emerging labor markets. One argument suggests that the present-day phenomenon of Indian dowry may be best explained as a modern institution of conspicuous con¬ sumption connected to colonial monetization of the econ¬ omy and to postcolonial globalization, which interact with hypergamous and caste-status enhancing practices. Thus, some communities are changing from bride-wealth to dowry as economic opportunities for men increase. In other cases, women themselves may concur with the practice of their families paying dowry for their own marriages, because they know they will receive little else from their parents, and because they too gain benefits from the con¬ spicuous consumption even if they are aware that the goods may not all be for their own use or control and that the consumption goods do not have the benefits of an inheri¬ tance portion. Relations of exchange, expectations of kinship, and socioeconomic transformations thus influence the signifi¬ cance of marriage payments; sex-gender systems reflect the organization of labor, property, and status. Dowry and bride-wealth can render women as powerless conduits of transaction, or facilitate their empowerment through labor contracts or property shares, or become a critical ground for gendered negotiation. [See also Brazil; Domestic Violence; Dowry; Hinduism; India; Marriage; Mexico; Patriarchy; and Single Women.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boserup, Ester. Women’s Role in Economic Development. 1970. Reprint, London: Earthscan, 1993. Bossen, Laurel. “Toward a Theory of Marriage: The Economic Anthropology of Marriage Transactions.” Ethnology 27, no. 2 (1988): 127-144. Goody, Jack, and Stanley J. Tambiah. Bridewealth and Dowry. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Rev. ed. Translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1968. First appeared in French in 1949. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton, 1967. First appeared in French in 1923-1924. Nazzari, Muriel. Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families and Social Change in Sao Paolo, Brazil (1600-1900). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women.” 1984. Reprinted in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson, 27-62. New York: Routledge, 1997. Srinivas, M. N. Some Reflections on Dowry. Delhi: Oxford Univer¬ sity Press, 1984.

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DOWER SYSTEMS

Tambiah, Stanley J. “Bridewealth and Dowry Revisited: The Position of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa and North India.” Current Anthropology 30, no. 4 (1989): 413-435. Srimati Basu

DOWRY. It is difficult to define contemporary “dowry” with the simplicity and clarity that the Indian lawgiver Manu gave the term stridhan (“women’s property”) almost two millennia ago: “What was given before the nuptial fire, what was given on the bridal procession, what was given in token of love, and what was received from her brother, mother, or father, that is called the six-fold property of a woman” (Muller, p. 198). In Manu-smriti (a prescriptive code of behaviors compiled around 200 c.e.) a woman’s right to own, control, and dispose of her own wealth—earned or given to her by her family and her husband or his family—was unarguable. Manu also stipu¬ lated the division of property among the sons of the deceased as well as an unmarried daughter’s share of the father’s estate. Dowry was widely prevalent as late as the early twentieth century throughout Europe and Asia, but the custom took on the coloration of extortion and blackmail in the Indian Subcontinent and a cause for female infanticide, the killing of brides, and other violence against women. It was redefined in an Indian national daily, the Indian Express (29 September 2000), as “the wealth—money, goods or property—that a woman brings her husband at marriage” and was commonly construed as the motive for the burning alive of an annual average of five thousand young brides from the late 1980s who brought insufficient dowries. These brutal murders, typically committed with kerosene poured over the woman and a lighted match, were called “dowry deaths” and “bride burnings” until the turn of the century. The still unabated killings are now called “dowry murders,” although new research and better forensics have brought about a fresh consensus that these killings are symptomatic of gender discrimination and male domination, rooted in the political economy rather than an artifact of a religion or custom (Oldenburg). Dowry and the Colonial Economy. Dowry in India changed radically under British rule, when a revolution in property rights transformed the social and economic world of the peasant. Shared rights in the produce of the land were summarily transmuted. Land became a privately owned commodity, entirely alienable by sale or foreclosure, and its revenue was a fixed sum deliverable on a fixed date in cash at the nearest revenue office. It gave men precise, titular ownership, at the cost of all customary claims or entitlements to what the land produced. Colonial officials attributed the increasing indebtedness of Indian peasants in north India not on the government’s inflexible tax

demands but to the allegedly profligate habits of the peasants, particularly the excessive cost of a daughter’s sumptuous wedding. The customary rights of women were the major casualties of this transformation of a peasant economy into an unevenly modern and capitalistic one. Dowry, subsumed under stridhan, became vulnerable to the new market economy that abruptly replaced the old order of obligations and reciprocities among those who had shared the produce of the commonly controlled land. Even the concept of a woman’s right to property was entirely forfeited (and had to be fought for anew in the twentieth century), and dowry increasingly became a matter for aggressive negotiation, for cash, gold, and new consumer goods, by the groom’s family. Native chiefs tried to implement colonial laws, but dowries and marriage expenses rose in response to other factors. Bride givers now had the added burden of paying for what was formerly maintained by the common funds disbursed by village headmen (which the colonial officials no longer permitted): the upkeep of a guesthouse, payment for musicians and bards, and, increasingly, demands by grooms’ parents for gold jewelry and cash, as indebtedness engulfed the smaller peasant proprietors. Moneylenders now insisted that loans be secured by land or gold, which made bride givers more vulnerable to extortion or blackmail when a groom’s family was seeking to pay off a debt or increase land holdings by buying more land with cash or gold. Indebtedness became a common incubus for those who were unable to remit the fixed taxes in a bad year. Lands were auctioned off by the British government, and straitened farmers’ daughters became an increasing finan¬ cial burden. These new trends, and the fact that men could get land grants for loyal military service and other paid employment with the colonial government, intensified the preference for sons, which contributed to ever more masculine sex ratios. Contemporary scholars and activists have defined dowry as compensation paid by the natal family to the conjugal family for a daughter who will not work outside the home. In 1961 the custom was prohibited by an act of parliament, allegedly to protect brides from violence and their families from blackmail. On 10 August 1983 the Law Commission of India redefined dowry as a demand for cash or equivalent goods by bride takers rather than a voluntary gift from bride givers. These changes have made dowry a multifaceted concept: woman’s right, gift, safety net, demand, payoff, or incentive to kill infants and brides. Dowry and Bride-Price. Despite such ambiguities the practice of dowry (dahej) has been spreading into commu¬ nities in which the earlier custom had been to pay bride-price (mul) to the bride’s parents. This has dismayed feminist scholars and activists who consider bride-price an indicator of the value of women’s work and worth. They

DOWRY

argue that the practice is declining because women’s repre¬ sentation in the workforce has declined. These conclusions are strongly contradicted by historical and contemporary records. For example, nineteenth-century records show that female infants were killed even among bride-price receiving groups, as well as among Muslims, who allegedly did not have dowry as a custom. Indeed, the idea that bride-price-paying communities value their women more than dowry-paying ones do can be traced to colonial reports. Even a postcolonial, indepen¬ dent Indian official report on the status of women, Towards Equality, noted that the bride-price system operated in a cultural milieu that values daughters. However, historians of regions in which both types of marriage payment flour¬ ished during the colonial period link the shift from mul to dahej to economic conditions. They have found that dahej offered advantages over mul for women when brides left the villages of their birth for their husbands’ homes (virilocality). The dahej, or daaj, accompanies the bride to her con¬ jugal home and for the most part is considered her personal wealth, whereas mul is intended mainly for her natal family. When the payment of bride-price gained ground in the first decade of the twentieth century, it was specific to the economically distressed peasantry; the price rose fourfold in bad times. Paying bride-price, it can be argued, is tantamount to the sale of a daughter by her father to a husband. A wife for whom money has been paid can also be sold to another man (at a loss from the husband’s point of view, but he would thus gain the capital to buy another woman) or be forced into prostitution to pay off the debt incurred to marry her in the first place. She is also regarded as a kind of family property—among the polyandrous Jats of northwestern India a wife often serves several brothers. She can opt to leave her husband and return to her family, but her kin are liable for returning the payment they received for her. The equating of a woman’s personal worth with the sum paid for her is precisely what makes bride-price objection¬ able; it reduces her to a commodity. Lower-caste women resent this equation and prefer to receive dowries from their families rather than be sold to their husbands. This might explain the widespread shift from bride-price to dowry in the past fifty years, with the impetus coming from women themselves. Colonial officials were the first to link dowry directly to “hypergamy,” or upward mobility through marriage among the upper castes, where women were not expected to do gainful work outside the home. However, several anthro¬ pologists have demonstrated that marriages are preferably arranged within the same caste group (endogamy) and between families roughly equal in status and income (isogamy). Although caste endogamy keeps marriage alliances from crossing caste lines, dowry might actually

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be a mechanism to promote isogamy, preventing lowerstatus persons from seeking alliances with those of higher status. However, even in the most carefully selected isogamous alliance the bride and her givers are at a perma¬ nent disadvantage, not because of caste status but because of the inherent gender inequality. The idea of the bride’s being acquired either as a gift of a virgin daughter by her father (along with her dahej) or after payment by the groom {mul) underscores the unambiguous construction of the woman as movable property in marriage. It is this reification of woman as either gift or purchased entity that makes all bride takers in some sense superior to all bride givers. Exchange marriages, when a brother and a sister of one family marry a sister and a brother of another family, effectively level all differences in status between the two families. Bride givers are not well served by uneven sex ratios. Although India’s high overall male-to-female ratio suggests a preponderance of males in the population, there was actually a shortage of eligible men with desirable character, appearance, educational qualifications and employment prospects with the overall Indian unemployment rate of 40 percent in 2000. This fact elevates the bargaining position of a desirable bachelor’s family, which can ask for a large dowry from the families of prospective brides and select the bride whose family agrees to the amount. Men also customarily marry women younger than themselves, making it possible for grooms to select from a pool of ever-younger brides. The advantage that women would have by being in the minority is erased. Lack of physical attractiveness in a man might be excused, but few parents would want to marry their daughter to an unemployed youth with dim prospects. If a big dowry is the price to be paid to secure the best match for a daughter, parents are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to meet it. In recent years the robust economy and availability of consumer goods have played a significant role. Scholars and activists have computed the levels of dowry for men according to region and profession. Men in government service with assured salaries and opportunities to make extra money on the side can demand several hundred thousand rupees. Business executives, computer and other engineers, doctors, and other professionals can also expect a high dowry. It may be demanded in the form of residen¬ tial property, particularly in major cities such as Mumbai (Bombay) or Kolkata (Calcutta), cash to underwrite the expenses for his education abroad, or capital for setting up a business, mainly in large cities. It is noteworthy that dowries have become common among Christians and Muslims; they are no longer an exclusively Hindu custom. The extent of a woman’s control over her dowry in her marital home depends largely on the nature of her relation¬ ship with her mother-in-law and their living arrangements.

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A variety of ethnographic sources make it clear that often a woman has her own locked trunk (patti or pitara) or a steel almirah in which she stores her jewels, cash, and other possessions. Bank lockers or safe-deposit boxes, savings bonds, fixed deposit receipts, and investments in the stock market are used by middle-class women. Women from peasant and urban working-class families wear their jewelry to keep it under their direct control. Towards Equality described assertive efforts by young women to enhance their dowries, noting “a disturbing trend that girls themselves aspire to have their household set up in a grand style by the parents and to have clothes, jewellery, furniture and vehicles, etc.” It thus recognized that women are not passive victims of the dowry system but may be actively involved in getting a fairer share of their families’ resources. This may eventually lead to real¬ ization by women that they have a lawful and equal share in their father’s postmortem property as well, and their insistence on obtaining it may begin to level the playing field across gender, community, and caste. Dowries are not unique to the Indian subcontinent; they are still the norm in Greece, Portugal, and Sicily, and a bride’s hope chest and lavish wedding gifts are common in the industrialized Western world. Dowry is also customary in China and there too, low female sex ratios have been attributed to the practice throughout its history. More recently, since China implemented the one-child policy, sex-selective abortions have become an epidemic, and scores of millions of potential women are “missing.” Per¬ haps the most skewed sex ratios on the planet exist in some of the Islamic countries, such as Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, where dowries are clearly not the problem but gender discrimination is notable. In the light of such facts, dowries, at their worst, are a symptom of gender discrimination rather than the cause of violence against women in general or the murder of young brides and female infants in particular. [See also Dower Systems; India; and Marriage, subentry Laws and Rituals.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ministry of Education and Social Welfare. Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India. New Delhi: Government of India, 1974. Members of the com¬ mittee that formulated the report included many eminent women, such as the feminist lawyer Lotika Sarkar and the feminist scholar and activist Vina Mazumdar. Muller, F. Max, ed. The Laws ofManu. Translated and with extracts from the seven commentaries by George Btihler. The Sacred Books of the East. London: Oxford University Press, 1884. Reprint. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1963-1973. Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Veena Talwar Oldenburg

DRAMA. See Performing Arts. \

DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER. The classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng) stands pre-eminent in the Chinese literary canon. Written by Cao Xueqin (c. 1715-1763), the semiautobiographical novel was first circulated in the mid-1760s at the height of China’s last imperial dynasty—the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). A masterful work of great elegance, Dream of the Red Chamber includes over 400 distinct characters in its 120 chapters. The novel traces the decline of the aristocratic Jia family and in the process provides intricate details of family life in the Qing, including costume, pharmacopoeia, cuisine, religion, and gender relations. Ultimately, Dream of the Red Chamber presents a Buddhist worldview wherein the tan¬ gible world is illusory and the suffering experienced during life inevitable. Women constitute the majority of the novel’s protagonists, presenting readers with a rare insight into the lives of women in mid-Qing China and the metaphorical role the symbolic “woman” played within elite literary culture of this time. Women and the Key Plot Line. The central figure in the novel is a young man, Jia Baoyu. Born with a mystical piece of jade in his mouth, Baoyu is indulged at every turn by the matriarch of the family, Grandmother Jia. Where elite families would normally practice strict sex segregation, Baoyu’s preference for the company of girls is indulged such that he spends his pre-marriage life within a walled garden in the constant company of his young half sister, girl cousins, and myriad maidservants. Prospect Garden is regularly described as a girls’ world where feminine sentiment reigns and male pollution is repelled. Baoyu is the only male figure resident within its walls. He disappoints his father by appearing to reject the traditional masculine path to respectability—scholarly success—preferring instead to spend time in the company of his female companions writing poetry, reading novels, and playing games amidst the beauty of Prospect Garden. Narrative tension through the novel is provided by Baoyu’s twin affections for two particularly beautiful and talented cousins—the ethereal, ailing, and temperamental Lin Daiyu and the sensible, robust, and steady Xue Baochai. Both are potential marriage partners, but ultimately the Jia family elders choose Baochai—leaving Daiyu to die a miserable and lonely death from tuberculosis on Baoyu’s wedding night. In elite Qing families, parents chose their children’s marriage partners, and the healthy Baochai was deemed more likely to produce sons to continue the clan line. Readers are alerted early in the novel to the central role of the women. In chapter five Baoyu makes a dream-visit to the Land of Illusion, where he is privy to the tragic fates

DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER

Dream of the Red Chamber. The book jacket of the 1929 edition.

109

New York Public Library; Astor,

Lenox and Tilden Foundations

awaiting the women in his family, collectively known as the Twelve Beauties. The novel proceeds to elaborate these tragedies, which ultimately result in the disbanding of the garden and the dispersal of its female characters—each to her specific preordained fate. Baoyu witnesses these tra¬ gedies and in the process achieves enlightenment. The girls’ tragedies serve as triggers for Baoyu’s enlightenment. They also present readers with insights into the lives of women within Qing China. Women’s Lives in Qing China. Elite women in the Qing lived strictly segregated from non-family men within multigenerational households. Virilocal marriage customs of the time resulted in multiple sons and their wives living within the same household, albeit in separate marital

quarters. The Jia clan depicted in the novel is indicative of this multigenerational, virilocal marriage pattern. The central tragedy of the young girls is their inevitable marriage out of the family and into an unknown fate as strangers within another family. One by one the girls depart the garden. Yingchun is traded in marriage to pay her father’s debts and survives for less than a year in a violent and humiliating marriage. Tanchun fares better but faces a marriage to a military family whose postings take them into remote parts of China. A third cousin, Xichun, on seeing the miserable fate of her peers resolves never to marry and enters a nunnery instead. Men from wealthy families in Qing China were able to take concubines in addition to a wife. However, the children produced through liaisons with the concubines

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DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER

were regarded as having lower status than those produced with a wife. In Dream of the Red Chamber, Baoyu’s half brother Huan and half sister Tanchun face repeated dis¬ crimination because their mother is a concubine and not a wife. Girls from elite families would expect to marry as wives and not as concubines. The tragedy for the youngest of the Twelve Beauties, Qiaojie, reveals the anxiety of maintaining appropriate class status. She is nearly married out as a concubine and is rescued only at the last minute. Even so, with the Jia clan’s wealth confiscated, she marries a simple farmer, well below her status. Elite men in Qing China were exhorted to seek their wives’ agreement before taking a concubine. Dream of the Red Chamber provides a riveting example of the tension that can occur when this custom is disregarded. A young man, Jia Lian, takes a concubine without his wife’s permission. He establishes a second household out¬ side of the family compound in an attempt to hide his new relationship from his wife. Ultimately his ruse is revealed and his concubine, You Sanjie, is brought into the Jia household where Lian’s wife persecutes her until she is driven to suicide. The strict hierarchies functioning within elite households were not always realized in their model form. Where age and sex hierarchies placed elder men in the dominant position of these households, if women outlived men, or men absconded from their responsibilities, older women could exert consid¬ erable direct influence. In the case of the Jia household, Grandmother Jia controls the family’s domestic affairs and exerts moral authority over each member of the Jia clan through her superior age. The two men who should assume control, Jia She and Jia Zhen, prefer, respectively, the life of a religious recluse or a drunken wastrel. Similarly, household management is transferred out of the main clan to a young woman from the junior branch of the family—Grandmother Jia’s favorite granddaughter-in-law, the fiery and supercompetent Wang Xifeng. Xifeng manages all aspects of the household’s finances and complex domestic econo¬ mies. Both women face humiliation at the close of the novel, as their leadership of the clan proves ineffective. Xifeng’s illegal usury provokes imperial investigation and results in the family’s impoverishment and disgrace. Central to the maintenance of order within multigenerational households were strict proscriptions on incest— interpreted within Qing China as any sexual relations between any members of the family, blood relatives or not. The extent of the degradation of the Jia men is typified by the incestuous, adulterous relationship between Jia Zhen and his young daughter-in-law, Qing Keqing. When their illicit affair is threatened with exposure, Keqing commits suicide. Curiously, this segment was altered before the novel was publicly circulated to have Keqing die of a mysterious wasting illness.

Modem Impact of the Novel. From early in the twentieth century, the novel has been hailed as the pinnacle of China s fictional tradition. Its author, Cao Xueqin, is revered as a literary master, and studies of the novel have their own specific category: Redology (Hongxue). This high standing drew the novel into the tumultuous literary and political debates of the twentieth century. In the first decades of the century the novel was read as an anti-imperial tract. Later, it was used to demonstrate modern literary methods, and after 1949 in the People’s Republic of China intellectuals critiqued the novel as an exercise in Marxist methodology. In this latter critical style, the representation of women in the novel was highlighted to credit Cao with proto-feminist sentiment. Marxist scholars assert that Cao’s depiction of the girls’ tragedies reflects his hatred of the “feudal” family system and loathing of the old culture that “denigrated women and elevated men.” Ultimately, the novel is a rich and diverse description of gendered family order within mid-Qing China and a classic of world fiction. [See also China, subentry Imperial Period.] BIBLIOGRAPHY PRIMARY WORKS

Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone. Vols. 1-3. Translated by David Hawkes. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973-1986. Cao Xueqin and Gao E. The Story of the Stone. Vols. 4-5. Translated by John Minford. Harmondsworth, U.IC: Penguin, 1979-1987. Tsao Hseuh-chin and Kao Ngo. A Dream of Red Mansions. Vols. 1-2. Translated by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978-1980. SECONDARY WORKS

Edwards, Louise P. Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the “Red Chamber Dream.” Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. An analysis of gender and sex in the novel deploying feminist critical methods. Levy, Dore J. Ideal and Actual in the “Story of the Stone.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. A study of the novel’s inversion of expected family relations. Li, Qiancheng. Fictions of Enlightenment: “Journey to the West,” “Tozver of Myriad Mirrors,” and “Dream of the Red Chamber.” Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. An analysis of the novel’s Buddhist intent. Miller, Lucien. Masks of Fiction in “Dream of the Red Chamber”: Myth, Mimesis, and Persona. Tucson: Published for the Associ¬ ation for Asian Studies by the University of Arizona Press, 1975. Exploration of the novel’s allegoric, realist, and narrative modes. Plaks, Andrew. Archetype and Allegory in the “Dream of the Red Chamber.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. Exploration of the underlying philosophical and iconic signifi¬ cance of the text. Wang, Jing. The Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism in “Dream of the Red Chamber,” “Water Margin,” and “The Journey to the West.” Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. A detailed study of the significance of magical stones in Chinese fiction. Yu, Anthony C. Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in “Dream of the Red Chamber.” Princeton, N.J.:

DRESS REFORM

Princeton University Press, 1997. A study of the novel as “fictive representation” and as a narrative of desire. Zhou, Zuyan. Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003. An analysis of the novel exploring gender identity and functions of androgyny. Louise Edwards

DRESS REFORM. Protests against fashionable clothing that constricted the body appeared throughout the history of Western dress. Seventeenth-century Puritans and Quakers wore simple, dark dresses with white collars. French revolutionaries of the 1790s designed simplified styles based on the chitons of ancient Greece. That style culminated in a dress design popular during the Directory and the reign of Napoleon III that was based on a straight line from the armpits to the ankles with a band of fabric under the breasts and with minimal corseting and body distention. Called the “Empire” style, after Napoleon’s empire, it later became important in the history of dress reform. As a self-conscious concept and movement, dress reform first appeared in England and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, in response to the extremely confin¬ ing fashions then in vogue, in which the hems of women’s skirts trailed in the mud, the tight cut of shoulders impeded arm movements, corsets were tight-laced to achieve eighteeninch waists, and as much as ten pounds of petticoats were worn to attain the fashionable bell shape—before the inven¬ tion of bent steel in the mid-1850s brought the fashioning of a wire hoop worn under the dress, which eliminated many of the petticoats. Nineteenth-century Dress Reform. Physicians, physical exercise advocates, and women’s rights reformers criticized the confining clothing of the nineteenth century as harmful to women’s health. As early as 1838 Philadelphia women’s rights advocate Sarah Grimke included dress reform in her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. Health reformers advocated the prevention of illness through loose dress, exercise, and proper diet. By the 1850s guests at the hydro¬ path, or water cure, establishments that were popular in Germany and the United States wore shortened, simple, and uncorseted dresses over loose trousers, as did residents of communitarian societies like Brook Farm in Massachu¬ setts, New Harmony in Indiana, and Oneida in upstate New York. The trousers were derived from “pantalettes” worn by young girls under short skirts and from the baggy trousers worn by Middle Eastern women. By the 1850s women academics in both the United States and England had intro¬ duced gymnastics and calisthenics into their curricula, and such exercises were performed in loose dress, as they were in the German Turnvereine, societies that encouraged national rejuvenation through gymnasium exercise. German immigrants brought the Turnvereine to the United States.

111

By the mid-nineteenth century, dress reform groups appeared in the United States. By 1856 the health reformer Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck promoted dress reform through her magazine, the Sibyl. In 1851 women’s rights advocates Elizabeth Smith Miller, Amelia Bloomer, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, the site of the first women’s rights convention in the United States in 1848, promoted the “Bloomer Dress,” a bell-shaped short dress that covered the body to the knees and had baggy pants over the legs. It was a variation on the “trouser” dress earlier worn at the hydropath establishments and the communitarian societies. Miller designed the dress, which was named after Bloomer, editor of the reform jour¬ nal, the Lily. Women’s rights advocates throughout the United States began wearing it. In 1856, a National Dress Reform Association was founded; the well-known reform¬ ers Harriet N. Austin, Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, and Mary Austin served as officers in it. In England, exotic versions of the bloomer costume were drawn to decorate sheet music covers, and the “Bloomer Waltz” and “Bloomer Polka” became popular. Yet public derision brought an end to the bloomer vogue in both England and the United States after a few years. Its failure influenced dress reformers in general to abandon reform dress, and the National Dress Reform Association disbanded. The major problem with this cos¬ tume was the trousers, which violated prohibitions against cross-dressing. The Baltimore physician Mary Walker per¬ sisted, wearing male jackets and pants that brought her widespread public criticism. By the 1870s reformers made new pleas for dress reform, as tight-lacing continued and the hoop skirt evolved into a straight skirt looped over the buttocks, with a small iron cage, worn there, known as a “bustle,” that created a visible body distention. Such pleas were furthered by the participation of European women in the revolutions of mid-century, of women in the United States as nurses and quasi-public officials during the Civil War, and of English women as nurses in the Crimean War. In 1874 in the United States the New England Women’s Club, led by Abba Goold Woolson, issued an appeal for “rational” dress in Dress Reform, a series of lectures in book form. The book called for the elimination of tight-laced corsets and the designing of dresses supported from the shoulders with straps rather than from the waist. Major women’s reform organizations, such as the Woman’s Christian Tem¬ perance Union, founded in 1874, also took up the call for simplified dress, especially for loose undergarments. By the 1870s reformers called for an undergarment support¬ ing the breasts from the shoulders, a reform idea that linked directly to the modern brassiere, developed in the years preceding World War I. The 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia contained many exhibits of hygienic undergarments. In England Lady F. W. Harberton

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DRESS REFORM

and Mrs. E. M. King founded a Rational Dress Society in 1881 to promote a “divided skirt” and an end to the tightlaced corset. Aesthetic Dress. In addition to the dress reform move¬ ment that grew out of general movements for social reform and women’s rights, a strain of dress reform was connected to aesthetic movements among artists and architects. This movement began in England among the Pre-Raphaelite painters and their women partners, who designed dress styles based on flowing clothing worn in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Initially scorned by the public, such designs became popular as they transitioned by the 1870s into “aesthetic” dress, associated with the “aesthetic” movement in art. That movement drew from the styles of ancient Greece to argue for simplicity of form in all the decorative arts, including dress. They were also influenced by the Japanese kimono and the flowing clothing worn by Middle Eastern women. The wealthy entrepreneur and reformer Arthur Lasenby Liberty, a proponent of the arts and crafts movement launched by William Morris, was important in the spread of aesthetic dress. In 1875 he opened a retail store in London, Liberty & Company, which by 1884 featured aesthetic dresses made from soft, drapable fabrics that skimmed the body without constrict¬ ing it. In 1890 Liberty opened a shop in Paris, the center of haute couture. In subsequent years he opened stores throughout England, Europe, and the eastern United States, while he ran a flourishing mail-order business. Liberty designs drew from the empire style or from a loosefitting Mother Hubbard. Aesthetic dress generated by artists in England spread throughout the Continent, appearing in such varied artistic movements as the Jugendstil in Munich, the Wiener Seces¬ sion in Austria, and Art Nouveau in general. The famed Viennese artists Gustav Klimt and Josef Albers became renowned for the simplified dresses they designed. These artists, early proponents of a modernist aesthetic, believed that clothes should correspond to the design of the interior of the house in which an individual lived as well as to the personality of that individual, to create a personalized beauty. Products and designs from Liberty & Company and those of aesthetic and Art Nouveau designers were displayed at the International Exhibitions in Paris in 1889 and 1900. Aesthetic dress also penetrated haute couture through the vogue in the 1880s of loose-fitting “tea gowns,” originally worn only at home for afternoon tea and subsequently taken up for evening activities. By the 1890s tea gowns were regularly offered for sale in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue. The proponents of aesthetic dress and dress reformers more directly associated with women’s rights came together to establish dress reform societies throughout Europe, includ¬ ing the Dutch Society for the Improvement of Women’s

Dress and the Free Association for the Improvement of Female Dress in Germany. The Gibson Girl and Paul Poiret. Dress reform in the late nineteenth-century was linked to the general move¬ ment of women outside the home into colleges, the professions, and the workforce in general. It was also connected to the expansion of the gymnasium movement and the appearance of popular systems of exercise and dance like those of Franqois Delsarte and Isadora Duncan, who wore loose clothing based on the Greek chiton and who danced barefoot. Women increasingly participated in such sports as field hockey, tennis, and basketball. By the turn of the century, millions of women in Europe and the United States were participating in the craze for riding bicycles, an activity that required wearing loose dress. The bloomer costume reappeared, as did “knickerbockers,” a style of trouser that was loose at the ankles. By that decade women at work and in volunteer activities were wearing a dark skirt and a white “shirtwaist blouse,” based on male attire. The Gibson Girl, drawn by the graphic artist Charles Dana Gibson, became the model of womanhood for the age. Tall and stately, she often wore a dark skirt and shirtwaist blouse (although her clothing was often tight-laced). The era of modernity had dawned, and the “New Woman,” strong and assertive, was a central figure in its iconography. The fashionable Edwardian costume of the 1900s, with a narrow skirt sweeping the floor and extreme constriction at the waist, was produced when Parisian corset makers tightlaced what was meant to be a reform corset. Such a fashion, with its drooping breasts, now appears to have been a short¬ term backlash on the part of haute couture designers who were otherwise adopting dress reform fashions. When the Parisian designer Paul Poiret in 1910 adopted the Empire style as the basis of his line to launch what he called a “revolution” in fashion, it appears that he was acceding to the widespread popularity of dress reform. Poiret, like many dress designers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, considered himself to be an artist equal to the famed painters of his age. In 1904 he visited the major artists and architects involved in dress reform in Austria and Germany, and his Empire designs resembled those previously marketed by Liberty & Company. By 1920 dress reform had triumphed. The French designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was inspired by the dress of pea¬ sants and laborers, the simple clothing women wore during World War I, and her own rebellion against constricting Edwardian styles to design simple, loose fashions. Her styles swept the world of haute couture. The “flapper” dress that she played a role in designing and that became ubiquitous in the 1920s was made of two strips of fabric joined at the shoulders, with a straight line to the hemline. “Modern women” adopted it as a sign of being au courant. Dress reform disappeared from the reform vocabulary, and no

DUAL-SEX POLITICAL SYSTEMS

further dress reform associations were organized. Constrict¬ ing fashions appeared from time to time, such as the bound breasts of the 1920s and the spike heels and tight-laced corsets of the 1950s, a revival of a Victorian style. Yet as early as the 1920s the designers of sports clothes became major fashion leaders, and over the course of the twentieth century sports attire consistently influenced mainstream dress styles. The modern woman’s desire for simple and healthy fash¬ ions became a basic principle of modern dress, even during such periods as the 1980s and after, in which designers attempted to make women look like high-class tarts— sometimes even featuring bondage clothing—while body reconstruction, especially breast implants, became standard “beauty” procedures that women followed. In the 1960s and 1970s Second Wave feminists rejected bras, girdles, and cosmetics, calling for an end to the objectification of women’s bodies in advertising and in fashion designs and the adoption of simplicity and naturalness in dress and body adornment, but they did not organize a formal dress reform organization. Nor has any such organization appeared in the decades since. [See also Body Adornment and Clothing; Communes; Grimke, Sarah; Health; Seneca Falls Convention of 1848; and Sports and Recreation.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banner, Lois W. American Beauty. New York: Knopf, 1983. Cunningham, Patricia A. Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Health, and Art. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003. Cunningham, Patricia A., and Susan B. Lab, eds. Dress and Popular Culture. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1991. Fischer, Gayle V. Pantaloons & Power: Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991. Kallir, Jane. Viennese Design and the Wierner Werkstatte. New York: George Braziller, 1986. Mackrell, Alice. Paul Poiret. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990. Newton, Stella Mary. Health, Art, and Reason: Dress Reformers of the Nineteenth Century. London: John Murray, 1994. Stamm, Brigitte. “Das Reformkleid in Deutschland.” PhD Diss., Technische Universitat Berlin, 1976.

Lois

Banner

DUAL-SEX POLITICAL SYSTEMS. Kamene Okonjo describes dual-sex systems well when she writes, “A number of West African traditional societies have political systems in which the major interest groups are defined and repre¬ sented by sex. We can label such systems of organization ‘dual-sex’ systems, for within them each sex manages its own affairs, and women’s interests are represented at all levels” (p. 45). She contrasts African dual-sex systems with Western single-sex political systems, which classify political

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offices and roles as male, thus forcing women into male roles in public life. To understand the history of dual-sex political systems, one needs to understand the history of gender in society and culture. Africa experienced transformations as a result of the colonial experience. Hence it is necessary to distinguish between gender systems that have a history in the traditions of African societies and those that are postcolonial Eurocentric formations. The discovery of a dual-sex political system surfaced in the study of Igbo women of southeastern Nigeria during colonialism. British colonization of the Igbo people of Nigeria began in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1920s all of Igboland was occupied, and colonial rule was forced on all the towns and villages. Immediately following this expansion of colonial rule, Igbo women in 1929 fought what is generally known as the Women’s War against the colonizers. The network of women involved in this anti¬ colonial struggle included Igbo women and women from neighboring ethnic groups like the Ibibio. Their courage, their determination, and the wide region over which these women mobilized drew international attention. Europeans saw their actions as unusual for women and almost mascu¬ line. Two white British women were sent into the field to study Igbo women. The works of Sylvia Leith-Ross and Margaret Green on Igbo women first suggested that in Igbo social structure there was a unique system of conceptual and social classification by gender, although neither author could make theoretical sense of it. Imposing their ethnocentric prejudices, understanding Igbo gender constructions as abnormal, and confirming an already biased assumption of “bisexuality,” they thus misread occasions and situations of gender role reversal. In fact, they were faced with a dual-sex political system in Igbo social and political institutions in which women ran women’s affairs and rituals and men ran men’s affairs and rituals. Senior, titled women headed women’s organizations, just as senior, titled men led men’s organizations. This dichotomous dual-sex system was mediated by a flexible gender system in Igbo language and culture that distinguished between biological gender and culturally con¬ structed gender roles and statuses. Especially in discussing power and politics, it is analytically important to separate sex and gender to appreciate fully the complexity and dynamism of gender in social, cultural, and political configurations. Such a distinction creates and opens up overlapping or neutral social categories and spaces for social cooperation or confrontation and thus allows for a political dynamism in such societies. This perhaps explains why women in dual-sex political systems have been politically active in their societies. By combining historical depth and contemporaneous comparison of major cultures of the world, using ancient

114

DUAL-SEX POLITICAL SYSTEMS

Egypt and its earlier matriarchal history of queen mothers as the classical heritage of black Africa, Cheikh Anta Diop made a major breakthrough on the question of gender ideol¬ ogies and histories. For Friedrich Engels, the major contrast in the history of gender was between an ancient egalitarian tribal order under matriarchy and the later transition to capitalism governed by patriarchy. For Diop, this transition was limited to Western European history because Africa has a unique experience of gender. Even today Africa remains matriarchal because of differences in material conditions and ideological superstructure. In Diop’s gendered view, the origin of patriarchy and violence is Indo-European. European civilization idealized a superstructure of violence, exhibited in nomadism, patriarchy, the veneration of war¬ rior deities, and so on, all of which led to imperialism and the colonization of other civilizations and cultures. Diop’s approach to gender poses serious analytical questions for the study of dual-sex political systems because it links gender to expressions of ideology and culture and ultimately to the question of power. The matriarchal history of African societies generated the widespread institutions of a dual-sex political system and a matriarchal culture. These institutions include the kinship systems of distinct matricentric production units and religions of female spirits and goddesses, all of which provided alternatives to patriarchy. The ethnography of the Igbo of Nnobi in eastern Nigeria can serve as an example (Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands). In the Igbo village compound, the obi (ancestral house) is occupied by the family head, usually a male husband to female wives. Some¬ times, however, a woman acting as husband or a daughter acting as son can occupy this ancestral house. Ideologically, the ancestral house is patriarchal and competitive in matters of property and political office, sometimes enforcing power by violence. In contrast, each wife’s household is a mother-centered space called a mkpuke, always occupied by a woman and independent for production. This matricentric unit is culturally female, with an ideology or culture of matriarchal collectivism, love, and compassion—all of which ameliorate the harshness of patriarchy. This matriarchal culture is an al¬ ternative route to social development but is quite absent from the works of anthropologists studying Africa. Many classic ethnographies of African societies have overlooked evidence of matriarchy in these societies. Eurocentric scholarship fails to identify and give importance to the dual-sex political system as an alternative to patriarchy. The Igbo and other gendered cultures have dynamic dual-sex lineage organizations of men and of women, as well as town women’s councils often operating in parallel to the ruling council of chiefs. In many centralized tradi¬ tional societies, the matricentric household is governed by mother, daughter, and son, each with a separate space, or by

a system of mothers coruling with a man, all beholden to a council of mothers. Lamentably, postcolonial government systems have proved sexist and have failed to Africanize the state by not carrying forward the heritage of gendered democracy into modernity. [See also Central Africa; Gender Roles; Matriarchy; Nigeria; and West Africa.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Achebe, Nwando. “Women in Community Politics: Colonialism and the Strategies of Female Resistance.” In Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2005. Amadiume, Ifi. “Family and Culture in Africa.” In A Companion to Gender Studies, edited by Philomena Essed, David Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi, pp. 357-369. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books, 1987. Amadiume, Ifi. “Theorizing Matriarchy in Africa: Kinship Ideolo¬ gies and Systems in Africa and Europe.” In Re-inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion, and Culture. London: Zed Books, 1997. Chuku, Gloria. “The Untouchable Vultures: Women in Resistance Movements.” In Igbo Women and Economic Transformation in Southeastern Nigeria, 1900-1960. New York: Routledge, 2005. Diop, Cheikh Anta. The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity. London: Karnak House, 1989. Engels, Friedrich. Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1891). Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1985. Green, Margaret. Igbo Village Affairs. 2nd ed. London: Frank Cass, 1964. Leith-Ross, Sylvia. African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (1939). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965. Maine, Henry. Ancient Law. London: John Murray, 1861. Mba, Nina. Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activity in Southern Nigeria, 1900-1965. Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1982. Okonjo, Kamene. “The Dual-Sex Political System in Operation: Igbo Women and Community Politics in Midwestern Nigeria.” In Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, edited by Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976. Van Allen, Judith. “‘Aba Riots’ or ‘Women’s War’? Ideology, Stratifi¬ cation, and the Invisibility of Women.” In Women in Africa: Stud¬ ies in Social and Economic Change, edited by Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976. Ifi Amadiume

DU BOIS, SHIRLEY GRAHAM (1896-1977), play wright, composer, biographer, novelist, and Pan-Africanist. Though Shirley Graham Du Bois carried the surname of a man who was one of America’s best-known activists and intellectuals of the twentieth century, she was an accom¬ plished woman in her own right long before she married W. E. B. Du Bois. Throughout her long life Graham Du Bois traveled extensively across four continents and established invaluable personal friendships and political alliances with heads of state in Ghana, Egypt, Guinea, and China,

DUNCAN, ISADORA

eventually becoming a well-known Pan-Africanist whose unapologetic embrace of Communism and nationalism earned her many allies and foes. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on 11 November 1896, Shirley Graham was the only daughter of Etta Bell and David A. Graham, an itinerant preacher and militant rabble-rouser. His example of defiance shaped Shirley’s understanding of the world and her responses to it. Her mother nurtured her creative side, allowing her to find joy and an affirming identity in writing and music. A relatively private woman who kept many parts of her life secret or deliberately lied about them, Graham married Shadrach T. McCants in 1915 and divorced him in 1927, although she told others he had died. In 1923 and 1925 she gave birth to sons, Robert and David. Graham Du Bois was a loving but absent mother, leaving her sons to be raised by her parents so that she could work, travel, and pursue her creative aspirations. In 1932, Graham produced Tom-Tom, the first large-scale opera—it used more than five hundred actors—produced by an African American. This hit musical drama documented African American history from enslavement to emancipation. In the early 1930s Graham earned a BA and MA from Oberlin College and moved from writing operas to writing plays.. She earned a reputation for writing plays that were wide-ranging in theme and tone—from historical dramatiza¬ tions about real events to comedies and plays that were pol¬ itical commentary, including Coal Dust and the acclaimed Elijah’s Ravens. Politically, Graham was developing a perspective on race and class that placed her among leading leftist figures of the Cold War era, including W. E. B. Du Bois, whom she had met as a teenager. In 1951 they married, and they remained so until his death in 1963. After settling in New York City and working for the NAACP, the couple left the repressive Cold War environment in the United States for Ghana. Graham Du Bois had an enduring fondness for and devo¬ tion to Africa, especially Ghana. She developed strong rela¬ tionships with African leaders as their countries emerged from decades of European colonialism. She served as a chief political adviser to the Ghanaian president ICwame Nkrumah, a giant among Pan-Africanists. She also was direc¬ tor of television in Ghana. The coup that toppled the Nkrumah government drove Graham Du Bois from Ghana in 1966. She spent time in Tanzania and Guinea before set¬ tling for some time in China, where she shared close political relationships with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Her avowed Communist and nationalist beliefs and allegiances had long since made her a pariah in the United States. In 1975 she discovered that she had breast cancer that had metastasized. In April 1977, Graham Du Bois died in China. [See also Racism.]

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Horne, Gerald. Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Thompson, Robert Dee, Jr. “A Socio-Biography of Shirley GrahamDu Bois: A Life in the Struggle.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997. Chana Kai Lee

DUNCAN, ISADORA

(1877-1927), choreographer, dancer, and cultural revolutionary. She was born Angela Isadora Duncan in San Francisco on 26 May 1877. Because her father, Joseph Duncan, abandoned the family when Isadora was extremely young, she and her siblings—brothers Augustin and Raymond and sister Elizabeth—were raised primarily by their mother, Mary Isadora Gray. Extreme poverty marked her childhood, and her youthful experiences almost certainly influenced her turn to Communism as an adult, as well as her lifelong campaign for women’s rights. Despite her hardships, Isadora had a rich cultural life that was nurtured by her mother’s love of literature and music and that was unbound by convention. Although Duncan did have some schooling in dance technique (including ballet), she chose to derive her move¬ ment from nature rather than according to any preexisting style. Unlike the modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, Duncan never developed an organized, formal vocabulary; she fostered an approach to dance based on musicality, unfettered movement, and the female body liberated from social restraints. Similar to many dancers—both amateur and professional—of the era, Duncan embraced the ideas of Franqois Delsarte (1811-1871), an influential French theorist of corporal expression, who sparked an explosion of physical culture classes throughout the United States. Though Duncan was certainly the most notorious— because of her private life—she was, in fact, just one of a group of women, including Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968) and Loie Fuller (1862-1928), who, with their various approaches, laid the foundation of modern dance. Duncan and her compatriots came to maturity in the age of dress reform, when women discarded constrictive Victorian corsets in favor of bloomers that facilitated physical free¬ dom, and just as Duncan dispensed with the bound-up body, she equally rejected the ties of marriage. She even had her two children, Deidre (born in 1906) and Patrick (born 1910)—both tragically killed in a freak car accident in 1913—out of wedlock. Isadora’s artistic journey truly began in 1895 when the Duncan family left San Francisco, beginning a voyage that took them to Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Athens. Like so many artists of the period, Isadora first came to fame not in her native country but in Europe. Primarily a solo dancer at this point in her career, she first

116

DUNCAN, ISADORA

performed in salons, slowly gaining popularity. She began to receive real notoriety in Berlin, where she not only danced but delivered lectures on the state of her art. As dedicated to the education of children as to performance (she had begun teaching as early as 1890), in 1904 she founded her Tanzschule (School of Dance) to perpetuate her philosophy of movement. As a young dancer, Duncan drank in Greek culture, performing as a “gamboling nymph” (Daly, p. 14). She also took inspiration from painting and sculpture, including Sandro Botticelli’s La Primavera (c. 1482) and works by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). From 1914 through 1918—years that saw World War I and the Russian Revolution—her choreography shifted to “heroic and patriotic” subjects: her well-known works included versions of Orpheus, Oedipus Rex (1915), Iphigenia in Aulis (1905-1915), and the Marseillaise (1914). During the early 1920s, Duncan became more radically politicized. Her connection with the newly established Soviet Union at this time, as well as behavior that flew in the face of America’s entrenched Puritan morality—including baring her breast at the end of a performance in Boston—harmed her popularity in the United States. In a death as dramatic as her entire life, Isadora Duncan was killed on 14 September 1927 when the long scarf she was wearing wrapped around the spoke of her car wheel, breaking her neck. Just before stepping into the auto, she had bid her friends farewell with what turned out to be her final words: “Je vais a l’amour” (“I am about to have a romantic interlude”). In 1922, Duncan wrote, “If my art is symbolic of any one thing, it is symbolic of the freedom of woman and her emancipation from the hidebound conventions that are the warp and woof of New England Puritanism” (Duncan, Isadora Speaks, p. 48). Almost as much as the movement she danced, Isadora is remembered for this fervent philosophy. [See also Dance.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daly, Ann. Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. First published in 1995 by Indiana University Press. Duncan, Doree, Carol Pratl, and Cynthia Splatt, eds. Foreword by Agnes de Mille. Life into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993. Duncan, Isadora. Isadora Speaks. Edited and introduced by Franklin Rosemont. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1981. Duncan, Isadora. My Life. Boston: Liveright, 1927. Duncan, Isadora. “Vision of America Dancing.” In I See America Dancing: Selected Readings 1685-2000, edited by Maureen Needham. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Steegmuller, Frances. Your Isadora: The Love Story of Isadora Duncan and Gordon Craig Told through Letters and Diaries. New York: Vintage, 1976. Karen Backstein

DUNHAM,

KATHERINE (1909-2006),

innovating African American dancer, choreographer, author, educator, and activist. Born 22 June 1909, Katherine Dunham spent the first years of her life in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She was the daughter of Albert Millard Dunham, an African American tailor, and Fanny June Guillaume, a woman of French Canadian and American Indian ancestry. Katherine showed her precocious ability for the performing arts when she was in high school, and she learned ballet and inter¬ national ethnic dances during those years. She attended the University of Chicago on scholarship and learned about the cultural meaning of dance from some of the most notable anthropologists of the period. Before she obtained her BA in social anthropology in 1936, she had already founded Ballets Negres in 1931. In subsequent years she tried to combine the duties of running a dance school and anthropological fieldwork. Her mid-1930s field travels in the Caribbean were the inspirational genesis of much of her work as a dancer and writer. She published many articles and several books, including Journey to Accompong (1946), The Dances of Haiti (1947), Island Possessed (1969), Kasamance: A Fantasy (1974), and A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood (1959). Dunham began to develop her choreographic work in Chicago between 1937 and 1939, when she founded the Negro Dance Group, dedicated to African American and Afro-Caribbean dance. Between 1937 and 1938 she was the dance director of the Negro Unit of the Federal Theater Project in Chicago. In those years she experimen¬ ted with several forms of Brazilian and African American dance and built her reputation as a choreographer. After she moved to New York in 1939, she became an instant success with her program Tropics and Le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem. Soon her troupe was engaged to dance in Cabin in the Sky, staged by George Balanchine. Also that year Dunham married the Canadian John Pratt, a theater designer who worked with her in 1938 at the Chicago Federal Theater Project. He was her lifelong artistic collaborator and died in 1984. By the mid-1940s Dunham was acclaimed as a brilliant and savvy choreographer who used materials from the Caribbean and Mexico, as well as from Polynesian and African American social dances, and she engaged in several successful shows in San Francisco, New York, and Toronto. In 1945, Dunham opened the Dunham School of Dance and Theater (also called the Dunham School of Arts and Research) in Manhattan, where students learned dance and took courses in philosophy, languages, aesthetics, drama, and speech. Dunham continued to experiment with AfroCaribbean dances and toured throughout the world in the 1950s. During these years Hollywood took an interest in her, and she appeared in nine movies and several foreign films between 1941 and 1959, among them Stormy Weather

DURAND, MARGUERITE

(1943), Casbah (1948), and Mambo (1954). She choreo¬ graphed dances for other films without receiving credit. Dunham engaged in civil rights activities before the 1960s, which cost her support from some institutions. She turned down contracts that demanded substitutions in her troupe and sued public venues that discriminated against African Americans. In 1951 her ideas translated into an hour-long ballet about lynching, Southland, which was per¬ formed in Chile and Paris. She carried her ideological stand against discrimination into her eighties: in 1992 she carried out a fast to support Haitian boat people. Overcoming health and financial problems, Dunham returned to Broadway in 1962 and in 1964 choreographed the Metropolitan Opera’s Aida. Between 1965 and 1966 she was cultural adviser to the president of Senegal and attended that country’s First World Festival of Negro Arts. Her company had dissolved in 1965, and she retired from dancing in 1966. In the late 1970s she opened the Katherine Dunham Museum and Children’s Workshop in East Saint Louis, Illinois. National and international recognition was showered on her from the 1980s until her death. She received honorary doctoral degrees from Brown University, Dartmouth College, Washington Univer¬ sity, Howard University, and Harvard University. In 1979 she won the Albert Schweitzer Music Award for a life devoted to performing arts and service to humanity, and in 1983 she received a Kennedy Center Honor’s Award. In 1989 she capped her national honors with the National Medal of the Arts. She was still actively engaged in the arts into her late nineties. At her death she was the most acclaimed African American woman choreographer and dancer. [See also Dance and Performing Arts.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aschenbrenner, Joyce. Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Clark, VeVe A., and Sara E. Johnson. Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Donloe, Darlene. Katherine Dunham: Dancer, Choreographer. Los Angeles: Melrose Square, 1993. Asuncion Lavrin

DUONG THU HUONG (b. 1947), one of contempor¬ ary Vietnam’s most famous dissident authors. Duong was born into a landholding family in Central Vietnam’s Thai Binh Province. War informed her early life. In her teens she led a Communist Youth Brigade during the war with the United States and was one of only four young people out of her troop of forty to survive. She reported from the front during Vietnam’s border conflict with China in 1979. By the early 1980s she was established in Vietnam as a fiction and screen writer, and from her position as a member of the

117

official Writer’s Union, she publicly protested government censorship of her work. Her third and most controversial novel, Paradise of the Blind, published in Vietnam in 1988, sold over sixty thousand copies in that country before the book was banned for its critical appraisal of official misconduct and heartless interference in the public and private lives of ordinary people during the land reform of the 1950s. After 1990 the author was expelled from the Party and imprisoned for seven months. After Paradise of the Blind was translated and published in English and French, she was honored by the French government for her writing and began to attract an international following. She published Novel without a Name, her unsentimental portrait of a young male Communist soldier’s disillusionment with war, in France and the United States, and her recent screenplays and novels have not been published in Vietnam. Her work, which consistently focuses on the tensions between per¬ sonal and public life and obligations to family and the Communist Party in a society dominated by corrupt and inept officials and their policies, continues to be banned in Vietnam. She was released from house arrest and allowed to travel in 2005 and has become Vietnam’s most promin¬ ent ambassador for improvements in human rights. [See also Bui Thi Xuan; Le Thi; Nguyen Thi Dinh; Nguyen Thi Minh Khai; and Southeast Asia, subentry Modern Period.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Duong Thu Huong. Novel without a Name. Translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. New York: Morrow, 1995. Duong Thu Huong. Paradise of the Blind. Translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. New York: Morrow, 1993. Hue-Tam Ho Tai. “Duong Thu Huong and the Literature of Disenchantment.” Viet Nam Forum, 14 November 1994. Karen Turner

DURAND, MARGUERITE (1864-1936), French ac¬ tress, journalist, and feminist. Marguerite Durand was best known as the resplendent Parisian actress and editor of La Fronde, the fin de siecle women’s daily, during the years 1897 to 1902. She was born the illegitimate daughter of Anna-Alexandrine-Caroline Durand de Valfere. Her father is most often thought to be Alfred Boucher, a colonel in the French army. Throughout her life, the desires for independence and for respectability tugged equally at Dur¬ and. While she received a convent education, she outraged her mother in 1879 by leaving school to study acting, a disreputable profession at the time, at the Paris Conserva¬ tory of Dramatic Art. After she won first prize in comedy there in 1881, she was asked to join the Comedie Frangaise, the premier theater in France.

118

DURAND, MARGUERITE

Somewhat abruptly, in 1886, she left the Comedie to marry Georges Laguerre, a move that can be seen as a strategy to gain bourgeois respectability. A politician, Laguerre involved Durand in the royalist, anti-republican movement that coalesced around General Georges Boulan¬ ger in the late 1880s. By editing the Boulangist paper La Presse, Durand obtained her first experience as a jour¬ nalist. In 1891 she separated from Laguerre and began writing for Le Figaro. Sent to cover the Congres Feministe International in 1896, she joined the feminist case and soon founded La Fronde, which she modeled after the bour¬ geois daily of the era. Its staff was entirely female: women edited, wrote, and even typeset the paper. Sometimes called “Le Temps in skirts,” La Fronde covered politics, news, and the stock market, and was particularly important as a pro-Dreyfusard paper in the years 1898-1899. Again trying to reconcile her need for both personal free¬ dom and social probity, Durand created La Fronde to pull French feminism into bourgeois conventionality. In con¬ trast to the fin de siecle stereotype of the feminist as virile, eccentric, and ugly, Durand was considered to be one of the loveliest women in Paris. She knew from her acting career that beauty, in the form of seduction, could be used as a tool to further women’s power. Believing that feminists had good ideas but were ignored because of their reputation for eccentricity, Durand set out to revamp this image both in her personal presentation and in the pages of La Fronde. Feminists, she believed, must try to make themselves as attractive as possible, “if only to deprive shortsighted men of the argument that feminism is the enemy of beauty and of a feminine aesthetic” (1903). La Fronde was a smashing success when it appeared in 1897 and maintained a circu¬ lation of about fifty thousand until the end of the Dreyfus Affair in 1899. As evidenced in popular novels and plays in the years before World War I, Durand’s efforts “to aestheticize” fem¬ inism had an enormous cultural impact in France. She and her frondeuses became models of a French revoltee who was both charming and sexual as well as independent and free. Despite her unpopularity among many, particularly working-class, feminists, who considered her snobbish and bourgeois, Durand insisted in 1903 that “feminism owes a great deal to my blonde hair.” Besides directing La Fronde, Durand established a library of feminist books and docu¬ ments, operating in the early twenty-first century under the name Bibliotheque Marguerite Durand. [See also Feminism.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dizier-Metz, Annie. La Bibliotheque Marguerite Durand, Histoire d’une femme, memoire des femmes. Paris: Bibliotheque Marguer¬ ite Durand, 1992. Rabaut, Jean. Marguerite Durand (1864-1936): “La Fronde” feministe ou “Le Temps” en jupons. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996.

Roberts, Mary Louise. Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Finde-Siecle France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Mary Louise Roberts

DURAS, MARGUERITE (1914-1996), French writer, director, screenwriter, journalist, and television presenter. Marguerite Duras is the pseudonym of Marguerite Donnadieu, who was born near Saigon, Vietnam, in what was then the French colony of Indochina on 4 April 1914. She was born to French parents, both teachers, who were attracted to Indochina by the French state’s propaganda. Marguerite’s father died in 1921, leaving Marguerite, her mother, and her two brothers to support themselves on her mother’s meager salary. In 1924, the colonial government cheated Marguerite’s mother out of her life savings by selling her unworkable land. This traumatic experience haunted Marguerite until her death, and images of this period can be traced through her largely autobiographical works: Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (1950; English trans., The Sea Wall, 1952); L’Amant (1984; English trans., The Lover, 1985), for which she won the Goncourt Prize for literature; and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; English trans., The North China Lover, 1992), all of which criticize colo¬ nial corruption. In 1932 Marguerite moved to France, where she published novels under the pen name “Duras.” Her first novels, Les impudents (1943; The Impudent Ones), La vie tranquille (1945; The Tranquil Life), Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950; English trans., The Sea Wall, 1952), Le marin de Gibraltar (1952; English trans., The Sailor from Gibraltar, 1966), and Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia (1953; English trans., The Little Horses of Tarquinia, 1960) reflect the influence of Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway, yet they also display the obsessive themes that remain distinctly Durasian: a simultaneous attraction to and abhorrence of the sea, a hatred for all systems, and a rejection of traditional values. Duras is identified with le nouveau roman (the New Novel), a French literary movement in the 1950s and 1960s that questioned traditional modes of literary realism, because of her minimalist style in Le Square (1955; English trans., The Square, 1959) and Moderato Cantabile (1958; English trans., Moderato Cantabile, 1960). However, Duras’s themes of violent, all-consuming desire, female alienation, and latent madness distinguish her work from that of her contemporaries. Duras received international acclaim in 1959 when her screenplay for Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour won the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. In the late 1960s, Duras produced the films La Femme du Gange (1973), India Song (1975), and Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta desert (1976), all of which worked

DUROVA, NADEZHDA

and reworked her novels of the 1960s, Le Ravissement of Lol V. Stein (1964, English trans., The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, 1967) and Le Vice-Consul (1965, English trans., The Vice-Consul, 1968). These works of fiction and the films that were made from them are commonly referred to as the “India Cycle,” in which many of the characters and themes from Duras’s fiction reappear in her cinemato¬ graphic work. In 1972 Duras also directed Nathalie Gran¬ ger, which solidified her professional relationship with the actress Jeanne Moreau. Throughout her life, Duras appeared on television and wrote newspaper articles that fought for the rights of “out¬ siders”—immigrants, criminals, women, etc. Because she was poor and embraced Vietnamese culture, Duras herself had been an outsider in the white society of Indochina. Additionally, because she had been born in Indochina, Duras never felt completely French and insisted that much of her identity as a writer stemmed from her Creole roots. Despite an acrimonious separation from the Communist Party in 1950, Duras embraced communist ideals throughout her life. When Duras died in Paris 3 March 1996, she had graced the world with a nearly fifty-year artistic legacy. [See also Cinema, subentry Criticism; and France.]

Feminist Theory and

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Duras, Marguerite, and Xaviere Gauthier. Woman to Woman. Translated by Katharine A. Jensen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. English translation of Les Parleuses, published originally in 1974. A series of unedited interviews between the authors. Blot-Labarrere, Christiane. Marguerite Duras. Paris: Seuil, 1992. This French-language biography traces through Duras’s written works, theater pieces, films, newspaper articles, and numerous interviews using themes that echo the known details of Duras’s life. Gunther, Renate. Marguerite Duras. French Film Directors. Series editors Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2002. English-language work outlines Duras’s cinematographic career and includes a section on her integration of autobiography, history, and politics in her work and a provocative analysis of gender and sexuality in her films. Harvey, Robert, and Helene Volat. Marguerite Duras: A BioBibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Knapp, Bettina L., ed. Critical Essays on Marguerite Duras. Critical Essays on World Literature. Series Editor Robert Lecker. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Includes articles by French scholars that have been translated into English. Marguerite: A Reflection of Herself. Produced and directed by Dominique Auvray. 61 minutes. Brooklyn, N.Y.: First Run/ Icarus Films, 2002. Videocassette. Movie outtakes, home video, and clips of Duras’s many interviews and television appearances. Williams, James S., ed. Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex. Liverpool, U.IC: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Discussions on myth, race, color, female homoerotics, fetishism, and photog¬ raphy in the Duras oeuvre. Cynthia Sharrer Kreisel

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DUROVA, NADEZHDA (1783-1866), Russian cav¬ alry officer and writer under the names Aleksandr Aleksan¬ drov and Cavalry Maiden. Women have served, either openly or in masculine guise, in every major war world¬ wide, but their individual stories have generally been lost to history. Durova, who served in Russo-Polish cavalry regiments throughout the Napoleonic Wars, is excep¬ tional in recording her experiences in memoirs and gothic romantic fiction. Durova published her account of the military years in late 1836 under the title The Cavalry Maiden and followed that up with the fragmentary Notes of Aleksandrov (Durova) in 1839. Both are based on journals she kept at the time. How much she modified them for publication is unclear, but the places, people, and actions she mentioned are mostly verifiable. In “My Childhood Years,” the memoir that introduces Maiden, she describes herself as a girl chafing under matriarchal domination who ran away in 1806 to join the army. She never admitted, in life or in print, that she was actually a 23-year-old estranged wife and the mother of a son. When Tsar Alexander I learned of the disguised woman in his cavalry who had shown rash bravery in the Prussian campaign of 1807, he was so moved by her impassioned plea not to be sent home that he promoted her to cornet in a hussar regiment and instructed her to call herself by his name, Aleksandr Aleksandrov. This unique mandate gave her a privileged, if isolating, status: nobody dared question an identity bestowed by the absolute monarch. The journals are as idiosyncratic as Durova’s life, an outsider’s view of the Russian army. She reveled in the masculine freedom to roam the countryside, meet people, and explore new settings. Her depiction of rear guard service in constant combat against the advancing French during Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 was so devastating that the Soviets republished it only in 1983. Impatient with the tedium of the post-Napoleonic army, Durova retired into provincial obscurity in 1816. She came to public notice in 1836, when the poet Aleksandr Pushkin, an acquain¬ tance of her brother, published a section of The Cavalry Maiden in his journal, the Contemporary. Between 1836 and 1840 Durova saw two other memoirs and some nine works of fiction into print before retiring for good. Durova’s novels and novellas cover settings from medieval Lithuania, seventeenth-century Bohemia, and nineteenth-century Poland to her native Ural region. Her themes include psychotic jealousy, murder, syphilis, and transvestite masquerade as well as brief, lyrical accounts of doomed love in tribal societies. Some are narrated by a female officer. Her journals and memoirs are also in a feminine voice, but to her death she wore semimilitary garb and used masculine grammatical forms in speaking of her¬ self. Her gendered identity may be enigmatic, but she seems

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to have lived up to Alexander’s injunction never to put “even the shadow of a spot” on his name. [See also Military, subentry Overview; and Russia and Soviet Union.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Durova, Nadezhda. The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars [Kavalerist-devitsa: Proisshestvie v Rossij]. Translated by Mary Fleming Zirin. Bloomington: Indi¬ ana University Press, 1988. Translation from Russian with intro¬ duction and notes setting Durova’s journals in historical context. Gheith, Jehanne M. “Durova.” In Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol: Prose, edited by Christine A. Rydel, pp. 119-125. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 198. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1999. Mary F. Zirin

DUTTA, GOLAP/SUKUMARI (d. c. 1910), Indian actress, playwright, and manager. In 1873, Golap aka Golapi, Golapkamini (later Sukumari Dutta), became one of the first four women to be hired as an actress by the Bengal Theatre, the first of the public theaters to break away from male impersonation of women. This hiring heralded a remarkable career that continued until about 1896. Golap was a gifted singer who was brought by her mother to Calcutta (now Kolkata) to be trained as a vaishnav singer. Contemporaries praised her remarkable singing and dancing skills, as well as her “grace and skill” in “clever and witty” parts. Golap became renowned as Sukumari after the heroine she played with great elan in Upendranath Das’s SaratSarojini on 2 January 1875. She played a similar role of an educated and lively young woman, embodying the best of modernity, in Das’s next play, Surendra-Binodini. Das, a committed social reformer and an outspoken critic of the Raj, arranged Golap’s marriage to a young man, Goshtobihari Dutta—under the newly promulgated Native Marriage Act III of 1872, which enabled mixed-caste and mixed-faith marriages—on 16 February 1875. Golap fig¬ ured in subsequent advertisements as “Mrs. Sukumari Dutta,” although the marriage itself was ridiculed and her husband socially ostracized because actresses were consid¬ ered to be prostitutes.

The anticolonial sentiments of Das’s plays brought a ban on them in February 1876. Despite the arrest of the chief members of the Great National Theatre under the newly promulgated Dramatic Performances Bill (made into an act by late 1876), the company continued performing for some time: on 11 March 1876, Sukumari played the title role in Jyotirindranath Tagore’s Sarojini to raise funds “for the benefit of distressed actors” (those arrested). Finally, the company disbanded. When her husband left for England to follow Das and died there, Sukumari was left alone to raise her daughter. She started an acting school but ultimately returned to the stage to earn her living. Her play Apurba Sati Natak (The Unvanquished Chaste Maid) was published in 1876 and was performed at the Great National for her benefit performance on 23 August 1876. As regards the disputed authorship of the play, both the title page and the end page present “Srimati Sukumari Dutta” as “the writer and pub¬ lisher.” Only the preface, which is highly literary, features an “Ashutosh Das” as a coauthor. A contemporary review of the play also refers to Sukumari as the author. Besides being the only known play by an actress of this period, the play is striking in the way that it lays bare the economy of contemporary Bengali society. Sukumari Dutta also figures as the manager of the all¬ women “Hindoo Female Theatre,” which advertised in the English-language newspapers of the early 1880s. This underlines the many levels of her involvement with the public theater through two of its most eventful decades, the 1870s and 1880s. [See also India and Performing Arts, subentry Drama and Theater Arts.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhattacharyya, Shankar. Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser LJpadan: 1872-1900 (Source Materials for the History of Bengali Theatre). Calcutta, India: Pachimbanga Rajya Pustak Parshad, 1982. Dutta, Bijit Kumar. “Introduction.” In Sukumari Dutta ebong “Apurba Sati Natak.” Calcutta, India: Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, 1992. Rimli Bhattacharya

EARHART, AMELIA (1897-1937), aviator and feminist. Amelia Mary Earhart was born on 24 July 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, to Amy Otis and Edwin Stanton Earhart. Her family moved frequently, and she attended many schools, including Hyde Park High School in Chicago and the Ogontz School in Pennsylvania. In 1917 she left Ogontz to volunteer as a nurse’s aide at the Spadina Military Hospital in Toronto, which awakened her love of flying. In California in 1921 she learned to fly from a female flight instructor, Neta Snook, and bought her first airplane. Earhart was working as a Boston social worker in 1928 when she was offered the chance to become the first woman to fly the Atlantic, just one year after Charles Lindbergh’s epic solo flight. Even though she had a pilot’s license, she was merely a passenger—or, in her self-deprecating phrase, “a sack of potatoes”—on the 20 hour, 40 minute, flight from Trespassey Bay, Newfoundland, to Burry Port, Wales. Still, her courageous exploit was front-page news world¬ wide. Grateful for the opportunities opened by her new¬ found celebrity, Earhart hoped to prove to the public that she deserved its respect as an aviator, which she did in May 1932 when she became the first woman, and only the second person since Lindbergh (1902-1974), to fly the

that women could live life on their own terms and overcome conventional barriers. This message, while not always specifically labeled “feminism,” provided a highly individua¬ listic route for exceptional women to excel and helped to sustain the momentum of the women’s movement. Putnam kept Earhart’s name before the public with record-setting flights, lecture tours, book projects, and other commercial endorsements. Earhart especially enjoyed so¬ cializing with other women aviators, serving as a founder and the first president of the Ninety-Nines, the pioneering pilots’ organization. Successfully making the first solo flight from Hawaii to California in 1935 put Earhart back on the front page, but commercial aviation was replacing the era of exploration and record setting that had propelled her to fame. Earhart felt she had one more good flight left, and after receiving a spiffy Lockheed Electra from backers at Purdue University, she announced a round-the-world flight in 1937. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, left Lae, New Guinea, on 2 July 1937 on the most difficult leg of the journey, but they never reached their destination of Howland Island, a speck in the Pacific Ocean. Despite being the center of one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of all time (no conclusive evidence about her disappearance has ever surfaced), Amelia Earhart should more rightly be remembered as a pioneering feminist whose brief life demonstrated women’s widening contributions to

Atlantic solo. At the peak of her popularity, Earhart was so well known that when she made a forced landing in a remote Mexican desert, the locals instantly knew who she was. The world was in the grip of the Great Depression, and flying was expensive; her career was managed by George Palmer Putnam (1887-1950), a publisher and promoter whom she had married in 1931. His goal was to make her name synonymous with the words “woman pilot.” Her goal was

modern life. [See also Equal Rights Amendment and Feminism, subentry Overview.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

to fly and advance the cause of women. Earhart consistently portrayed her individual achieve¬ ments as examples of women’s capabilities in the modern world and as steps forward for all women. By her widely publicized accomplishments and clearly articulated feminist ideology (she lobbied President Herbert Hoover for the Equal Rights Amendment in 1931), Earhart demonstrated

Butler, Susan. East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997. Rich, Doris L. Amelia Earhart: A Biography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989. Ware, Susan. Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modem Feminism. New York: Norton, 1993. Susan Ware

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EAST AFRICA: 1500-1900

EAST AFRICA This entry consists of two subentries: 1500-1900 Twentieth Century

1500-1900 Women in East Africa are often marginal in the literature, yet when one looks at different aspects of social, economic, and political life in the region, it is obvious that this is a misrepresentation. Women, like men, used their relation¬ ships to negotiate access to political power, wars affected women as participants and victims, women made up a disproportionate share of the slave population, and free and slave women contributed as much to economic life as did men.

Women and Political Power. The greatest variations in women’s access to political power were between more and less centralized areas. In places with centralized governments, there was a stark contrast in political agency between elite and commoner women, with commoners having little or no access to power structures. Those with access to power were born or married into the ruling family, had direct political authority, created alliances between states—or power was transferred through them. In less politically centralized groups, women often participated directly in politics. Iteso women in Uganda participated in clan and peaceful interclan meetings, while the Kikuyu in Kenya had a council of mature women with disciplinary power over other women. Patriarchy also shaped access to power: pastoral women in Somalia had no direct access to formal political institutions. In the Funj Kingdom of the Sudan from the early sixteenth century, the king had to be the son of a woman from the royal clan. To ensure such an heir, the king mar¬ ried a girl of the royal clan during his succession. Ideologi¬ cally at least, the king’s legitimacy derived from the female founder of the royal clan. As the Funj Kingdom became more Islamic from the eighteenth century, this changed, and kings claimed legitimacy through their fathers. In Tanzania succession among the Fipa also depended on the royal blood of the mother, for by the eighteenth century the heir was the son of the chiefs sister. And among the Hehe, also of Tanzania, in the nineteenth century one chief successfully claimed a neighboring chiefship through his mother. In some states women actively participated in selecting the new ruler. In 1508 Empress Eleni of Abyssinia together with the Christian patriarch chose Lebna Dengel to succeed his father. Eleni could do so because of her great wealth and authority. Because Lebna Dengel was still young, Eleni

Hippolyte Arnoux. A daughter of the King of Abyssinia, c. 1880. Photo Verdeau/Adoc-photos/Art Resource, NY

served for many years as regent, furthering her power. In the nineteenth century a powerful woman ritualist at the Rwandan court ensured the contested succession of Gahindiro by attesting to his legitimacy. Such interventions were not always successful. In the Patongo Kingdom in eighteenth-century Uganda, an attempt by the wives of the deceased king to have their preferred candidate enthroned was foiled by his brother. In Shambaa in Tanzania, also in the eighteenth century, Mboza Mamwinu, the daughter of the dead king, attempted to have her full brother crowned in place of the designated heir. She failed and with her brother formed a second Shambaa Kingdom in Mshihwi. Farther west, a succession dispute between two Fipa brothers again resulted in the formation of a new polity. Here the succession passed to the chiefs sister’s son. One sister, Mwati, succeeded in making her son chief, but his cousin soon de¬ feated him, and he fled with Mwati to found a separate chiefdom. In 1786 in the Sudanese kingdom of Darfur, the king’s principal wife Kinana conspired to control the succession so that she retained her powerful position. Her work was undone when she was executed for conspiring against the new sultan.

EAST AFRICA: 1500-1900

Queens, queen mothers, and queen sisters. Women’s interventions in succession disputes were often motivated by political ambition, especially where they stood to become queen mother, queen sister, or queen. Such women wielded significant power, sometimes overshadowing their male counterparts. In sixteenth-century Hadeya in Ethiopia, for example, it was the queen who asked the Abyssinian emperor for assistance against an attempt to oust her husband. In Mazaga in western Ethiopia the chiefs sister Ga’ewah kept his death in 1525 secret until she had ensured the succession of her nephew and her own position as regent. In Funj in the 1690s the young king ruled under the guidance of his mother and a viceroy, while in Darfur the sultan’s favorite sister had the powerful position of iiya baasi (royal mother). Zamzam ruled Darfur after her brother went blind in 1856. Elsewhere queen mothers acted as a check on the king. In nineteenth century Fipa the queen mother could pardon anyone the king sentenced to death. She could also de¬ throne a king whose conduct was unacceptable, and in the 1850s the queen mother unseated King Kampaamba for cruelty. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shawa in Ethiopia, the queen mother and the church were the only checks on the king’s power. The queen mother herself ruled half the kingdom and, besides having a powerful influence over her son, could revoke his commands. In Ankole in Uganda the queen mother vetoed executions, decided judicial cases with the king, and was consulted in questions of war and peace. The queen mother of Burundi was also consulted on all important matters and ruled the country herself if her son was a child when he became king. The Ugandan kingdom of Buganda had two powerful women at its core: the queen mother and the queen sister. The queen sister had her own palace and estates. She was crowned with the king, and together they took an oath to rule the kingdom well. The queen mother, before acceding to office, was actively involved in ensuring that her son, rather than another prince, succeeded his father. Once in power she advised her son on matters of government, including warfare. In the nineteenth century Queen Mother Muganzirwaza wielded significant power over King Mutesa in the early years of his reign, though he later reclaimed much of that authority. In Rwanda the queen mother was also powerful and often central to her son’s accession. In the seventeenth century King Ndori’s mother was key to legitimizing his reign. Queen mothers were most prominent in the nineteenth century, notably in the succession strug¬ gles after the death of King Rwabugiri in 1895. Rwabugiri had selected an heir whose mother was dead and appointed ICanjogera as the future queen mother. Kanjogera, however, had a son, Musinga, and initiated a coup to replace the heir with Musinga.

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The position and influence of mothers of rulers ex¬ tended down the political ladder. The mothers of chiefs in nineteenth-century Shambaa acted with their brothers to limit the powers of their sons and reported them to the king if they became tyrannical. In nineteenth-century Ethiopia several women used their connections to secure political positions for their sons and then wielded power through their influence over them. For example, Weleta Tekle secured the governorship of Qwara Province for her son in 1827 and played an important role in his administration. Women rulers and alliance makers. Occasionally women ruled in their own right. A queen ruled sixteenth-century Waj in Ethiopia; in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Nyamwezi in Tanzania, though most chiefs were male, some were women. In 1892-1893 Isike, the female relative of a Nyamwezi chief, supported the Germans in deposing him and became chief in his place. Earlier in the eighteenth century a woman named Mabokela Kiume was chief in Kimbu, Tanzania. And in southern Sudan the Dinka have had at least two female leaders. Acol was chief in the Bahr el-Ghazal in the 1860s, and Atiam led six Dinka clans as they moved east of the Nile, overseeing their transformation into a united group, the Paweng Dinka. Women were also important in creating alliances through marriage. In sixteenth-century Ethiopia the marriage of Empress Eleni and Emperor Ba’eda Maryam united a Muslim dynasty with the Christian empire. In the 1820s in southern Ethiopia, the Galla king Abba Bagibo married, for political reasons, several daughters or sisters of surrounding rulers. In Sudan during the seventeenth-century migrations, a Dinka leader gave a girl to the neighboring Yibel people to end intermittent fighting. After this there was much inter¬ marriage between the two groups to maintain the peace. The Shambaa king Kimweri ye Nyumbai, who ruled from the early nineteenth century until the 1860s, married women from different chiefdoms; the eldest sons became chiefs in their maternal lands. In Buganda the king married women from each of the clans to ensure their loyalty. Princesses occupied special positions in their societies. In Shambaa women of the royal lineage were treated as men, undergoing male initiation rites and choosing their husbands in contravention of usual norms. In Buganda princesses were addressed as “sir,” and men knelt in their presence. They could not marry or have children but had sexual freedoms not shared by nonroyal women. Some became the wives of deities and wielded significant power on the basis of this religious authority. In neighboring Bunyoro many princesses ruled regions of the kingdom, but they too could not marry or have children. Women and Warfare. Women’s encounters with warfare were on various levels, from being particularly targeted for capture to the transient life in military camps and active participants. One woman could experience all three

124

EAST AFRICA: 1500-1900

aspects, particularly as those who were present at battles were vulnerable to capture if their side was defeated. Women were targeted by armies as captives to enter the households of rulers and soldiers or to be sold because women were favored over men as slaves in East Africa, both internally and for export to Arabia. By raiding neighboring states, the Rwandan kings from the late eighteenth century consolidated ties with chiefs by giving them women and girls. Women were also captured to be sold in the external slave trade. In Buganda a rapid increase in the number of slave women in the palace reflected a period of expansion¬ ary warfare beginning in the eighteenth century, and as in Rwanda, some captive women were traded to the Swahili coast. In Tanzania from about 1840 the Ngoni often raided weaker opponents to seize women and children. Whereas some were incorporated into Ngoni households, others were sold into the slave market. Women were also aggressors in warfare, mobilizing soldiers and participating in battles. In the 1532 Ethiopian war between the invading Imam Ahmad and the Christian ruler of Bali, the wives of soldiers of both sides were on the battlefield. When Ahmad’s troops were victorious, women captured prisoners and boasted of how many they had taken. In Hamasen to the north three centuries later, women entered the battlefield to encourage the soldiers, and among the Shaygiya in the 1820s Sudan, two girls, Safiyya and Mahira, were famous for leading the Shaygiya into battle against Turco-Egyptian invaders. Others focused on mobilization, such as Maasai women, who prayed for and encouraged warriors in battle, and Tegre women in northern Ethiopia, who called men to fight. Women formed a significant proportion of the occupants of camps during times of war. In Ethiopia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, women formed up to half the camp. Some were wives or consorts to the leaders and soldiers; others carried loads, cooked food, and brewed alcohol. This was not a unique phenomenon. In nineteenth-century Buganda the wives of chiefs followed them to war, and in Rwanda the army camps included many women. Women and Slavery. Women had long predominated in the slave population within East Africa as well as among those exported, but during the nineteenth century the nature of slavery changed with the growing demand for slaves for export and to work on coastal plantations. From the ninth century several hundred enslaved East Africans were traded annually to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Subcontinent. The majority of enslaved people, however, remained in the region and were usually incorporated into households. In the eighteenth century demand for planta¬ tion slaves in the Indian Ocean and the Americas began to grow, peaking in the mid-nineteenth century at tens of thousands exported per annum. This, combined with the new demand for slave labor for East African coastal

plantations (up to 100,000 slaves lived in Zanzibar alone in the mid-nineteenth century), resulted in the expansion of the slave trade into regions that had been largely isolated from the codstal trade, including Uganda and Rwanda. Despite this new demand for plantation labor, many slave women remained part of palace retinues or ordinary households. And conversely, some women owned slaves. Dar Fur in the Sudan was known as a source for female slaves in 1663, but it was in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century that enslavement became significant throughout the region. By 1770 Muslim Baggara were raid¬ ing Nuba and Dinka communities for slaves, targeting women and children. In Buganda in the eighteenth century expansionary wars generated a rapid inflow of women into the kingdom as slaves. Some of these were concubines and servants in the royal palaces, others went to chiefs or joined the households of soldiers. In the nineteenth century the demand for slaves for export increased the number of raids on neighboring areas, and in Buganda unmarried women were increasingly sold by male relatives. In nineteenthcentury Shambaa and among the Digo of Kenya, unmarried women were also often pawned by male relatives. With the rise in the external slave trade, pawned women who pre¬ viously could have been redeemed were more often sold to the coast and lost for good. In central Kenya by the 1880s, even for those enslaved women who stayed in the region, the people selling and buying viewed the transaction as involving the actual woman and not her labor. This situa¬ tion was intensified by the famine in 1897-1902, whereas the famine of 1894-1896 pushed the Iteso to sell their sons and daughters for food. From the sixteenth century the Funj royal family had many slaves. The slave population was reproduced in two ways: all children of slave women and free men and all illegitimate children of free women became slaves of the king. In Buganda slaves were also a feature of the palaces from early on, and one of the slave women’s main tasks was producing and preparing food for the palace. In nineteenthcentury Ethiopia, Shawa and Galla palace populations included several thousand slaves and concubines. The slave women were responsible for providing food and brewing alcohol. In nineteenth-century Shambaa courts slave women were concubines and were also responsible for food produc¬ tion, whereas in Islamic Dar Fur under the Masalit Sultanate, one of the main duties of slave women was to expand the sultan’s kin group by bearing him children, the advantage being that a concubine who bore the sultan a child would be freed. Many slave women belonged to individual households. In seventeenth-century Rwanda women slaves performed household tasks. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Funj all traders and merchants had slaves for domestic work, with important merchants owning several, often

EAST AFRICA: 1500-1900

sending slave women into towns to work as prostitutes. Along the Swahili coast women predominated among field slaves. Many worked in terrible conditions on sugar planta¬ tions, while others were nursemaids in patrician families. Domestic work was preferable for many slave women, but they also had to provide sexual services for male members of the household. For Swahili elites, slave ownership al¬ lowed the luxury of purdah, because only those who had slaves to cultivate for them could remain secluded. Similarly in nineteenth-century Ethiopia slave women collected water and firewood, allowing seclusion for married women. In many places slave women had little chance of changing their status, though in Muslim areas concubines who bore children to their masters were usually manumitted. In less centralized communities, such as the Kamba, Kikuyu, and Meru of Kenya, however, slave women were often integrated into society and suffered little lasting discrimination. Women and Work. Women worked inside and outside the home, for the benefit of the household and for personal gain. Although the precise nature of the division varied across ethnic and class lines, work was often divided according to gender. Women and men participated in food production, often performing different tasks. In seventeenth-century Rwanda women in pastoral households neither herded nor milked cows but stored the milk and churned butter. Eighteenthand nineteenth-century Maasai women milked cows but did not herd them, while Chagga women on Kilimanjaro collected grass to feed cattle. Nineteenth-century Tegre women did not milk livestock, some Amhara women milked, and Oromo and Galla women tended the livestock while men cultivated. Shambaa men cleared the land for the first planting, and women harvested the crop. Sowing and weed¬ ing was done by both. Women fed their children from their fields and traded any surplus, while men supplemented their wives’ harvests and planted crops for trade. Nyamwezi and Nyakusa men helped prepare fields for sowing, but the rest of the work fell to the women. In Ngoni only women and slaves worked the land. Food preparation, in contrast, was almost always women’s work. In Ethiopia from at least the sixteenth century, women spent several hours daily preparing the staple bread, but in Buganda, where the staple food was steamed bananas, women spent less time on food preparation. Class divisions in labor were most evident in urban centers, but anywhere where elite women could control the labor of slaves, their burden of manual labor was much reduced. In Somali city-states middle-class women wove, embroidered, cooked, and spent hours beautifying themselves in seclusion, while their lower-class counterparts labored for others. A similar situation prevailed in Swahili city-states and Ethiopia, where seclusion was a privilege of those able to command others to work for them.

125

While much craft work, such as pottery, basketry, and weaving, was for domestic use, it was also skilled work performed for trade. In nineteenth-century Ethiopia pottery was made by a distinct class of women and men, while women were the potters among the Nyiha, Fipa, Kikuyu, Kamba, and Maasai. In northwestern Tanzania, Haya men were the pot makers. Basketry and mat making were female activities in Ethiopia, the Swahili coast, and Buganda, where women generated surplus income from trading bas¬ kets. For the Nyiha these were male activities. Iron smelting was generally a male activity throughout the region, but women were often involved at different stages of the process, and in Pare it was done by women. While long-distance trade was predominantly men’s work, women were part of nineteenth-century Nyamwezi trade caravans as wives and children accompanied Nyamwezi por¬ ters carrying ivory to the coast and goods such as textiles and guns to the interior. Women were also important in regional and local trade, especially in the trade in foodstuffs, pottery, and basketry. In sixteenth-century Ethiopia women predomi¬ nated in markets, and some specialized in measuring grains and salt. In the nineteenth century itinerant women traders moved unhindered even during times of war. Elsewhere too women were the primary market traders, such as in the Swahili town of Siyu and the Pare and Chagga markets in northeastern Tanzania. In nineteenth-century Geledi in Somalia, women were the principal traders at the local level. During the nineteenth century men across the region sometimes took advantage of the new opportunities in long-distance trade to dominate trade at all levels. Women and Family Politics. Ultimately family and lineage politics helped determine whether women had access to political power, whether they became slaves or slave owners, and what type of work they did. These were not static, however, and were affected by broader social issues, for example, the expansion of the external slave market in the nineteenth century. In most of this region polygyny was an option, but its practice varied according to social status. During the sixteenth century in the Christian empire of Abyssinia, while the general population largely adhered to the rules of monogamy, the emperor had several wives and concu¬ bines. In Buganda polygyny was most common among the elite, but with the influx of captive women during the wars from the eighteenth century onward, the practice became more widespread among commoners. In Burundi and neighboring Buha in the 1880s, the trade in women as commodities led to their fathers “selling” them in marriage to the man who offered the most extravagant bride wealth or dowry. Wives were generally expected to show deference to their husbands. Emperor Galawdewos’s wife Sabla Wangel was praised for her obedience to her husband, and in

126

EAST AFRICA: 1500-1900

Bunyoro princesses could not marry, for showing the required deference to their husbands would undermine their status. Senior wives had more authority than their junior counterparts in the household. For example, in Rwanda young wives without children had no authority, but more established wives who had their own houses and children controlled most of the household activities. In Swahili towns, in addition to showing deference, wives were sup¬ posed to lead lives that generated respect for their husbands. In sixteenth-century Ethiopia marriages were secular affairs, and divorce was common, particularly among nobles. This was facilitated by the tradition of couples keeping their property separate. Elite Swahili marriages were also fragile affairs, but again women retained their property, and so divorce, though difficult, was not economically devastating. In Buganda men could easily divorce their wives, who then returned to their natal homes, leaving their children behind. Where descent was patrilineal, such as in pastoral Somali societies, women had to negotiate belonging to their fathers’ lineage while living in their husbands’ lineage. Their rights were in their natal lineage, but their labor and children be¬ longed to their husbands, reducing the interest of their natal lineage in them. Women in eighteenth- and nineteenth century Swahili towns faced similar problems, especially when they wished to leave their husbands but their fathers or brothers were unable to support them. In Shambaa women who were rejected by their natal lineage and mistreated by their husbands could either join a chief’s court or make an oath while breaking a cooking pot, after which it was expected that they would die along with anyone named in the oath. When patrilineal lineage ties and marital ties broke down, women sometimes formed their own households. While not the majority of households in Ethiopia, they have been noted there since 1520, and in Swahili coastal towns they were fairly common. Swahili women, aware of the fragility of marriage, maintained strong alliances with the female kin group so that if they were both divorced and rejected by their brothers, they could survive by moving into female¬ headed households. This was possible because Swahili women could own and inherit property, and patrician women were given at marriage usufruct of a house belong¬ ing to their lineage that they retained throughout their lives. [See also Kinship; Marriage; Monarchy; Slavery; Slave Trade; and War.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beswick, Stephanie. Sudan’s Blood Memory: The Legacy of War, Ethnicity, and Slavery in Early South Sudan. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2004. A book that goes beyond narratives of migration to discuss the political and social history of South Sudan. Feierman, Steven. Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Mainly focused on male intellectuals in Shambaa but has some good discussion of women. Hanson, Holly Elisabeth. Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003. The early chapters give good detail on women and political power. Horton, Mark, and John Middleton. The Swahili: The Social Land¬ scape of a Mercantile Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. A helpful overview of Swahili society. Koponen, Juhani. People und Production in Lute Pvecoloniul Tanzania: History and Structures. Helsinki: Finnish Society of Development Studies, 1988. A synthetic history of nineteenthcentury Tanzania with good discussion of gender relations. O’Fahey, R. S., and J. L. Spaulding. Kingdoms of the Sudan. London: Meuthuen, 1974. A good introduction to both the Funj and the Dar Fur kingdoms in Sudan. Pankhurst, Richard. A Social History of Ethiopia: The Northern and Central Highlands from Early Medieval Times to the Rise of Emperor Tewodros II. Trenton, N.J.: Red Sea, 1992. A helpful overview of Ethiopian history for the nonspecialist with consid¬ erable discussion of women’s history. Reid, Richard J. Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda: Econ¬ omy, Society, and Warfare in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: James Currey, 2002. Includes discussion of women’s political power and economic lives. Roberts, Andrew, ed. Tanzania before 1900. Nairobi, Kenya: East African Publishing House, 1968. A good overview of several different societies. Vansina, Jan. Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. One of the few books on precolonial Rwanda in English, and it includes women in the analyses. Webster, J. B., C. P. Emudong, D. H. Okalany, and N. EgimuOkuda. The Iteso during the Asonya. Nairobi, Kenya: East African Publishing House, 1973. An overview of Iteso history. Women are present but hidden in the text. Willis, Roy. A State in the Making: Myth, History, and Social Transformation in Pre-Colonial Ufipa. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1981. A specialist book but with considerable discussion of the prominent role of women in the Fipa states. Rhiannon Stephens

Twentieth Century During the last decades of the nineteenth century, following the Berlin Conference of 1884 when European states divided up the African continent in what has become know as the “scramble for Africa,” all of East Africa (apart from Ethiopia) came under the direct colonial rule of either Britain, Germany, Italy, or, in the case of Sudan, joint British-Egyptian domination. The fluid social, economic, and political environment in the wake of conquest created the social space for a few exceptional women to attain promi¬ nence by opposing colonial rule. The priestess Muhumusa in northern Rwanda and southern Uganda and the Empress T’aitu Bitoul in Ethiopia combined traditional claims to spiri¬ tual or political authority with unique personal strengths. The

EAST AFRICA: Twentieth Century

empress, educated unusually well in the Ge’ez and Amharic languages, took to the battlefield against Italian troops, while Muhumusa’s connection to the powerful spirit Nyabingi aided her struggle against both the European take-over and the central Rwandan state. Mekatilili, a leader of the Giriama uprising in eastern Kenya, combined personal charisma with an ability to articulate women’s deeply felt fears about losing control over land. Once colonial administrations were established, patterns of change in gender relations depended on many factors: whether white settlers expropriated local land, how mis¬ sionaries interacted with particular communities, and how officials pressed their claims to labor and taxes. But the most powerful cause of economic dislocation for women came from the disproportionate reliance on men to work in urban centers and on European-owned farms and plan¬ tations, as well as to build the colonial infrastructure of roads and railways. Though these new opportunities for men left many rural women at a disadvantage, Luo women in western Kenya seized the chance to experiment with new crops and agricultural techniques and to expand local trade; the most successful female innovators, often Christians, were able to convert their agricultural surplus into large herds of highly valued livestock. Similar variations in opportunity occurred among urban women, depending on the size and function of towns, the political economy of the colonial territory, and the conse¬ quent division of labor by race and gender. Despite the paucity of formal wage-earning opportunities for women, many in urban areas found niches that served them well. Most notable were the Nairobi prostitutes and beer brewers who took advantage of a skewed demographic situation to garner considerable savings, which they shrewdly invested in urban housing. Estranged from their rural kin, many of these women converted to Islam in the quest for a new source of community.

Capitalism, Christianity, and the Reconstruction of “Tradition.” The close of World War I ushered in an era of fully developed colonial rule. As capitalism, Christianity, and imperialism made deeper inroads into African life, colonial states began to formulate new ways of controlling those outside the boundaries of recognized “traditional” authorities. Thus this period combined continued erosion of precolonial economic and political institutions with efforts to reconstruct the social controls inherent in those relationships. In the process, both colonial administrators and local rural authorities began to conceptualize women as inherently immoral and in need of regulation. Though the larger colonial cities remained areas of gender imbalance, increasing numbers of women were attracted to them. With formal employment still extremely limited, women continued to sustain themselves and their families by marketing produce and prepared food, brewing beer,

127

and selling domestic and sexual services. As the female population in towns began to increase, so did the concerns of both colonial officials and African male authorities. Since many of the women who migrated to cities were deliberately escaping the controls of husbands, elders, or fathers, they sought urban relationships such as informal marriages that left them some degree of flexibility. In older cities such as Mombasa on the Kenya coast, women’s dance societies reflected and expressed the changes of the period. Newly popular lelemama dance associations took on names such as “Kenya Colony” and “Land Rover,” and their leaders assumed European titles. In rural areas of Kenya, Luo women continued to experi¬ ment successfully with new crops and tools. But as econo¬ mic security came to rely more on formal education and wage employment outside the home than on farming, these women lost ground compared to men. For Kikuyu women in central Kenya, where European settlers had appropri¬ ated vast areas of land, the women who picked coffee on European farms held the most menial, lowest-paying positions. Colonial ideologies of social control, generally expressed through mission-sponsored education, aimed to cast African women in the mold of late-Victorian wives and mothers. Aspiring to shape a generation of married, Christian African mothers, missionaries sought to control coming-of-age cere¬ monies and marriage in an effort to keep their charges from the shame of premarital pregnancy. Where older rites of passage to adulthood remained actively practiced, as in the Kikuyu area of Kenya, missionaries condemned excision and related rituals. In attacking practices that were fundamental to Kikuyu identity, they incited conflict with early nationalist organizations and with individual local leaders, such as the country’s future president Jomo Kenyatta. In response to cultural challenges from missionaries, less orthodox forms of Christianity often were more appealing than the established churches. In the Kigezi district of south¬ western Uganda, the highly successful balokole revival movement responded to women’s tensions over issues of family life and sexuality, as well as to individual difficulties at meeting the rigid standards of official mission churches. Through new families created among communities of con¬ verts, women also sought refuge from the pressures of more traditional non-Christian relatives. In an era of wide-ranging popular protest, women played a fuller part in local resistance movements than in formal nationalist organizations. Nonetheless, women were not absent from political action, particularly in Kenya, where female coffee pickers organized labor stoppages to press for higher wages and an end to physical and sexual abuse. Their efforts led the East African Association (EAA) to make the oppressive conditions on coffee estates one of its concerns in the early 1920s. In 1922 when the EAA gathered to

128

EAST AFRICA: Twentieth Century

protest the arrest of its leader, Harry Thuku, the women in the crowd reviled the men for being too hesitant and led the assembled crowd to the police station. When European settlers and police fired on the crowd, the women’s leader, Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru, was the first to die. Economic Restructuring and the Push for Indepen¬ dence. During the 1950s both women’s authority and their economic position continued to erode. They suffered a particularly decisive setback in areas making the strongest effort to modernize agriculture in response to such problems as soil erosion, overstocking, and presumed agricultural inefficiency. As colonial states increased their assistance to local male farmers and gave individual land title to male family heads, men’s control over land and new technology and their easier access to government finances and markets made many rural women more economically dependent on their husbands. During the postwar period, larger numbers of women moved to cities, shifting the urban demographic imbalance to more equal proportions of women and men. In most cities, some new female jobs in the wage economy began to open up, but the vast majority of women continued to work casually and independently. As an African middle class developed in both numbers and self-consciousness during the years lead¬ ing to independence, very small numbers of Westerneducated women began to work in the acceptably female professions of teaching, nursing, and social welfare and some¬ times began to opt for the culture of domestic dependency that was growing among a select group of Christians. This small female elite reflected the colonial effort to promote the “advancement” of African women and to supply educated men with suitably trained wives by more actively promoting girls’ education. The curriculum for girls combined academic subjects with a heavy emphasis on cooking, sewing, hygiene, and child care. Simultaneously, a network of official and voluntary programs developed to promote women’s “domestication” on a European model. These organizations all conveyed a morally laden message emphasizing that women’s primary place was in the home and with the family. Such ideas were by no means unwel¬ come, however. Some groups, while initially run by Europeans, were rapidly taken over by African women. As anticolonial protests swept the continent in the late 1940s and 1950s, women joined in voicing their grievances. In 1945, Pare women in northern Tanzania marched to the district headquarters to oppose new taxes seen as disruptive to family and agricultural life. Similarly, in Bujumbura (Burundi) in the late 1950s, Muslim women organized an effective revolt against a special tax on single women, incensed at the implications that all widowed, divorced, and polygynous women were prostitutes. In the Meru area of Kenya, located on the northeastern slopes of Mount Kenya, thousands of young girls defied a local ban on clitoridectomy by attempting to excise each other.

Women also were drawn into wider anticolonial struggles. In Tanzania, women organized through dance societies became the strongest supporters of TANU (the Tanganyika African National Union). In the Sudan, the local Communist Party organized women into the nationalist movement, and the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya from about 1952 to 1960 drew in some Kikuyu women as armed combatants but drew in most as helpers tunneling food, information, and medicine to the forest fighters. The Ambiguities of Change, 1965-2000. The struggle for independence involved many women in new forms of political activity. But its attainment no more solved the problems of African women than it did the other pressing problems of poverty and economic dependency. Formal independence did lead to more widespread female education at all levels as governments responded to insistent demands for improved opportunities. But the tendency—when they addressed women’s issues at all—for development projects to accept the existing sexual division of labor as unalterable, or to exacerbate this division, meant that little transforma¬ tion occurred in the lives of most poor women. And political leaders in the majority of independent African states, notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary, continued to express ambivalence about women’s equality. Throughout East Africa, independence brought conflict¬ ing demands for modernization and for the preservation of tradition. With the patriarchal vision of tradition con¬ structed during the colonial period as a model, subordinate and domesticated women have at times come to symbolize “African custom.” Pressures to bear children remained strong, and most women continued to consider large families as central to their emotional and economic well¬ being. Therefore options were often limited for those who wished to restrict the number of children they bore, with abortion illegal and contraception a contentious subject. Attitudes and policies toward marriage remained com¬ plex, often combining efforts at increasing women’s rights with a reluctance to upset customs such as bride-wealth, polygyny, and excision. Some studies suggest that the resulting contradictions in legislation may have increased a tendency to prefer single motherhood to the constraints of marriage. In Tanzania, the Marriage Act of 1971 led some women to avoid marriage in order to maintain custody of older children in case of divorce. In Kenya, the all-male national assembly voted in 1969 to repeal an act that had required men to contribute to the support of illegitimate children. The Ethiopian civil code, although affirming that spouses owe each other respect, support, and assistance, recognized the husband as head of the family, meriting obedience from his wife. In the Sudan, sustained pressure from women’s groups led to legal reforms in women’s economic and family position, although without attacking the most extreme form of genital surgery. By contrast, in its campaign against excision the Somali Women’s

EAST AFRICA: Twentieth Century

Democratic Organization gained the support of many wo¬ men and, for a time, the government. As education expanded the ranks of teachers, nurses, and secretaries, while others rose through well-chosen marriage partners, class divisions among women widened. In Uganda in the 1970s, for example, tension was quite open between elite women and their female domestic workers. Yet from among these educated women have come a prominent minority of writers, artists, and other professionals, some of whom have taken considerable risks on behalf of poor women. They include physicians and health workers who have organized locally against antifemale violence; women who have identified with the goals of a global women’s movement, working to define and create speci¬ fically African forms of feminism; environmentalists such as the Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai in Kenya who led a grassroots movement of women to protect the land on which their livelihood depends; and the writers and artists who have articulated the conflicts that many women feel. Grace Ogot stands out as perhaps the best-known woman writer in East Africa, although the work of others has also attracted attention, including Barbara Kimenyi (Uganda), Martha Mvungi (Tanzania), and Rebeka Njau and Charity Waciuma (Kenya). In her novel The Promised Land (1966) and in some of her short stories, Ogot addresses the conflict between the limiting effects of traditional attitudes toward women, including submissiveness to men, and the positive attributes of a spiritual and communal heritage. Even where national politicians made efforts to increase women’s participation in nation building and development, they too often conceptualized women as domestic rather than economic beings and guided their assistance under the aegis of community and social welfare agencies. This was the case in Tanzania, where the ruling party supported the development of a women’s organization at the time of independence. Although participants in the Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanzania (Tanzanian Women’s Union) gradually included economic as well as domestic activities and goals, women remained peripheral to conceptions of public policy. Furthermore, the female activists so critical to the success of TANU in the 1950s nearly all disappeared from the political process. Rarely well edu¬ cated, most were unsuited to assume positions in the new government. Similarly, after the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia, rural women’s groups were subordinated to larger peasant associations, with little interest in women’s per¬ spectives. Exceptions to this pattern usually came in cases of armed revolt or national trauma. Women in the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), struggling for autonomy from Ethiopia, were particularly successful in promot¬ ing gender-balanced land reform, education for Muslim girls and women, and more egalitarian marriage relation¬ ships. Following the Rwandan genocide of 1994, women’s

129

political organizing earned them nearly half of the seats in the national legislature in 2003. The 1990s brought new challenges and new opportu¬ nities. Though the continuing spread of HIV/AIDS, the mandates of structural adjustment programs, and periodic crises (as in Somalia and Rwanda) threatened women’s economic position—and often their lives—the continent¬ wide push for democratization opened up new possibilities. When Kenya restored multiparty politics in 1991, women’s organizations immediately launched campaigns to educate women on democratic participation and to elect women candidates on both the local and the national levels. With a variety of dynamic women’s groups in many countries of East Africa, issues such as sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence took their place alongside political participation, clean water and sanitation, and access to land as issues that prompted women’s organizing. The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, afforded African participants the opportunity to formulate and voice a strong agenda on behalf of women and girls. The appointment of a Tanzanian, Gertrude Mongella, as secretary-general of the gathering heightened its importance to gender awareness on the con¬ tinent. Yet all the East African delegates were vocal against including sexual and reproductive rights in the final declara¬ tion. That such issues remain contested points to the variety of women’s voices in the region. It also highlights the efforts of some women to respond to the disruptions of the twentieth century by seeking to define and preserve distinctive features of African family life. [See also Female Genital Mutilation; Imperialism and Colonialism, subentries Modern Period and Anticolonial Protests; Kenya; Maathai, Wangari; Nyanjiru, Mary Muthoni; and Ogot, Grace.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berger, Iris, and E. Frances White. Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Fair, Laura. Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Iden¬ tity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890-1945. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001. Geiger, Susan. TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955-1965. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1997. Hafkin, Nancy J., and Edna G. Bay, eds. Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni¬ versity Press, 1976. A collection of essays that includes important articles on twentieth-century East Africa—by James Brain on Tanzania and by Margaret Jean Hay and Margaret Strobel on Kenya. Hodgson, Dorothy L. The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries. Bloomington: Indiana Uni¬ versity Press, 2005. Hodgson, Dorothy L., and Sheryl A. McCurdy, eds. “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001. A collection of essays that includes important articles on twentieth-century East Africa—by Margot Lovett,

130

EAST AFRICA: Twentieth Century

Dorothy Hodgson, and Sheryl McCurdy on Tanzania and by Nakanyike B. Musisi on Uganda. Kanogo, Tabitha. African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 190050. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. Obbo, Christine. African Women: Their Struggle for Economic In¬ dependence. London: Zed, 1980. Presley, Cora Ann. Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992. Strobel, Margaret. Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890-1975. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. Thomas, Lynn M. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. White, Luise. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Iris Berger

The DSM-IV identifies two specific types of anorexia ner¬ vosa: the restricting type, in which the patient restricts food intake without engaging in any bingeing or purging activ¬ ities, and the binge-eating-purging type, in which the patient also engages in binge eating (uncontrollable episodes of eating very large quantities of food over a short period of time) and purging (causing evacuation of stomach and/or bowels, usually achieved through induced vomiting or mis¬ use of laxatives, diuretics, or other medications). Patients diagnosed with the binge-eating-purging type often alter¬ nate between binge eating-purging and restricted food intake. Bulimia nervosa. The symptoms of bulimia nervosa include: • Frequent recurring episodes of binge eating • Inability to control the intake of food during bingeing

EASTERN ORTHODOXY. See Christianity.

EATING DISORDERS. Only in relatively recent his¬ tory have eating disorders been identified and treated as diseases. They were first identified and labeled by the med¬ ical community in Western cultures, where the majority of worldwide diagnoses still occur. Cultural, psychosocial, and biological factors have been implicated, but the exact causes remain largely unknown. Eating disorders primarily affect women, especially in Western cultures and increasingly across the globe. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office on Women’s Health reports that more than 90 percent of those suffering from eating dis¬ orders are women; other research offers estimates of maleto-female ratios ranging from 1:6 to 1:10. Diagnoses in men have increased in recent decades. Definitions and Symptoms. Based on clusters of symptoms, the medical community in the United States has identified two principal eating disorders, which serve as the basis for most studies of eating disorders worldwide. They are categorized in the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa; a third category is classified as “eating disorder not otherwise specified.” Anorexia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa is characterized by several symptoms, including: • Refusal to maintain body weight at or above a minimal normal weight for the patient’s age and height • An intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat despite being underweight • Dramatically increased influence of body weight or shape on self-evaluation • Amenorrhea (the absence of menstruation)

episodes • Recurring compensatory behavior, which may consist of purging aimed at preventing weight gain through induced vomiting and/or the overuse of laxatives, diuretics, or other medication; fasting; or excessive exercise • Occurrence of this cycle at least twice a week for three consecutive months not associated with the excessive restrictive food intake present in anorexia nervosa As in anorexia nervosa, another symptom is a markedly increased influence of body weight or shape on the patient’s self-evaluation. The DSM-IV identifies two specific types of bulimia nervosa: the purging type, in which patients engage in induced vomiting and/or the overuse of laxatives, diure¬ tics, or other medication, and the nonpurging type, in which patients do not induce vomiting or overuse purging medi¬ cations but do engage in fasting and/or excessive exercise. Eating disorder not otherwise specified. Many patients, particularly in younger age groups, have a combination of eating-disorder symptoms that cannot be strictly categor¬ ized as either anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa and are thus technically diagnosed as “eating disorder not other¬ wise specified.” The DSM-IV identifies this category for patients who meet at least one of the following criteria: • Exhibit all symptoms of anorexia nervosa but are not under the normal body weight for their age and height despite significant weight loss • Exhibit all symptoms of anorexia nervosa except amen¬ orrhea or exhibit all symptoms of bulimia nervosa except occurrences of the binge-compensatory behavior cycle occur less frequently than twice a week for three consecu¬ tive months • Repeatedly chew and spit out (rather than swallow) large amounts of food • Engage in binge eating without subsequent compensatory acts (known as binge-eating disorder)

EATING DISORDERS

131

Anorexia. The Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston, who died in November 2006 in Sao Paulo from a generalized infection caused by anorexia. REUTERS/Ho

Historical Perspective. Disordered eating behaviors have been recorded since ancient times. Ancient Egyptian and Greek cultures as well as early Christians and “gnostic cults” engaged in fasting for varying periods of time. Spirituality also motivated self-starvation during the Middle Ages, when many women fasted as part of the aspirational process of becoming saints in the Roman Catholic Church. Although not as common as behaviors similar to those of anorexia, the bingeing and purging acts present in bulimia have also been identified throughout history. Ancient Romans, particularly those of wealth and elite social status, participated in bouts of excessive eating followed by vomiting—even making use of buildings designated as vomitoriums. Many instances of disordered eating throughout history did not stem from a fear of fatness, even including the first cases medically labeled anorexia. The extreme “culture of thinness” commonly associated with modern eating disorders dates to the nineteenth century, when thinness for women began to emerge as attractive and glamorous in western Europe. Anna Silver has argued that certain strands of the “culture of the thin” materialized in Victorian literature of the late nineteenth century, claiming that some characters in works by authors such as Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker exhibited the beliefs and actions of anorexic women. In fact, this “culture of the thin” became so prevalent in the late nineteenth

New

century, Silver notes, that anorexia—first diagnosed at this time (in 1873)—can be seen as a paradigm for middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. Culture and Geography. Although anorexia and bulimia have often been perceived as diseases that affect only white middle- and upper-class women, these diseases are not limited to any specific race or class. Cases of eating disorders among ethnic minority groups in the United States, including Asian American, Hispanic American, and African American girls, have been on the rise in recent decades. Earlier research had concluded that African American girls were mostly “protected” from the risk of developing eating disorders by particular elements of their culture, such as different attitudes regarding weight, body image, and attractiveness; greater influence of family and friends; and distance from the dominant “culture of the thin,” in which the ideal body presented in Western media was usually white. Recent research, however, has shown that African American girls’ risk of developing eating disorders has risen. Outside the United States, reports of eating disorders have been much less frequent, although recent research points to an increasing appearance of such disorders across the globe. Some of these cases are tied to the increasing influence of Western ideals. For example, eating disorders—and attitudes associated with risk for eating disorders—have

132

EATING DISORDERS

been reported in the Middle East, particularly in Israel, where Western attitudes regarding weight and body have become more accepted. The prevalence of eating disorders in Europe, especially in Great Britain, for the most part follows patterns of increasing diagnosis in the United States. Eating disorders in Asia, on the other hand, are very rare, but recent research has confirmed the presence of anorexia and bulimia in Japan and Hong Kong. However, in Hong Kong, as in India, cases of disordered eating were found to be motivated more by religious beliefs than by a fear of fatness or perceived pressure to be thin. Cultural Effects. The development and increased in¬ cidence of eating disorders in the United States are often closely tied to the cultural value of beauty, ideas of thinness, media saturation, and even changes in women’s roles in society. A great deal of research in communications and media studies has linked popular media with the prevalence of attitudes that pose risk for the development of eating disorders in women and, increasingly, men. Advertising in particular, with its use of the female body to sell goods and services, has been identified as a source of body dissatisfaction and perceived pressure to be thin. Studies have identified a direct relationship between images in the media and attitudes associated with the development of eating disorders, not only in traditional media such as magazines, movies, and television but also in electronic media. Some researchers have theorized that the increased presence of eating disorders in the late twentieth century is related to the changing roles of women in modern society, suggesting that changing ideals and opportunities for women as a result of the feminist movement have created a tension between the drive to conform and a drive to compete that puts teenage girls at risk for developing attitudes and behaviors that may develop into eating disorders. Eating Disorders and Sexuality. Psychoanalytical theory was used to hypothesize causes and analyze symptoms in early descriptions of eating disorders, frequently attributing a patient’s disordered eating mainly to problems with sexuality. Although the theoretical framework has progressed, the relationship between sexuality and eating disorders remains an important topic. Studies have shown a link between eating disorders and decreased sexual interest, typically more often in those suffering from anorexia than in bulimia. Patients with anorexia are less likely to get involved in sexual relationships, are dubious of their own sexual appeal, and usually lack interest in sexual activity, whereas those suffering from bulimia are as likely to engage in sexual relationships as those without an eating disorder. Treatment. There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the identification of eating disorders as curable diseases because relapse rates are very high. Physicians use measures that will help patients manage their symptoms. Although a single accepted standard of

medical care for eating disorders does not exist, most practitioners look to an integrated approach, including treatment from mental health professionals, nutritionists, and sometimes endocrinologists and other physicians. Patients may be treated with various types of psy¬ chotherapy, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, inter¬ personal therapy, and family and group therapy. Some treatment regimens employ antidepressants and anti¬ anxiety medication along with the psychological and nutritional counseling. [See also Healing and Medicine and Health.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed, text revision. Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. DiNicola, V. F. “Anorexia Multiforme: Self-Starvation in Historical and Cultural Context. II: Anorexia Nervosa as a Culture-React¬ ive Syndrome.” Transcultural Psychiatric Review 27, no. 4 (1990): 245-286. Gilbert, S., and J. K. Thompson. “Feminist Explanations of the Development of Eating Disorders: Common Themes, Research Findings, and Methodological Issues.” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 3 (1996): 183-202. Harrison, Kristen. “The Body Electric: Thin-Ideal Media and Eating Disorders in Adolescents.” Journal of Communication 50, no. 3 (2000): 119-143. Jacob, Ann V. “Body Image Distortion and Eating Disorders: No Longer a ‘Culture Bound’ Topic.” Healthy Weight Journal (2001): 93-95. Kilbourne, Jean. Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. New York: Free Press, 1999. Miller, Merry N., and Andres J. Pumariega. “Culture and Eating Disorders: A Historical and Cross-Cultural Review.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal & Biological Processes 64, no. 2 (2001): 93-111. Silver, Anna Krugovoy. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wiederman, Michael W. “Women, Sex, and Food: A Review of Research on Eating Disorders and Sexuality.” Journal of Sex Research 33, no. 4 (1996): 301-311. Lindsay Hogan

EBERHARDT, ISABELLE (1877-1904), nineteenthcentury traveler. Despite the briefness of her life, Eberhardt managed to transgress many boundaries. She was born into a middle-class European family but lived most of her life in northern Africa, where, disguised as a man, she wandered as a nomad. Unlike most late Victorian women, she eschewed bourgeois conventions, experimenting with drugs and sexuality and violating even the taboos of Islam, to which she converted. Her unusual life began in Geneva, Switzerland, as the illegitimate daughter of an aristocratic Lutheran German mother and a former Russian priest who had converted to Islam. Her father encouraged nonconformity and educated

ECOFEMINISM

Isabelle in chemistry, metaphysics, and foreign languages, including Arabic. As a young girl she enjoyed dressing in boy’s clothes and the freedom it allowed. During a trip to North Africa with her mother in 1897, both converted to Islam, and when her mother died, Isabelle decided to remain in her newly adopted homeland. Exploring the desert disguised as “Si Mahmoud,” a male Sufi, she traveled easily in Arabic society, even though it was known that she was really a woman. She supported herself by writing books and articles for French newspapers about the local Arabs and the colonial ruling class. In 1901 she married an Arab officer in the French colonial cavalry. Her sympathy for the plight of the Algerian people under colonial rule, as well as scandals of her reputed sexual excesses, distanced Eberhardt from most of the European community in Algeria, but she was a valued adviser to the French administration. Eberhardt felt most at home wandering the Sahara, where she sought spiritual freedom, and she was initiated into the religious confraternity of the Qadiriyya. In her diary she wrote, “A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.” Unlike many of her Victor¬ ian contemporaries, Eberhardt didn’t perpetuate a myth of the “Orient” as exotic or inferior to the West. Instead, she tried to understand and immerse herself in its landscape and culture—although she was unable to conform to all of the rules of Islam, as exhibited by her marital infidelities and alcohol and drug use. Her unconventional life came to an ironic end at the age of twenty-seven. Seeking treatment for recurring malaria in a hospital on the edge of the Sahara, she died when a flash flood struck, swallowed up by the very

133

subordination and oppression of women in patriarchal societies and that the only way to improve the situation of one is to improve the situation of the other. Ecofeminists also agree that women play an important role in the transition to a more equitable and sustainable society. The term “ecofeminism” was first used by the French feminist Franqoise d’Eaubonne in her article Le feminisme ou la mort (1974; Eng. trans., Feminism or Death, 1980), and ecofeminism emerged as a movement in the mid-1970s, almost simultaneously in locations around the world. It drew on, among others, second wave feminism, the green movement, and the antinuclear and peace movements for inspiration. Ecofeminism takes elements from all of these

desert she so loved. [See also Literature, subentry Personal and Private Narratives.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eberhardt, Isabelle. The Passionate Nomad: The Diary of Isabelle Eberhardt. Translated by Nina de Voogd and edited by Rana Kabbani. London: Virago, 1988. Kobak, Annette. Isabelle: The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt. New York: Knopf, 1989. Mackworth, Cecily. The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt. New York: Ecco Press, 1975. Julie Anne Taddeo

ECOFEMINISM. Ecofeminism is not a single unified ideology, but rather a broad spectrum of theory and activ¬ ism that ranges from academic and theoretical debates in the United States to local grassroots movements in Africa or South Asia. Despite the diversity of methods and ideas, most ecofeminists agree that there is a strong connection between the exploitation of the natural world and the

Green Belt Movement. Kenya’s assistant minister for environment, the Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, participates in a cere¬ mony to plant trees in Sabatia forest, Eldama Ravine, Kenya, November 2006. REUTERS/Antony Gitonga

134

ECOFEMINISM

other movements while challenging them to go further in their critiques of patriarchal societies. Early on, ecofeminism was concerned mainly with the problems facing women in highly developed societies and hence was articulated mostly by feminists in the United States and Europe. In the 1990s, however, in response to critiques of its Northern focus, ecofeminists began to focus more on the situation of poor, marginalized women around the world as well as the problems caused by ecologically unsound and unsustain¬ able development. Recent work has also focused on the ways in which ecofeminism can better address the multiple oppressions through race, class, and gender, as well as pursuing more multicultural perspectives. Theories and Philosophies of Ecofeminism. Despite the plurality of ecofeminist philosophies, there are two major strands of ecofeminist theory: the affinity, or spiritual, strand, and the social construction strand. Although both groups ultimately hope to achieve a similar goal in the sense that they both seek to overturn the oppressive domination of patriarchal societies, their methods and practices are very different. Some of the major sources of debate between the different ecofeminist philo¬ sophies are the extent to which women have an essential and privileged connection to nature, the connections between feminism and the environment, and the extent to which ecofeminism interrogates the material imbalances created by Western patriarchal society. Spiritual ecofeminism has developed as a discourse that presupposes and emphasizes women’s essential and holistic connection to nature. Ecofeminist spirituality is an earthbased spirituality that draws on mythologies and traditions that emphasize women’s power, including tribal religions, paganism, and goddess worship. The goddess is often used as a symbol for female power, the reversal of patriarchal control, and the celebration of women’s bodies. Charlene Spretnak and Starhawk are two ecofeminists who have pro¬ moted earth-based spirituality in the ecofeminist movement, arguing that spirituality can provide a source of energy and empowerment for political action. Earth-based spirituality also emphasizes the interconnectedness of humans and nature, particularly focusing on women’s elemental power and understanding of nature. Other ecofeminists who particularly explore the connections between women and nature are Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, and Andree Collard, who argue that women’s relationship with nature is defined through their bodies, as sexual beings and mothers. The concept of affinity, which emerges from these womannature connections, is one of the central components of spiritual ecofeminism and also one of the most debated. Affinity ecofeminists tend to see irreconcilable biological and cosmological differences between men and women, while at the same time arguing that there is an essential affinity between women and nature. They often describe

women’s experiences as universal, maintaining that all women are united by a common identity of the mother. They argue that women’s universal experience of oppres¬ sion by the patriarchy then makes them more sensitive to the oppression of nature. The strongest opposition of affinity ecofeminism comes from social and socialist eco¬ feminists who take a postmodern view that nature and gender roles are socially constructed—in other words, not rooted in a biological or essential proclivity. Ynestra King, Carolyn Merchant, and Mary Mellor are prominent socia¬ list ecofeminists who support the view that the domination of women and nature has been socially constructed while still acknowledging the centrality of women’s experience with nature to ecofeminist thought. Socialist ecofeminists, who often come out of a Marxist tradition, or have formu¬ lated ecofeminist critiques of Marxism, argue in addition that nature and humans are both active agents in a dialec¬ tical relationship. In her book Feminism and Ecology, Mary Mellor writes, A materialist ecofeminist identification of women and nature is not based on an essential affinity, but reflects women’s role as mediators of hu(man) society. It is not women’s identity with “nature” either as biology or ecology that should form the basis of ecofeminism, but a material analysis of the way in which male domination is created and sustained (1997).

While affinity ecofeminists may celebrate or promote the nature-culture dualisms of the Western philosophical tradition, socialist ecofeminists tend to interrogate them, arguing that the patriarchal hierarchy has associated women with nature in order to maintain their subordination. Ecofeminist philosophers, along with social ecofeminists, have been some of the most active scholars to enter into the discourse of ecofeminism, particularly in their critiques of environmental movements, deep ecology, and femin¬ ism. In particular Karen J. Warren, Jim Cheney, and Val Plumwood have written extensively on ecofeminism’s con¬ ceptual framework and the relationships between ecofe¬ minism and other feminist or ecological philosophies by showing how the logic of domination is present both in the domination of women by men and the domination of nature by humans. They challenge environmentalists and ecologists to become more aware of gendered hier¬ archies, while challenging feminists to become more ecologically aware. There are several ecofeminists who attempt to bridge the gap between spiritual and social ecofeminism, includ¬ ing Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, whose 1993 book, Ecofeminism, argues for attention to be paid to the material situations of women, especially women in the Third World, whose very lives are threatened by ecological disasters in the form of air and water pollution or Western development practices. This argument is also partly in answer to a

ECOFEMINISM

critique of ecofeminism for its Eurocentric or Western con¬ ception of oppression, which often excludes Third World women’s concerns and gives primacy to gender oppression at the expense of race and class oppression. Mies and Shiva highlight the commonalities of women around the world, arguing that they “share common concerns that emerge from an invisible global politics in which women world¬ wide are enmeshed in their everyday life.” The most recent scholarship on ecofeminism is examining the interconnec¬ tions of gender, race, and class oppression with that of the natural environment, specifically looking at development, globalization, and non-Western ecofeminist concerns. Ecofeminism and Environmental Activism. One of the important aspects of ecofeminist thought is that women have a much different relationship to the environment than men do, in that they are the ones who are most affected by ecological disasters and environmentally devastating devel¬ opment practices. This became evident through several grassroots movements of the 1970s that emerged when women around the world responded to ecological disasters that were threatening their lives and families. Ecological threats from nuclear accidents and toxic waste helped galvanize the peace and ecofeminist movements in Europe and the United States through grassroots activism, but in fact some of the strongest and most well-known activist movements are in South Asia and Africa, with the Chipko and Green Belt movements. There has also been extensive local grassroots activism in South America, Africa, and Asia, where women fight against environmental pollution and destructive development practices. In many ways ecofeminist grassroots activism has had as much of an impact on the movement as ecofeminist scholarship and theory. In the United States, ecofeminist activism was galvanized by two ecological catastrophes: the nuclear reactor acci¬ dent at Three Mile Island in 1978 and the Love Canal disaster. Love Canal was a working-class neighborhood near Niagara Falls in New York State that, unknown to the residents, had been a dumping ground for chemical waste for several decades. Lois Gibbs, one of the residents, became concerned by the unusually high number of medi¬ cal problems occurring in children in the neighborhood as well as a high number of miscarriages and birth defects. After galvanizing the support of other women in the neighborhood, Lois Gibbs led a two-year campaign for relocation. Government officials at first refused to accept her claims, calling her a “hysterical housewife,” but when her activism became more radical, people began to take notice. In 1981 Gibbs set up a national network called the Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW), which helps local communities clean up toxic waste. As in the Love Canal case, the Chipko movement in the Indian Himalayas was started in the early 1970s by local

135

women who were the most affected by the ecological con¬ sequences of an environmental policy of commercial forest development that threatened their livelihood as well as causing soil erosion. The name Chipko comes from the Hindi word for “hugging” and describes the way that the Himalayan women hugged trees to prevent them from being cut down. In many ways the movement symbolizes Third World women’s struggle against destructive international development as well as demonstrating the intimate relation¬ ship between poor women and the environment in many subsistence-level communities. It was also the major influ¬ ence on the prominent ecofeminist writer and theorist Vandana Shiva, who works on issues of “maldevelopment” and biotechnology in India. A third impressive grassroots ecofeminist movement is the Green Belt movement in Kenya. Launched in 1977 by Professor Wangari Maathai of the National Council of Women of Kenya, who was influenced by the British eco¬ logical critic Barbara Ward, the movement encourages women to plant trees in rural areas to solve the fuel problem, prevent deforestation and soil erosion, and provide employment to women. In a 1994 speech at Radcliffe College, Maathai stated, The women of the Green Belt Movement have learned about the causes and the symptoms of environmental degradation. They have begun to appreciate that they, rather than their government, ought to be the custodians of the environment (www.greenbeltmovement.org).

This radical movement challenges the conception and practice of unsustainable development in Kenya, but while it began as a local initiative in Kenya, the Green Belt movement has both global inspirations and outcomes, as women around the world promote greening programs in their local communities. In 2004 Maathai received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in the movement and for her contributions to sustainable development, peace, and democracy. There are many more grassroots movements around the world that have been created by local women seeking to protect their local environments from destruction. In almost every case, women’s survival is at risk when their environments are destroyed through unsustainable devel¬ opment practices, deforestation, pollution of air and water, or simply through the violence with which destruction takes place. One of the important aspects of the ecofeminist movement is the way that theory and activism influence each other. In each of the three cases above, local women’s responses to ecological threats greatly influenced ecological theory. A similar situation is happening as ecofeminists and women at the local level are working to create alternatives to unsustainable development. Organizations like DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era)

136

ECOFEMINISM

and WED (Women, Environment and Development) have attempted to address the problems in the patriarchal power structure of traditional development that excludes women and nature from the conception of development. Ecofeminists are also addressing issues such as reproductive technologies and biotechnologies that continue to margin¬ alize poor rural women. As the philosopher Karen J. Warren has pointed out, ecofeminism is not just one idea, but is rather an umbrella term for a large body of theories and practices that seek to identify and overturn the hierarchical dualisms of the Wes¬ tern patriarchy that subordinate both women and nature. The debates within ecofeminism over whether women have an essential connection to nature and their role in the rela¬ tionship between man and nature will likely continue for many years. But what is undeniable for ecofeminists is that women are disproportionately affected by ecological disas¬ ters and unsustainable development practices. Although recent work has begun to address issues of gender, race, and class and the ways that harmful environmental and ecological practices continue to threaten the lives and welfare of women and children in non-Western countries, there is much more work to be done. Few ecofeminist the¬ orists have so far addressed issues of development and the material implications of globalization or found use¬ ful links between the spiritual and material aspects of ecofeminism. While the diversity of opinion and practice in the ecofeminist movement is in many ways one of its strong points, as the movement continues to address issues on a global scale, it would be useful to see more dialogue and debate about ecofeminism on both the global and the local level, further connecting grassroots activism with philosophy and spirituality. What is clear, however, is that ecofeminism is a strong movement with a very diverse body of participants that has grown and adapted over the past three decades and continues to address new challenges and debates from around the world. [See also Kelly, Petra.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

d’Eaubonne, Franqoise. “Feminism or Death.” In New French Fem¬ inisms, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Ar¬ ticle translated from the French by Betty Schmitz. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. English translation of “Le feminisme ou la mort,” first published in 1974. D’Eaubonne is credited as the first person to use the term “ecofeminsm” in this article. Diamond, Irene, and Gloria Feman Orenstein, eds. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990. One of the earliest edited collections of eco¬ feminist writings with a good variety of themes and authors. Eaton, Heather, and Lois Ann Lorentzen, eds. Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion. Lanham, Md.: Rowan and Littlefield, 2003. A good edited collection that

brings in perspectives on globalization and development from ecofeminists around the world. Mellor, Mary. Feminism and Ecology. New York: New York Uni¬ versity Press, 1997. The best overview of the debates and theories behind ecofeminism until the mid-1990s, although it has little on the problems of women in the Third World. Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. Atlantic High¬ lands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1993. This book brings together ecofe¬ minist perspectives from Germany and India, focusing especially on the problems of development and the crisis of science. Plant, Judith, ed. Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989. An early anthology of ecofeminist writings, especially focusing on ecofeminist spirituality. Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ed. Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996. An anthology that examines Third World women’s perspectives on ecofeminism. Warren, Karen J., ed. Ecological Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1994. A collection of philosophical texts that addresses the basic questions of ecofeminist philosophy. Warren, Karen J., ed. Ecological Feminist Philosophies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. An edited collection that gives a good overview of ecofeminist theory and philosophical debates. Darcie

S.

Fontaine

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. Economic develop¬ ment became a prominent field after World War II in connection with the prospects of what came to be called underdeveloped, decolonizing, developing, or Third World countries. Between the 1950s and the 1980s a number of theories of economic development and various policy strategies emerged, and the growth of “development studies” reflected cross-disciplinary interest in the subject. Themes included the role of agriculture and industrialization in eco¬ nomic growth, rural-urban labor migration, employment cre¬ ation, population dynamics, poverty alleviation, and “human capital” formation through education. In the early decades women were not regarded as agents of or participants in development, but the 1970s saw the emergence of the field of women in development (WID). Since the 1980s women’s role and gender dynamics have become a significant part of the discourse and policies of economic development. The World Bank, for example, shifted from a neglect of women’s roles in the early decades to an emphasis after the 1990s on the importance of ending gender gaps in education and enhancing women’s economic participation. In tandem with changes in theories and policies of eco¬ nomic development, the field of women in development has evolved, with distinct or overlapping fields known as women and development (WAD), gender and development (GAD), the efficiency approach, the empowerment ap¬ proach, and mainstreaming gender equality. Over the dec¬ ades various WID or gender analysis policy frameworks have been used, such as the Harvard Analytical Framework,

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

the Moser Framework, the Gender Analysis Matrix (GAM), the Capacities and Vulnerabilities Analysis Framework, the Women’s Empowerment (Longwe) Framework, and the Social Relations Approach.

From Welfare and Motherhood to Women and Devel¬ opment. When theories of economic development were emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, little or no attention was paid to women. If women were discussed at all in policy circles, it was in relation to their role as mothers, an approach that came to be known as the welfare or motherhood approach. Development was still considered a technical problem lacking political or ideological dimensions. Women and children were regarded as real or potential victims of the disruptions of development (and “modernization”); the literature thus recommended that development efforts take household welfare into account and ensure that women and children were beneficiaries of social and economic change. Here the reproductive roles of Third World women were emphasized along with issues pertaining to population, health, and nutrition. In 1970 the Danish economist Ester Boserup published a book that became a classic and gave rise to a new field of study. Woman’s Role in Economic Development described the negative consequences of development projects on women and families. Drawing on her fieldwork in Africa, Boserup argued that modem development projects tended to favor men and marginalize women from economic activity. By displacing women, development projects unintentionally contributed to lower food production and household poverty. As a result development projects failed because they did not take women into account. The study interested some practitioners, policy makers, and advocates, and the U.S. Agency for International Develop¬ ment (USAID) opened an Office of Women in Development. Here the concern was to overturn the marginalization that Boserup had described and ensure that women were adequately integrated into the development process. The WID strategy focused on women as a group and sought to address the exclusion of women from the develop¬ ment process, emphasizing that if development incorpo¬ rated and included women’s productive capacity, it would be much more efficient. As such, this presaged the later “efficiency approach.” During the 1970s the field of economic development was oriented toward the achievement of “basic needs,” and WID research examined the needs of “poor women” and especially women in agricultural production. On the Left, the field was influenced by theories of development and underdevelopment associated with the Latin American “dependency school” and the Marxist approach to capital¬ ism. At the same time feminism was formulating theories of women’s subordination. Influenced by both feminist and dependency theories, some WID specialists criticized the

137

focus on integration of women into what they regarded as a flawed economic process and formulated a line of thinking that came to be known as women and development (WAD). Here emphasis was placed on international inequalities, the persistence of poverty, and the exploitation of women in capitalistic development. It was further argued that social inequalities, such as the long-standing sexual division of labor, rendered women subordinate and vulnerable to projects that did not take their interests into account. WAD emphasized that selfreliant development is not possible within established struc¬ tures, a view articulated primarily by Third World feminists. WAD took issue with large governmental projects and ad¬ vocated smaller-scale projects and local participation. In particular it called for small-scale women-only projects to ensure participation and prevent male domination. These new ideas coincided with the entrance of women into the development arena and as a subject of interest to the United Nations and its programs, funds, and specialized agencies. Issues of women in development were discussed at the First U.N. World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975 and became part of the discourse of the U.N. Decade for Women (1976-1985): Equality, Development, Peace. Universities, research institutes, international devel¬ opment agencies, and U.N. organizations began a prolific body of research on the role of women in development. WID policy frameworks, replete with checklists, were designed to ensure women’s integration in and benefits from development projects, such as the Harvard Analytical Framework.

Women, Efficiency, and Empowerment. By the late 1970s many developing countries were in debt, and the international financial institutions began to play a more visible role in directing these countries’ economic develop¬ ment strategies. Structural adjustment policies were meant to streamline government spending, but they entailed controversial changes to the role of the state and the public sector in economic planning. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund made economic policy change a condition of new loans, emphasizing efficiency and private sector growth. By the mid-1980s many development specialists recognized that structural adjustment had drastic social effects in many developing countries, resulting from the reallocation of government spending from health, education, and welfare to debt payment. Critical feminists, largely from the WAD school, began to document the adverse effects of structural adjustment policies on poor and low-income women. They noted, for example, that reduced government social spending meant additional burdens on women for the care of their family members, including children and the elderly, along with formal and informal economic activities. They empha¬ sized the onerous nature of poor women’s productive and

138

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

reproductive labor and the lack of acknowledgment of wo¬ men’s roles in sustaining households and communities. The WAD approach is evident in many U.N. documents of the time, such as the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies, which were agreed upon at the Third U.N. World Conference on Women in Kenya in 1985, as well as in the manifesto of international feminism issued by the transnational feminist network DAWN titled Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions. Though some WAD specialists continued to criticize the nature of the development process within which women were exploited, others began to highlight the importance of a gender perspective in economic theory and planning. Addressing the World Bank, development planners, and macroeconomic theorists, they developed quantitative models of gender analysis to prove the male bias in conven¬ tional theories and policies. Some also argued that adjust¬ ment policies could only fail to accomplish their goals if women and gender were not taken into account. This line of policy-oriented research came to be known as the efficiency approach. Its objective was to make a difference with policy makers, and though it came to be criticized by some feminists, it did have the desired effect of convincing the World Bank of the centrality of gender to development outcomes. The bank came to emphasize the importance of capturing women’s productive capacity, especially in regions where women’s labor is underutilized. The rationale is that development fails where it does not take advantage of the labor of half of the population, that is, the labor of women. With this approach, income-generation and microenterprise projects became a popular focus. As the efficiency approach grew in the 1990s and into the new century, the World Bank became its chief proponent, issuing many policy papers and research reports on, for example, the importance of women’s economic participation to poverty alleviation and economic competitiveness in regions such as the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. An approach that came to be known as gender and devel¬ opment (GAD) combined elements of previous approaches but emphasized the social relations of gender. GAD sees the subordinate status of women to men as determined by so¬ ciety as the core problem that needs to be addressed and believes that focusing on women in isolation does not address the power issues that are at the core of the pro¬ blem. It asserts the need to investigate relationships among gender ideology, the sexual division of labor, women’s subordination, and the operations of social, political, and economic power. In emphasizing the global diversity of wo¬ men’s experiences and interests (that is, no single “female” experience), it takes issue with “one size fits all” prescrip¬ tions and calls for careful analysis of gender relations on the ground. As with the WAD approach, GAD emphasizes

global inequalities and systemic crises and calls for women’s empowerment through collective action in feminist and grassroots women’s groups. The U.N. conferences of the 1990s, including the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, September 1995), came to incorporate and reflect the WID, WAD, GAD, and efficiency approaches. The empowerment approach fol¬ lowed from the Beijing Platform for Action’s language of women’s human rights and empowerment. The document also called for the full integration of women and gender issues in all development planning, policies, and projects to realize the goal of gender equality. Gender mainstreaming for gender equality was subsequently recognized by the ma¬ jor international development agencies of the U.N. system, including the U.N. Development Programme and the World Bank, as well as the donor agencies of the rich countries. Indeed, the third of the eight Millennium Development Goals, agreed upon by the world’s governments in 2000, calls for the achievement of gender equality through the elimination of gender disparities in education and in politi¬ cal participation. Academic and policy collections reflect the accumulated knowledge of four decades of economic development theories and policies and combine the varied approaches to women and development. Several basic themes have emerged from the literature on women and gender in development. One is that all societies exhibit a division of labor by sex, although what is consid¬ ered a male or female task may vary across time and space. Another is that gender analysis must take into account the sexual division of labor within the household as well as in production and account for women’s unpaid as well as paid work. A third is that economic development has had a differential impact on men and women, though the impact on women has tended to be conditioned by class and ethni¬ city. Finally, for women to take charge of their lives and harness the development process—as well as what is now called globalization—to their advantage, women’s grass¬ roots networks and formal organizations are needed. [See also Capitalism; Gender Gap; Globalization; Indus¬ try and Industrialization; International Women’s Confer¬ ence; Labor; United Nations; United Nations Decade for Women; and Wages.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Catagay, Niliifer, Diane Elson, and Caren Grown, eds. “Gender, Adjustment, and Macroeconomics.” World Development 23, special issue (1995). Catagay, Niliifer, Diane Elson, and Caren Grown, eds. “Gender, Macroeconomics, and Globalization.” World Development 28, special issue (2000). Jaquette, Jane S., and Gale Summerfield. Women and Gender Equity in Development Theory and Practice: Institutions, Resources, and Mobilization. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.

EDDY, MARY BAKER

Kabeer, Naila. Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Develop¬ ment Thought. London: Verso, 1994. King, Elizabeth, and Andrew Mason. Engendering Development through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001. Moghadam, Valentine M. Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Moghadam, Valentine M. Women, Work, and Economic Reform in the Middle East and North Africa. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998. Momsen, Janet Henshall. Gender and Development. New York: Routledge, 2004. Rathgeber, Eva M. “WID, WAD, GAD: Trends in Research and Practice.” Journal of Developing Areas 24, no. 4 (1990): 489-502. Sen, Gita, and Caren Grown. Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives. New York: Monthly Review, 1987. Tinker, Irene, ed. Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. World Bank. Improving Women’s Lives: World Bank Actions since Beijing. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2005. Valentine M. Moghadam

EDDY, MARY BAKER (1821-1910), founder of the religious healing movement Christian Science. During the last decades of the nineteenth century Eddy rose to national prominence in the United States as the author of the Christian Science textbook Science and Health (1875), founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist (1879), and fig¬ urehead for the medicoreligious movement of Christian Science. Noted for a radical theological affirmation of the goodness of reality and a denial of the existence of sin, sickness, and death, Eddy and her movement exerted a highly influential but intensely polarizing influence on American religious and medical history. Hounded by physicians for their healing practices, attacked by competing religious healers, and pilloried in press and pulpit, Christian Scientists learned to survive and to fight back. But, owing to her prominence within the movement and her visibility outside it, Eddy became the focal point for many personal attacks against her character and the supposedly ludicrous and dangerous nature of Christian Science beliefs and practices. In the face of this hostile, antifemale environment, often faced by women willing to venture onto America’s public stage, Eddy and her followers mounted a vigorous defense, actively proselytized for their beliefs, and legally defended their practices. Bom in Bow, New Hampshire, Mary Morse Baker studied at Sanbornton Academy in 1842 and with the mental healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in 1862 and 1864. When she spontaneously recovered from a severe

139

injury in 1866, Eddy believed that she had discovered the key to Jesus’s healing miracles, and with this sign of her divine calling she embarked on a career of healing and teaching that culminated in the establishment of the Christian Science movement. Science and Health went through numerous editions in Eddy’s lifetime and bears the strong imprint of her ex¬ periences with homeopathy, mesmerism, Quimbyism, and Victorian Christianity. She taught a radical idealism— only God, his manifestations, and synonyms that express the attributes and completeness of his nature exist; all else, especially body, matter, death, error, and evil are merely illusions. Healing is the experience of physical and spiritual wholeness that follows from a recognition of these truths. Eddy founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881 to educate students in the theory and practice of Christian Science healing and encouraged the graduate practitioners to spread her teachings and establish profes¬ sions as religions healers. For most of her career she focused her own efforts on teaching, writing, and creating the orga¬ nizational structures and personal legacy that would secure the future of her movement. Controversies stimulated by Eddy’s healing ministry and her alleged plagiarism and immorality mounted both from within and outside the movement in the 1870s and 1880s and led her in 1889 to retreat from public life for nearly three years. On her return she managed the complete reorganization of her movement and charted its future course. She centralized church organization in Boston under a mother church and an official board of directors, and she founded the Christian Science Publish¬ ing Society to spearhead worldwide evangelism through the printed word, including the Christian Science Monitor, which was founded in 1908. Despite continued legal chal¬ lenges to the practice of Christian Science healing, under the direction of these new initiatives membership grew rap¬ idly, the movement expanded worldwide, and the historical prominence of this remarkable American medicoreligious innovator became well established.

[See also Religion.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gill, Gillian. Mary Baker Eddy. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1998. Insightful feminist portrait. Schoepflin, Rennie B. Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Exploration of Eddy, her movement, and American attitudes toward religious healing. Thomas, Robert David. “With Bleeding Footsteps”: Mary Baker Eddy’s Path to Religious Leadership. New York: Knopf, 1994. Outstanding psychobiography. Rennie B. Schoepflin

140

EDUCATION: Overview

EDUCATION This entry consists of four subentries: Overview Comparative History Elementary and Secondary Institutions Higher Education Institutions

Overview Historically, opportunities for girls to acquire an education have lagged behind those for boys owing to entrenched cultural attitudes that girls required less book learning given their future role in society. Paradoxically, the expand¬ ing educational possibilities available to girls often began precisely because reformers wanted better-educated wives and mothers, women who could raise their children with the appropriate religious, moral, and, eventually, civic values. This was as true in Confucian China as in the Christian West. Initiatives to improve girls’ education began in the early modern period in Europe in the context of the Enlightenment and of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. The impact of intellectual calls for more ser¬ ious education and the development of private religious and charitable schools had an impact not only on European countries, but also on the North American continent, Africa, and Asia, thanks to the arrival of missionary and religious teachers. With the rise of public educational sys¬ tems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, public girls’ schools increasingly replaced private schools, often in the context of an ideological debate over who should control access to women’s minds—the church or the state. For most of the early modern and modern periods, separate schools for boys and girls were the rule, since it was assumed that the sexes needed different lessons to become honest, hard-working men and devout, obedient women. These gendered assumptions changed, however, often thanks to transnational discussions, so that coeducation gradually has become the norm throughout the world. The generalization of coeducation and a seemingly more gender-neutral vision of education has not changed the fact that schools continue to shape distinct gender identities, and that in the developing world girls often have fewer educational opportunities than do boys, especially in Africa. Religious and Charitable Initiatives in the Early Modern Period. In Europe Catholic religious orders, and particularly French orders, played an important role in the provision of schooling for both wealthy and poor girls. These orders included the Ursulines (founded in 1535 in Italy), the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (founded in 1611 by Mary Ward [1585-1645]), the Sisters of Charity (founded in 1633 by Saint Vincent de Paul [1581-1660]),

and the Ladies of Saint-Maur (initially founded in 1670 as a charitable institute in Rouen, France), whose Parisian branch split and became independent in 1691. The institu¬ tional structure of these orders facilitated their growth throughout Europe and into North America. Offering a range of services—free schools for the poor and boarding schools for the wealthy, as well as health care for the impoverished—nuns dominated educational provi¬ sions for girls in Catholic countries as well as in many German states. The lessons they provided varied according to social class, but religious values dominated for wealthy and poor alike. In England, Scotland, and Wales, charity schools for both girls and boys began to spread during the eighteenth century, thanks to the efforts of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK; founded in 1698). By the 1750s Quakers and Unitarians were also active in setting up both fee-paying and free schools. The curriculum differed little from that of Catholic schools: girls were offered lessons in the rudiments, religion, and needlework; character formation was the primary goal of this education. Schools for wealthy girls also provided lessons in the humanities, excluding the study of Latin and Greek, some sciences, and the arts, but the goal was rarely to form learned women; such women generally acquired their learning at home. Missionary and Colonial Education. Religious and private initiatives helped spread girls’ education beyond western Europe in the early modern period. In the seventeenth century groups of religious women settled in Canada, most notably Marie de l’lncarnation (1599-1672), an Ursuline who taught both French and native Indian girls in the Quebec wilderness as early as 1639; in 1727 the first Ursulines settled in New Orleans; a decade later a group set off for Pondicherry in India; and in 1751, the Ursulines settled in Brazil. The concern to improve the lot of women was present in most European imperialist adventures from the early modern period onward. Both Protestant mission¬ ary groups and Catholic religious orders were at the fore¬ front of these initiatives to spread religious values, and also to inculcate habits of domestic order in addition to the rudiments. In many ways the “civilizing” impulse of mis¬ sionary or colonial schools echoed that of charity and free schools for the European poor. The Rise of Public Educational Structures. The emer¬ gence of public educational systems in the modern period added another layer of educational institutions for girls, although often with a time lag compared to boys’ schools. State investment in public schools bore the marks of different ideological motivations—the concern to have a literate hard-working workforce, the concern to form patriotic future citizens, the concern to reduce public immorality, the concern to wrest girls from the arms of the church—but the ultimate result was the emergence of public systems of education that offered schooling to both

EDUCATION: Comparative History

boys and girls from the ages of six to twelve by 1900. This increased provision of public schooling, which ex¬ tended to high schools and even higher education in Western Europe, North America, and Australia, did not fundamentally alter the messages that girls received in their education, even when religious lessons vanished from the curriculum, as they did in France and Italy. Indeed, nineteenth-century domestic ideology permeated all levels of education for girls, teaching both the wealthy and the poor that a woman’s most important role was as wife and mother. This justified the fact that public secondary girls’ schools most often failed to provide training in Latin and Greek, which was required to pursue studies at a higher level. Feminist reformers pressured authorities in many countries to expand the scope of middle-class girls’ education in order to offer women the opportunity to acquire professional competencies. The rise of public school systems occurred far later in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, since it followed the decolonization process, but in these regions female illiteracy has remained very high as families continue to fail to send their daughters to school, and the gap between female and male illiteracy persists. In nonurban societies where female labor for domestic chores is in high demand, where there are traditions of early marriage and childbear¬ ing, and where public schools are few and far between, girls’ education is often a low priority. Generally, however, the existence of either missionary or colonial girls’ schools from times before independence explains the relatively high literacy rates in certain countries, such as in Botswana (where cattle herding is done primarily by boys, giving girls a comparative advantage in attending schools) or Senegal (where girls are enrolled more in private Catholic schools than in public schools). In poorer countries throughout the world, international initiatives to battle illiteracy have recently encountered criticism concerning their adverse effects on girls. World Bank initiatives pushing for literacy drives and informal education have had the effect of leaving girls outside of the educational system particularly when the onus for bringing girls to schools is placed on families rather than the government. The Triumph of Coeducation. Although mixed-sex schools existed throughout the early modern period, particularly in rural areas where maintaining two schools was financially impossible, the spread of such schools only occurred in most countries over the course of the twentieth century. The United States led the way in introducing coeducation, especially in the north and west. By the 1890s most American school children were in coeducational schools. Elsewhere, the triumph of coeducation occurred as a product of various forces: egalitarian discourses among educational reformers seeking to provide the same oppor¬ tunities for girls as existed for boys, the concern to pacify

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relations between the sexes through commingling on school benches, but above all pragmatic economic reasoning and nationalistic concerns for the creation of productive citizens. With the democratization of secondary education following World War II and the consequent imperative to build new schools, most administrators recognized it was far cheaper to unite boys and girls in the same school rather than maintain separate institutions. As a result, throughout most of the world (excepting much of Africa and the Arab nations) coeducation has become the rule, rather than the exception, in both elementary and secondary schooling. The triumph of coeducation has not, however, eliminated gendered differences in the educational experience and, indeed, in certain parts of the world, conservative religious forces, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, have targeted coeducation in order to deprive girls of an education. [See also Christianity; Imperialism and Colonialism; Literacy and Numeracy; Missionaries; Religion; World Religions; and entries on countries and regions mentioned in this article.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eisenmann, Linda, ed. Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Fass, Paula A., ed. Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: In History and Society. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004. The entries on coeducation, education, and girls’ schools offer perspectives mainly on the United States and Europe, but other continents are mentioned as well. Includes primary sources and illustrations. Rogers, Rebecca. “Learning to be Good Girls and Women: Educa¬ tion, Training, and Schools.” In The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700, edited by Deborah Simonton, pp. 93-133. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. A com¬ parative European perspective on girls’ education that includes information on colonial schools. Stock, Phyllis. Better Than Rubies: A History of Women’s Educa¬ tion. New York: Putnam, 1978. Although dated, this general presentation of the topic offers useful insights into the debates about girls’ education throughout Europe from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Walter, Lynn, ed. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Women’s Issues Worldwide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Separate volumes cover Asia and Oceania, Central and South America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, North America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa. Education is mentioned in each volume, but the division by individual country and the focus on the very recent past makes it less useful for an historical overview. Rebecca Rogers

Comparative History Over the course of the past two centuries the overall devel¬ opment of modern educational systems has enabled more and more girls and women to acquire fundamental literacy skills as well as more advanced education. For feminists,

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EDUCATION: Comparative History

both in the past and today, access to education is often seen as the essential first step in achieving autonomy. This access, however, is uneven throughout the world as UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cul¬ tural Organization) statistics from 2000 testify. Developed countries are estimated to have achieved 98 percent female literacy rates while in developing countries these rates are only 66 percent. Among developing countries, however, there are significant differences: the lowest rates are found in southern and western Asia (43.6 percent), fol¬ lowed by the Arab countries (47.8 percent), sub-Saharan Africa (52 percent), eastern and Pacific Asia (80.6 percent), and Latin America and the Caribbean (87.9 percent). Not surprisingly, male literacy rates are superior to female liter¬ acy rates worldwide. While statisticians debate the methods and criteria used to determine what constitutes literacy, historians also argue about the meanings of literacy. Should literacy be perceived as an index of civilization at the very heart of the process of modernity? Or is there a “literacy myth” about the importance of literacy as an indicator of modernity that has been promoted by historians and social scientists seeking to pattern cultural development over time? Skepticism concerning the transformative nature of literacy has increasingly gained ground, but still the fact that literacy rates for women and girls continue to lag behind those for men and boys in certain regions does speak tell¬ ingly to the nature of educational development in the mod¬ ern period. The reluctant and uneven inclusion of girls in emerging educational systems has left its traces, most obvi¬ ously in areas where states demonstrated a reluctant com¬ mitment to providing schooling for all. Despite the tardy provision of girls’ schooling in compar¬ ison to boys’ schooling, more informal modes of education allowed remarkable women writers or poets to leave their creative mark throughout the world prior to the emergence of modern institutions. Among the upper classes, court or salon culture often provided women with the intellectual nourishment necessary for their creative entreprises. This was the case for Zeb-un-Nissa (1638-1701), the eldest daughter of Aurangzeb, the last of the major Mughal rulers of India, recognized for her poetry in Persian and Arabic, as well as for the brilliant French-speaking Swiss writer Germaine de Stael (1766-1817), who grew up in Paris in the heady environment provided by the salon of her mother, Suzannne Cucherod Necker. In Berlin, the salon of Rahel Varnhagen (born Levin; 1771-1833) offered a cultural setting for both men and women writers and poets. More woman-oriented gatherings, such as the female poetry clubs that flourished in late Ming China or the Blue¬ stockings in England, allowed the poet Hsu Ts’an (c. 1610after 1677) and the essayist Hannah More (1745-1835) to acquire literary reputations. In general, the ability to travel or to assemble with like-minded men and women was

a necessary precondition for women writers or poets to acquire the education necessary to leave their mark. By the early modern period informal associations existed in most major cities offering women the sorts of opportunities to make their voices heard. The Rise of State Involvement in Education (Europe and North America). In Europe the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries promoted an abstract ideal of learning that provided an impetus for reform. Moreover, the French Revolution, and its ramifications thanks to the Napoleonic occupation of much of Europe, generated many debates about the purpose and organiza¬ tion of elementary education. Increasingly, the provision of schooling and the diffusion of literacy were seen as critical in the development of modern states. Prussia was precocious in this process, legislating a system of elementary education as early as 1717. The northern countries quickly followed suit, and even Portugal adopted a blueprint for reform with the Marquis de Pombal’s legislation on elementary education in 1772. The spread of universal, compulsory elementary education throughout Europe only occurred in the final third of the nineteenth century, and even then, many countries took decades to implement these reforms. Not surprisingly, girls’ attendance in the schools that proliferated after mid-century tended to fall behind that of boys except when employment opportunities for boys encouraged truancy. The presence of schools was rarely sufficient to generate a demand for schooling; families needed to perceive schooling as useful in order for regular attendance to become generalized. Most contemporaries perceived the advantages of girls’ schooling as lying less in the acquisition of literacy than in the inculcation of religious lessons as well as basic domestic skills. As Napoleon Bonaparte argued in 1807: “In a public institution for demoiselles religion is a serious matter; whatever else may be said about it, it is the surest guarantee for mothers and for husbands. Make believers of them, not reasoners” (quoted in R. Rogers, Les demoiselles de la Legion d’honneur. Les maisons d’education de la Legion d’honneur au XIXe siecle, Paris, Perrin, 2006, p. 332). Only gradually did book learning acquire value for girls and their families. In Europe and North America, secular and religious authorities cooperated throughout much of the nineteenth century in providing schooling for boys and girls. For the latter, religious authorities frequently dominated educa¬ tional offerings at both the elementary and secondary level because churches were far better organized than most states in raising the money necessary to open separate girls’ day and boarding schools, keeping in mind that most countries practiced a rigorous separation of the sexes. Although the trend was for states to gradually structure a national system of education, in practice this involved granting churches a significant role within that system. In Prussia, where the

EDUCATION: Comparative History

Allgemeines Landrecht (General State Law) of 1794 asserted the authority of the state over nationwide elementary schools, the Protestant church nonetheless controlled the school in¬ spectorate and influenced the daily curriculum in the Volksschule (literally, people’s school), which provided primary education. Girls were not always included in the initial laws, however, as in France where the first major edu¬ cational law (the Guizot law of 1833) only mentioned boys’ schools. The provision of schooling for all classes of society and both sexes really only triumphed at the end of the nine¬ teenth century and often more in theory than in practice. Generalized elementary education. The growth of public school systems undoubtedly contributed to female literacy and opened up employment opportunities for women in the service sector, most notably as schoolteachers. The focus of elementary schooling was, however, moral training. In the United States, the “common school” refers to the public school system that became organized after about 1830. Educational reformers such as Horace Mann (1796-1859) and Henry Barnard (1811-1900) included girls in their concern to provide knowledge and moral train¬ ing for future citizens. And although they imagined a woman’s world as a domestic one, they also pushed for the creation of normal schools and state-supported teacher education, which attracted many women stu¬ dents. By 1880 women represented 80 percent of elemen¬ tary teachers nationwide. Although compulsory school attendance in the United States was determined on a stateby-state basis, girls clearly took advantage of schooling in common schools where expenses were supported by the public. By 1900 most European states had legislated free compulsory elementary education—in 1842 with the Elem¬ entary Education Act in Sweden, in 1857 with the Moyano law in Spain (it took almost a century to make the provi¬ sions operational), in 1871 in the new German Empire, in 1881-1882 with the Ferry laws in France, and in 1891 in England—although not always with much practical success. In some countries, the development of statesupported elementary education was also accompanied by the concern to wrest girls’ education from the hands of religious orders, as in France and Italy. But despite the secular or religious nature of this education, the principle of compulsory schooling contributed to the grow¬ ing equality of the sexes, especially in terms of the teach¬ ing of reading and writing. At the elementary level, gender differences in curriculum were relatively minimal, although, naturally, schoolbooks as well as the inevitable lessons in knitting and sewing powerfully contributed to conditioning girls for their domestic futures. With the growth in the number of schools for both boys and girls, European states also invested in teacher training. In many countries women quickly dominated in their roles as teachers within these schools and within the elementary

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school profession as a whole. The high percentage of female schoolteachers in the United States by 1880 was not an isolated phenomenon. In Wales 60 percent of elementary schoolteachers were women as early as 1877, and, by the turn of the century, the figures for women were 66 percent in Sweden, 63-65 percent in Italy, 80 percent in Canada, and 70-75 percent in Russia. But such high percentages were not universal. Differing levels of feminization were the product of many factors: economic conditions, law, religion, cultural traditions, gender ideologies, length of schooling, the existence of single-sex schools, urbanization, and even war. In Germany, for example, only 20.9 percent of full-time elementary teachers were women in 1911 because of government willingness to spend money on male teachers in a country where teaching had become a male career. In France and Belgium, where single-sex schools continued to exist, elementary-school teachers were rela¬ tively evenly divided between men and women. Nonetheless, despite varying degrees in the feminization of the elementary school profession by 1900, state involvement in education had provided the means for most school-age girls in western Europe and North America to acquire the tools of literacy. Secondary and higher education. At the turn of the century, female access to secondary or higher education remained very limited in most countries outside the United States. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the classand gender-based division of schools had not significantly changed in most countries. Secondary education (and ipso facto higher education) was restricted to a relatively small social elite. While the number and variety of girls’ secondary schools developed between 1800 and 1900, they tended to offer a distinctly feminine curriculum aimed at producing good wives and mothers. European states invested in boys’ secondary education, following the model provided by Napoleon in 1802 when he created a system of public secondary schools, while girls’ institutions were generally the product of private initiatives and religious orders in Catholic countries. The creation of Napoleon’s schools for the daughters of the Legion of Honor was an exceptional instance of governmental support for girls’ secondary education in the early 1800s. State investment in the development of girls’ secondary education only occurred in a few countries toward the end of the nineteenth century. The French led the way with the Camille See law of 1880, which created public secondary schools for girls that offered a five-year curriculum. A year later, Belgium created similar three-year public institutions for girls. But elsewhere a more common trend was to allow girls to attend existing boys’ schools: boys’ schools were opened to girls in 1871 in the Netherlands and in 1880 in Portugal. In Italy and Spain girls began quietly to attend boys’ schools in the 1880s. Italy in the 1920s, under Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), and Spain in the 1930s, under

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EDUCATION: Comparative History

Francisco Franco (1892-1975), initiated single-sex public schools for girls, raising intriguing questions about the “progressive” nature of state investment in girls’ secondary education. In Germany, where private high schools for girls flourished in the nineteenth century, the state only began to intervene through mandated curricula in the early twen¬ tieth century, while in Austria a standardized six-year program was established with the “provisional statute” of December 1900. The progress of coeducation in American high schools by the second half of the nineteenth century and the high numbers of girls attending these schools—in 1900, 58 percent of public high school students were girls—suggests that in many countries the decision to promote girls’ secondary education through the creation of distinct schools may have limited girls’ access to this schooling given the cost involved in building and running separate schools. Moreover, separate institutions for boys and girls often made girls’ access to qualifying exams for university study more difficult. In France girls’ public sec¬ ondary schools only began to prepare their pupils to pass the secondary school-leaving certificate, the baccalaureat, in 1924 thanks to the Berard law, and in 1938 girls still comprised only 36 percent of the total public secondary school population. As long as secondary education remained restricted to a wealthy few, a situation that prevailed in Europe until well after 1945, access to this education remained heavily tipped in favor of boys. Social democratiza¬ tion and gender equality progressed together. In North America the expansion of the educational system benefited girls and women far earlier than in Europe, as foreign visitors noted with much amazement over the course of the nineteenth century. The first women to enter higher education did so as early as 1837 when Oberlin College (originally the Oberlin Collegiate Institute) admitted its first women students. In North America, as in Great Britain, women’s access to higher education was also provided thanks to the founding of single-sex colleges. Institutions such as Vassar College (opened 1865; originally the Vassar Female College) in the United States, Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada (opened 1873; originally the Mount Saint Vincent Academy), and Queen Margaret University (opened 1883; originally Queen Margaret Col¬ lege) in Scotland permitted middle-class women to pursue higher education in a single-sex environment less subject to moral criticism. Throughout the Western world, universities gradually opened their doors to women between roughly 1870 and 1910; in Europe Swiss universities led the way as early as 1860, welcoming large numbers of foreign women students, particularly from the Russian Empire. Still, male students far outnumbered women students in higher educa¬ tion well into the post-World War II period. Promoting Education in the Colonies. Education for girls existed within African and Indian communities, but

actual schools for girls were virtually nonexistent. As a result, British, French, and Dutch colonizers were highly critical of indigenous practices that did not conform to Western styles of education. Carried by the post-Enlightenment commitment to spreading the fruits of knowledge, Western missionaries and colonizers set up schools and promoted the “civilizing” values of Western education among native girls throughout much of Africa and Asia. Indeed, both colonial administrations and Christian mis¬ sionaries unquestioningly adopted the rhetoric of domestic ideology and sought to promote the education of “good” wives and mothers. And although European colonial politics varied in terms of advocating assimilation or association with Western cultural and administrative patterns, all agreed that women’s education was key because of the lessons they transmitted to their children. In reality, however, the task of establishing girls’ schools often took a backseat to other priorities, most notably that of training male native elites. European colonizers may have been committed to the abstract goal of spreading literacy, but the masses of illiter¬ ate boys and girls made that task in Africa unattainable in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Christian missionaries were the first to establish schools for girls, arguing for the importance of teaching indigenous women “the rules of Christian decency” (Rogers) as the Sisters of the Holy Family in Bordeaux stated with respect to their mission in Basutoland in Southern Africa in 1864. As British, French, and Belgian colonial governments sought to establish their authority over newly acquired territories, they echoed missionary attitudes about the role of women within families. Cultural imperialism blinded colonial states to the differences in social and familial conditions, which often made the domestic orientation of girls’ schooling inappropriate in Africa. In French West Africa, an adminis¬ trative entity founded in 1895, the governor-general, Ernest Roume, established a federal system of free, secular, but not compulsory, schools for Africans in 1903. The system placed elementary education at its cornerstone, but also provided for more advanced instruction within regional schools in the capital of each school region. Boys were the primary target but girls’ schools were also envisioned. In reality, however, girls’ schools were not the object of much concern until well into the period after World War I. In 1921, a survey indicated only ten public girls’ schools in an area comprising eight distinct territories with a population of about 12 million. A total of 2,477 girls benefited from some rudimen¬ tary education, but access to schooling varied widely. Girls in Dahomey (modern-day Benin) benefited from the relatively widespread existence of mission schools, and comprised fully 47 percent of all girls educated in French West Africa. The obvious failure to achieve any sort of mass literacy among either boys or girls redirected French

EDUCATION: Comparative History

145

Secondary Schools. A third-year high school student in the chemistry lab, Pocahontas County, West Virginia, October 1921. Photograph by Lewis Hine. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

educational efforts toward the training of a native elite. The 1924 development plan by the minister of colonies, Albert Saurraut, explicitly targeted native girls, arguing that only through women would French influence be able to penetrate native families. The most famous result of this orientation was the decision to create a female normal school, the Ecole normale de jeunes filles de l’Afrique Occidentale Franqaise, in Rufisque (in modern-day Senegal), in 1938 to train future schoolteachers. In northern Africa the French trod lightly with respect to the education of Muslim girls, particularly in Algeria, where the large settler population made relations with the local population more difficult than elsewhere. Nonetheless, in the early days of French colonization, a Frenchwoman, Veronique Allix-Luce, founded a “Franco-Arab” school for girls in Algiers in 1845 that received governmental sup¬ port until 1861. Here girls learned French, the rudiments of an elementary education, and handiwork—but not Catholicism. An Arab woman gave religious lessons so as not to offend Muslim sensibilities. Local Muslim opposition brought an end to this educational experiment, which pro¬ vided schooling to some one thousand young girls over its sixteen years of existence. The French then waited until 1900 to create the Ecole Millet in Tunis, the first academic primary school to depart from an artisanal model. The school, which was founded by the wife of the resident gen¬ eral, Rene Millet, offered free education “to improve the

lives of our Muslim females and to enhance French cultural influence among the natives” (Clancy-Smith, “Envision¬ ing Knowledge,” p. 107). An academic curriculum that provided lessons in French, classical Arabic, history, geo¬ graphy, and mathematics inevitably attracted girls from a bourgeois elite. In 1945 the school was transformed into a secondary school and integrated into the system of French colonial public education. Without question, how¬ ever, the focus on the elite meant that most North African girls had little access to schooling prior to independence. Elsewhere in Africa similar patterns prevailed: mission¬ aries were often the first to provide schooling for girls and colonial states often perpetuated this situation, as in the Belgian Congo in the early twentieth century. In this colony a 1948 reform sought to provide a system of education from primary through secondary schools that included limited opportunities for girls in homemaking programs or teacher training schools. In 1955, the results of this reform were heavily tipped in favor of boys: twenty-two girls’ teacher training schools educated 1,600 students, compared to 7,750 boys in similar schools. In general, indigenous cultural attitudes toward girls’ schooling determined the colonizers’ success in introducing literacy. In countries where the value of girls’ labor was low, girls often had better access to schooling, as in South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, where boys were involved in herding at an early age. The presence of single-sex schools, arising from

146

EDUCATION: Comparative History

an earlier missionary tradition, also encouraged more wide¬ spread girls’ schooling, as in Uganda and Zaire, although the general trend over the course of the twentieth century was for government schools to take over missionary ones. Ultimately, however, the high illiteracy rate for women on the eve of independence for African colonies (88.5 percent in 1960) points to the overall failure of colonial govern¬ ments to provide widespread access to schooling and to change attitudes with respect to girls’ education. British, French, and Dutch colonizers had relatively more success in the Near East, in promoting girls’ educa¬ tion, at times because of existing indigenous traditions of female education. In Java, for example, priyayi (aristocratic) society allowed women some latitude to act as cultural agents, thus explaining the Dutch romanticization of Raden Adjeng Kartini’s (1879-1904) efforts to emancipate Indonesian women. In these areas greater respect for the existing culture encouraged more flexible curricula and, notably, the use of local languages in primary schooling. In Indochina in Southeast Asia, for example, the French did not rigidly separate primary and secondary education, and they used the Annamite language in Vietnamese schools and Cambodian and Laotian in the territories where those languages were spoken. In 1944, 100,000 girls attended schools, out of a total of 850,000 pupils (12 per¬ cent). The British in India included girls’ education in their priorities from the outset. In 1850 the colonial governorgeneral, James Andrew Broun Ramsay, first Marquess of Dalhousie, endorsed the principle of girls’ education through the development of native female schools: “The importance of female education in India cannot be over¬ rated; and we have observed with pleasure the evidence which is now afforded of an increased desire on the part of many of the natives to give a good education to their daughters. By this means a far greater proportional impulse is imparted to the educational and moral tone of the people than by the education of men” (cited in Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India: The New Cambridge History of India, p.40). Although the number of girls’ schools founded was relatively small (in 1854, there were 624 schools with a total of 21,755 students), attitudes toward girls’ education began to change. Most notably, Indian reformers took up the more egalitarian messages of British feminists and pro¬ moted girls’ education as a way of achieving greater equality among the sexes. Still, in 1882, 98 percent of school-age girls did not attend schools and so the Hunter Education Commission recommended more aid for girls’ schools than for boys’. This encouraged the emergence of women reformers, such as Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), who es¬ tablished institutions for girls and made the issue of girls’ schooling a matter of public debate. The growth in the number of girls being educated was the combined result of charitable, missionary, reformist, and government initiatives.

A quantitative jump in the number of girls’ schools oc¬ curred with the Government of India Act in 1919. The act provided for $ome degree of Indian participation in policy making, such as education; between 1921 and 1931 the number of girls’ schools and colleges increased from 23,500 to 33,900, and the number of female students went from 1.4 million to 3.1 million. Naturally, of course, girls’ access to education remained heavily determined by caste, class, location, and religion. In the colonial region of Bengal, for example, local Hindu elites remained suspicious of girls’ schools because they involved modifying purdah rules, which required women to be secluded. As a result, despite ideo¬ logical support from Christian missionaries, Indian religious reformers, and British officials, female schooling remained limited at the time of Indian independence in 1947. Japanese and Chinese Women’s Education. In East Asia, Japan unquestionably led the way in providing school¬ ing for girls, roughly at the moment when European govern¬ ments also began to invest more heavily in girls’ education in the second half of the nineteenth century. National authorities during the Meiji period (1868-1912), when Japan was ruled by the emperor Meiji Tenno, formulated the model of “good wife and wise mother” that encouraged the development of girls’ schools both by local elites and by missionaries. The Education Ordinance of 1872 instituted compulsory elementary education for boys and girls in coeducational schools, and in 1899 the Girls’ High School Law required the opening of at least one high school for women in every prefecture. By 1904, 90 percent of Japanese females were enrolled in school. Conservative and modern forces, foreign associations (including American education¬ ists and Christian missionary societies) and government authorities worked each in their own way to expand the range of girls’ educational opportunities. While a woman’s movement influenced by Western ideas promoted the devel¬ opment of girls’ schools, nationalist concerns were probably more important. In 1887 Mori Arinori, Japan’s progressive minister of education, stated: “The basis of national wealth is education and the foundation of education is female education. The encouragement or discouragement of female education, we must remember, has a bearing on national tranquility or its absence” (Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan. Citizenship, Embodiment, and Sexuality, p. 25). The ideology of good wives and wise mothers then merged ancient Chinese female ethical principles with con¬ temporary nationalist concerns, allowing more conserva¬ tive educators such as Miwada Masako (1843-1927) and Atomi Kakei (1840-1926) to attract many students from elite families. Shimoda Utako (1854-1936), one of the pro¬ ponents of this ideology both in her school and in her extensive pedagogical writings, actively contributed to the development of women’s education throughout Asia, most notably thanks to her role in establishing a Chinese female

EDUCATION: Comparative History

147

Primary Schools. Chinese girls’ school, Singapore, early twentieth century. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

overseas study movement in Japan, which resulted in the education of hundreds of Chinese female students at the Jissen Jogakko (Practical Women’s School), founded in Tokyo in 1899. In China traditional Confucian ideals were not favorable to the development of female learning, although examples of highly literate and talented women abound in the early modern period. A campaign to promote women’s education only developed, however, at the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) in the aftermath of China’s defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). Private girls’ schools began to emerge in the late 1890s, following earlier Western examples, but still girls were not included in the 1901 reform of the Chinese educational system. Finally in 1907 the government sanctioned the establishment of elementary level and teachers’ schools for girls and women; the Ministry of Education’s memorial on the enactment of regulations for women’s normal schools stipulated that men could not serve as teachers in these schools, thus promoting teachers’ education and more women in teaching. The Japanese model greatly abetted the promotion of Chinese girls’ educa¬ tion because it was seen as a way to both sanction and control

inclusion of women in the national project. Female Chinese students who traveled to Japan for an education in the early twentieth century were active in the revolutionary movement that brought an end to dynastic rule in 1911. The founding of the republic enabled the expansion of a women’s emancipation movement that placed a high priority on education: in 1912 the government approved secondary educational facilities for women, and in 1920 women were admitted to Beijing University. In the period between the May Fourth Movement (1919) and the found¬ ing of the Communist People’s Republic of China (1949), girls were steadily pulled into an expanding educational system but remained clearly under-educated compared to their “brothers” and to their Japanese counterparts. In the primary system girls comprised 19.2 percent of all pupils in 1936, 17.6 percent of all secondary students in 1930, and 15.2 percent of university students in 1936. The Evolution of Literacy Rates. In general, literacy rates offer only a very partial insight into educational opportu¬ nities. Nonetheless, the progress of literacy in Europe and North America clearly benefited from the expansion of both a public and a private educational systems, while in Asia and

148

EDUCATION: Comparative History

in Africa the slow and uneven emergence of such a system partially explains contemporary high rates of illiteracy. Still, even when compulsory elementary education exists, cultural and economic factors frequently intervene, creating gender differences in literacy rates. Since the United Nations Decade for Women (1976-1985), the international com¬ munity has sought to eliminate the gender disparities in

by 1860. Historians explain these high rates by citing the emergence of a network of schools early in the eighteenth century, the ^devotional appeal of the Great Awakening, the impact of market forces and consumerism, and, finally, improved schooling in the nineteenth century, notably thanks to the common school movement. Studies of female literacy are far less developed for the

literacy and school attendance. But, as historians have

non-Western world, in particular in countries where oral

shown, the relationship between educational laws, the pro¬

traditions predominated in conjunction with the absence of

gress of literacy, and women’s status in societies is complex.

state record keeping. In most of Africa female literacy rates

Historians use the ability to sign one’s name to determine

were undoubtedly low throughout most of the contempor¬

literacy rates of the past. However, women were often

ary period and continued to be low in many countries at the

unable to write their names because even when they

beginning of the twenty-first century. In 1960 an estimated

attended school, they generally only learned to read. Still,

88.5 percent of African women were considered illiterate,

in the absence of other measures, literacy rates do provide

a rate that gradually fell in the following decades to 82.4

a rough index of a population’s encounter with educational

percent in 1970 and 72.8 percent in 1980. The persistence

structures, and the rise of literacy rates frequently coincided

of high illiteracy rates is attributed to a tendency to favor

with state efforts to promote schooling. This is clearly the

boys’ education over girls’, to the need for female labor

case

spread

in families due to high marital instability, and to early

of schooling and rising literacy rates coincided, although female rates always started from a lower level. In 1800

marriages. The situation in Asia offers far greater contrasts over the

female literacy rates in the more literate northern and

past 150 years owing to different historical circumstances,

in nineteenth-century Europe where the

northwestern areas tended to lag 10 to 25 percentage points

and varying degrees of economic modernization. Unques¬

behind male rates. In eastern and southern Europe wide¬

tionably, Japan led the way in terms of female literacy

spread illiteracy tended to be relatively evenly shared

despite a strongly patriarchal cultural tradition. The nation¬

among men and women. In Spain, for example, male illit¬

alist commitment to including women in late-nineteenth-

eracy is estimated at around 80 percent at mid-century and

century reforms contributed to high rates of female literacy.

female illiteracy at 90 percent. Overall, however, the trend

By 1912 virtually the entire population was considered

in the course of the nineteenth century was slowly rising

functionally literate, while figures for female literacy in

rates until 1860, followed by more rapid progress at the end

China ranged between 2 and 10 percent. For Chinese

of the century with the spread of national education sys¬

women, access to literacy only became widespread after

tems. Given the lower starting point of women, the pace of

the triumph of Communism in 1949. The Indian census

change for girls was faster than that for boys. Indeed, in

recorded a literacy rate for women in any language of 0.7

some areas, girls’ rates exceeded that for boys, as in late-

percent in 1901 and only 6 percent in 1946. While female

nineteenth-century Estonia where rural wives signed their

literacy rates have risen since Indian independence, the

names more frequently than did their spouses in marriage

numbers remain very low in comparison with Japan where

registers, because they were kept in schools longer. In coun¬

female literacy is around 99 percent. In 1991 only 39 per¬

tries where literacy rates were low as late as 1900—in 1897

cent of Indian women were considered literate compared to

in Russia 86 percent of women were illiterate—growth

64 percent of men. Similar gender differences in literacy

occurred over the course of the twentieth century as a result

rates persist in southern and eastern Asia, notably in rural

of improved schooling, of course, but also at times through

and Muslim areas.

a concerted political effort to provide literacy for both

Girls’ Education Since 1945. Dramatic progress in girls’

men and women. In the Soviet Union, in particular, the

schooling opportunities throughout the world has occurred

Bolsheviks launched an ambitious campaign to combat

in the past sixty years, as developed countries have raised

illiteracy between 1923 and 1927.

the obligatory age for leaving school and promoted

Literacy rates within the United States show the same

an integrated educational system where pupils progress

general tendencies: high rates of literacy as early as 1800

from primary to secondary school in institutions that are

in New England, including among women (80 percent

free of cost. This democratization of the system has had

in 1790) and far lower rates in the southern areas, in rural

a tremendous impact on the percentage of girls enrolled in

locations, and among African Americans. But the growth of

secondary schools, in particular. In countries such as

literacy was far faster in the United States than in Europe for

China or the former Soviet Union, the egalitarian premises

a number of reasons, and female rates (among native-born

within Communism gave women educational opportu¬

white women) were only a few points behind male rates

nities they had not enjoyed before, although girls and

EDUCATION: Comparative History

Catholic Schools. Girls study in a recently rebuilt Catholic school, Tokyo, Japan, 1946.

149

Prints and

Photographs Division, Library of Congress

women remain disadvantaged in secondary and higher

labor and early marriages where the ability to read, write, or

education in China. The story of rising literacy rates and

calculate is considered to be of little value.

egalitarian school attendance patterns suggests a linear pattern of progress that is far from accurate, however. In nineteenth-century industrializing European cities, literacy often declined as opportunities for work pulled children from schools; during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) female education rates also fell as women

[See also Christianity; Hinduism; Imperialism and Colo¬ nialism; Islam; Literacy and Numeracy; Missionaries; Reli¬ gion; World Religions; and entries on countries and regions

mentioned in this article.]

missed educational opportunities. As women’s access to schooling has risen in eastern Asia, Europe, and North America, the persistently high rates of illiteracy in many parts of Asia and Africa highlight the weight of develop¬ mental and cultural factors in its uneven distribution. Obviously, it costs money to build schools and it requires governmental commitment to enforce compulsion. More recently, international organizations such as the World Bank have made girls’ education a priority, arguing that it yields a higher rate of return than any other investment in the developing world. It is too soon to see whether such development

strategies

will

have

an

enduring

effect.

Ultimately, for girls to achieve equal access to schooling, communities and families need to perceive such schooling as useful. And here, economic, religious, and cultural tradi¬ tions frequently intervene, condemning girls to early lives of

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albisetti, James C. “Female Education in German-Speaking Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, 1866-1914.” In Austrian Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Crossdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes, pp. 39-57. Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1996. A comparative study of women’s access to secondary and higher education and the role of the women’s movement in this struggle. Albisetti, James C. “The French Lycees de jeunes filles in Inter¬ national Perspective, 1878-1910.” Paedagogica Historica 40, nos. 1 and 2 (2004): 143-156. A comparative approach to the development of girls’ secondary education in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Ballara, Marcella. Women and Literacy. Women and World Devel¬ opment. London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1992. This slim book focuses on the final decades of the twentieth century.

150

EDUCATION: Comparative History

Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi, Joseph Bara, Cinna Rao Yagati, and B. M. Sankhdher, eds. The Development of Women’s Education in India: A Collection of Documents, 1850-1920. New Delhi, India: Kanishka, distributors in association with Educational Records Research Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2001. Clancy-Smith, Julia. “Envisioning Knowledge: Educating the Muslim Woman in Colonial North Africa, c. 1850-1918.” In Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie, edited by Rudi Matthee and Beth Baron, pp. 99-118. Costa Meza, Calif.: Mazda, 2000. Clancy-Smith, Julia, and Frances Gouda, eds. Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism. Charlottesville, Va., and London: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Provides a series of case studies of colonial attitudes toward indigenous women that address issues of education and schooling. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. Les africaines: Histoire des femmes d’Afrique noire du XIXe au XXe siecle. Paris: Editions Desjonqueres, 1994. Includes a useful chapter on girls’ education. Eisenmann, Linda, ed. Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Forbes, Geraldine. Women in Modern India. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. One chapter provides a succinct summary of women’s education during the nineteenth century. Judge, Joan. “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century.” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 765-803 Focuses on the discourse concerning girls’ education in China and Japan. Lee, Wong Yin. “Women’s Education in Traditional and Modern China.” Women’s History Review 4, no. 3 (1995): 345-367. A brief survey of several centuries of girls’ education in China. Mackie, Vera, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment, and Sexuality. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Maynes, Mary Jo. Schooling in Western Europe: A Social History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. A general study of both literacy and schooling that pays careful attention to gender differences. Mianda, Gertrude. “Colonialism, Education, and Gender Relations in the Belgian Congo: The Evolue Case.” In Women in African Colonial Histories, edited by Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi, pp. 144-163. Bloomington: Indiana Univer¬ sity Press, 2002. A useful case study for understanding the evolution of colonial attitudes toward female schooling in Africa. Minault, Gail. Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Ramusack, Barbara N., and Sharon Sievers. Women in Asia: Restoring Women to History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Provides a useful synthesis of women’s status in Asia, with information on literacy and schooling. Robertson, Claire. “Women’s Education and Class Formation in Africa, 1850-1980.” In Women and Class in Africa, edited by Claire Robertson and Iris Berger, pp. 92-113. New York: Africana, 1986. Rogers, Rebecca. From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Focuses on secondary education with a final chapter that examines girls’ education in the colonies.

Stock, Phyllis. Better Than Rubies: A History of Women’s Educa¬ tion. New York: Putnam, 1978. An overview of European girls’ education with more of a focus on discourses than institutions. Tao, Jie, Zheng Bijun, and Shirley L. Mow, eds. Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future. Translated by Amy Russell. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2004. Three chapters address women and educa¬ tion in the twentieth century, with a focus on higher education. Tocco, Martha. “Made in Japan: Meiji’s Women’s Education.” In Gendering Modern Japanese History, edited by Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, pp. 39-60. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2005. Vincent, David. The Rise of Mass Literacy. Reading and Writing in Modern Europe, Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2000. Rebecca Rogers

Elementary and Secondary Institutions Schools for girls have existed since the Middle Ages in Europe but only for a limited few. Significant growth in the number and variety of girls’ schools only occurred over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, inspired by both religious motivations and the spread of Enlightenment ideals. From the outset girls’ schools tar¬ geted specific social groups, so that the rich and the poor never mingled on the same school benches. As a result of this social segregation, lessons varied considerably although religion did play a major role in the education of all. Poor girls learned only the rudiments, in addition to religion and needlework, whereas wealthy girls also had lessons in literature, history, geography, the natural sciences, and the accomplishments (art, music, dance, and, at times, modern foreign languages). The charity and free schools run for the poor bore little resemblance to the convent and academy schools for the wealthy. The former offered only elementary education for young girls between the ages of five and twelve, while the latter can be argued to have introduced what would become known as secondary education, al¬ though these schools frequently taught basic reading and writing to very young girls as well. The most significant difference between elementary and secondary schools was their clientele. The growth of clearly secondary institutions for girls only occurred in Europe and North America in the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks to feminist organizations, which also campaigned for girls to have access to the qua¬ lifying exams allowing them to pursue higher education. In Africa and much of the Middle East, the opportunity for girls to pursue secondary education would only come well over a century later. In areas colonized by the British, such as India and Australia, secondary schools for girls were an

EDUCATION: Elementary and Secondary Institutions

151

early part of the landscape, often directed toward the

religious orders set up free schools for the poor, and in

daughters of colonial administrators.

cities cathedrals also operated fee-paying schools; in Paris

Since 1900 in the Western world and in much of East

prior to the Revolution, schools existed for one-third of the

Asia, elementary and secondary schools have proliferated

female school-age population, undoubtedly a high in

for both boys and girls, creating a generally literate society.

eighteenth-century Europe. On the American continent

The two most significant educational trends have been the

girls also had some access to schools run by Catholics,

democratization of secondary education and the gradual

Quakers, Presbyterians, or Moravians, while venture

spread of coeducation so that distinct girls’ and boys’

schools provided fee-based elementary instruction and

schools have become scarce. Nonetheless, girls and boys still

missionary societies opened charity schools.

experience the schooling process in gendered terms and

Wealthy girls

also

had

some

access

to

schooling,

have different success rates (since the 1970s girls tend to

thanks to the proliferation of convent schools as well as

outperform boys). In France, for example, more girls obtain

secular boarding schools. In Europe and North America,

the school-leaving certificate, the baccalaureat, than boys,

Catholic boarding schools provided the model for elite girls’

just as in the United States a higher percentage of girls than

education. The most learned of the religious orders, the

boys graduate from high school. In a world perspective,

Ursulines and the Congregation de Notre Dame, opened

generalized access to secondary education is far from the

institutions throughout Europe and in North America,

norm, most notably in Africa, where female illiteracy rates

offering lessons in a wide range of subject matter that would

remain high.

allow their students not only to be efficient housewives

Schools before 1800. The roots of European educational

but also to be conversant within polite society. In some

models stretch back into the early modern period. In

countries the state more or less actively encouraged the edu¬

response to religious debates, charity and religious schools

cation of aristocratic girls. When Madame de Maintenon

for the poor emerged throughout the Continent. These

(Frangoise d’Aubigne,

schools offered lessons in the rudiments, in addition to

Royale de Saint-Louis, a French school for noblewomen

1635-1719)

opened the Maison

religion, and often some training for a trade. In 1733 it

at Saint-Cyr, in 1686, she had the explicit approval of King

is estimated there were some twenty thousand girl students

Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). This institution fostered many

in English charity schools. In France and Italy, female

imitations, such as the Smolny Institute for girls of the

Primary School. Students read in the comer of a classroom at the Girls’ School in Quanzhou, China, 1895. Presbyterian Church of England Missions Archive/School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

152

EDUCATION: Elementary and Secondary Institutions

nobility in Saint Petersburg, Russia, founded in 1764 by Catherine II, the Great (r. 1762-1796). In Austria, the state supported advanced education for the daugh¬ ters of officers and civil servants in two institutions: the Offizierstochter-Erziehungs-Institut (Institute for the Education of Officers’ Daughters, 1775) and the ZivilMadchen-Pensionat (Boarding School for Daughters of Civil Servants, 1786), both of which prepared girls for careers as governesses. Educating for Gender Roles, 1800-1900. In the modern period, both elementary and secondary schools contributed strongly to defining a newly valorized role for women as able wives and caring mothers. Within the schoolroom, moral and religious lessons combined with those in housewifery to present home life as the appropriate sphere for women’s talents, whether the students were from the working or the middle classes. At the same time, however, girls’ schools, generally run by women teachers, offered an opportunity for women to exert their feminine talents in a professional field. This tension between an educational message that directed women into the home and the running of schools that required increasingly profes¬ sional qualifications helps to explain how conservative messages in schools could still aid in women’s emancipation. Private and public elementary schooling for the lower classes. Schools for the lower classes, both urban and rural, spread widely in Europe, North America, and Australia over the course of the nineteenth century. The prevalence of private versus public schools depended a great deal on local, regional, and national contexts. In the United States public schools began to develop widely in the North in the antebellum period and in the South after the Civil War; a parochial (single-sex) school system only emerged in northern cities at mid-century. In the public schools, girls and boys increasingly attended coeducational schools, while segregation existed between whites and blacks. In French Canada, women taught within the public school system, but female teaching orders increasingly opened private schools for girls in urban areas and by 1901-1902 constituted almost 30 percent of the female teaching per¬ sonnel. Australian girls were incorporated into generally free state-sponsored elementary schools between 1872 and 1893, thus opening new work opportunities for women. In Europe the motley variety of early modern charity schools, Sunday schools, and religious free schools for girls continued into the nineteenth century, but the general trend was for private initiatives to give way to public elementary schools that were incorporated into national systems of education. The creation of public girls’ schools tended to lag behind those of boys’ schools since in Europe coeduca¬ tion was generally frowned upon. As a result, in Catholic France, for example, teaching nuns played an important role in providing elementary schooling for girls in both privately

and publicly funded schools; by 1863 nuns constituted 70 percent of public elementary schoolteachers. Compul¬ sory schooling emerged precociously in the German states, as early as 1794 in Prussia, as well as in Protestant Denmark 1814, but elsewhere such laws were passed toward the end of the century (Italy, 1877; England and Wales, 1880; and France, 1882). Such laws were often poorly enforced, nota¬ bly in southern Europe, but they contributed to the spread of elementary schooling for girls. Elsewhere in the world, missionary societies and colonial authorities sought to spread the fruits of Western “civiliza¬ tion” to both girls and boys. Improving women’s status within “native” societies was often at the heart of imperial projects, which explains the early commitment to opening girls’ schools in societies where formal schooling was vir¬ tually nonexistent. These institutions sought to transform African, Asian, or Near Eastern girls into good domestic wives and mothers, emphasizing hygiene and housewifely skills in addition to lessons in Christian morality. The French sisters of Saint-Joseph de Cluny was a missionary order that set up a school for “young negresses” as early as 1826 in Senegal and by 1900 were running schools through¬ out Africa, in the French Antilles and French Polynesia, and in South America and Asia. The British Church Missionary Society opened day schools and boarding schools for Hindu girls in southern India; the London Missionary Society attended to girls in Africa; American Protestant and Catholic missionaries opened schools for girls in China; the Dutch Missionary Society provided lessons in house¬ wifery to Karo women in Sumatra, all in the early decades of the twentieth century. Reformed secondary schools for the middle classes. Schools for the middle and upper classes changed dramatically over the course of the century thanks to changing attitudes about what constituted an appropriate education for women. The emergence of a feminist move¬ ment in Europe, North America, and Australia had a clear impact in promoting more serious studies for girls that would provide better education for motherhood, but also job training for single women. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, individual institutions often served as models within the country or even abroad. Arguably the most fam ous of the European institutions were the schools of the Legion of Honour created by Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 1800s to provide a serious education for the daughters of his military officers and civil servants. Directed by the famous educator Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan (1752-1822), these schools spawned numerous imitations throughout Europe, such as the Max Joseph Institute, which opened in Munich in 1813, and the Saint Annunziata boarding school for elite Italian girls, which opened in Florence in 1825. In North America, first academies and then female seminaries provided serious education to a

EDUCATION: Elementary and Secondary Institutions

chosen few. Institutions such as Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy (founded in 1792) offered solid academic training and spurred the creation of later seminaries to train good Christian teachers. These seminaries often became the first women’s colleges, making the United States a precur¬ sor in the development of higher education for women. Similar serious institutions for “ladies” existed in England in the early 1800s and in Australia at mid-century, often providing the education for the women who pioneered school reforms throughout the Western world in the second half of the century. In Australia, as in many European coun¬ tries and the United States, the appearance of grammar or high schools (Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School in 1875 and Sydney Girls’ High School in 1883) did not, however, spell the end of Catholic secondary schools run by such orders as the Ursulines or the Sacred Heart. Teaching orders were also responsible for opening secondary boarding schools in colonial Africa or Oceania, although in general these schools catered to a European elite; the revenues from these schools nonetheless often allowed the orders to open free day schools for “native” girls. The development of state-supported secondary schools for girls certainly improved educational offerings for middle-class girls, but these institutions frequently main¬ tained a distinctly “feminine” curriculum, notably without the lessons in Latin and Greek that were the hallmark of a European gentleman’s education. In the United States, where girls comprised 63 percent of all high school gradu¬ ates in 1900, high schools were often coeducational but gender differences manifested themselves in the choice of courses. More generally, the growth of public school systems, from kindergarten through secondary school, gen¬ erated a need for teachers and a consequent emergence of normal schools for the training of these teachers. By the end of the century, teaching had become a profession that increas¬ ingly welcomed women because the figure of the mother educator had acquired such strong cultural resonance. Changes and Continuities Since 1900. By 1900 girls’ access to elementary schooling had become commonplace in western Europe, North America, and Australia, but access to secondary schooling remained a phenomenon restricted to a middle-class minority. In countries like the United States or the Netherlands, where coeducational secondary schools existed, girls profited from the situation, but elsewhere separate institutions maintained distinct gender differences in the curriculum. In institutional terms the century witnessed the generalization of coeducational elementary schools including in Africa where schooling opportunities for girls have historically lagged behind those of boys. In the Western world, the democratization of public educational systems has opened secondary schools to most children over the age of twelve, constituting a significant change from earlier practices when social class

153

rather than age determined access to secondary schools. In industrialized eastern Asia, literacy rates for both boys and girls in the late twentieth century were comparable to, if not higher than, literacy rates in western Europe and North America. In developing countries, however, access to secondary schools remains the privilege of a few where gender continues to play a discriminating role: in 1980 only 39 percent of boys and 24 percent of girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen attended schools in Africa. The contradictory effects of coeducation. Feminist and pedagogical reformers promoted coeducational schools in 1900 as a measure to promote more egalitarian relationships between the sexes. The United States was highlighted in international conferences as the country where coeducational schools had spread the most with noticeable effects for the emancipation of women. In Europe, however, coeducation was generally the exception in both primary and secondary schools. The spread of coeducational schools accelerated in the postwar period for financial reasons but also because of the emergence of a new youth culture where gender roles came under scrutiny. By the late 1970s, coeducation had become a reality in the state sectors of most European countries, although in Ireland, and to some degree in England and Wales, single¬ sex schools remained in the state sector. Catholic private schools, particularly at the secondary level, often contin¬ ued, however, to maintain sex segregation. The persistence of girls’ schools in Europe and elsewhere reflects both the persistence of conservative attitudes in education and feminist disenchantment with the effects of coeducation. Indeed, placing boys and girls on the same school benches has not eliminated gender stereotypes in education, although it undoubtedly facilitated widespread access to secondary schools for girls. The contradictory effects of the spread of coeducational schools are perhaps most obvious in Africa where gender disparities in education are the most apparent today. When colonial authorities began to develop schools, girls’ schools were generally not a high priority, and special initiatives, like the creation of the Ecole normale de jeunes filles de l’Afrique Occidentale Franqaise (Girls’ Normal School for AOF) in Rufisque, Senegal, in 1938 to train future elemen¬ tary school teachers in French West Africa, were unable to redress the gender imbalance between boys’ and girls’ schools. In postindependence Africa the situation improved dramatically for girls, but countries where single-sex institu¬ tions remained tended to educate slightly more girls than did countries with predominantly coeducational schools. In 1980, in countries favoring single-sex schools, educational statistics revealed 41.4 percent of girls (and 60.6 percent of boys) were in primary schools, compared to 38.7 percent of girls (and 53 percent of boys) in countries with mainly coeducational schools. The presence of single-sex schools is

154

EDUCATION: Elementary and Secondary Institutions

generally a legacy of Christian missionary schools, and in Muslim countries, in particular, families tend to prefer single-sex schools for their daughters. Gender discriminations in schooling worldwide. Although girls’ increasingly widespread access first to primary and then to secondary schools has undoubtedly been an important factor in promoting women’s economic, social, and intellectual autonomy, feminists continue to note the ways in which schools, often unconsciously, promote a “hidden curriculum.” In the developed world, girls tend to be directed toward studies in the service and care sector while thoroughly internalizing the more conservative messages of the schoolroom that valorize obedience and conformity to the norm. Not surprisingly, this has an impact on women’s presence afterwards in positions of authority. In the developing world, and notably in Africa, gender discriminations in access to schooling, especially lower secondary education, remain widespread. As a result, institutions such as UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) have placed equal access for boys and girls to primary and secondary education as a goal—a goal still to be achieved. The single most important factor in improving the lives of women in poor countries today is the promotion of female literacy and educational opportunities. [See also Christianity; Imperialism and Colonialism; Islam; Literacy and Numeracy; Missionaries; Religion; UNESCO; World Religions; and entries on countries and regions mentioned in this article.}

as well as monographs to analyze religious, private, and state schools; provides as well a comparative perspective and a chapter on French girls’ schools in Algeria, Senegal, and the United States. Rogers, Rebecca. “Learning to be Good Girls and Women: Educa¬ tion, Training, and Schools.” In The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700, edited by Deborah Simonton, pp. 93-133. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. A com¬ parative European perspective on girls’ education that includes information on colonial schools. Theobald, Marjorie. Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Educa¬ tion in Nineteenth-Century Australia. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. A stimulating interpretation of women’s education that offers both theoretical insights and portraits of individual schools, teachers, and students. A comparative perspective with British and American education is offered throughout. Walter, Lynn, ed. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Women’s Issues Worldwide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Separate volumes cover Asia and Oceania, Central and South America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, North America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa. Education is mentioned in each volume, but the division by individual country and the focus on the very recent past makes it less useful for an historical overview. Wilson, Maggie, ed. Girls and Young Women in Education: A European Perspective. Oxford, and New York: Pergamon, 1991. The volume includes essays on Belgium, England and Wales, France, Greece, the Republic of Ireland, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and West Germany, as well as a general European overview. Particularly useful for educational statistics for the post-World War II period. Rebecca Rogers

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Higher Education Institutions

Eisenmann, Linda, ed. Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Fass, Paula S., ed. Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: In History and Society. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004. The entries on coeducation, education, and girls’ schools offer perspectives mainly on the United States and Europe, but other continents are mentioned as well. Includes primary sources and illustrations. Prentice, Alison, and Marjorie R. Theobald, eds. Women Who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teaching. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. A landmark study of women teachers in Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States that offers many insights into the variety of schools these women ran. Purvis, June. A History of Women’s Education in England. Milton Keynes, U.K., and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991. A slim but suggestive synthesis for the period between 1800 and 1914; contains a useful bibliography. Robertson, Claire. “Women’s Education and Class Formation in Africa, 1850-1980.” In Women and Class in Africa, edited by Claire Robertson and Iris Berger, pp. 92-113. New York: Africana, 1986. A useful, although somewhat dated, analysis of African women’s access to schools based on UNESCO statistics. Rogers, Rebecca. From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Uses primary sources

Measured by all indicators, women have made great strides in education during the past three decades. Overt practices and policies of sex discrimination have been remedied through federal legislation. More women than ever before are continuing their education past secondary school. Today women account for the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees earned in the United States and in several other countries. Types of institutions of higher education included in this analysis are women’s colleges, research and comprehensive universities, liberal arts colleges (coeducational), commu¬ nity colleges, and vocational colleges. Post-secondary vocational schools include technical institutes, proprietary business colleges, and trade schools in which certification can be earned in some specialties (such as court reporting and dental assisting, two female-dominated career fields). A liberal arts curriculum is not included in a student’s course of study at vocational colleges. Community and junior colleges offer general education liberal arts curri¬ cula at the undergraduate level, as well as curricula in semiprofessional and technical areas, such as health

EDUCATION: Higher Education Institutions

155

Oberlin College. The fifteen female graduates from the Oberlin class of 1855, with the college officials Mrs. James Dascomb and Mrs. Charles Finney. Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio

services and computer programming. Associate of Arts and Sciences degrees are offered in addition to certifica¬ tion programs. Women’s participation in U.S. institutions of higher education is both similar to and unique vis-a-vis women’s enrollment in higher education institutions in Europe, Great Britain, Mexico, Central and South America, Asia, South Asia, Australia, and Canada. According to U.N. studies, women have made significant gains in enrollment throughout the world. For example, women’s enrollment in higher education surpassed that of men in the Caribbean and western Asia and is now equal to that of men in South America. Enrollment ratios are higher for women than for men in many countries of Europe as well as in the United States. Women’s participation in higher education is high¬ est in the world in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. The lowest ratios of tertiary education enroll¬ ments are found in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The benefits of higher education are frequently measured in factors of life satisfaction and economic autonomy or viability. Although higher education brings higher income for everyone, the economic rewards are less marked for women. A U.N. study found that in Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden, men with secondary education earn more on average than women with university degrees.

Historical Context. When Harvard College was founded in 1636, women as a class were categorically forbidden by law and by custom from enrolling in institutions of higher education. College education was designed to prepare men for the careers open to them, all of which were virtually closed to women, for example, the clergy, civil leadership, law, architecture, college teaching, and medicine. Research universities in Germany influenced the development of research institutions in the United States in the nineteenth century while the liberal arts colleges derived from British models, notably Oxford and Cambridge in England. Two hundred years after the founding of Harvard, Prin¬ ceton, Dartmouth, Yale, and the other Ivy League colleges, a few independent colleges began admitting women—most notable among them Oberlin College—and federal legisla¬ tion in the 1860s established policies that required women applicants be granted equal access with men to land-grant colleges, that is, newly mandated, federally funded state institutions of higher education. It was another century before sex discrimination in higher education institutions was acknowledged, and overt practices and policies were virtually eliminated in the 1970s through institutional char¬ ter amendments driven by federal legislation, most notably Title IX and affirmative action. In the acknowledgment of sexism, and subsequent remedial actions to counter sexism,

156

EDUCATION: Higher Education Institutions

U.S. institutions of higher education became the model for reform at colleges and universities in many other countries. Women’s Colleges. Separate education for women has been the norm in most of the history of higher education. Discrete women’s colleges and coordinate colleges (those affiliated with men’s institutions) were the two most popular models. In the 1830s women’s colleges began to emerge. Founded by social reformers to prepare women for careers in teaching and nursing (the specific fields that needed women workers), the women’s college curriculum was designed to recognize women’s intellectual potential, and to foster their intellectual development. Women’s colleges challenged coeducational colleges and state uni¬ versities that admitted women but did not provide them full access to academic programs. Even at the progressive Oberlin, women were required to do laundry for their male peers into the 1850s, and they were not allowed into the full liberal arts curriculum that included the study of Greek and Latin, always the mark of a truly educated man. Research suggests that academically high-achieving graduates of women’s colleges may be influenced positively by having a greater number of women faculty as mentors; it is argued that women’s colleges produce disproportio¬ nately high numbers of graduates who are very successful in their careers as a result of having women professors as role models and teachers (approximately 60 percent of professors at women’s colleges are female; approximately one-third are female at coeducational institutions). As women’s educational and professional aspirations rose in the 1970s, and as women were admitted more readily to previously all-male institutions, they tended to eschew single-sex education in favor of coeducational institutions. Women’s colleges lost enrollment, and by the close of the twentieth century, 68 wom en’s colleges reported a total enrollment of 112,523 students. Colleges responded to the precipitous drops in enrollments by merging with other institutions, by admitting men to their colleges, and by eliminating themselves altogether. Women’s colleges are not single-sex at the graduate level; when graduate degrees are offered, men are admitted to those programs. In the United States today 33 percent of women’s colleges are Catholic and 18 percent are Protestant; the rest are independent private colleges, and only three are public universities (Mississippi State University for Women, Douglass College of Rutgers University, and Texas Women’s University). Two historically black colleges founded in the nineteenth century, Spelman in Atlanta and Bennett in Greensboro, North Carolina, continue to be women’s colleges. Many women’s colleges are residential colleges (a residential college is one in which more than 50 percent of the students reside on campus). In the colleges that are historically women’s colleges, rather than ones that now admit some men, that percentage rises to 73 percent.

Women’s colleges granted a total of 101,174 associate’s, bachelor’s, and doctoral degrees in 2001-2002. Whereas this number represents less than one percent of all degrees awarded in that year, the role of women’s colleges can still be seen as highly influential. Historically it has been the case that women who graduate from women s colleges gain access to positions of top leadership in greater numbers than their peers who graduate from coeducational institutions. Statistics. In the United States, 87 percent of women 25-34 years old had completed high school in the mid1990s, far more than their counterparts in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Canada. In the United States, 23 percent of women 25-34 years old had completed higher education degrees, which is significantly higher than for women in France and Japan (12 percent each), the United Kingdom and West Germany (11 percent each), or Italy (7 percent). In 2001-2002, 1,291,900 bachelor’s degrees were awarded in U.S. institutions of higher education; 742,084 (57 percent) were awarded to women. Of those degrees, 543,700 (more than 73 percent) were awarded to white women; 77,430 to black women, 50,016 to Hispanic women; 45,435 to Asian women; 5,540 to Native American women; and 19,963 to non-resident (“foreign”) women. Women are awarded the majority of associate’s degrees (two-year degrees) annually: in 2001-2002, of 595,133 total degrees, 357,024, or 60 percent, were awarded to women. Degree attainment is tied to race and ethnicity. White women account for the large majority of degrees earned across all institutions of higher learning. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 24.8 percent of white women over the age of 25 hold a four-year college degree, as do 15.3 percent of African American women, 39.8 percent of Asian American women, 12.1 percent of Native American women, and 10.8 percent of Hispanic women. All minority groups are underrepresented except Asian American women. Women are more likely than men to be part-time students in all U.S. institutions of higher education (44 percent and 38 percent respectively in a 1999 study). The competing demands on women’s lives of family obligations and work makes it more likely that women can afford neither the time nor the financial cost of full-time higher education. Women’s fields of study have been shifting steadily since the 1970s. By 1996 female students comprised the majority of both undergraduate and graduate students. Women’s enrollment increased 100 percent between 1975 and 2000; men’s enrollment increased 27 percent in that time period. Female enrollment increased 400 percent in professional fields, including dentistry, medicine, optometry, veterinary medicine, law, and theology. However, in spite of such changes, women continue to earn disproportionately high percentages of degrees in female-dominated fields: health

EDUCATION: Higher Education Institutions

sciences, education, and biological and life sciences. These bachelor’s degrees lead to employment in lower pay¬ ing fields than engineering, computer and information sciences, and the physical sciences, all areas in which men still prevail. In 2001-2002, 44,904 doctoral degrees were awarded in the United States. Women earned 20,176 of those degrees, with white women accounting for more than two-thirds of the total. Of the doctoral degrees awarded to women, 22 percent (4,356) were in the field of education, the only professional field in which women earn significantly more doctoral degrees than do men. One study found that minority women are disproportio¬ nately earning bachelor’s degrees in comparison to minority men: in the late 1990s, black women earned 64 percent of degrees awarded to black students; Hispanic women received 57 percent of all degrees awarded to Hispanics. Interestingly, black women are more likely than white women to earn degrees in technical fields, especially computer science and engineering and physical sciences. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The single most important factor in expanding women’s opportunities in higher education is Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Expanding opportunities are defined here primarily in terms of access to financial aid resources, including academic and athletic scholarships previously awarded only to men; access to initial admit¬ tance to higher education via the elimination of quota systems; access to employment in higher education; and dramatically increased funding for women’s sports. The preamble to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reads as follows: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subject to discrimination under any educational programs or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

Title IX prohibits institutions that receive federal funding from practicing gender discrimination in educational programs or activities. Because almost all schools receive federal funds, Title IX applies to nearly everyone. The Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education is charged with enforcing the civil rights and regulations in education, extending protection to more than 3,600 colleges and universities, more than 5,000 proprietary schools, and thousands of elementary and secondary school districts and facilities, public libraries, museums, vocational rehabilita¬ tion agencies, and correctional facilities. Enforcement of Title IX and related legislation has at times been problematic. During the 1980s, the Reagan administrations cut the budget for the Office of Civil Rights, forcing the curtailing of compliance reviews. During the 1990s, remedies were sought and budgets reinstated. Since

157

2000, the Bush administration has been curtailing Title IX enforcement efforts, most notably by providing legal repre¬ sentation for universities that have been charged with Title IX infractions. Related Legislation. In addition to Title IX, other supporting and related legislation has been enacted: •

•

•

The Women’s Educational Equity Act of 1974 provides for federal financial and technical support to local efforts to remove barriers for females in all areas of education through, for example, the development of model pro¬ grams, training, and research. The 1976 amendments to the Vocational Education Act of 1963 require states to act affirmatively to eliminate sex bias, stereotyping, and discrimination in vocational education. Affirmative action legislation from the 1970s has pro¬ vided means by which institutionalized, systemic dis¬ crimination based on sex, race, age, and ability could be redressed. The university was from the beginning a male institution and found it comfortable to rationalize the exclusion of women, but not to remedy the discrim¬ ination against them. Affirmative action is an active method to bring restitution and establish balance be¬ tween female and male faculty, students, and staff. The federal Department of Health and Human Services established guidelines that mandated that the under¬ utilization of protected classes must be addressed by estab¬ lishing availability pools, that is, reasonable expectations of availability established through data gathering and ana¬ lyses, and thorough advertising of positions.

Female graduates of higher education institutions are enter¬ ing previously all-male professions in greater numbers every year, and women faculty members are being promoted to higher ranks in greater numbers than ever before owing in large part to the scrutiny of former hiring practices and the subsequent remedies provided by affirmative action and Title IX. [See also Affirmative Action and Seven Sisters Colleges.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chamberlain, Mariam K., ed. Women in Academe: Progress and Prospects. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988. Freeman, Catherine E. Trends in Educational Equity of Girls & Women. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 2004. “The National Council for Research on Women.” www.ncrw.org Perkins, C. O. “Pragmatic Idealism: Industrial Training, Liberal Education, and Women’s Special Needs: Conflict and Continu¬ ity in the Experience of Mary McLeod Bethune and Other Black Women Educations, 1900-1930.” PhD diss., Claremont Gradu¬ ate School and San Diego University, 1986. See pp. 35-54. “The Women’s College Coalition.” www.womenscolleges.org Carol

O.

Perkins

158

EGYPT: Ancient Period

Legal Position. Because there is no surviving book of

EGYPT

Egyptian law, information about the legal position of dynastic women has to be drawn from a mixture of

This entry consists of four subentries:

indirect and randomly preserved sources: bureaucratic Ancient Period

records, fictional stories, tomb inscriptions, art, and

700-1500

architecture. Many of these sources were commissioned

1500-1800

by, and reflect the achievements of, men rather than

1800-Present

women. Nevertheless, when combined, there is enough evidence to confirm that women were accorded the same broad legal rights as men in their social class. Women were

Ancient Period

able to own, buy, sell, and inherit land and property. They

independent city-states

could live alone, and they could raise their children alone

that lined the Nile River and the rivers of the Nile Delta

without a male guardian. They could work outside the

united to form one long country. For the next three

home, could participate in religious rituals, and could act

thousand years Egypt was ruled by a succession of kings

for an absent husband on matters of business. They could

until, in 30

the suicide of Cleopatra VII saw Egypt

be called as witnesses in court cases and could be punished

become a part of the Roman Empire. Today historians

by the courts. In death they experienced the same

divide Egypt’s lengthy list of kings into thirty-one dynasties,

mummification rituals, and they expected to enjoy the

Approximately 3100

b.c.e.,

b.c.e.

the

or lines of connected kings; the dynasties themselves are

same afterlife as their menfolk. These legal rights persisted

grouped into kingdoms—times of political unity and strong

until the end of the dynastic age, when attitudes toward

rule—and periods, or times of weakened royal authority,

women became heavily influenced by more restrictive

disunity, and foreign rule, as follows:

Greek and Roman customs.

Family Life. Although men and women were legal Early Dynastic Period, c. 2920-2649

b.c.e.

(First and

Second Dynasties) Old Kingdom, c. 2649-2134

equals, they led very different lives. Men were expected to interface with the outside world. In a society with very little

b.c.e.

(Third through Eighth

Dynasties) First Intermediate Period, c. 2134-2040

apprenticed to follow the family trade or profession. Kings, b.c.e.

(Ninth

through Eleventh Dynasties) Middle Kingdom, c. 2040-1640

social mobility, men were almost invariably educated or commoners, and even male gods were expected to marry, regardless of sexual orientation. Within the marriage the

b.c.e.

(Eleventh through

Thirteenth Dynasties)

his wife, children, and any family dependents. Scribes

Second Intermediate Period, c. 1640-1550

b.c.e.

(Four¬

teenth through Seventeenth Dynasties)

advised young men to respect the women in their house. Women were expected to follow in their mothers’ footsteps:

New Kingdom, c. 1550-1070 b.c.e. (Eighteenth through Twentieth Dynasties)

marrying young, remaining faithful to their husbands, bearing many children, and taking responsibility for all

Third Intermediate Period, c. 1070-712

b.c.e.

(Twenty-

first through Twenty-fourth Dynasties) Late Period, c. 712-332 b.c.e. (Twenty-fifth through Thirty-first Dynasties) Macedonian/Ptolemaic Period, 332-30

man, as the dominant partner, was expected to provide for

domestic matters. Formal female education was considered unnecessary, and although an estimated 5-10 percent of the population may have been literate, very few women were. This division of expectation is clearly demonstrated in

b.c.e.

formal Egyptian art, which conventionally depicts slender,

Throughout the dynastic age, Egyptian culture, social

pale wives and daughters alongside tanned and muscular

structure, and religious thought remained remarkably con¬

husbands and sons. Often the wife stands slightly behind

servative and unchanging. At all times the semidivine king

her husband, physically supporting him with an arm

headed the priesthood, the civil service, and the army. He was

around his waist or his shoulder, making the two comple¬

assisted in his rule by the educated elite, who represented an

mentary opposites—male/female, outdoor/indoor, passive/

estimated 5 percent of the population. With skilled artisans

active—into one complete unit.

representing a further 10 percent of the population, the vast

The myth of the goddess Isis confirms the wife’s duty to

majority of the people were peasants who worked the land

support her husband and children in good times and bad.

owned by kings, temples, and the elite. The essentially static

Married to the god Osiris, king of Egypt, Isis was content to

nature of daily life, and the almost complete absence of social

spend her days teaching the mortal women of Egypt how

mobility, allows Egyptologists to make valid comparisons

to weave, bake, and brew beer. But when her husband was

between the lives of women who lived many centuries apart.

kidnapped, murdered, and dismembered, Isis was able and

EGYPT: Ancient Period

159

Ancient Egyptian Music. Women playing the harp, lute, and tambourine, Nineteenth Dynasty, c. 1490-1410 b.c.e. Tomb of Rekhmere, Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, Tombs of the Nobles, Thebes/ E. Strouhal/Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY

willing to take decisive action. Using her magical powers she reunited her husband’s body parts and brought Osiris temporarily back to life so that she could conceive a son. As Osiris retreated to rule the land of the dead, Isis protected their son, Horns, until he was old enough to fight his own battles. Marriages were arranged between couples of equal social standing, with cousin-cousin unions being considered particularly suitable. Incestuous marriages between com¬ moners did not occur until the very end of the dynastic age; the use of the kinship term “sister” to describe any close female relation confused many early Egyptologists into misunderstanding the nature of nonroyal marriage. There is no record of any official wedding ceremony. Once married, the woman took the title “Mistress of the House.” Because the vast majority of Egypt’s mud-brick cities and villages have been lost—either plowed into modern fields or dissolved in rising groundwater—female domestic work (raising children and feeding, clothing, and maintaining the household) is severely underrepresented in the archaeolo¬ gical record. More obvious are the women who also worked outside the home. Tomb scenes show female servants, dancers, and musicians, as well as female market traders selling surpluses (bread, beer, or food). Midwives were invariably female. However, their lack of formal education,

their time-consuming domestic duties, and social expecta¬ tion prevented women from entering the professions. Childbirth and Motherhood. Children of both sexes were welcomed, although there was a preference for boys who could provide for elderly or infirm parents, officiate as priests at their funerals, and maintain the funerary cults that would ensure the deceased a happy afterlife. Infertility, invariably seen as a female problem, could be “cured” by adoption or divorce, and there is no evidence that the Egyptians ever developed the socially acceptable practice, found in other Mediterranean societies, of discarding unwanted or disabled babies. Written sources, including specialist medical papyri, include many references to pregnancy and pregnancy-related problems. There are few references to the use of prophy¬ lactics, although prolonged breast-feeding—for up to three years—may have acted as a natural contraceptive. Although their mortuary practices involved dissection, the ancient Egyptians had little understanding of female anatomy. They believed that the womb could float freely within the body, and the medical papyri suggested ways of draw¬ ing the womb back to its proper position to allow concep¬ tion to occur. They understood that coitus had to occur before conception could take place and that an absence of menstruation was an indication of pregnancy—although

160

EGYPT: Ancient Period

menstruation itself is rarely mentioned. A pregnancy could be confirmed by examining the eyes and the breasts and by sprinkling urine on grains of wheat and barley. A rapid sprouting of the barley would indicate that the mother was carrying a boy child; a rapid sprouting of the wheat, a girl. Childbirth, a dangerous, private, female-dominated rite of passage, is almost totally excluded from the written records; only the fictional Papyrus Westcar—a tale set during the Old Kingdom, composed during the Middle Kingdom, and written down during the Second Intermediate Period— includes a description of a birth scene, where four god¬ desses act as midwives and “hasten” a difficult birth in an unspecified manner. Mortal midwives were armed with a sharp obsidian or flint knife, a set of birthing bricks (where the mother squatted for her delivery), and a series of spells and charms that could be used to ward off evil forces. Magical ivory wands, carved with images of spirits and demons, might be used to draw a protective circle around the birthing bricks, while amulets of the pregnant hippopot¬ amus goddess Taweret and the dwarf demigod Bes might offer some protection to the mother and her unborn child. The mother prepared for her delivery by unbinding her hair; disheveled hair symbolized the loss of control that allowed the forces of life and death to enter into the household. The few surviving childbirth scenes—informal images rather than officially sanctioned art—appear to show the mother in a special birthing room or tent. Although wealthy women may have retreated to a specially designated room, it is unlikely that this privilege would have been available to the poorer members of society. However, some of the stone houses of the New Kingdom workman’s village of Deir el-Medina include enclosed beds that, archaeologists have speculated, may have been used during childbirth. If all went well a healthy baby would be delivered into the arms of the midwife who squatted in front of the mother. If things went badly there was little that could be done. Royal Women. The royal family was unique in approving both polygamous and incestuous royal marriages. Kings had one principal wife, the queen consort, and many other secondary or junior wives who lived in dedicated harem palaces away from the royal court. Far from the luxurious pleasure palaces of popular film and fiction, Egypt’s harems were economically independent female-based institutions that housed not only wives but all the king’s female dependents, including those inherited from his father, plus their young children and servants. During the New Kingdom, the royal harems played an important role in the linen industry. Egyptologists do not know how the harem wives were selected, although some were close members of the royal family and others were foreign princesses, sent to Egypt to form political alliances. This traffic in brides was a one-way process. Egyptian princesses were not sent abroad

until the Twenty-first Dynasty when a King’s Daughter (princess) married the Prince of Edom. The queen consort, or King’s Great Wife—a title used from the Twelfth Dynasty onward—was the mother in the nuclear royal family; she was the queen whose son would eventually inherit his father’s crown. She had an important role to play in political and religious rituals, and as the wife of a semidivine king and the potential mother of his heir, she had her own particular divinity. Should her husband die young, the queen would be expected to act as regent until her son came of age. Often, but by no means always, the queen consort was the sister or half sister of the king. The so-called heiress theory, the idea that the kingship passed through the female line, making brother-sister marriages essential, is now discredited; it is obvious that many of Egypt’s most influential queens, including the New King¬ dom consorts Tiy, Nefertiti, and Nefertari, were not immedi¬ ate members of the royal family. Nevertheless, brother-sister unions offered several advantages. They linked the royal family with the gods—Isis was the sister of her husband Osiris—and so separated them from mere mortals. Equally important, they allowed the royal family to choose a consort who could be trained to her role from birth. They limited the number of potential heirs to the throne by limiting the number of royal grandchildren, and they provided appropri¬ ate husbands for royal sisters who, during the New Kingdom, were not allowed to marry outside their immediate family. There is no doubt that the brother-sister marriages were fully consummated unions. There is more doubt over the two recorded examples of father-daughter marriages. The Eighteenth Dynasty kings Amenhotep III and Ramses II both married at least one of their daughters. Only one of these marriages appears to have produced a child—a daughter, born to Bint-Anath, daughter-wife of Ramses II—and it is possible that these were political or religious appointments rather than true marriages. Female Kings. The ideal succession saw the dead king, now revered as Osiris, followed by a son born to the queen consort, the Horus king. If the queen was unable to provide an heir, a successor might be found in the harem, or a suitably qualified candidate might be adopted into the royal family. Very occasionally a woman took the throne to rule Egypt as a female king. Sobeknofru (r. c. 1787-1783 b.c.e.) and Tawosret (r. c. 1198-1196 b.c.e.) enjoyed brief reigns at the end of the Twelfth and Nineteenth Dynasties, respec¬ tively. Hatshepsut (r. c. 1473-1453) enjoyed a far longer reign in the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty, ruling alongside and totally dominating her stepson and co-regent Thutmose III. Nefertiti, consort of Amenhotep IV (or Akhenaten; r. c. 1353-1335 b.c.e.), clearly played an important religious and political role during her husband’s reign, but there is as yet no evidence to confirm unequivocally that she ever

EGYPT: 700-1500

ruled Egypt either as a co-regent or as a solo king. Two of Nefertiti’s six daughters, Meritaten and Ankhesenpaaten/ Ankhesenamun, served as queen consorts at times of dynastic disruption; the exact extent of their power is, again, ill understood, but there are indications that a queen, not yet firmly identified, may have enjoyed a solo reign at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty Amarna Period. The Ptolemaic period saw Egypt’s queens playing a more obvious role in state affairs. Queens Berenice III (r. 81-80

b.c.e.)

and Berenice IV (r. 58-55

b.c.e.)

were

queens regnant rather than consorts. Egypt’s last queen, Cleopatra VII (r. 51-30

b.c.e.),

was technically co-regent

successively to her two younger brothers, Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV, and her son, Ptolemy XV Caesar, but she effectively ruled Egypt alone.

State Religion. Most women had little contact with state religion and official ritual. Some elite wives acted as priestesses of the goddess Hathor; others commissioned votive stelae and left votive offerings in temple courtyards. Many more working-class women were employed as temple musicians and dancers. But because temple rituals were hidden from the general public, most women worshipped at home, revering an eclectic mixture of lesser local gods, demigods (including Bes and Taweret), and ancestors.

161

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Dorothea. The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty from Ancient Egypt. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996. A beautifully illustrated presentation of female representa¬ tions in Amarna art. Kemp, Barry J. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. 2d ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. A unique presentation of dynastic history. Manniche, Lise. Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt. London and New York: KPI, 1987. Redford, Donald B., ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. An excellent source for many aspects of women’s lives in dynastic Egypt. Roberts, Alison. Hathor Rising: The Serpent Power of Ancient Egypt. Totnes, U.K.: Northgate, 1995. An in-depth examination of the evidence for the female-dominated cult of Hathor. Robins, Gay. Women in Ancient Egypt. London: British Museum Press, 1993. Troy, Lana. Patterns of Queenship in Ancient Egyptian Myth and History. Uppsala, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1986. A detailed presentation of the evidence for ritual aspects of Egyptian queenship. Tyldesley, Joyce A. Chronicle of the Queens of Egypt: From Early Dynastic Times to the Death of Cleopatra. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006. Tyldesley, Joyce A. Daughters of Isis: Women in Ancient Egypt. London: Viking, 1994. Joyce A. Tyldesley

During the New Kingdom, the office of God’s Wife of Amen (the state god) developed. The original God’s Wives were queen consorts. They wore priestly clothes—a short wig, a filet, and a shift dress tied with a girdle at the waist—

700-1500

and performed a series of important but ill-recorded reli¬ gious rituals. There are images of God’s Wives supporting

When in 640

the king as he performs sacred rituals in the Karnak temple

country with an agriculture-based economy and a fairly

of Amen, Thebes, and a series of images shows Neferure,

developed textile industry. The Copts (Christian inhabitants

daughter of the female king Hatshepsut and God’s Wife

of Egypt) had long been involved with the production of flax

of Amen, performing a purification ritual in the sacred

and, from the seventh century onward, cotton, which they

lake of the Karnak temple, holding a long-handled fan

spun, dyed, and wove for practical and ornamental uses, for

c.e.

the Arabs conquered Egypt, they found a

decorated with the image of an enemy of Egypt and carrying

state and domestic consumption, and eventually for export.

a flaming torch.

Women worked on textiles mainly at home and, occasion¬

From the Twentieth Dynasty reign of Ramses VI the

ally, in shops. Throughout the medieval period, Muslim,

office of God’s Wife of Amen underwent a major increase

Coptic, and Jewish women would go out with their heads

in status. The new God’s Wives were celibate princesses

covered and draped by a large shawl or veil so that, as

who wore crowns, wrote their names in royal cartouches

sources report, it would be impossible to distinguish one

(the oval drawn around royal names), and performed

from another. Only slave women remained unveiled in pub¬

rituals—including making offerings—hitherto reserved for kings. The office was passed down from God’s Wife to

lic places. The Arabs also found a country with a long-attested mon¬

adopted daughter. At a time when Egypt’s kings ruled from

astic tradition with numerous Christian monasteries and

the north, it seems that the God’s Wives were expected

nunneries and a widespread practice of devotion to male

to curtail the power of the Theban high priests of Amen.

and female saints or holy persons. Visiting shrines and

Effectively, they governed southern Egypt on behalf of

tombs was an occasion for female social gatherings, as well

their fathers.

as for missionary and political activities. In particular, at the site of the Qarafa cemetery near the capital, shrines

[See also Cleopatra VII; Deities; Hatshepsut; Nefertiti; and Tiy, Queen of Egypt.]

of famous figures became places of pilgrimage. Such popu¬ lar practices prompted all succeeding dynasties to care for

162

EGYPT: 700-1500

the pilgrims to Qarafa and its inhabitants, as well as for the restoration and upkeep of the shrines housing the remains

departments and the army. Some women became famous for their architectural patronage, usually of mosques, mau-

of the various saints. From the Arab Conquest to the Abbasid Governors. The Arab victors kept the existing system of government by entrusting local governors with the administration of the country and undertook, upon payment of a poll tax, to protect the status and religious freedom of the Copts; in time, Arabic replaced Coptic as the official administrative language, and from the time of Ahmad ibn Tulun (d. 884), the founder of the Tulunid dynasty, the governors of Egypt became increasingly autonomous from the caliphs of

solea, and palaces. Both elite and ordinary women were the beneficiaries of the first state-sponsored educational sessions held in the capital. Thanks to a Shiite interpretation of inheritance law, women under the Fatimids were able to own and inherit immovable assets such as estates and land, to benefit from legal entitlements and salaries, and to own movable

Baghdad. Prior to the Tulunids, the only well-known female figure is Nafisa bint al-Hasan (d. 824), a descendant, through cAli and Fatima bint Muhammad, of the prophet Muhammad. Born in Mecca, Nafisa moved to Egypt where she became famous for her piety and erudition. Her shrine in Qarafa is a place of pilgrimage to this day. Under the Tulunids some references can be found to Ahmad ibn Tulun’s mother. Named Qasima, she was the slave girl of the command¬ er Tulun and acquired influence when she became the mother of two of his sons. After Tulun’s death, she married a prominent Turkish general, who was instrumental in the upward career of Ahmad as governor of Egypt. As for women in the local population, there are refer¬ ences to restrictions imposed upon Christian women by Christian authorities. It is still a matter of debate whether such increased conservatism was a reaction to the growing number of converts to Islam or a response to the practice of female seclusion among Muslims. The Fatimid Dynasty (969-1171). It was under the Shiite dynasty of the Fatimids (969-1171) that Egypt, gov¬ erned from its new capital Cairo, became an economic and political power throughout the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. This power was based on the production and export of food and textiles, was served by a sophisti¬ cated administration, and was supported by a multiethnic army. So far as women are concerned, the Fatimid period is one of the best-documented medieval periods because of the interest that this Shiite dynasty provoked among histo¬ rians and chroniclers. A number of elite women, such as Sitt al-Mulk and Arwa, became influential, and some held posi¬ tions of authority. Indicative of the opportunities open to some women is Rasad, who rose from the status of slave to the position of queen regent. Of Sudani or Abyssinian origins, Rasad was the mother of the Fatimid imam-caliph al-Mustansir (d. 1094), and for almost forty years during her son’s reign she was a force to be reckoned with: she championed court patronage, she was instrumental in making and breaking ministers and judges, and her influence extended to the internal politics of running the palace’s administrative

assets, especially textiles. The discovery in 1896 of letters and documents buried in a synagogue in Cairo allowed a rare insight into the com¬ mercial and social life of the Jewish community there from the tenth to thirteenth centuries. Included are references to women’s daily chores such as cooking, cleaning, rearing children, and caring for the elderly, as well as to their activ¬ ities as embroiderers and traders of textiles and as bakers, nurses (even an ophthalmologist), midwives, bath attendants, and professional mourners. However, because working women were generally perceived as a disgrace to the men of the family—because such women seemed to show that their men were unable to provide for them—writers are reticent about the real extent of women’s work and explain that those in most need of work were the widows and the divorced. The Ayyubid (1171-1260) and Mamluk Sultanates (1260-1517). After the end of the Fatimid dynasty, the Kurdish Saladin (Salah al-DIn; d. 1193) restored allegiance to the Sunni Abbasid caliphate, and his successors, the Ayyubids, promoted Sunnism by building law schools and religious institutions while expanding the economic and administrative influence of the military. An example of the growing power of the military is the most famous sultana of Egypt, Shajar al-Durr, who marks the transition between Ayyubid (1171-1260) and Mamluk (1260-1517) rule. As for ordinary women in thirteenth-century Egypt, they seem to have been engaged in the same professions as before, and legal documents show that among the Copts the practice of divorce must have been rather common if, notwithstanding doctrinal considerations about the indis¬ solubility of the sacrament of marriage, the Coptic Church of Egypt came to allow some forms of divorce. A military government of Turkish soldiers of slave origins, the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt witnessed periods of great economic, cultural, and artistic success during the late thir¬ teenth and early fourteenth centuries until the Ottoman sultan Selim I (r. 1512-1520) conquered Egypt and made it a province of his empire run from Anatolia. The Mamluk period saw a flourishing of historiographies, chronicles, and biographical dictionaries that, together with documentary material, provide greater information than before about women from the military elite as well as the civil population. Among the women in the military elite are some cases of women influential in court decisions, such as the mother of

EGYPT: 1500-1800

the sultan al-Sacid (r. 1277-1279) or Khawand Toghay, wife of the sultan al-Nasir (r. 1293-1294). Wealthy Mamluk women, such as the sultan’s mother or his wife, again were part of the trend of architectural patronage of funerary edifices and madrasas (religious schools attached to mosques). Among the civilian population several women were renowned in the fields of Hadiths and jurisprudence. One is the Cairo-based jurist Hajar bint Muhammad ibn cAli ibn Abi al-Ta a (d. 1469), who, unveiled, gave lectures on fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) that were attended by students from all over the Islamic world. Another teacher was the mystic cA'isha al-Ba'uniyya (d. 1516), born in Syria, who lived in Egypt, where she received certificates authorizing her to teach and to pronounce fatwas (legal opinions). Born into a distinguished family of scholars, she composed hundreds of poems and other mystical writings. By means of allegor¬ ical terminology and the symbolism of love, she described mystical states and praised the virtues of the prophet Muhammad and of 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, the founder of the Sufi order to which she belonged. Married and mother of at least one son, cA3isha inspired many a Sufi scholar for generations to come. As in the preceding eras, women’s work was mainly con¬ fined to the more menial and least-paid professions, espe¬ cially with reference to the expanded textile manufacture, a link can be made between growing revenue from paid work and the increase in women’s marriageable age. Legal documents record numerous divorce cases, many initiated by men; the incidence of divorce in fifteenthcentury Cairo might have been as high as 3 out of 10 marriages. Cases are also recorded of women initiating a divorce, sometimes accusing their husbands of violating their rights. Even though sympathy for the woman is found in the court records for offenses caused in the name of gender prerogative, the court decisions endorsed male rights, thus showing that Mamluk society remained patri¬ archal and that practice could be quite removed from theory. Some scholars argue that toward the end of the Mamluk period such patriarchal structure was being gradu¬ ally eroded and that, as a result, assumptions on gender relations in the medieval Islamic world could be reconsidered. [See also Arwa, Queen of Yemen; Codes of Law and Laws, subentry Islamic Law; Fatima bint Muhammad; Islam; Shajar al-Dur; Sitt al-Mulk; and West Asia, subentry Islamic Empires.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Abd ar-Raziq, Ahmad. Le femme au temps des Mamlouks en Egypte. Cairo, Egypt: Institut Franyais d’Archeologie Orientale du Caire, 1973.

163

Cortese, Delia, and Simonetta Calderini. Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Hambly, Gavin R. G., ed. Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Homerin, Th. Emil. “Living Love: The Mystical Writings of'Alshah al-Bacumyah (d. 922/1516).” Mamluk Studies Review 1 (2003): 211-234. Levanoni, Amalia, “agar ad-Durr: A Case of Female Sultanate in Medieval Islam.” In Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk Eras, vol. 3, edited by U. Vermeulen and J. van Steenbergen, pp. 209-218. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2001. Mernissi, Fatima. The Forgotten Queens of Islam. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland. Cambridge, U.IC: Polity, 1993. Rapoport, Yossef. Marriage, Money, and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society. Cambridge, U.IC: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Roded, Ruth. Women in Islamic Biographical Collections: From Ibn Safd to Who’s Who. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1994. Taylor, Christopher S. In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1999. Simonetta Calderini

1500-1800 Egypt in the sixteenth century was transformed from an independent sultanate under a dynasty of slave soldiers known as the Mamluks to a province of the Ottoman Empire. In 1516-1517 the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim I (r. 1512-1520) conquered Egypt and ruled it from the imperial capital at Istanbul. A pasha, or governor, appointed by the central government resided in Cairo and was supposed to provide security and ensure the flow of tax revenue to Istanbul. However, the Ottoman government, in an attempt to win the loyalty of the defeated Mamluks, created twenty-four beys or princes and made them salaried employees of the state. By the late seventeenth century the Mamluk beys had become increasingly powerful, and by the mid-eighteenth century they were able to challenge the Ottoman government’s authority in Egypt. The Mamluk revival ended with the French invasion and occupation under Napoleon Bonaparte between 1798 and 1801, the reassertion of Ottoman control after the French with¬ drawal, and, in the nineteenth century, the rise of a power¬ ful governor, Muhammad Ali Pasha, who asserted Egypt’s autonomy. Under Islamic Law. For these reasons there was con¬ tinuity between the period of the Mamluk sultanate and the early modem period of Egypt’s history, which is reflected in the society and culture and in the status of women, particularly elite women who were the concubines and wives of the powerful Mamluks. Muslim women in Egypt benefited from certain rights guaranteed to them by the Qur an and the law (Sharia), such as the right to own property, to have

164

EGYPT: 1500-1800

custody rights over children, to contract their own marriages, and to have some recourse to divorce. Islamic law—unlike English common law, for example—made women legal persons, and thus they were able to act autonomously and did not need the consent of a male guardian to make a contract. This legal personhood meant that women could buy and sell property, make wills and religious endowments, receive the dowry (mahr) as a legal right, and generally act autonomously in terms of owning and managing property. Thus class position and the law empow¬ ered women in a variety of ways. Elite women were those in Mamluk households or those who were part of the class of large merchants who traded in spices, textiles, and coffee. Mamluk women, like the men, were former slaves imported from Georgia or Circassia who formed a quasi-caste in Egypt. Concubines were a legal category of persons under the law who had certain legal and customary rights. When a concubine gave birth to her master’s children, they were born free because the law stipulated that a man could not own his own children. The children born of a slave mother also became legal heirs to their father’s estate. A concubine who bore her master’s children was unlikely to be sold away from her family and was likely to be freed upon the death of her master. Women of the Mamluk elite came to Egypt as slave-concubines, were freed, and were married after their conversion to Islam either to their former master or to a close ally within his extended household. As Muslim women they had all the legal rights of freeborn women, including property rights and the right to a dowry upon marriage. Evidence of women’s property ownership is available in the records of the estates left upon their death, in the religious endowments they created, and in the court records showing women as buyers and sellers of property. The religious endowments (waqf) show that women were able to amass estates of considerable size, often rivaling those of the wealthiest merchants. Because of the laws regulating inheritance, women did not have to be wealthy to buy real estate. Islamic law demands the division of the deceased’s estate among his close relatives, male and female. Thus women often inherited a share of a house, tenement, or shop. Islamic law allows men to marry up to four wives, pro¬ vided that he treats each of them equally. Although Mamluk men and wealthy merchants married multiple wives and also had concubines, polygamy was practiced mainly by the elite and was rare among the lower classes, partly be¬ cause of the expense of purchasing slaves and also because lower-class men could not afford to house large extended families. Whereas the political and merchant elite could build large homes and multiple dwellings for each wife or concubine, the lower classes lived in tenements (rabc) that provided barely enough space for a man, his wife, and his children.

Activities. Elite women were economically active through the purchase of income-producing property or often as paid managers (nazira) of the religious endow¬ ments of deceased relatives or friends. In the countryside, women worked as part of families engaged in subsistence farming. In the towns, women worked in a number of oc¬ cupations, including as midwives, bakers, greengrocers, sellers of foodstuffs, attendants in the public baths, and singers. Eighteenth-century European travelers to Cairo remarked on and were scandalized by the scantily clad women who sang for money on the streets. However, more highly trained singers entertained in private homes particularly on religious and secular holidays. Women exerted some control over their marriages by writing marriage contracts that stipulated, among other things, the amount of the dowry, where the bride would live, and conditions that if violated would result in divorce, such as a husband’s abusing his wife or taking a second wife. A study of marriage contracts from the early seventeenth century shows that most of the contracts were made by women from three groups: artisans, traders, and merchants. Women stipulated conditions prohibiting their husbands from taking another wife or demanding to be housed sepa¬ rately from another wife or concubine. One woman stipu¬ lated her right to go to the public bath, visit her women friends and relatives, and entertain them in her home. Although travelers to Egypt described the harem as a virtual prison for women and a site of unbridled sexuality, it was in reality the family quarters of the home. The harem was one device used in Islamic society to keep marriageable men and women separated from each other and to ensure familial privacy. Though the wealthy could afford to have separate women’s quarters in the home, lower-class families could not. So men met and talked with each other on the stone benches outside the tenements. Women of all classes used public space. Women went to the baths, to the homes of their friends and relatives, to visit the tombs of their deceased relatives on Fridays, and to participate in secular and religious holidays including the opening of the main canal at the height of the Nile flood, which brought water to Cairo’s aqueducts and lakes, and celebrating the breaking of the fast each evening during Ramadan. When outdoors, elite women wore garments that covered them from head to toe and concealed their faces with a veil that left only the eyes exposed. This mode of dress was a marker of a woman’s wealth and elite status. It also gave her a high degree of autonomy because no man could approach or talk to a veiled woman on the street. Women of all classes were subject to the patriarchal authority of the head of the household and family, although this authority was tempered by the law, which gave women certain rights, and by an accessible court system, which allowed a woman to adjudicate disputes and protect her

EGYPT: 1800-Present

interests. Divorce was the prerogative of the husband, who could dissolve his marriage by reciting a certain formula. A wife had to petition the court for a divorce, which was granted only in certain grave circumstances such as impo¬ tence or insanity, or buy herself out of the marriage using the unpaid portion of her dowry. Also, although women inherited property from family members, their share was one-half of a man’s, and often a woman’s male relatives coerced her to give or sell her share to them, particularly if the property was agricultural land. Nevertheless, Egyptian women’s legal right to property ownership and the law’s acknowledgment of women’s legal personhood were rights that they enjoyed—whereas women in Britain and the United States would not be granted these rights until the late nineteenth century. [See also Codes of Law and Laws, subentry Islamic Law; Concubinage; Divorce; Islam; and Marriage.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modem Debate. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Fay, Mary Ann. “From Concubines to Capitalists: Women, Prop¬ erty, and Power in Eighteenth-Century Cairo.” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 3 (1998): 118-140. Sonbol, Amira El-Azhary, ed. Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996. See in particular Nelly Hanna, “Marriage among Merchant Families in Seventeenth-Century Cairo” (pp. 143154), and Abdal-Rehim Abdal-Rahman Abdal-Rehim, “The Family and Gender Laws in Egypt during the Ottoman Period” (pp. 96-111). Mary Ann Fay

165

The reforms of Muhammad Ali Pasha (r. 1805-1848) had far-reaching implications for the lives of women. He set out on a program of economic and military expansion aimed at making Egypt autonomous from its Ottoman overlord. He founded the first national army, which involved conscrip¬ tion, and he used countless numbers of men in public works projects. Early on, campaigns and projects tended to be shorter and closer to home, so women and children might follow. But as the campaigns and projects became longer and more complex, women and children were left behind to fend for themselves on family plots of land. Women were often abandoned or widowed without confirmation. Such a woman might face the prospect of fighting her husband’s family in court for her share of the property. Muhammad Ali turned Egypt into a state-run monopoly, created private property, introduced long-staple cotton, and built gender-segregated factories to produce textiles. Never¬ theless, the bulk of production remained home-based, and families now had to buy and sell materials at state-set prices. The existence of the (short-lived) factory system tended to institutionalize a gendered division of labor. Public health was an important issue for Muhammad Ali because of his interest in the productive capacity of the country. Cultural mores prevented women from seeking male medical care, so Muhammad Ali’s adviser Antoine Clot suggested training women as midwives. The same mores impaired recruitment, so the first students at the school were slaves. As time passed, orphans and others negatively im¬ pacted by state policies found their way to the School of Midwifery, which opened in 1832. Scholars have disputed the role of hakimas (female doctors). Opponents argue that they were tools used by the state to extend its authority over women’s bodies, and supporters emphasize the hakimas’ importance in extending health care to women.

1800-Present Women’s lives in 1800 were not remarkably different than they were one hundred years earlier, but Egypt itself was in a period of change. The majority of Egyptian women were peasants who worked alongside their husbands in the pro¬ duction of wheat and sugar. There were women involved in family-based urban or rural craft production, such as textiles, or urban professions, such as trader, bathhouse keeper, musician, or dancer. Working did not necessarily stigmatize a woman, but practicing a profession in front of men or lowerclass women would. Some elite women in Egypt arrived as slaves. Upper-class households would purchase Circassian or Georgian female slaves to serve as companions in their homes. Female slaves of African origins generally held lower positions in the household. Like other elite women, elite women in Egypt became businesswomen by investing their wealth or became influential by donating to charitable causes.

Egyptian Political Activist. The Egyptian writer Nawal el Saadawi, Cairo, May 2001. REUTERS/Mona Sharaf

166

EGYPT: 1800-Present

Elite women were not unscathed by the reforms of Muhammad Ali. The old Mamluk (slave) system kept men away for long periods of time, and these women ran signifi¬ cantly large households. With the creation of a national army and the disposal of his mamluk enemies, Muhammad Ali did away with this system. Elite women lost many lu¬ crative sources of wealth, which were taken over by the state. Muhammad Ali distributed property to loyal, male servants of the state and to his family. Although women could inherit land, and royal women held significant tracts of land, land ownership in the new state was dominated by men. Though elite women had always lived by a system in which men could marry up to four wives and take unlimited concubines, the stakes seemed to have changed. 1848 until World War I. Great changes occurred in the lives of Egyptian women as the country was drawn further into the world economy and came largely to function as a supplier of raw cotton to Britain. The majority of women remained peasants, but the nature of agriculture changed. Peasant lands continued to erode with the creation of large, landed estates, and the rise of wage labor for men marginalized the value of women’s labor at home. Women became responsible for subsistence farming on shrinking plots—which by the twentieth century was becoming nearly impossible. European textiles flooded the markets, but certain female crafts, such as embroidery and rug making, remained valuable skills. The economy and the infrastructure of the country be¬ came geared toward facilitating the export of cotton, with better roads, ports, railroads, and so on. Projects like the building of the Suez Canal (1859-1869) and the building of the first Aswan Dam (1899-1902) represent the dominance of foreign influence in Egypt, including the British occupa¬ tion from 1882, the power of the state over its subjects, and increasing difficulties for lower-class women, whether peas¬ ant or urban. Consequently, many peasants fled to the larger cities of the Nile Delta. Conditions in the cities for newly arrived peasants were usually no better than the ones that they had left, and for women who remained, it was a similar story of struggling to hold on to property or being forced into domestic service. These changes were not entirely negative for women of the growing middle and upper classes, particularly with respect to the spread of education. Isma'il Pasha (r. 18631879) opened the first primary school for girls in Cairo in 1873. As happened with the School for Midwifery, there was an immediate difficulty finding students. The poor did not want to send their daughters to school because they needed their labor, the elite could afford to educate their daughters at home, and those in between the two extremes were few in number. Once again the first students were slaves from the royal family.

Ismacil viewed female education with an eye toward the end of the slave trade (1877), hoping to substitute educated Egyptian peasant girls. The linkage of slavery, domestic service, and education meant that few girls with options chose to go to the new school. Education spread, and other options included schools run by missionaries and minority communities, private establishments, tutors, European governesses, and schools attached to mosques (kuttabs). The price ranged from entirely subsidized at gov¬ ernment schools to substantial at the most exclusive private schools. Curriculum in the government schools for girls pushed home economics in addition to the basics of Arabic reading and writing, religion and morals, French, and history. Private and missionary schools offered a wide range of sub¬ jects, with some teachers focusing solely on literacy through reading the Bible and others offering sophisticated pro¬ grams of study involving multiple European languages, art, and music. The more exclusive the school, the less likely the curriculum was to include practical home economics. Great debates took place in the mainstream and burgeon¬ ing women’s press about what this curriculum for girls should include. Although overall female literacy rates remained at about 6 percent, rates in the large cities of the Nile Delta were double or triple that. The household came to be seen as the key to reform: without an educated woman at its helm, there would be no redemption for a new Egypt. The nature of the elite household had greatly changed with the suppression of the slave trade, and bourgeois monogamy formed the marital ideal. Architecture reflected the changes in the new home, with Western styles replacing Islamic ones. The household and household politics were topics of both the mainstream and women’s presses. Though elite and upper-middle-class women deemed practical home economics beneath them, the “science” of home manage¬ ment was an honor worthy of national attention. Male nationalists used the trope of the family and the household to criticize the monarchy and the British occupation, as well as to call for reform from within. World War I, the 1919 Uprising, and Egypt’s Liberal Era. As World War I ended and the British occupation continued, the occupation provided new fuel for the women’s press and an organizational structure for a women’s movement. A delegation (wafd) of Egyptians led by Saad Zaghloul asked permission to attend the Versailles Peace Conference in January 1919. The British rejected Egypt’s request, and by March of 1919 widespread rioting erupted in Egypt. Upper-class men and women of the socalled Wafd Party organized controlled protests, signed petitions, and waged a campaign against the British in the press. Demonstrations, the arrest and deportation of lead¬ ers, and celebrations marking the return of those leaders

EGYPT: 1800-Present

characterized the period between 1919 and 1922, when Egypt gained its independence. Women were thrust into leadership roles because many of their husbands and fathers were arrested. Some scholars have questioned why male nationalists turned their backs on women’s rights in the writing of the 1923 constitution. More recently, scholarship has focused on the evolution of the women’s agenda and its confusion in historical memory, or on the male agenda that simply used the discourse of home in achieving its ends. Women worked together during the 1919 Uprising be¬ cause their goals were united. As they continued to meet, it became clear that there would be breaks related to person¬ alities, politics, and the monarchy. Huda Sharawi (d. 1947), the leader of the Women’s Wafd, founded the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) in 1923, even before her break with the Wafd Party. Those following Sharawi followed the path of Western feminism and joined international women’s conferences; however, by the 1930s and 1940s it had be¬ come difficult for Egyptian and Arab participants to make Europeans understand their feelings regarding Zionism. Within Egypt, it became difficult to make inroads with male politicians with respect to women’s suffrage. Modest gains were made with respect to expanded education—primary education was made compulsory in 1923—and raising the legal age of marriage. A more radical splinter in the feminist front occurred where women disagreed with the goals of Western femin¬ ism. Some sought an indigenous model of feminism and looked for a more inclusive model of organization. Labiba Ahmad (d. 1951) used her journal Female Renaissance to seek not only political but economic, cultural, and moral independence from the British. Zainab al-Ghazali (d. 2005), a onetime supporter of the EFU, broke ranks and formed her own Muslim Women’s Association in 1936; by 1948 she had joined the Muslim Brotherhood. 1952-Present. Male politicians of the liberal era had done little to deal with the major problems affecting women’s lives in the twentieth century: illiteracy, poverty, and inequity in the political and judicial systems. A group of young army officers headed by Gamal Abdeul Nasser spearheaded a revolution in July 1952 that had, on many levels, far-reaching implications for the lives of women, yet continuity on others. The Suez Crisis of 1956 and the nationalizations that followed created the migration of an educated technical and business class, and Nasser recognized the need for mass mobilization. By the early 1960s the regime had made the educational system free at all levels, promised jobs to all graduates, and granted maternity leave. The numbers of children in elementary school more than quadrupled be¬ tween 1952 and 1965. The growth rate for women attending higher education was astounding: it increased sixfold

167

between 1960 and 1976. Though not entirely gender blind, the state education and civil service system facilitated the hiring and promotion of women. The “massification” of the educational system under Nasser and his successors never¬ theless meant a severe decline in its quality. Although the Hosni Mubarak government (from 1981) might boast of high enrollments, enrollment does not trans¬ late into high rates of attendance, nor does it equate with literacy. The reality is that Egypt remains on UNESCO’s list of E-9 countries that have high populations and high rates of illiteracy. Mothers continue to strive in the mothereducator role defined at the turn of the twentieth century. This struggle takes place in a variety of class settings, whether it is a maid working from dawn to dusk to send her child to a private school or a professional mother rush¬ ing home to shuttle her children to their various private tutors so that they can succeed on the General Secondary Exam that determines where and what they can study at the university level. With respect to land, Nasser limited land ownership and redistributed land to peasants; however, the old system was not entirely eradicated until peasants were given other options—namely, the ability to leave and work in the Gulf. Male peasants were able to travel more freely under the presidents Anwar el Sadat (d. 1981) and Mubarak. Though the men sent remittances home and their departure raised wages in Egypt, the men’s absence once again placed those left behind in a precarious position because the men were subject to conditions beyond their control, including for¬ eign immigration and conscription. Temporary labor migra¬ tion to the Gulf has been an option open to women of the upper classes, usually with their husbands. Egyptian women cannot travel without the permission of their husband, and although often not enforced, a poor woman would find it difficult to leave. Initially the Nasser regime was no more committed to women than were the politicians of the liberal age. Women’s groups, such as the Bint al-Nil (Daughter of the Nile) Union led by the activist Durriya Shafiq (1908-1975), managed to gain female suffrage from the new administra¬ tion in 1956. Nevertheless, such a right was growing mean¬ ingless with Nasser’s increasing authoritarianism. The government had already liquidated political parties and was moving toward the absorption of women’s organiza¬ tions in the early 1960s under the ministry of social affairs. Headed by a woman, Hikmat Abu Zayd, the ministry now took over many functions previously dictated by elite women’s groups and ventured into new areas such as family planning. Female politicians, academics, and lawyers have been helpful in bringing about change for other women by work¬ ing against the system, within the system, and with other

168

EGYPT: 1800-Present

women around the world. Notable in the last two categories is Dr. Farkhonda Hassan (b. 1930), an environmentalist, women’s activist, and parliamentarian. The psychiatrist and feminist Dr. Nawal el Saadawi (b. 1931) is infamous for her outspoken views on sexuality, patriarchy, govern¬ ment, and world politics. She has a larger following among foreign feminists than among Egyptian women, and her Arab Women’s Solidarity Association has been shut down by the government a number of times. In 2000 the lawyer and activist Mona Zulfikar was part of a team that success¬ fully used rights guaranteed to women by Islam to make divorce more accessible to Egyptian women. In 1979 wo¬ men’s organizations had used the executive branch—by means of Jehan al Sadat, the wife of Anwar el Sadat—to make these changes, but they had been overturned on con¬ stitutional grounds. Egypt’s loss to Israel in the 1967 war, combined with economic and political strains, breathed new strength into Islamic fundamentalist currents that were already in exis¬ tence. The return of the hijab (headscarf) in the last two decades of the twentieth century has been greatly debated by many scholars. Though there may have been a class (lower-middle) and age (twenties) factor in the 1980s, by the early twenty-first century the overwhelming majority of adult, Muslim women adopted some form of the headscarf, although relatively few have opted for complete facial or head covering. The adoption of Islamic dress has heigh¬ tened distinctions between Muslim and Coptic women, evi¬ dence of the growing tension between the communities since the 1970s. Though the return of the hijab is, for many women, a critique of Western politics and consumption, ironically the wearing of the hijab can be associated with new forms of consumption and sexuality. Large numbers of stores cater to the Islamic chic fashion, which can also be pur¬ chased online. Scholars and tourists have noticed the liber¬ ating and concealing effect of the hijab on young lovers in a society that rigorously monitors premarital behavior. Egypt remains a society where nearly all women marry, engage¬ ment generally precedes courtship, and premarital sex is taboo. Although the Internet and new venues for consump¬ tion (malls, new cafes) provide alternatives for meeting prospective mates, family—broadly defined—remains the single most important facilitator, whether as a means of introduction or through cousin marriage. [See also Egyptian Uprising of 1919; El Saadawi, Nawal; Imperialism and Colonialism, subentries Modern Period and Anticolonial Protests; Islam; Seclusion; Shafiq, Durriya; and Sharawi, Huda.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abaza, Mona. Changing Consumer Cultures of Modern Egypt: Cairo’s Urban Reshaping. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2006.

Badran, Margot. Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Baron, Beth. Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Polit¬ ics. Berkeley ^University of California Press, 2005. Macleod, Arlene Elowe. Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the Nezv Veiling, and Change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Pollard, Lisa. Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805-1923. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Russell, Mona. Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education, and National Identity, 1863-1922. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Russell, Mona. “The Female Brain Drain, the State, and Develop¬ ment in Egypt.” In Women and Development in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Joseph G. Jabbra and Nancy W. Jabbra, pp. 122-143. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1992. Tucker, Judith E. Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Mona L. Russell

EGYPTIAN

UPRISING

OF

1919. The

Egyptian Uprising of 1919—also called the Egyptian Revolution— broke out in early March 1919. Demonstrations, boycotts, and riots spread sporadically throughout the country be¬ tween 1919 and 1922, uniting Egyptians of all classes and religions in a common struggle against imperialism. The revolutionaries responded to a colonial occupation that had lasted since 1882 and to unmet promises by the British to end Egypt’s protectorate status at the end of World War I. The hardships endured by the Egyptian population during the war years and Great Britain’s refusal to allow a delega¬ tion (wafd) of Egyptian politicians to participate in the postwar peace process served to ignite the frustrations of both the urban and the rural classes. A handful of Egyptian elites established the Wafd in November 1918 to speak directly for Egypt in the postwar negotiations, and the Wafd was declared a formal political party in 1923. Revolutionaries demanded that Britain end the occupation and grant Egypt self-rule. It was not until 1922, when the British granted Egypt provisional independence and when Egyptians began drafting a constitution, that order was fully reestablished in Cairo and the provinces. Egyptian women played a prominent role in the activities that are collectively referred to as the Egyptian Uprising of 1919. By mid-March 1919, shortly after the leaders of the Wafd had been exiled for their demands on the British, upper-class Cairene women organized and led what are referred to as the “ladies’ demonstrations.” Hundreds of elite women took to the streets, marching against the occu¬ pation, carrying placards demanding independence, and demonstrating outside the residences of foreign consuls. The women were frequently surrounded by British troops,

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE

who drew their weapons on the women and sometimes left them standing for hours in the hot sun. When not involved in demonstrations, women circulated and delivered peti¬ tions for independence to members of foreign legations. In addition to the ladies’ demonstrations, urban women of the elite and working classes appeared in mixed-sex demonstrations; a number of lower-class women were killed in demonstrations in Cairo, and their funerals turned into further demonstrations of nationalist solidarity. In the provinces, women played central roles in boycotts of British-produced goods, designed to make continued occu¬ pation as costly as possible. Provincial women also helped provide food and assistance to local militants engaged in sabotage against the British infrastructure. In the words of Huda Sharawi, an active female revolutionary: “The revolution manifests itself the same everywhere because there was only one way to act and that was to revolt” (quoted in Badran, p. 75). The frequent exiling of members of the Wafd leadership during the revolution and beginning in the spring of 1919, their ultimate sojourn in Paris and London, where they began negotiating for Egypt’s independence, created oppor¬ tunities for elite female revolutionaries at home. In January 1920 elite and middle-class women created the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee (WFCC). When male Wafdists were absent, women handled finances. They organized boycotts, circulated petitions, collected money to keep the Wafdist cause going, interacted with the British authorities, and worked to expand the Wafd’s power base. After the uprising had ended, however, Egyptian men and women were split over the role that women would play in independent Egypt’s body politic. In the ladies’ demonstra¬ tions and also in the mixed-sex demonstrations, elite women presented themselves both as kin to the male nationalist leadership and as members of the Egyptian nation itself. For some this signaled that their participation in the revolu¬ tion portended actual political enfranchisement once the struggle had ended. For others, the activities of the WFCC signaled women’s ability to participate in political affairs. Indeed, the women drew on their prerevolutionary experi¬ ence as philanthropists and educators as they organized and negotiated. But though male Egyptian politicians seemed to be grateful for women’s participation in the uprising, they did not enfranchise women in the constitution that was promulgated in 1923. In March 1923—the fourth anniversary of the appear¬ ance of women in the demonstrations—a handful of the WFCC membership met at the home of Huda Sharawi, the organization’s head. From this meeting a new entity was born, the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU). The organiza¬ tion’s birth represented the continuity of women’s political activism and aspirations and also their frustrations with the male politicians who were locking them out of the political

169

arena. The EFU’s growing participation in international conferences on feminism indicates their commitment to bettering women’s position in Egyptian society—as did their symbolic removal of their face veils in spring 1923. And the EFU’s distancing of itself from the Wafd when the Wafd insisted that the WFCC act as a mere rubber stamp signaled its determination to gain actual political rights for women. EFU women continued to petition for suffrage, which they were not granted until 1956. Though the 1919 uprising created the active, political Egyptian woman, it could not, ultimately, sustain her. Women’s participation in the riots, boycotts, and demon¬ strations of 1919 played a concrete role in making the occupation untenable. And at the symbolic level, the appearance of women in the streets proved to the British that Egyptians were ready for self-rule. Elite and middleclass women gained actual political experience while men were absent, and when that experience could not be parlayed into suffrage, an experienced, articulate, and active feminist movement took shape. [See also Egypt, subentry 1800-Present; Imperialism and Colonialism, subentries Anticolonial Protests and Modern Period; Nationalism; and Sharawi, Huda.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Badran, Margot. Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Classic account of women in 1919 and the growth of the Egyptian feminist movement. Baron, Beth. Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Polit¬ ics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Accounts for women’s participation in 1919 and the symbolic importance of it. Pollard, Lisa. Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt (1805-1923). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Tracks the sym¬ bolic role of women and family in the construction of Egyptian politics through the revolutionary period. Russell, Mona L. Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumer¬ ism, Education, and National Identity, 1863-1922. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Chronicles the rise of elite women’s economic and educational agency through the revolution. Lisa Pollard

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE (also spelled Alienor, Eleonore, Eonor, Alia-Aenor; 1122-1204), is recognized as the most powerful woman of twelfth-century Europe. Educated, intelligent, determined, and ambitious, she be¬ came a patron of western Europe’s most culturally sophis¬ ticated and wealthiest courts. She was queen to King Louis VII of France (r. 1137-1180), then to Kang Henry II of England (r. 1154-1189), and mother to King Richard I and ICing John of England. Eleanor’s grandfather, Duke William IX of Aquitaine, was one of Europe’s first troubadour poets. When her father

170

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE

(Duke William X) died in 1137, Eleanor inherited the duchy of Aquitaine, landholdings extending in southwestern France from the Loire River to the Pyrenees. Her mother, Aenor de Rochefoucauld, had died in 1130, and a brother, William Aigret, had died at the age of four. In 1137, Eleanor married Louis VII of France. Their daughter Marie was born in 1145. Eleanor accompanied Louis on the Second Crusade (1147-1149) and offered a thousand vassals for the cause. At Antioch, her friendship (and possibly adulterous liaison) with her uncle, Raymond of Poitiers, resulted in strife between Eleanor and Louis. She supported her uncle’s military strategies, asking her husband for assistance. Louis refused, and Eleanor pro¬ claimed her marriage to Louis VII invalid. She was forced, nonetheless, to remain with Louis on the crusade, riding with him to Jerusalem before the two returned to France on separate ships. Pope Eugene III refused Eleanor’s plea for divorce, and the royal couple produced another daughter, Alix, in 1150. In March 1152, Pope Eugene III annulled the marriage between Eleanor and Louis VII on the proclaimed basis of consanguinity. Eleanor regained her lands in France and married Henry Plantagenet, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou. He was eleven years younger than she. Henry became king of England (Henry II) in 1154, and he and Eleanor produced five sons and three daughters: William, Henry, Richard (the future King Richard I, the “Lionhearted”), Geoffrey, John (the future King John), Mathild, Eleanor, and Joan. The marriage brought England, Aquitaine, Anjou, and Normandy under a single rule. The couple eventually became estranged, and Eleanor reestablished her court at Poitiers, where, in the early 1170s, Eleanor and her daughter, Marie of Champagne, supported and entertained one of Europe’s most sophisticated cultural centers, including troubadours, musicians, and scholars— a foundation center for international “courtly” styles and “courtly love” traditions. In 1173 Eleanor supported her three eldest sons (Henry, Richard, and Geoffrey) in their rebellion against their father. Her husband had her impris¬ oned, and she was released only four years before his death in 1189. Eleanor secured her son Richard’s accession to the English throne, and when he joined the Third Crusade (1189-1182), she ruled England as regent. Eleanor traveled throughout Europe arranging marriages for her grandchil¬ dren. Her granddaughter Blanche of Castile became queen of France when she married Louis VIII, the grandson of Eleanor’s first husband, Louis VII. The alliance was meant to heal the strife between the (English) Plantagenets and the (French) Capetians. Upon Richard I’s death (1199) she supported her son John’s claim to the throne, against his nephew Arthur, duke of Brittany. Arthur held her in the Angevin castle of

Mirebeau in 1202, and John was victorious in rescuing her. She died in 1204 and is buried in the Plantagenet funerary church at Fontevrault with Henry II and Richard I. [See also ’Europe, subentry Medieval Monarchy, subentry Comparative History.]

Period,

and

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kelly, Amy. Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950. Mead, Marion. Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography. New York: Penguin, 1992. Owen, D. D. R. Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen and Legend. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1993. Weir, Alison. Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life. New York: Ballantine, 2001. Ann R. Meyer

ELIOT, GEORGE (1819-1880), English Victorian nov¬ elist. George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, who was the youngest of five children of an estate manager in Warwickshire. Evans wrote Middlemarch (1871-1872), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and other novels and is considered one of the most important and influential writers in the history of English literature despite leading an unconventional lifestyle that flouted the accepted moral codes of nineteenth-century England. Her novels are often praised as being the prototypes for the modern novel, full of rich detail of English country life and replete with characters whose motivations are laid bare by the author’s probing psychological dissections. Middlemarch, her mas¬ terpiece, represents the culmination of Eliot’s recurring theme: the intelligent girl swept away by life’s endless par¬ ade of tempting adventures only to be pulled back by Victorian convention and stymied by society’s expectations of her gender. Evans received a typical education for her day and social status, at a Baptist-run school with a curriculum that heavi¬ ly emphasized religious training. She was bright, shy, and observant. An unattractive child who grew to be an unat¬ tractive adult, she nevertheless possessed qualities that led friends and acquaintances to be drawn to her charms and great intellect. Among the first adults to notice her was Maria Lewis, one of her early tutors. Lewis, an evangelical, started Evans on a path of religious scholarship that would eventually lead her away from God and religion and into a humanistic morality realized through duty to others. Her budding doubts about religion flowered when her mother died in 1836 and Evans returned home to take care of her father. They moved to Coventry, where Evans became acquainted with Charles and Cara Bray. Bray was a wealthy manufacturer and, more important for Evans, a freethinker

ELIZABETH I OF ENGLAND

when it came to religion and politics. It was at Rosehill, the Bray home, that Evans first met Herbert Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other intellectuals. During this period she anonymously penned her first literary work, a transla¬ tion of David Strauss’ Life of Jesus (1846). In 1851, two years after Evans’s father died, she became the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, which had been bought by her publisher, John Chapman. By then Evans had shortened her name to Marian and taken up residence in Chapman’s house, along with his wife and mistress. She suffered from Chapman’s amorous advances, and his wife and mistress insisted that she leave the house. She did so but continued her professional association with Chapman, continuing as editor for two years and ten issues. Chapman introduced her to George Henry Lewes, philoso¬ pher and literary critic and the man who would become Evans’s husband in every meaning of word except the legal sense. Lewes was a married man, living in an open marriage. His wife bore him three children, but she bore his best friend four children. To avoid the appearance of impropri¬ ety, Lewes gave all these offspring his last name, making him a complicit partner in the adultery and thus unqualified to seek divorce on those grounds. Lewes’s marriage was effectively over, but Evans demanded reassurances from him and his wife before she would live with him openly. She and Lewes lived as husband and wife for twenty-five years, initially bringing scandal in British society and ostra¬ cism from Evans’ family. In 1854, for the first and only time, the name Marian Evans appeared on a literary work by the author, when she com¬ pleted the translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. After years of translating and writing countless pieces of criticism and reviews, Evans longed to fulfill her childhood dream of writing fiction. In 1857 Scenes of Clerical Life was published as three separate stories in Blackwood’s Magazine under the nom de plume George Eliot. While it was not unusual for women to be writers, Evans wanted her work to be taken seriously and not to be confused with what she considered silly romances penned by women writers of her day. She chose the name George in honor of Lewes and the name Eliot because she liked the way it sounded. With Lewes as her muse, George Eliot wrote her first novel, Adam Bede (1859). For fifteen years she wrote of young women coming of age, doubting and questioning their upbringing, and eventually finding a more humanistic approach to life. Lewes died in 1878, and Evans married family friend John Cross in May of 1880. An American banker, Cross was twenty years her junior. Within the year she fell ill with a throat infection, and her recovery was complicated by kidney disease. She died unexpectedly on 22 December 1880 at the age of sixty-one. George Eliot was buried in Highgate

171

Cemetery in an area designated for religious dissenters, buried beside her great love, George Henry Lewes. [See also Literature, subentry Fiction and Poetry.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen, Paula Marantz. “Why Read George Eliot? Her novels are just modern enough—and just old-fashioned enough, too.” American Scholar 75 (Spring 2006): 129-132. Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Hughes, Kathryn. George Eliot: The Last Victorian. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998. Randy L. Abbott

ELIZABETH I OF ENGLAND (1533-1603; r 15581603), queen of England and Ireland. The second daughter of Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547) by his second wife, Anne Boleyn (c. 1500-1536), Elizabeth was born into contro¬ versy on 7 September 1533. In his quest for a male heir, Henry had broken with the Catholic Church, and Catholics refused to recognize Elizabeth’s legitimacy since the pope had never annulled Henry’s first marriage. Before Elizabeth was three, her mother was executed for adultery, and Elizabeth, like her older half-sister Mary (r. 1553-1558), daughter of Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536), was declared illegitimate. By his third wife, Jane Seymour, Henry had his heir, Edward (r. 1547-1553). But Henry still made provi¬ sions for the succession to the throne: if Edward died with no heirs of his own, the crown would pass to Mary, and if she died without heirs, to Elizabeth. Elizabeth had a diffi¬ cult and dangerous time in the reigns of both her brother and her sister, but they both died without heirs of their own, and in 1558 Elizabeth ascended the throne. She was to rule successfully and alone for nearly forty-five years. Elizabeth found excellent men to aid her government, including William Cecil, Lord Burghley (c. 1520-1598), Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1532-1590), and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (c. 1532-1588), for many years her favorite. Between Henry’s death in 1547 and Mary’s in 1558, the official Church of England was in great upheaval; it moved far more in a Protestant direction in the reign of the boy-king Edward, and back to Roman Catholicism under Mary. One of the most important issues facing the young queen was religion, and while Elizabeth I was clearly Protestant and was named Supreme Governor of the Church of England, she initiated a broad-based religious settlement that she hoped would be satisfactory to her people and would also allow her to be acceptable to both Catholic and Lutheran princes abroad. Another significant issue was the succession. Parliament and her council begged Elizabeth to marry and, they hoped, have a son; in the meantime they wanted her to name

172

ELIZABETH I OF ENGLAND

a successor. But Elizabeth, though she used courtship as a political tool for the first half of her reign, never married and never named an heir. She clearly preferred to rule without a mate and appeared convinced that England was safer without a designated heir. The issue of the succession became much more difficult after Elizabeth’s cousin Mary Stuart (1542-1587) fled from Scotland to England in 1568. For nineteen years she stayed as Elizabeth’s enforced “guest,” the center of plots to have Elizabeth assassinated and Catholic Mary made queen. For her role in these plots, Mary was finally executed in 1587. During her reign Elizabeth also encouraged trade with Russia and the Ottoman Empire. She granted Sir Walter Ralegh the right to establish a colony in North America. After the failure of the first attempt in 1585, over a hundred people, including families, established Roanoke under Governor John White in 1587. But White returned that year to England to acquire supplies, and because of the Spanish Armada of 1588, he was not able to return until 1590, when he found all the settlers to be missing. The Great Armada, sent by Philip II of Spain (r. 1556-1598) attempted to conquer England and return it to the Catholic faith. A combination of skillful seamanship and stormy weather foiled the Spanish attempt to invade England. But even with this success, the last fifteen years of Elizabeth’s reign were difficult. The economy was troubled by bad harvests and inflation, and attempts to control Ireland were problematic and expensive. In 1601 the Earl of Essex led an unsuccessful rebellion against the Crown. Yet at Elizabeth’s death on 14 March 1603 there was a smooth transition of leadership to James VI of Scotland (ruled England as James I 1601-1625). Elizabeth, who ruled at a time of great cultural achievement, had a reign known far more for successes than for failures. She was one of the most famous rulers England has ever had, and under her England began to develop its global profile. [See also Great Britain; Monarchy; Stuart, Mary; and Tudor, Mary.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Doran, Susan. Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Doran addresses the various courtships throughout Elizabeth’s reign and argues that Elizabeth did seriously consider marriage but that at those times her Council could not agree. Levin, Carole. The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. Philadelphia: University of Penn¬ sylvania Press, 1994. Levin examines how Elizabeth I presented herself and also examines representations of her as an unmarried sixteenth-century queen. Marcus, Leah S., Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. A wide-ranging collection of Elizabeth’s letters, speeches, and poetry. Carole Levin

ELIZABETH II OF ENGLAND (b. 1926), queen of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth realms since 1952. The daughter of Prince Albert the Duke of York, and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Elizabeth was born on 21 April 1926 in London. The young princess received her education from private tutors and her religious training in the Church of England from the Archbishop of Canterbury. After experiencing World War II as a teen, Elizabeth joined the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service as a driver, becoming the first royal woman to serve in the British military. She married Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, who then became the Duke of Edinburgh, on 20 November 1947. After the death of her father—who had reigned as George VI from 1936—on 6 February 1952, Elizabeth acceded to the throne; her coronation on 2 June 1953 began a long period of monarchical stability in the United Kingdom. The queen’s constitutional powers have only rarely been exercised. Elizabeth on three occasions helped to legitimate leadership of the House of Commons in the postwar period. In 1957 and 1963 the queen, in the absence of any formal or constitutional method, exercised her royal prerogative and commissioned Conservative leadership to establish Britain’s prime minister. She also asked Harold Wilson to form the Parliament as head of the Labour Party in 1974. On all three occasions she remained politically neutral, consulting esteemed party figures in an effort to institute a fair transi¬ tion in newly elected majority administrations. Scholars have suggested that Elizabeth’s actions, rather than showing the monarchy as antithetical to democratic government, served to stabilize and support contemporary political prac¬ tices in the United Kingdom. Others contend that in the early twenty-first century Elizabeth’s power is mostly sym¬ bolic, though the monarch’s rituals and ceremonies pro¬ vided useful historical continuity in Britain’s tumultuous postwar period. Elizabeth’s social authority and ritual con¬ stancy also once again gave British politics and society an influential woman leader. Though great, Elizabeth’s significance for the global community has had less scholarly attention. The queen over¬ saw the dismantling of the British Empire and the decolonization of several Commonwealth nations. She currently serves in many different capacities in former British territories as queen, head of state, and commander in chief. As in Britain, she exercises very little political power, but her status as figurehead has helped to ease political relationships between Britain and the Commonwealth of Nations. She helped usher in the beneficial political associa¬ tions between the United Kingdom and Commonwealth members like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Antigua, and other Caribbean principalities. Largely through esteemed public visits and philanthropy, Elizabeth has maintained foreign relations by ensuring that other nations understand their connections with the United Kingdom.

ELIZABETH I OF RUSSIA

Elizabeth has offered both symbolic leadership and a repre¬ sentation of the relationship with Britain, while the British have benefited from economic and political associations with Commonwealth nations. Her major role in world history, then, has been to facilitate the ritual and practical connections between Britain and the Commonwealth, not by political maneuvering, but by creating a shared sense of informal monarchical leadership as decolonized nations established their place in the global economy. [See also Great Britain and Monarchy.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bogdanor, Vernon. The Monarchy and the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pimlott, Ben. The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth II. London: Harper Collins, 1996. Brett M. Bebber

173

which the infant Ivan Antonovich (1740-1764) and his mother Anna Leopoldovna (1718-1746) held the throne. This fragile government allowed Elizabeth and her friends to stage a nocturnal bloodless coup on 25 November 1741. Almost thirty-two, Elizabeth crowned herself in Moscow in 1742 and jealously guarded her autocratic authority. Sweden’s attempt to capitalize on Russian disarray was defeated, and further territorial gains were registered by the peace of 1743. Though she constantly feared coup attempts, she also abolished the death penalty. Elizabeth quickly stabilized the succession by bringing her nephew, the future Peter III (1728-1762), from Holstein to adopt Russian Orthodoxy and marry Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst, the future Catherine the Great. This marriage only provided a male heir in 1754, and Elizabeth and Peter and Catherine later became alienated. Dominated by aristocratic officials such as the Shuvalov brothers, the Razumovskii brothers, and Chancellor Aleksei Bestuzhev-Riumin, Elizabeth’s reign was peaceful until 1756, when Russia entered the Seven Years’ War. Other¬ wise it was a period of prosperity and much conspicuous

ELIZABETH I OF RUSSIA (1709-1761; r. 17411761), empress and grand duchess of Russia. The second daughter of Peter I the Great (1672-1725; r. 1682-1725) and his second wife, Catherine (1684-1727), Elizabeth was born under a lucky star on 18 December 1709 before her parents officially married. Although she had a series of lovers and favorites as empress, she never married and waited long for the throne, to which she had scant claim. Her youth passed unremarkably, whereas judgments about her adult character and reign are wildly divergent. Some praise her beauty, grace, singing, dancing, patronage of cul¬ ture, building of palaces, piety, and the international peace that pervaded most of her reign. But others brand her an ignorant and spoiled mediocrity as compared to Peter the Great and Catherine the Great (1729-1796; r. 1762-1796). In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Russian historians ventured more balanced assessments. When ranked among the five females who reigned after Peter the Great’s death, Elizabeth looks fairly good. She had a commanding physical presence most of her life. Elizabeth grew up between two worlds, imbibing tradi¬ tional Russian customs while learning French and Italian and European court culture in preparation for marriage into a European dynasty. Her questionable legitimacy thwarted several matches. Fun-loving, musical, and extroverted, she made friends easily and gathered an entourage in her teens among the noble elite and guards officers. Too young to be considered for the throne amid the dynastic crisis of 1730 that brought her cousin Anna Ivanovna (1693-1740) to the throne for ten years, Elizabeth endured constant surveil¬ lance. Anna’s sudden death in October 1740 triggered another dynastic crisis that lasted more than a year, during

Elizabeth Petrovna, Empress of Russia. An unattributed engraving

in the Allgemeines Historisches Portratwerk, Fursten und Papste, Munich, 1884.

Mary Evans Picture Library

174

ELIZABETH I OF RUSSIA

consumption, as exemplified in the Russian court. Elizabeth selected some able officials, who founded the University of Moscow in 1755; the first Russian public theater in Saint Petersburg in 1756; and the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1757. Elizabeth became ill in the mid 1750s and died on Christmas Day 1761 (5 January 1762, new style) from hemorrhages. Peter III succeeded her for only 186 days. [See also Catherine II of Russia; Monarchy; and Russia and Soviet Union.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anisimov, Evgenii V. Five Empresses: Court Life in EighteenthCentury Russia. Translated by Kathleen Carol. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Anisimov, Evgeny V. Empress Elizabeth: Her Reign and Her Russia, 1741 -1761. Edited and translated by John T. Alexander. Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International 1995. Naumov, Viktor Petrovich. “Empress Elizabeth I, 1741-1762.” In The Emperors and Empresses of Russia: Rediscovering the Romanovs, edited by Donald J. Raleigh, pp. 66-100. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996. John

ELISABETH

T.

Alexander

OF SCHONAU (1128/29-1164/65), German nun and religious visionary. Elisabeth was born in the Rhineland to a well-established family with ties to local religious institutions. At the age of twelve, she entered a Benedictine monastery for monks and nuns at Schonau in the diocese of Trier. Eleven years later, she began to experience what she described as visions—extraordinary experiences of trance or religious ecstasy, in which she was visited by heavenly beings, transported to other worlds, tormented by the Devil, or heard the voice of God. Elisabeth described her experience to her fellow nuns who kept some kind of written records of her testimonies. This process of confiding her visions seems to have encouraged Elisabeth’s developing sense of herself as a divinely inspired prophet. Within a few years, Elisabeth’s brother Ekbert joined the community at Schonau and took over the task of producing publishable texts of her visions: he served as her secretary, recording her words, querying what he found questionable, suppressing what he considered unworthy of publication, and translating any of her German utterances into Latin (she used both Latin and German in describing her experi¬ ences). Within this collaborative relationship between Elisa¬ beth and Ekbert, shaped by the nature of composition in a scribal culture as well as by the gendered dynamics of reli¬ gious authority in medieval Christianity, Elisabeth came to use her visions as a vehicle for exploring issues beyond those that seemed to come spontaneously to her from heavenly sources. Elisabeth’s visionary proclamations were published in three chronologically arranged collections (Libri visionum

primus, secundus, and tertius [First, Second, and Third Books of Visions, published 1159-1184]), a treatise on the paths to heaven (Liber Viarum Dei [Book of the Ways of God, published 1159-1165]), a text about the martyrdom of Saint Ursula and her companions (Revelatio de sacro exercitu virginum Coloniensium [Revelation about the Sacred Company of the Virgins of Cologne-, published 1159-1165]), a short collection of visions about the bodily resurrection of the Virgin Mary (Visio de resurrectione beate virginis Mariae [Vision about the Resurrection of the Blessed Virgin Mary, published 1159-1165]), and twentytwo letters (published 1159-1184). These texts are primarily pastoral and devotional in their concerns. Elisabeth was dedicated to the spiritual renewal of the church, an institu¬ tion whose leaders she frequently condemned for their corruption and negligence. She thus emerged as one of the rare women’s voices in the conflicts about church reform that roiled society in western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Her texts about Saint Ursula and the Virgin Mary demonstrate her intervention in controversial matters of devotional practice; she used the authority of her visionary experience to support her creation of new know¬ ledge that reflected her own commitment to the veneration of powerful saintly women. Elisabeth’s works were also innovative in their style. She adapted the idiom of monastic learning to create a new type of religious autobiography in which her own subjectivity as a Christian woman was central to the experience of divine revelation and the role of prophetic preacher. Her works circulated widely in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and were translated into several vernacular languages. [See also Christianity; Europe, subentry Medieval Period; and Germany.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clark, Anne L. Elisabeth of Schonau: A Twelfth-Century Visionary. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Elisabeth, of Schonau. Elisabeth of Schonau: The Complete Works. Translated and introduced by Anne L. Clark. New York: Paulist Press, 2000. Anne

L.

Clark

EL SAADAWI, NAWAL (b. 1931), Egyptian psycholo¬ gist, writer, and activist. This feminist describes a woman’s struggle as beginning in the womb and continuing her entire life. Her struggle began in 1931 in the village of Kafr Tahla near Cairo, where, she recalled, her male and female sib¬ lings experienced huge disparities. Nevertheless she was given the opportunity to attend the upper-track schools at a time when fewer than half the children in Egypt went to the lower-quality “compulsory” schools. El Saadawi

EL SAADAWI, NAWAL

attended the Helwan Secondary School, where classmates remember her leading protests against the British and com¬ posing extemporaneous poetry. Despite her flair for litera¬ ture, she turned to medicine and earned a degree in psychiatry from Cairo University in 1955. Like most graduates in Egypt, el Saadawi looked to the state for employment. Rising quickly through the ranks to become the director of public health in 1966, she founded a medical journal in 1968. Her appointment to the high post of director was part of the regime’s effort to replace elite women’s charitable organizations with government offices. El Saadawi’s positions eerily foreshadowed some contro¬ versies that would take place in the United States more than

175

two decades later when Joycelyn Elders was asked to resign as surgeon general for her controversial views regarding proactive responses to teen sexuality. Three years after publishing her groundbreaking work Women and Sex (1969), el Saadawi was dismissed from the ministry of health, and the government shut down her journal. She continued to publish, research, and write about mental health, sexuality, and women, using both fiction and non¬ fiction to reach larger audiences. El Saadawi’s feminist philosophy is simple. Women are trapped in a triangle of patriarchy: the apex of the triangle is represented by God (male-interpreted monotheistic tradi¬ tions), another corner is represented by the state, and the final corner is represented by the family (father or husband). As for the last, as a child she endured infibulation, and as an adult she endured a husband who was not supportive of her writing. With respect to the state, she was imprisoned under Anwar el Sadat in 1981, and the Egyptian government frequently shut down her Arab Women’s Solidarity Asso¬ ciation (founded in 1982) and censored her publications. She has never complacently accepted this patriarchy. A large portion of her career has been spent battling the practice of genital mutilation. She divorced her husband and married a true partner, Sherif Hetata, in 1964, and she believes that through what she calls “creativity and dissidence” women and men can oppose patriarchal states. El Saadawi’s battles with religion range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Islamic fundamentalists put her on their hit list after the 1991 Gulf War, and the Egyptian govern¬ ment, concerned about its image and ability to keep order, placed armed guards outside her home. El Saadawi then spent several years teaching in the United States to escape both the death threats and the government protection. After returning to Egypt, she commented that pilgrimage prac¬ tices in Islam grew out of pagan practice, and in 2001 Islamic fundamentalists tried (unsuccessfully) to divorce her from her husband as an apostate. El Saadawi has been active in various international women’s organizations, but her radicalism has alienated her from the people she views as her natural allies. Her works have been translated into thirty languages and include novels, plays, short stories, and memoirs. [See also Egypt, subentry 1800-present, and Female Genital Mutilation.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nawal El Saadawi. Photograph, Russell

c.

1950.

Courtesy of Mona

al-Ali, Nadje. Gender Writing, Writing Gender: The Representation of Women in a Selection of Modern Egyptian Literature. Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press, 1994. El Saadawi, Nawal. Al-mara wal-jins (Women and Sex; 1969). 4th ed. Cairo, Egypt: Dar wa Matabia al-Mustaqbal, 1990. El Saadawi, Nawal. An al-mara (On Women). Cairo, Egypt: Dar alMustaqbal al-Arabi, 1988. El Saadawi, Nawal. Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of Nawal el-Saadawi. London: Zed, 1999.

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EL SAADAWI, NAWAL

El Saadawi, Nawal. Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1983). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. El Saadawi, Nawal. Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958). London: Saqi, 2002. El Saadawi, Nawal. Walking through Fire: A Life of Nawal elSaadawi. London: Zed, 2002. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Men, Women, and God(s): Nawal el Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. “Nawal el Saadawi and Sherif Hetata. ” http://www.nawalsaadawi. net. Tarabishi, Georges. Woman against Her Sex: A Critique of Nawal el-Saadawi. Translated by Basil Hatim and Elizabeth Ortini. London: Saqi, 1988. Mona L. Russell

EMECHETA, BUCHI (b. 1944), Nigerian-born British author whose works blur the line between autobiog¬ raphy and fiction. Born on 21 July 1944 of Igbo parents in Yaba near Lagos, Nigeria, Emecheta was educated at the Methodist Girls High School in Lagos even after her father, a railroad worker, died when she was still young. Emecheta married Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged since she was eleven, in 1960, and they soon moved to London as part of the swell of emigration to Britain that coincided with the process of decolonization. During the six years of their marriage they had five children. But in 1966 Emecheta left Onwordi after he burned the manuscript of her earliest attempt at fiction writing, The Bride Price, and in 1970 she enrolled at the University of London, where she earned an honors degree in sociology four years later. In 1972, Emecheta published her first novel, In the Ditch; through its female protagonist Adah, the work chronicles Emecheta’s own experiences of racial discrimination in housing, employment, and health care as she struggled to raise her children in a poor London ghetto. Like In the Ditch, Emecheta’s second novel, Second-Class Citizen (1974), centers on Adah and is semiautobiographical inso¬ far as it is based on Emecheta’s own travails in postcolonial Britain. Providing a rare female African perspective within the genre of immigrant literature—which in Britain is dom¬ inated by male Caribbean authors—Emecheta’s works reveal how gender asymmetries are often reconfigured, but not necessarily overcome, in the movement across cultural and national boundaries; the works suggest that she is a second-class citizen in both Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Indeed, Emecheta’s fiction often features protagonists who like herself are caught between two worlds and do not belong entirely to either. Emecheta published her autobiography, Head above Water, in 1986 and continued to feature black immigrant women characters in her fiction, first in Gwendolen (1989), a novel about a young West Indian girl living in London,

and then in Kehinde (1994), the story of a middle-aged Nigerian wife and mother who returns home after spending years in London. Emecheta’s books capture the sense of displacement, and dislocation that result from migration, but they also depict the return to the homeland as an ambivalent process inducing emotional crisis. The male protagonist of The New Tribe (2000) is warned before he embarks on a journey to Nigeria: “You don’t seem ready to accept reality. ... We don’t belong in Africa, we’re British. Black British maybe, but this is our home now.” Another major thematic thread in Emecheta’s writings—in The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), and The Joys of Motherhood (1979)—concerns the relationships among womanhood, family, and mother¬ hood against the backdrop of a rapidly changing Nigerian society. Emecheta’s most critically acclaimed book, The Rape of Shavi (1983), is a philosophical novel that presents an allegory of the encounter between Africa and Western modernity in the story of a group of Europeans fleeing from nuclear war to the fictional African kingdom of Shavi. In addition to her impressive literary output—for which she has received numerous awards and accolades—Emecheta and her son run the Ogwugwu Afor publishing firm with offices in London and Ibuza, Nigeria. [See also Migration and Nigeria.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fishburn, Katherine. Reading Buchi Emecheta: Cross-Cultural Conversations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Sougou, Omar. Writing across Cultures: Gender Politics and Difference in the Fiction of Buchi Emecheta. New York: Rodopi, 2002. Umeh, Marie, ed. Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta. Tren¬ ton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996. Marc Matera

EMMA, PRINCESS (1842-1892/93), the eldest daughter of the Xhosa chief Sandile, one of the first African women to receive an education at a mission boarding school, and the first African woman in South Africa to own land. Princess Emma was deeply influenced by the impact of British impe¬ rial power and its effect on the Africans of the Cape Colony, her Christian mission school education, and the compelling forces of her powerful, male-led African family. Sandile’s people lived west of the Great Kei River in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa. Born in 1842, by the time Emma was eleven years old she had lived through two of the Cape Frontier Wars fought between the British and the Xhosa. The impact of these wars left Sandile’s lands annexed to the British crown as part of British Kaffraria. Further devastation came to the western Xhosa in the dis¬ aster known as the Xhosa Cattle Killing of 1856-1857. After

ENHEDUANNA

the destruction of the wars and the cattle killing, Sandile permitted several of his children to be educated under the authority of Robert Gray, the Anglican bishop of Cape Town. British-style schooling and Christianity were not entirely new to Emma, who had been a day scholar at the Mgwali Mission station run by the Xhosa Presbyterian clergyman Tiyo Soga. The colonial governor Sir George Edward Grey (18121898), governor of Cape Colony from 1854 to 1861, be¬ lieved that educating African chiefs’ children in Cape Town would not only help forestall further frontier conflicts between white settlers and the Xhosa but also—if these elite African children became Christians and were “civi¬ lized” into the British way of life—allow them to become agents of change, taking the lead in “improving” (that is, Anglicizing) the values, beliefs, and practices of their people. In Cape Town the African children would find all the “advantages of civilization”: they would be in the midst of the “highest intelligence in the land” and experience “most striking proof of Britain’s power” (Hodgson, p. 42). As ambassadors from the most important defeated chief of the western Xhosa, Emma and her brother Gonya were considered a means of guaranteeing their father’s obedience to British rule. Thus it was that Emma, along with two female age-mates, Gonya (who was Sandile’s heir), and a number of other African boys, all sons or close relatives of a variety of Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho chiefs, became some of the first South African children to receive an education in a mission boarding school. By 1860 these children were settled into Zonnebloem College, the newly established An¬ glican boarding school for Africans. Grey felt that it was important, given that their father had lost his lands in antic¬ olonial wars against the British, to secure title to substantial farms for Emma and Gonya by way of demonstrating that the British government did not wish Sandile’s children ill. Emma’s father and her British sponsors disagreed about how best to find her a husband. Bishop Gray cherished hopes of creating a corps of African evangelist-clergymen from this first group of male children of chiefs, while in¬ tending that a Christianized Emma would serve as the first of a line of civilized African brides for the newly established African clergy. When after nine years in Cape Town, Emma wrote a letter to Grey asking permission to go home for a short visit to her own land and to see “my mother’s face,” Grey denied her request on the grounds that he feared that her father might marry her off to a “heathen” chief. These fears proved prescient. With the hearty endorsement of Bishop Gray and the new governor, Emma was eventually betrothed to Qeya, the Christian-educated heir to theThembu chiefship, a match she aspired to quite poignantly and hopefully. Though Qeya counted himself a devout Methodist, Qeya’s people insisted that he promise that Emma not be his only wife, but rather that she be his Great Wife among many others

177

to follow. Qeya conceded, agreeing that marrying from among the various great families in the area was advanta¬ geous for his position as ruler. However, Emma, imbued with Christian teachings on monogamy and under pressure from her British sponsors to reject a potentially polygamous union, was mortified at the plan and refused the match. Sandile saw the end of Emma’s betrothal as a humiliating turn of events for his own statesmanship, for the marriage would have been a fortuitous alliance between the western Xhosa and the Thembu. Sandile resolved that when the next likely suitor for Emma’s hand came along, he would insist that she accept it. The heartbroken Emma therefore mar¬ ried, in the end, precisely the type of man her British spon¬ sors had hoped she would not: Stokwe, son of Ndlela, a minor Thembu chief who already had one wife. Although Emma, as daughter of Sandile, became Stokwe’s Great Wife, in the end she was one among ten wives. As Stokwe’s wife, she gave up her English clothing, her piano playing, and her church affiliation, and she reared her children outside the fold of the church. She also proved an able assistant to Stokwe. He needed Emma’s literacy skills in his interactions with colonial authorities, to read their communiques and to write letters for him. She died in 1892 or 1893. [See also Imperialism and Colonialism, subentry Modern Period; Missionaries; and Southern Africa, subentry 15001900.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Etherington, Norman, ed. Missions and Empire. Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford Univer¬ sity Press, 2005. Hodgson, Janet. Princess Emma. Craighall, South Africa: Donker, 1987. Keegan, Timothy. Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Levine, Philippa, ed. Gender and Empire. Oxford History of the British Empire, Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Wendy Urban-Mead

EMPERORS AND EMPRESSESS. See Monarchy.

ENGELS, FREDERICK. See Communism.

ENHEDUANNA (c. 2300 b.c.e.), early Mesopotamian high priestess and poet. Around 2330 b.c.e., Sargon, the charismatic usurper of the city-state of Kish in Akkad (central Mesopotamia in what is today Iraq), defeated Lugalzagesi, who controlled the prominent city-states of Ur and Uruk in Sumer to the south. Sargon’s unification

178

ENHEDUANNA

of Sumer and Akkad (effectively all of southern Iraq) created the first Mesopotamian territorial empire. Central¬ ization under the rule of a northern Akkadian dynasty, which based its power at a newly founded capital outside Sumer, engendered deep resentment and rebellion among the traditionally powerful southern cities. In a strategic ploy to mitigate the unrest, Sargon appointed his daughter, Enheduanna, high priestess of the Sumerian moon god Nanna at Ur. As such, she served as the divinely sanctioned embodiment of the goddess Ningal, Nanna’s consort. Her activity in the temple complex in this city is documented archaeologically by several administrative seals that bear the names and titles of her top officials. She may also have been appointed the high priestess of the sky god An at Uruk to consolidate ties of loyalty between the southern cities and Sargon. The position of high priestess of Nanna remained in the hands of subsequent princesses for the next five hundred years, signaling the effectiveness of this political move. In addition to Enheduanna’s elevated status as a priestess, which entailed the administration of an extensive and wealthy temple estate, she is known for her poetry. In a literary and scribal landscape in which authorship was rarely acknowledged and men dominated the profession, the explicit attribution of several literary compositions to Enheduanna confirms her exceptional character. Although she served as priestess of the moon god, Enheduanna held a personal devotion to the Sumerian goddess Inanna (equated with the Akkadian goddess Ishtar). Her most remarkable work is The Exaltation of Inanna, which takes

the form of an autobiographical hymn in praise of the fore¬ most Mesopotamian goddess and expresses the emotive qualities of the devotee. Other compositions, which include hymns to various temples, reveal a more scholarly aspect of Enheduanna as a profound theologian of Sumerian religion. Enheduanna remained a central figure in the later collective imagination of ancient Mesopotamia. A small ala¬ baster disk about twenty-five centimeters in diameter, carved on one side with a relief representation of Enheduanna officiating at a ritual and on the other side with an inscription recording the dedication of a cultic item, was found by the excavators of Ur in the high priestesses’ resi¬ dence dating to the Old Babylonian period around five hun¬ dred years after her death. (It is now housed in the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.) Also during this later period, a scribe at Ur carefully copied the disk’s inscrip¬ tion onto a clay tablet. These relics of Enheduanna’s life, along with the preservation of her literary works, attest to her enduring place in Mesopotamian intellectual history. [See also West Asia, subentry Ancient Period.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bahrani, Zainab. Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia. London: Routledge, 2001. Highly theoretical analysis of the representation of women in ancient Mesopota¬ mia, including a short discussion of Enheduanna (pp. 112-117). Hallo, William W., and J. J. A. van Dijk. The Exaltation of Inanna. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968. Scholarly translation of and commentary on Enheduanna’s major literary work; includes an introductory chapter on her life and works. Melville, Sarah C. “Royal Women and the Exercise of Power in the Ancient Near East.” In A Companion to the Ancient Near East, edited by Daniel C. Snell, pp. 219-228. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. Recent overview, including discussion of Enheduanna and current bibliography. Marian

H.

Feldman

ENLIGHTENMENT. The Enlightenment was a broad

Enheduanna. A disk depicting Enheduanna at worship, c. 2300 b.c.e. University of Pennsylvania Museum (image no. 139330)

intellectual and cultural movement that began in Europe and that had an impact on nearly every aspect of Western society in the eighteenth century. The men and women who espoused the new practices and ideas of the Enlightenment turned away from dogma and tradition toward reason and science. They explicitly rejected traditional explanations for religious and political authority and sought explanations based on human reason and natural science. As enlightened thinkers they turned their attention to a series of broad ques¬ tions concerning the nature of man, reason, society, and nature. They laid the ancients to rest and attempted to craft modem solutions to social and political problems ranging from the regulation of the economy and reform of the penal system to early childhood education and religious toleration.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Not surprisingly, in the spirit of reform, many enlightened men and women called into question traditional beliefs about women’s nature and women’s status in society. But as they triumphantly celebrated reason as the solution to social and political ills, many enlightened thinkers elabo¬ rated new theories about women’s nature and capacity for reason that led to strikingly new ideologies of male and female difference. The Enlightenment thus offered women the radical promise of equality with men and unprecedented opportunities for inclusion in Western cultural, intellectual, and political life. Yet at the same time, enlightened thinkers posed new questions about women’s capacity for reason and led to new arguments for the restriction of women’s full participation in public life. If the Enlightenment gave birth to modernity, as is often claimed, it gave birth to a distinctive experience of modernity for women, marked by the tension between equality and difference, reason and emotion, public and private, and human and female nature. Historiography. In the mid-twentieth century, scholars defined the Enlightenment in quite specific terms, that explicitly excluded women. For Ernst Cassirer in Die Philosophie der Aufklarung (1932; English trans., The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1951), the movement was clearly bounded by the lives of two great men: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and Immanuel Kant (17241804). For many historians the Enlightenment was the product of a group of mid-eighteenth-century French male philosophers, the philosophes, who socialized in Parisian salons, wrote for Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopedie, and participated in academies. Their goal was to reform politics and improve society. De¬ spite the individual political and philosophical differences among Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu (1689-1755), Voltaire (Franqois-Marie Arouet, 16941778), Diderot (1713-1784), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the philosophes self-consciously constituted a new kind of society, a republic of letters, where liberty, tolerance, rationality, and the goal of the progressive improvement of humanity reigned. It was a world in which women were considered to play little or no role. At best, bluestockings such as Elizabeth Robinson Montagu (1720-1800), literary patrons like Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764), and salonnieres such as Madame Geoffrin (1699-1777) were seen as playing frivolously on the side¬ lines of the Enlightenment; at worst, these women were depicted as impediments to the serious work of male philosophers. During the last three decades of the twentieth century, however, historians’ confidence about what the Enlighten¬ ment was and their ability to define it were shattered. Gone is the philosophical precision of Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment or the certitude of Peter Gay’s magis¬ terial two-volume The Enlightenment: An Interpretation

179

(1966-1969). Previously clear chronological, geographic, biographical, and thematic boundaries of Enlightenment thought—the who, what, where, and when—were re¬ placed with ongoing questions about what the Enlighten¬ ment was, where it was located, when it began, and when it ended. With the Enlightenment no longer a movement ex¬ clusive to the mid-eighteenth century, its beginnings have been pushed backward into the seventeenth century to the seminal figures of the Scientific Revolution: Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), John Locke (1632-1704), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Many his¬ torians now prefer to locate the Enlightenment in a “long eighteenth century” that begins in the 1670s and 1680s with what the historian Paul Hazard called “la crise de la conscience europeenne” (the crisis of the European con¬ science) and that ends, not at the end of the eighteenth century with the American or French revolutions, but with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France in 1815. Likewise, scholars now emphasize that the geographical reach of the Enlightenment extends considerably beyond the salons of Paris or even the academies of Scotland. A new emphasis on the margins of Europe sheds light on the Enlightenment, from the Aufklarung in Berlin to the illuminismo in Naples. If we conceptualize the Enlighten¬ ment as a broad diverse cultural and social movement, rather than as a narrow philosophical project, the begin¬ nings and endings, the center and periphery, and the content of Enlightenment thought are increasingly difficult to pin down. As J. G. A. Pocock observed, if trends in the historiography continue as they have, “there will no longer be ‘The Enlightenment,’ a unitary and universal phenom¬ enon with a single history to be either celebrated or con¬ demned, but instead a family of discourses arising about the same time in a number of European cultures” (p. 7). Historians’ expanding vision of what constitutes the Enlightenment geographically, chronologically, and thema¬ tically is a product of a new approach that revolutionized studies of the Enlightenment in the 1970s and 1980s as new scholarship challenged historians to think of the Enlight¬ enment not as a set of ideas but as a set of practices. The Enlightenment was not abstract reason, but very real men (and women) using their reason in radically new ways in cafes and salons, in academies and laboratories, at Masonic lodges and mesmerism sessions, in written letters and at din¬ ner parties. This was a vision of the Enlightenment that en¬ couraged historians, for the first time, to acknowledge the presence of women and to take seriously their roles as letter writers, journal readers, dinner-party hostesses, and scientists. By insisting that the perspectives of social history be included in the study of the Enlightenment, historians such as Robert Damton, pioneer of the new social history of ideas in the 1970s, opened the door (perhaps unwittingly at first) for wo¬ men to enter histories of the Enlightenment in a serious way.

180

ENLIGHTENMENT

The Enlightenment and the Arts. Moliere reads his play Tartuffe in the home of Ninon de Lenclos. A painting by Nicholas Andre Monsiau, early nineteenth century. Bibliotheque de la Comedie Francaise, Paris/Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource,

The scholarship on women in the Enlightenment from the last two decades of the twentieth century as above revolutionized how historians think about women’s rela¬ tionship to the Enlightenment. The ongoing project of scho¬ lars of women’s history to uncover women’s hidden history has refocused attention both on the “women worthies”— celebrated, exceptional, eighteenth-century women such as the physicist and mathematician Emilie du Chatelet (1706-1749) and the artist Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (17551842)—and on those women who, though famous in their own day, have until recently faded from historical memory. Because of this shift in focus, historians now know considerably more about the roles of female musi¬ cians, artists, writers, composers, and philosophers in the Enlightenment. The work of the German sociologist Jurgen Habermas in Strukturzvandel der Offentlichkeit (1962; English trans., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans¬ lated by Thomas Berger [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press], 1989) proved particularly useful for historians attempting to rethink the connection of women to the Enlightenment. Echoing Kant, Habermas defined “the public sphere” as that space where private individuals come together to use their reason. One of the first American scholars to grapple with the implications of Habermas’s work for understand¬ ing the Enlightenment was Joan Landes in her influential study Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (1988). As historians began to

NY

reconceptualize the Enlightenment as a key moment in the birth of the public sphere, sites of sociability and con¬ versation, from the coffeehouse to the salon, which were once considered frivolous or ephemeral, took on new import¬ ance. Historians quickly began to ask what women’s relation¬ ship was to this new public sphere that was emerging on the margins of the absolutist state in countries like France. Was the public sphere, defined as the public use of reason, inher¬ ently masculinist, or did it provide opportunities for women, too, to make use of their reason as readers and writers? These questions about the gendered nature of the concept of the public sphere proved so pressing because by the 1980s they dovetailed with historians’ interest about the gendered nature of Enlightenment thought and practice more generally. From aesthetics to politics, historians began to excavate the ways in which Western philosophy and science during this seminal period was deeply imbued with gender ideology. In politics, Locke’s conception of the social contract, central to liberal political theory, is now recognized as having been built on the foundations of an implicit sexual contract between husbands and wives within the family, and deep fears of the power of aristocratic women are now seen as central to Rousseau’s development of republicanism. In the natural sciences, new categorizations of animal species that gave rise to our acceptance of the category “mammal” prioritized and naturalized lactation as the source of the close mother-child bond among mammals. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s reconstruction

ENLIGHTENMENT

of male and female skeletons drew on the prevailing gender ideology that stressed women’s reproductive capacities over their intellectual capacities. In the arts, the aesthetic theory of Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), postulated the superiority of “genius” over “effeminate” taste, and Diderot argued that the detached, autonomous form of spectatorship required for the true moral contemplation of art was impossible in feminized genres such as portraiture. In the second half of the eigh¬ teenth century, the enlightened philosophes who cham¬ pioned neoclassical over rococo art argued their points in deeply gendered terms. Assessing the role of women in the Enlightenment requires a four-pronged approach: first, historians must be attentive to recognizing women’s involvement in roles, professions, and occupations that have traditionally been conceived as masculine, so that we can render visible the important work women produced as physicists, poets, and political philosophers. To borrow the terms of the art historians Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker, we must look for the “Old Mistresses” who worked alongside the “Old Masters” (Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology [London: Routledge and Kegan], 1981). Second, working with an expanded definition of the Enlightenment that rejects older definitions as being part of a narrowly conceived philosophical project, we must look for the ways in which women participated in the enlightened public sphere as readers, writers, salonnieres, patrons, journalists, and entrepreneurs. Third, we need to recognize the way in which Enlightenment thought was itself “gendered.” That is, we need to explore the ways in which Enlightenment claims were built on the foundation of prevailing gender ideologies and the ways in which enlightened knowledge was used both explicitly and implic¬ itly to construct new gendered roles for men and women. Finally, to take women’s role in the Enlightenment seriously means taking women’s awareness of their partici¬ pation in the Enlightenment seriously. To define the Enlightenment so loosely that all eighteenth-century wom¬ en fall under this category would be a disservice to the many women who self-consciously embraced the use of their literacy, skill, and knowledge to further the Enlightenment project of using reason for the improvement of humankind. It is to these enlightened women that we must turn our attention. Women and Science. At every stage of scientific inquiry, from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, women played active roles. Historians have argued (for example, Londa Schiebinger in The Mind Has No Sex?) that the movement of scientific research in the late seven¬ teenth century from aristocratic and court circles to formal academies and scientific associations such as the Royal Society of London (founded in 1662) and the Parisian

181

Academie Royale des Sciences (founded in 1666) curtailed valuable professional opportunities for women’s engage¬ ment with scientific research. Yet many women continued to publish research at the forefront of science. Nicole-Reine Lepaute (1723-1788), married to the French royal clockmaker, conducted significant work on pendulums and eclipses, and she predicted the return of Halley’s comet in 1759. Following in Lepaute’s footsteps, and continuing many of her research projects, Louise du Pierry (1746-1789) became the first woman chair of astron¬ omy at the University of Paris. Though never a member of a scientific academy and largely self-trained, Emilie du Chatelet was among the most celebrated scientists of her day. Her Institutions de Physique (Lessons in Physics, 1740) introduced Leibniz’s celestial mechanics to French scientists. Her translation of Newton’s Principia (published posthumously, 1756-1759) became the authoritative French edition. Throughout the 1730s and 1740s, du Chatelet and her friend and lover the famous philosophe Voltaire worked at her husband’s chateau at Cirey, transforming it into a laboratory for her scientific research and acquiring a vast library of twenty-one thousand books, a match for the library of the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris or a well-stocked eighteenth-century university library. Contemporaries fondly referred to Clelia Borromeo (16841777) as gloria Gennunsium—the glory of the Genoese— in recognition of her learning in science, math, and languages and of their conviction that no problem in math¬ ematics seemed beyond her comprehension. Though many female scientists like Lepaute, du Pierry, and du Chatelet were acclaimed in their own day, modern historians of science have neglected the accomplishments of many enlightened women because these historians have ignored the important scientific work that women did with¬ in the private confines of the family and in collaboration with husbands, brothers, and other family members. Within the craft-based family workshops of Europe, many female scientists honed their skills in observation, toolmaking, and experimentation. In England, Caroline Herschel (17501848) conducted important astronomical observations and calculations alongside her brother, William Herschel, who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781. In 1786 she discov¬ ered her first of eight comets, described by her contempor¬ aries as the “first lady’s comet.” In 1787, King George III (r. 1760-1820) acknowledged her important contributions to research by awarding her an annual stipend of fifty pounds, and in 1835 the Royal Astrological Society awarded her achievements with honorary membership, along with those of her fellow mathematician and astron¬ omer Mary Somerville (1780-1872). In Germany, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), one of the leading entomologists of the eighteenth century, learned

182

ENLIGHTENMENT

the craft that enabled her to make stunningly accurate drawings of her observations of the natural world in the workshop of her father, a well-known artist and engraver, and her stepfather, a noted still-life painter. Merian went on to have an independent career at the intersection of art and natural science. At the age of fifty-two she traveled to Suriname with her teenage daughter to observe native flowers and insects. With her Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suri¬ name, 1705) she became the first scientist to record the life cycle of insects, from egg through larvae and pupa to adult. In North America, Jane Colden (1724-1766) was educated at home by her naturalist father, Cadwallader Colden. A friend of the renowned scientist and inventor Benjamin Franklin, she compiled the first illustrated flora of New York in the 1750s and discovered new plant species. She was also among the first scientists to use the taxonomy of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), with whom she corresponded. Although most European universities forbade women to study and teach, thereby restricting women’s opportunities in the sciences, the Italian universities at Salerno, Padua, and Bologna provided notable exceptions. In particular, the University of Bologna fostered the careers of a number of female scientists both as students and as professors and research scientists. Laura Bassi (1711-1778), the first woman to earn a doctor of philosophy degree at the University of Bologna, held a university chair in physics there. During her long academic career she conducted experiments in the fields of mechanics, hydraulics, and anatomy and delivered public lectures. Anna Morandi Manzolini (1716-1774), also a professor at the University of Bologna, was hailed as the finest anatomical illustrator of her day and became famous for her detailed wax models of internal organs. Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799), a member of the Academy of Sciences in Bologna, wrote Instituzioni Analitiche (1748; English trans., Analytical Institutions, 1801), one of the most im¬ portant early syntheses of different fields of mathematics, including differential and integral calculus. At the age of thirty-two she was awarded the chair in mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Bologna. In 1799, Maria Dalle Donne (1778-1842) was the first woman awarded a doctorate in medicine. In recognition of her important research on female anatomy, reproduc¬ tion, and fertility, she became director of the Department of Midwifery at the University of Bologna. From astronomy to zoology, studying science was a la mode in eighteenth-century Europe. Women were not only producers but also avid consumers and disseminators of scientific knowledge. The noted poet and letter writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) popularized the smallpox vaccine during the 1720s after her return from a

trip to Turkey. Although the practice of inoculation stirred up as many critics as supporters, through her influence Montagu persuaded the London College of Physicians to conduct experiments with the vaccine, and the royal family was inoculated. The popularity of books such as Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianismo per le dame (1737; English trans., Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies, 1739) spawned other books such as Giuseppe Compagnoni’s Chimica per le donne (Chemistry for Ladies, 1796). These books, in addition to book reviews, public lectures, and popular journal articles, all popularized the latest scientific knowledge and explicitly valorized women s study of science. Women and the Republic of Letters. The intellectual breakthroughs of the Scientific Revolution inspired men and women across a range of fields far beyond the hard sciences, as the empiricism and rationality of the scientific method provided an important new intellectual paradigm for reflection on society and the human condition. By the early eighteenth century the exploration of subjectivity and sentiment in novels, plays, and paintings emerged along¬ side the work of scientists in their laboratories as a major site of enlightened production. The sociability of the salon and the sentiment of the novel complemented the agenda of empiricism and reason pioneered in the laboratory by the seventeenth-century practitioners of the so-called new science. By combining the exploration of human morality, sensibility, and virtue with the agendas of science, empiri¬ cism, and reason, enlightened painters, philosophers, and poets helped create an enlightened culture in which it became possible not only to rewrite the traditional Aristotelian and Ptolemaic conceptions of nature but to imagine a revolt against traditional patterns of political rule and social mores as well. Beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing throughout the eighteenth, an international group of en¬ gaged writers, readers, and correspondents self-consciously constituted themselves into an imaginary intellectual community, the republic of letters, based on a new form of sociability. From Russia to France many of these men and women lived in absolutist regimes, yet as they socialized in salons and sat at their desks writing letters they began to imagine themselves as “citizens,” albeit citizens without sovereignty in our modern democratic sense. Women played a crucial role in the cultural projects of the republic of letters. In the late seventeenth century, female authors participated actively in the broad cultural turn against “the ancients” and toward “the modems.” Aristocratic Frenchwomen such as Marie-Madeleine de La Vergue, Comtesse de La Fayette (1634-1693), and Mad¬ eleine de Scudery (1607-1701) pioneered the new cultural form of the novel and championed women’s “natural

ENLIGHTENMENT

eloquence” over classical learning; they elevated the analy¬ sis of subjectivity and the human heart in the novel over the history and drama of the classical forms of tragedy and the epic. In doing so they laid the foundation for modern narrative fiction that flourished with female authors such as Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (1714-1792) and Franqoise d’Issembourg d’Happencourt, Madame de Graffigny (1695-1758), in France; Isabelle de Charriere (1740-1805) in Switzerland; Sophie von La Roche (17301807) in Germany; Eliza Haywood (c. 1693-1756) and Frances Burney (1752-1840) in England; and Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) in America. Historians are currently debating the connection between political change and women’s empowerment to write. French historians debate whether the Enlightenment or the Revolution inspired women to pick up their pens. Some historians see a significant increase in female authors before 1789, but others argue that women’s writing took off only after the Revolution. British literary historians note that ironically the restoration of monarchy in the 1660s, not the political freedom after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, inspired women such as Aphra Behn (c. 16401689) to write. But what historians do agree on is that not only did eighteenth-century women’s novels stand at the cutting edge of the genre, celebrating subjectivity, interiority, and women’s voices, but they also engaged the most pressing issues of the Enlightenment concerning morality, virtue, and reason. Indeed, Charriere, the lover of Benjamin Constant, intended her novel Trois Femmes (Three Women, 1795) as a critique of Kant’s ethical treatise “Uber den Gemeinspruch” (1793; English trans., “On the Proverb”). And Mary Wollstonecraft’s last novel, Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), explicitly attacked the political injustice of men’s power over women. The Enlightenment inspired women to read as well as to write. Although women’s literacy rates lagged behind men’s in almost every European country throughout the eigh¬ teenth century, literacy rates for middle- and upper-class women in the urban areas of western Europe climbed significantly in the eighteenth century. From the grand vol¬ umes of Diderot and d’Alembert’s EncyclopecLie to journals, magazines, and clandestine pornographic novels, the new market for books transformed the experience of reading. Women as well as men participated in what historians of the book have termed a “reading revolution,” in which older practices of intensive reading of a few sacred and canonical texts were replaced by new practices of extensive reading of a wider variety of books and magazines. Though reading aloud in public continued to be a popular form of sociability in salons and coffeehouses, the novel encouraged a new kind of reading that promoted silent reading in private. Many of the women who were most engaged with the republic of letters were avid letter writers. Indeed, it is

183

arguable that the private letter, more than the printed treatise, encyclopedia, or novel, was the currency in which ideas were traded in the informal marketplace of enlight¬ ened sociability. New studies that take seriously the intellectual content of letters by French and Italian authors such as Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini (1751/52-1807), Giustina Renier Michiel (1755-1832), Julie de Lespinasse (1732-1776), and Marie-Jeanne Philipon Roland de la Platiere (Mme. Roland, 1754-1793) reveal the ways in which women’s letters “authorized the self.” An exami¬ nation of these letters, written at the fashionable ladies’ writing desks in the newly articulated space of elite homes, the cabinet de lecture, reveals that rigid distinctions between public and private and between published and unpublished work obscures much of women’s participation in the Enlightenment. The salon was the complement to the intellectual sociability of the written letter. Salons were weekly gather¬ ings, usually hosted by a female salonniere, to which were invited philosophes, artists, and men of letters to discuss a wide range of topics. It was the site where, to paraphrase Habermas, private individuals came together to use their reason in public. Though some men, such as Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach in France, hosted salons, the institution was primarily associated with women. Contemporaries believed that women were the ideal arbiters of taste who could serve as “enlightened legislators” to delicately direct and control the conversation. The institution began in France when Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet (1588-1665), created a realm of sociability outside the uncouth court in the early seventeenth century, and it flourished in the eighteenth century in the hands of famous salonnieres such as Madame du Deffand (1697-1780), Lespinasse, Madame Geoffrin, and Madame Necker (1739-1794). In London, Elizabeth Montagu’s “bluestocking circle” was the most important site of sociability for men and women of letters by the 1770s. At weekly parties, Montagu hosted female authors such as Frances Burney and Hannah More (1745-1833) along with male luminaries such as Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), and Edmund Burke (1729-1797). In Venice, Giustina Renier Michiel, translator of Shakespeare into Italian, ran an important salon from 1780 to her death. Sophie von La Roche hosted a salon in Weimar frequented by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832). And in Berlin, at a time when Jews did not have full civil rights, the Jewish salonnieres Henriette Herz (1764— 1847), Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833), and Dorothea Schlegel (1764-1839), daughter of the German philozopher Moses Mendelssohn, provided a unique opportunity for men and women of different social classes and religious traditions to socialize.

184

ENLIGHTENMENT

In addition to fostering intellectual sociability, women played a key role in the Enlightenment as patrons of the arts and sciences. Catherine II the Great of Russia (r. 17621796) is the most powerful example of female patronage. As an enlightened absolutist monarch she was avidly commit¬ ted to using the reason and learning of the Enlightenment to aid her rule. Well read in the major works of Enlightenment, from Montesquieu to Voltaire, she was inspired to revise and codify Russian law. Not only did she provide patronage to philosophes in the West (notably, she invited Diderot to Russia), but she also fostered the spread of the Enlighten¬ ment within Russia. To aid in the project of elevating Russian as one of the great literary languages of Europe, she appointed the aristocratic writer Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova (1744-1810), who had traveled extensively in Europe and met many of the major philo¬ sophes of the Enlightenment, director of the Saint Peters¬ burg Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1782. Dashkova became the first woman to direct a national academy of science when she was named the first president of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1784. Women and Private Life. Although many women like Dashkova were engaged with the Enlightenment at the very highest levels of politics and official culture, it is perhaps in the private realm that the Enlightenment had the greatest impact on women’s lives. In the art they viewed, the encyclopedia articles they pondered, the magazines they perused, and the novels they absorbed, women encountered radical new ideas about gender, love, marriage, femininity, sexuality, and child-rearing. Historians have argued that the eighteenth century ushered in a new “biology of incommen¬ surability” that posited radical physiological and emotional differences between men and women (Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press], 1990). Schiebinger builds on Laqueur’s paradigm in her exami¬ nation of the history of male and female anatomy and skel¬ etons in Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). No longer were women to consider themselves, in the ancient Aristotelian sense, as flawed or lesser men; they were to imagine themselves as completely other to men. If men were to devote themselves to the public realm of politics, women were to find their true fulfillment in the private realm as wives, mothers, and consumers. Many historians have argued that the exclusion of women from formal participa¬ tion in democratic politics—for example, their eviction from the public sphere during the French Revolution—was the logical conclusion of this strain of enlightened thought. Rousseau is the figure most clearly associated with the new conceptualization of female difference. In his educa¬ tional treatise Emile, ou De leducation (1762; English trans., Emile; or, On Education) and his novel Julie, ou La

nouvelle Heloise (1761; English trans., Julie; or, The New Heloise) he elaborated his ideas about women’s moral and intellectual capacities. Though his depiction of Sophie, the model wife for his model man, Emile, is the very epitome of a mindless doll, educated only to please Emile, his heroine Julie provided a more complex and compelling vision of femininity for his female readers. La nouvelle Heloise inspired women to rethink motherhood as an active calling that required virtue, intelligence, and breastfeeding. Even women like Madame Roland, known for her lively salon and republican activism, worried, when she experienced difficulty breastfeeding her child, that she was not forging the kind of warm emotional bond with her daughter that was required of her. Although Rousseau has been roundly denounced by fem¬ inists for his denial of full political rights and human ration¬ ality to women, he was by no means the sole Enlightenment thinker to craft and disseminate the new discourse of fem¬ ininity. Samuel Richardson’s best-selling novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) encouraged women to imagine that they were more restrained and sexually passive than men. Indeed most eighteenth-century fiction encouraged women to imagine that the plot of their lives would end with marriage. Yet, as we have seen in the many examples of women’s accomplishments in the arts and sciences, the contradiction between Rousseau-esque restrictions on women’s use of reason and the often very public experience of women as salonnieres, scientists, patrons, and writers kept alive a counterdiscourse that argued for women’s full inclusion in the public sphere. Women, Education, and Feminism. During the Enlight¬ enment, as men and women used their reason to question many traditional beliefs, not surprisingly they began to question the limitations placed on women’s development of reason, and the subject of women’s and girls’ education became hotly debated. In the late seventeenth century the Cartesian thinker Frangois Poulain de la Barre (16471723) was one of the first theorists to advocate a fully equal education for women and men. Starting with the Cartesian principle that “the mind has no sex,” he argued that women should be educated. The impact of Locke’s sensationalist epistemology, which argued that our minds are a tabula rasa at birth, also opened the door to thinking about women’s education in new ways. Mary Astell (1666-1731) was one of the first proponents of women’s education in England explicitly to invoke Lockean arguments in favor of women’s use of reason. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (in two parts, 1694-1697), Astell argued for separate female seminaries for girls. In America, Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) advocated equal education for girls and boys in her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” (written in 1779, published in 1790). Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights

ENTERTAINERS

of Woman (1792) was the most influential book calling for education for women and encouragement for them to use their reason in public. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication was inspired by the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft argued passionately against Rousseau’s limited view of women’s reason and proclaimed that after almost a century of reflection and modest pro¬ posals the time had arrived for revolutionary change in politics, gender relations, and women’s roles in society. Women could be good mothers in the private realm, she argued, only if they received an education that nurtured their virtue and prepared them for careers so that they could provide for themselves. The French Revolution also incited important French feminists like Olympe de Gouges (1745-1793), Etta Palm d’Aelders (1743-1799), Anne-Joseph Theroigne de Mericourt (1762-1817), and Louise de Keralio-Robert (1758-1822). But it was the male mathematician and political philosopher Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), who advanced the strongest argument for women’s inclusion as full citizens in the new French state. In his newspaper article titled “De l’admission des femmes au droit de cite” (On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship, 1790), he argued that if political rights were universal, as the Declaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789) proclaimed, then rights must extend to women as well as men. Like many others who argued for women’s rights during the French Revolution, Condorcet was denounced by the radical republicans during the Terror. He died, perhaps by suicide, in his jail cell in 1794. The noted scientist E. O. Wilson argued that Condorcet’s death marked the end of the Enlightenment (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge [New York: Knopf, 1998], p. 14). Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenments. As we have seen, historians are undecided about when the Enlightenment ended. If we focus on the Enlightenment as a movement to use rationality and science to develop universal laws about man and nature, then Condorcet’s death seems an apt conclusion. But if we accept the more complex view of the Enlightenment that is opened up by adding women’s experience to the story, perhaps Wollstonecraft’s death in childbirth in 1797 (the baby was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley), with an unfinished novel and love letters on her desk, is the more fitting conclusion. Including women in the history of the Enlight¬ enment requires more than documenting their publications, mathematical proofs, and university professorships. It re¬ quires taking seriously the ways in which the Enlightenment shaped the private as well as the public lives of the women and men of Europe. It requires recognizing that the Enlight¬ enment pioneered a discourse of difference and sensibility as well as a discourse of universalism and rights.

185

Many feminists and postmodern theorists have been quick to denounce the Enlightenment for its dangerous elevation of nature and reason and its false universalist claims. But by including women in the history of the Enlightenment, a new picture emerges in which questions and dialogue, salon conversation and letter writing, and the tension between public lives and private lives stand at the very core of the experience of the Enlightenment. Perhaps Wollstonecraft, wracked by a broken heart yet passionately engaged with the most pressing problems and issues of her age, demanding in a voice that contemporaries sometimes found shrill that women’s reason be part of the solution, was in fact the quintessential philosophe. [See also Bluestockings; Citizenship; Civil Society; Dem¬ ocracy; Education; Salon; Scientific Revolution; and biog¬ raphies of women mentioned in this article.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, Keith Michael, and Peter Hanns Reill. What’s Left of En¬ lightenment? A Postmodern Question. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Bannet, Eve Tavor. The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Fem¬ inisms and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951. Craveri, Benedetta. The Age of Conversation. Translated by Teresa Waugh. New York: New York Review of Books, 2005. Fraisse, Genevieve. Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. Hazard, Paul. The European Mind, 1680-1715. Translated by J. Lewis May. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1964. First published in French in 1935. Hesse, Carla. The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Be¬ came Modern. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Landes, Joan. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pocock, J. G. A. “Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment.” In Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850, edited by Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa, pp. 7-28. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1998. Schiebinger, Londa. The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modem Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Smith, Theresa Ann. The Emerging Citizen: Gender and Enlighten¬ ment in Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Jennifer

ENTERTAINERS. See Performing Arts.

M.

Jones

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EQUALITY

EQUALITY. The

concept of equality for women presented a dilemma in the gradual development of democ¬ racy in Western cultures. Historically, under the influence of patriarchy, women were defined as the property of men and as individuals who were distinct from men because of the primacy of the female function in human reproduction. The resultant gender system created the inferior legal, political, and economic status of women, for whom biology was destiny, a destiny that was averred by divine and natural law. In Book of the City of Ladies (1405), Christine de Pizan (1365-c. 1430) raised the querelles des femmes, the intellectual discourse regarding the value of women; by the end of the nineteenth century that issue was desig¬ nated the “woman question.” The rights talk of British constitutionalism and the rise of capitalism tied property ownership to political rights—a reform also found in other nations. In addition to these influences, the Protestant Reformation, which declared an equality of souls regardless of gender, likewise promoted democratization. The spread of Protestantism required literacy for women as well as for men, to promote the study of the Bible among the laity. The discourse among Enlightenment intellectuals and reformers in eighteenthcentury Great Britain and Europe confronted the issue of class among men and launched discussion of equality in terms that invited a concurrent consideration of race and gender as well. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) voiced the early feminist argument of woman’s equality in response to the gender-specific rhetoric spawned by the French Revolution. Contemporaneously in the late eighteenth century, the establishment in the United States of a system of liberal democratic government founded on the social-contract theory interacted with unprecedented economic opportu¬ nity in the Western Hemisphere. The writings of Judith Sargent Murray (17 51 -1820), for example, cautiously assert women’s equality in terms of Republican Motherhood yet avoid challenging the gender system head-on. Over three centuries the process of social and political democratization gradually included acknowledgment of the issues of race, class, and gender in the quest for equality. Equal rights feminism characterized the struggle of the nineteenth-century U.S. and British women’s movements to achieve equality for women, while in Europe the women’s movements gathered liberals, socialists, and nationalists in pursuit of equality for women. Despite suf¬ frage and other gains for women in the twentieth century, equality for women in education, in employment, and in their political and legal rights remained elusive in the twenty-first century because of the resilient influence of patriarchy and its gender system. The fundamental obstacle to the equality of women was the reluctance to consider as equal women’s potential to

think and learn; the socialization of women as daughters, wives, and mothers—and therefore as dependent on the protection and support of men grounded women s identity as persons and individuals in their relationships to men. To reinforce the domestic identification of women, the gender system defined women as biologically and emotion¬ ally peculiar in their abilities and potential as individuals and citizens. Even when women entered the paid labor force, their dependent status remained, and that status sanctioned constriction of their economic activity as members of gender-specific professions and occupations. Within European nations, feminist socialism challenged the central tradition of women’s subordination and cham¬ pioned equality for women as fundamental to economic and political reform. Reluctantly and gradually, the limited definition of women expanded to accommodate social and economic changes that have been characterized as “progress” in the Western world since 1800. The designation of “women’s work” as specific tasks of production and service within the family unit in agricultural societies resulted from a prehistoric sexual division of labor; however, the crucial nature of those tasks to preindustrial family survival had not translated into economic power for women. Whatever egalitarian status between men and women might have existed in prehistory, male dominance subjugated women in cultures developed before the Com¬ mon Era. Women’s domestic work was transferred into sexsegregated paid occupations within a paid labor force in societies that were being transformed by industrialization and urbanization after 1800. A legacy of women’s definition as the property of men presented two almost insurmountable impediments to establishing equality of any kind for women. First, the assumption of women’s inescapable obligation of unpaid labor in the family undermined their ability to seek employ¬ ment or a career outside the home, or to receive salary or wages equal to those of men, even when performing the same jobs in the paid labor force. Second, defined as prop¬ erty under coverture, married women had no legal rights to their wages or to any other property prior to nineteenthcentury legislative reforms. Nor were the rights of widows or single women in the home or workplace protected as equal to men’s; only in their obligation to pay taxes on their property were women treated equally. Women’s unpaid labor in the home translated into underpaid labor in the workforce. Efforts toward Equality for Women. Thus the quest for equality for women has required fundamental social, legal, and political reforms. The nineteenth century witnessed incremental advances for women in education and employ¬ ment, the result as much of economic changes as of the parallel efforts of women’s advocacy groups and women’s rights reform movements. Women remained approximately

EQUALITY

half of the population, and demographic trends reflected women’s increased presence in the paid labor force because of widening opportunities in education and employment despite the predominance of homemaking among adult married women. An expanded labor force that drew in married and single women resulted from the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The broader agenda of mid-twentieth-century movements for peace and social welfare marginalized the issue of women’s equality, especially as resistance to the rise of fascism diverted the energy and focus of reformers—although Three Guineas (1938) by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) made plain that women’s equality was critical to the success of pacifism, feminism, and antifascism. Both the mobilization during the war and the demobili¬ zation of men after the war added increasing numbers of both married and single middle-class women to the working-class women in the paid labor force, thus reinfor¬ cing the economic dislocation of women in the labor force in the mid-twentieth century. Advances in industrial and commercial technology and a rise of the tertiary (or service) sector of the economy stimulated women’s entry into the labor force worldwide as the twenty-first century arrived. The influence of Western nations on developing nations in all of Asia and the Pacific Rim as well as in Africa exported the issue—if not the practice—of women’s equality. The growing economic presence and power of women in the industrialized nations supported their struggle for equality, prompting their access to the education and work experience required for their entry into all professions and occupations. In the nineteenth century, women’s increased property in the form of wages added to their agitation for married women’s property reform legislation and suffrage rights. The so-called First Wave of feminism pursued both women’s equality as citizens and workers in the labor force and also women’s reproductive rights; a myriad of reform movements that addressed women’s disadvantaged status demanded full equality for women and their full protection under the law as enfranchised citizens. The Second Wave of the U.S. women’s movement chal¬ lenged the post-World War II gender system. The social critique of Second Wave feminism gave rise to efforts by men to alter their own roles as workers, spouses, and parents; however, the collective efforts of all kinds of feminists did not succeed in achieving equality of women and men. The Third Wave of feminism applied, as a tool for investigating gender, academic skepticism in assessing the implications of biological determinism. Third Wave researchers posited individual resistance as effective in gen¬ der subversion, and thus they invited consideration of dif¬ ferences of race and class in evaluating the source and impact of gender in obstructing or promoting equality of women and men.

187

Assessment. Although the women’s movement suc¬ ceeded in incremental improvement in women’s status, by the end of the twentieth century women’s status fell short of equality in most nations. Gender inequality persisted. Around the globe, married women in the home remained economically dependent on their spouses; in general, despite their proportion in national or workplace populations, women in the workforce continued to be responsible for more home and family care than were men, they earned less pay than their male counterparts, and they remained underrepresented in the leadership of business and industry. Even women in Great Britain and the socialist nations of northern Europe faced residual sex discrimination in hiring, pay, and promotion. Women who chose to be homemakers or to interrupt their careers to rear their children were disadvantaged in their economic security and career devel¬ opment. Women in the workplace continued to face sexual harassment in all its forms, from subtle to blatant. Their participation in local, regional, and national government politics also lagged behind the proportion appropriate for their numbers. The pace of their entry into political office and leadership in governmental policy-making continued to be glacial. Although equality for women was not achieved by the second millennium, women nonetheless persevered in their struggle for economic independence and full participation in the civic and political process. [See also Capitalism; Communism; Democracy; Parity; Socialism; Wollstonecraft, Mary; and Woolf, Virginia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andersson, Magdalena. “Why Gender Equality?” In The New Egalitarianism, edited by Anthony Giddings and Patrick Diamond, pp. 173-182. Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2005. A discussion of gender equality in the context of women’s economic independence and their presence in the political and economic power structures. Connell, R. W. “Change among the Gatekeepers: Men, Masculin¬ ities, and Gender Equality in the Global Arena.” Signs 30, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 1801-1825. Discussion of men’s response to feminism and women’s movements that notes a process of creating opportunities for opponents to undermine feminist efforts for women’s equality when women’s issues are defined as gender issues. Gomez, Elsa Gomez. “Equidad, genero, y salud: Retos para la action.” Revista Panamericana de Salud Publica 11, no. 5 (2002): 454-461. Investigates the impact of unchallenged assumptions regarding gender differences on women’s access to health care in Central and South America. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, from the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Historical background of the development of feminist consciousness and its quest for women’s equality. Mazur, Amy G., ed. State Feminism, Women’s Movements, and Job Training: Making Democracies Work in the Global Economy. New York: Routledge, 2001. Popa, Raluca Maria. “The Socialist Project for Gender (In)Equality: A Critical Discussion.” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 6 (Winter 2003): 49-72. Addresses the consequences of socialists’ not confronting the unequal gender order.

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EQUALITY

Saliba, Therese, Carolyn Allen, and Judith A. Howard, eds. Gender, Politics, and Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Collection of articles regarding the social conditions, political activity, and feminism of Muslim women. Svallfors, Stefan, ed. Analyzing Inequality: Life Chances and Social Mobility in Comparative Perspective. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Collection of articles that consider various aspects of gender inequality and the resultant impact on the prospect of women’s equality. Waylen, Georgina. Gender in Third World Politics. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996. A gendered analysis of Third World politics. Williams, Christine L., Patti A. Giuffre, and Kirsten A. Dellinger. “Research on Gender Stratification in the U.S.” In Social Inequalities in Comparative Perspective, edited by Fiona Devine and Mary C. Waters, pp. 214-236. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Angela Marie Howard

EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT. The origins of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) date back to the American campaign for woman suffrage, which gained its momentum at the turn of the twentieth century. After the Nineteenth Amendment (ratified in 1920) gave women the right to vote—albeit unevenly, given the continued disfranchise¬ ment of African Americans as a result of state-enforced and federally unchallenged Jim Crow legislation—femi¬ nists divided over what the next political step should be.

Many feminists wanted to use their new power of the vote to push for stronger protective labor legislation that would offer women safeguards from unduly long working hours and onerous conditions. Such legislation, they argued, acknowledged their special physical and social conditions as mothers and caregivers. Prominent and influ¬ ential progressive organizations, labor unions, and political agencies, including the newly formed Women s Bureau of the Department of Labor, supported protective labor legis¬ lation. Moreover, such U.S. feminists joined colleagues in the international women’s, peace, and labor movements of the early twentieth century in opposition to any form of “equality” that denied on-the-job protections to women. Other feminists, however, argued that such legislation blocked the path to true equality; so long as women were legally treated as being different from men, they would never be economically or politically on par with them. Among these feminists was Alice Paul (1885-1977), leader of the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and author of the original Equal Rights Amendment. Paul had gained tremen¬ dous fame and notoriety during the suffrage campaign as a prominent leader in the fight for the constitutional amendment granting woman suffrage. She participated in the suffrage movement in Britain and helped bring some of its successful, if radical, tactics to the U.S. movement. With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Paul turned to the larger question of equal rights in the United States, penning the original ERA: “Men and women shall

ERA Opponents. Women protesting the federal Equal Rights Amendment gather outside the White House, February 1977. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” In 1923, Senator Charles Curtis and Representative Daniel Anthony, both Republi¬ cans, introduced the ERA into Congress. The amendment was introduced in Congress every year for the next fortynine years, but a coalition of progressives (who wanted to ensure specifically women’s and children’s health and safety), labor unions (who did not want to surrender men’s jobs and who pursued a [male] family wage), and conserva¬ tives (who saw the ERA as a threat to “traditional” gender norms) created solid opposition to the amendment. With the onset of the international Great Depression in 1929, the class issues that attended protective labor legisla¬ tion came to the fore. The severity of the Depression led to attacks on women’s right to employment. Whereas working-class women could, and did, mobilize in support of a growing labor movement in the United States, profes¬ sional and middle-class women sought to transform the debates over women’s work from “protection” to “equality.” Various U.S. women’s groups, including the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs (BPW) and the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL), joined Paul and the NWP in support of the ERA in the 1930s. This organizational support was important, but it was the Republican Party that revita¬ lized the ERA by placing it in the party’s platform. The Democratic Party followed suit in 1944, albeit with strong opposition from organized labor. At the start of World War II, women entered the paid workforce in unprecedented numbers, but at the war’s end they were removed in order to provide jobs for returning male veterans. This wartime workplace experience, however, was a turning point in the fight for the ERA. Although there was not a full-blown women’s movement, from the end of World War II through the mid-1960s there was rapidly growing momen¬ tum for women’s political and economic equality. During the 1950s, support for the amendment grew, and pro-ERA acti¬ vists lobbied successfully for it. In 1950 and again in 1953 the U.S. Senate passed the ERA, but both times, senators at¬ tached the “Hayden rider,” which provided that the ERA “shall not be construed to impair any rights, benefits, or ex¬ emptions now or herein after conferred by law upon persons of the female sex.” Women’s organizations favored the origi¬ nal ERA and mobilized to block the amended ERA in the House of Representatives; in both years, the U.S. House recessed without voting on it. Although postwar support for the ERA was broadening, prominent Democrats, including Eleanor Roosevelt, aban¬ doned their support for the ERA in favor of the United Nations charter, which in 1945 asserted the “equal rights of men and women.” At the federal level, the presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy affirmed their support for women’s equal rights, but neither pushed the

189

ERA, preferring a neutral stance. Subjected to tremendous anti-ERA labor influence, Kennedy changed course and created the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) in 1961. Chaired by Roosevelt and seating promi¬ nent labor and government women who sought to stave off support for the ERA, the PCSW ultimately concluded that “a constitutional amendment need not now be sought” in order to establish equal rights for women. In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which included Title VII, prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex. But Title VII also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a govern¬ ment agency charged with determining whether businesses were in compliance with the law. In 1970 the EEOC, along with the federal courts, agreed that Title VII’s prohibition of sex discrimination on the job rendered protective legisla¬ tion null and void; they also extended most protective labor laws to men rather than removing them for women. As a result, union opposition to the amendment waned: in April 1974 the United Auto Workers (UAW; officially the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Imple¬ ment Workers of America) voted to endorse the ERA, and other labor unions soon followed; the following month the Department of Labor also endorsed the ERA. At the same time, an emerging mass feminist movement also called for women’s equality, and the National Organi¬ zation for Women (NOW), founded in 1966, came out in support of the ERA. NOW’s support for the amendment caused some of its union-based founders and members to leave the organization, but NOW stood firm and became a feminist leader for the ERA. Although the U.S. House passed the ERA in 1970, the Senate sought to attach a provision that women be exempted from the military draft. Pro-ERA activists objected, arguing that for women to enjoy the full rights of citizenship they must also have access to all of its responsibilities, including, if necessary, compulsory military service. In 1971 the House again voted to adopt the original ERA, rejecting a Senate-based provision exempting women from military draft. In March 1972 the original and unamended ERA passed the Senate and moved to the states for ratifica¬ tion. Success appeared certain, but by late 1973, anti-ERA forces—led by Phyllis Schlafly of the conservative Eagle Forum—were mobilizing in the states, opposing the ERA on a number of fronts. Some targeted the amendment as the work of the “women’s libbers” who sought to dismantle traditional gender roles and devalue motherhood; others condemned the amendment because it would ensure the military draft of American women; still others objected to the ERA because, it was argued, the amendment would legislate that women and men would have to use the same restrooms. The most strenuous objection, however, was that a federal amendment to the Constitution would trample on

190

EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

states’ rights. Public opinion polls throughout the 1970s and early 1980s indicated that the majority of Americans supported the ERA and women’s equality, but when it came time to vote in state referenda on ratification, anti-ERA forces won. By 1977, thirty-five states had ratified the amendment. Despite the work of ERA proponents, and because of strong anti-ERA activism, no other states ratified the amendment. In 1978, pro-ERA activists persuaded Congress to extend the original 1979 deadline to 30 June 1982. However, the deadline passed with no additional states ratifying the amendment. Since 1982 the ERA has been introduced into every session of Congress. In the 2001-2002 session, Senator Edward Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts) and Repre¬ sentative Carolyn Maloney (Democrat, New York) spon¬ sored joint legislation that would impose no deadline on the passage of the ERA. Supporters of the ERA mobilized again to pass it in the remaining unratified states, but no state has yet to do so. The rhetoric of equality persists in the United States, but it is difficult to point to specific legislation that guarantees it. [See also Antifeminism; Equality; Feminism; Nineteenth Amendment; Roosevelt, Eleanor; United Nations; and United States, subentry Modern Period.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harrison, Cynthia. On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945-1968. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Mansbridge, Jane J. Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Mathews, Donald G., and Jane Sherron De Hart. Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Rupp, Leila J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Ryan, Barbara. Feminism and the Women’s Movement: Dynamics of Change in Social Movement, Ideology, and Activism. New York: Routledge, 1992. Stephanie Gilmore

EROTICISM. “Birds Do It. Bees Do It. People Seek the Keys to It”: thus ran the headline of a 2007 New York Times article by Natalie Angier about the nature of sexual desire. Michel Foucault could not but agree with the point that the journalist makes, namely that while sexual desire and arousal are common to all sorts of animal species, only humans seek the keys to understanding it. Foucault himself devoted much effort to unlock “the secret,” as he calls sex, and the truths produced around it in volume 1 of his History of Sexuality.

The reason behind this all-too-human curiosity for all matters erotic, especially these days, is not just an insatiable sexual drive: understanding what triggers female and male human desire is also a lucrative business. According to Pfizer’s earnings report, sales of Viagra, a drug for erectile dysfunction, grossed $1.6 billion in 2005. Viagra and other drugs that enhance sexual performance mirror contempor¬ ary Western cultural views of male and female sexuality. But how is sexual performance connected to eroticism? The short answer is that these days an erotically attractive man is one who can satisfy his partner sexually. In many premodern cultures, an unfailing male erection, both in representations and in real life, was the hidden premise of many erotic trysts and long-lasting romances. It was also the often unspoken assumption in the act of rape. As with many other erotic symbols derived from the human body, erection was from the beginning a revered idol of worship, a tumescent marker of desire, and a feared and violent aggressor. These days, for many Western men, it has become a much fetished and often elusive dream. Thus the boundaries of the erotic grow and morph through time, driven and shaped by cultural imperatives, economic needs, emotion, and social customs. The example of male erection shows how sex, for humans, is never just about the act itself. The word “eroticism,” at least in many Western languages, encompasses some of the most puzzling and complex existential, political, artistic, and literary predicaments in Western culture, as well as a few of the most problematic debates of Western philosophy, beginning with Plato and Aristotle. In modern-day par¬ lance, “eroticism” is usually juxtaposed to “pornography” and is often deployed to indicate a more aesthetically elevated way of arousing sexual desire in men and women, through the languages of art, music, dance, literature, cinema, and other multimedia forms of expression. In the gendered wars against pornography, eroticism has emerged as the healthy, politic¬ ally correct, and often corrective alternative to the obscene pornographic spectacle of sex. Whereas porn is all about the mechanics of sex, eroticism widens the angle to include such emotions as love, affection, tenderness, and bonding. Interestingly, eroticism has also become associated more and more with empowered and liberated female producers and consumers of the genre. This has been in great part a result of the roles played by various generations of Western feminists and gay- and lesbian-rights activists. The Internet has also played a prominent role by ushering in a new era not only for the circulation of pornography but also for the circulation of erotic literature and imagery, allowing readers to indulge private fantasies without having to face a store clerk or mail carrier. Yet even if the public rhetoric is that pornography is bad and gendered male, and erotica is good and gendered female, the semantic and representational boundary be¬ tween the two is porous, to say the least. For example,

EROTICISM

in many English-speaking countries, there is a substantial overlap between erotic literature (legal) and pornography (often illegal), with the distinction traditionally having been made on the basis of perceived artistic and literary worth. To complicate matters further, defining eroticism proves even more difficult if one tries to trace perceptions of what is erotic across different historical periods and cultures. For example, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s 1601 paint¬ ing Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All), which depicts a prepubescent naked Eros, could be perceived these days as proof of Caravaggio’s pedophilia, especially when seen together with many of his other paintings. These other works obsessively feature the same boy, often in various states of disrobement, challenging the boundary of homo¬ erotic images. Similarly, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, in 1934, had to be published in Paris. Its publication in the United States in 1961 led to a series of obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography. Yet now the novel can be purchased in most bookstores in the Western Hemisphere, and it is considered by many to be a literary masterpiece. In contrast, Shanghai Baby, the 1999 erotic novel by Wei Hui, has very slim, if any, literary merits. Though it has been translated into numerous Western languages, it was banned in 2000 by the mainland Chinese government on the basis of vague claims of obscenity and pornography. As these few ex¬ amples show, there are no moorings for trying to define the allure of sex at a given time and place. The ways in which the erotic is semantically mapped by a non-Western language, Chinese, can illuminate further the complexity of the issues at stake. Halvor Eifring, in discuss¬ ing the conceptual history of one single word, qing (which can be loosely translated as “emotion” in traditional Chinese culture), unveils how comparative studies of emotions, which include the arena of the erotic, are fraught with daunting challenges. He notes, “While philosophical debates in the West have taken place across language barriers, all similar debates in traditional Chinese were conducted in the Chinese language” (pp. 2-3). The word in Chinese that comes closest to “eroticism,” “se,” and that the term qing encompasses, has a long and complicated textual history of at least two thousand years. “Se” means color, feminine beauty, form in the Buddhist sense of “rupa,” sexual and sensual desire, and, of course, eroticism. There are some other terms that overlap with “se,” and that complicate our understanding within the context of Chinese culture alone. So while it is clearly important to enlarge the scope of the study and exploration of the erotic to include other cultures, Western and non-Western, this move must be done carefully and exhaustively. Using non-Western traditions to contrast with Western understandings of eroticism is challenging also because of the subtle and not so subtle cultural discrimination on the

191

part of Western thinkers and scholars. Foucault, just to mention perhaps the most outrageous and yet seemingly undetected example of a Eurocentric approach to the study of eroticism, centers his study of Western sexual history on the dichotomy between the Western notion of scientia sexualis and non-Western concept ars erotica. In all of two pages, Foucault brings together China, Japan, India, Rome, and the Arabo-Islamic societies and presents them as an unchanging, apparently ahistorical continuum, despite their heterogeneous, historically diverse, and strikingly disparate cultural heritages. According to Foucault, this East¬ ern tradition, “endowed with an ars erotica,” draws truth “from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumu¬ lated as experience.” “Pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden,” but “first and foremost in relation to itself,” and is “experienced as pleasure.” He presents this ars erotica as an esoteric and masterful art serving as “the elixir of life” and contributing to the “exile of death and its threats.” Thus does Foucault reduce a multicultural, polyvocal universe to one undiffer¬ entiated continuum, untouched by modernity. In contrast, Western civilization, according to Foucault, stands alone as “the only civilization to have produced procedures for tell¬ ing the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret” (pp. 57-58). These procedures are the scientia sex¬ ualis, which Foucault then exhaustively discusses and stud¬ ies in the three volumes of The History of Sexuality. While Foucault does not cite the works on which he may have based his claims, it is clear that he subsumes the various erotic traditions of the countries he mentions under the exoticizing epistemological paradigms of nineteenthcentury French and British Orientalist literature and of the inaccurate and fantastic Victorian renditions of works such as the Kamasutra. It is true that in some non-Western religious and spiritual traditions, such as some aspects of Tantric Buddhism (especially as developed in Tibet after the eighth century), there were esoteric practices transmitted from teacher to disciple. But such practices were limited to only a tiny fraction of the segment of the population in the countries where they developed and were transmitted, and as such they should be seen as minor, marginal practices of these cultures. Moreover, Chinese sexual yoga is often misunderstood in the West as the ultimate in eroticism and erotic literature, yet it squarely belongs, at least since the third century b.c.e., to the medical tradition of yangsheng (nurturing life), to be found in the macrobiotic manuscripts that provided a foun¬ dation for early Chinese medicine. As Donald Harper, a leading scholar of these sources, puts it, “The medieval sex manuals provide theoretical background for sexual cultivation, but their chief objective is to translate the erotic subtleties of intercourse into a technique which, like other

192

EROTICISM

cultivation techniques, guides a man towards success.” “Success” here means not the elixir of life drawn from pleasure, as fantasized by Foucault, but long life resulting from a complete health regimen. Here sexual yoga is emp¬ tied of its erotic meanings and re-created as a technique designed for the man’s benefit. Even the attention to the woman, so often celebrated in Western readings of these sources, is a necessary part of realizing this project, focused on men’s changing anxieties, needs, and desires in a very contextualized patriarchal society. This is not to say that it is impossible to think critically about eroticism. Thomas Laquer, in Making Sex and Soli¬ tary Pleasures, displays an exhaustive, historically specific, and theoretically challenging approach to the slippery issues of sexuality, the body, and the politics of power and desire—the fields in which eroticism is situated. It is works such as his that show how beliefs in the power of women, of men, and of their bodily chemistry, merge with religion, politics, biology, medicine, magic, literature, poetry, paint¬ ing, and sculpture, to evoke landscapes in which talent, reason, and spirituality become embodied in ways that shape all aspects of human life. In short, such works show how the erotic is part of the tapestry of life. Human beings, across times and cultures, have made of the representation of sexual desire, in all its titillating aspects, a relentless aesthetic pursuit. This quest has gener¬ ated countless texts, artifacts, and voices. Such “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (which Foucault attributes exclusively to nineteenth-century Western sources and dis¬ course) are the most fertile points of intersection among sources as varied as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353) and the Chinese late Ming novel fin Ping Mei (iGolden Lotus), or an African sculpture of a phallus and Lucian Freud’s portrait of the British supermodel Kate Moss. In this sense, such spirals may also be the most fruitful angle, albeit unstable and in perpetual motion, from which to experience the erotic as a site of pleasure. More import¬ ant, such spirals may be the platform necessary to view eroticism in a way that exposes, but does not reproduce, uneven, unjust, and discriminatory balances of power and agency between the different genders in various cultures. It could well be that many of these representations have resulted in sexual intercourse, but more important—in view of the temporary and cyclical nature of desire, arousal, and consummation—they stand as lasting artifacts and texts, both in a strict and wider sense, that codify, mirror, and produce the codes of desire of various cultures. As such, they show us new ways to be human. Even more importantly, however, is the fact that one element that brings together many cultures seems to be the way in which women, their gender roles, and femininity figure preeminently in the crea¬ tion of the category of the erotic, regardless of time, place and language. In many instances, indeed, regardless of

whether we are dealing with premodern or modern literary, artistic, or visual works, the thread with which the web of the erotic, with all the nuances and implications we have illustrated here, is spun is one that literally locates and traps women onto the canvas of history, in roles too often not of their choosing. Thus devoting time and energy to studying the dynamics of this semantic field can be a very useful path to uncover instances of agency denied, and thus enable empowerment and understanding. [See also Art and Architecture, subentry Erotica and Pornography; Pornography; and Sexuality.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Angier, Natalie. “Birds Do It. Bees Do It. People Seek the Keys to It.” New York Times, 15 April 2007. Eifring, Halvor. Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Litera¬ ture. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Galimberti, Umberto. Le cose dell’amore. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006. Harper, Donald, trans. Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts. London: Kegan Paul Inter¬ national, 1998. Hunt, Lynn, ed. Eroticism and the Body Politic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Laqueur, Thomas. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturba¬ tion. New York: Zone Books, 2003. Ma, Jixing. Mawangdui guyishu kaoshi. Changsha, China: Hunan Kexue Jishu Chubanshe, 1992. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Paz, Octavio. The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism. Translated by Helen Lane. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995. “Scarlet.” http://www.scarletmagazine.co.uk/. Smith, Aaron. “Lilly’s Sex Drug Sales Jump in 2005.” http://money. cnn.com/2006/01/20/news/companies/cialis/index.htm?section= moneyjates. Vatsyayana. Kamasutra. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Paola Zamperini

ESPIN, VILMA (b. 1930), sister-in-law of Fidel Castro and one of the most influential women in the politics of revolutionary Cuba. Vilma Espin Guillois was born into an upper-middle-class family in Santiago de Cuba, in Cuba’s most eastern province, to a French mother and a Cuban father who held an executive position in a major rum distillery. She attended parochial school for two years, but claims she never had any religious beliefs. She became one of the first women to graduate as an industrial chemical engin¬ eer from the University of Oriente in her home city. As a student, she became involved in a group headed by Frank Pais in opposition to the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship (1952-1959); this informal revolutionary group later (1956) merged with Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement.

E’TESSAMI, PARVIN

In 1955-1956 Espin did postgraduate work in Boston at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before returning to Cuba, she contacted Fidel Castro, who was training revolu¬ tionaries in Mexico, and offered to be an intermediary between anti-Batista oppositionists in Mexico and those in Cuba. Under Pais’s command, “Deborah,” as she became known, prepared first aid brigades to care for the wounded once the yacht Granma arrived in Cuba carrying Castro and his associates. The revolutionary hopes for the Granma landing in 1956 were unsuccessful, however, and the 26th of July Movement retreated to the mountains. Espin and others in Santiago worked underground for the revolution, including trans¬ porting weapons to the rebels in the Sierra Maestra. When Frank Pais was killed by the Batista army in 1957, Espin became responsible for coordinating all clandestine work in Oriente Province. In 1958, she joined the Castro guerrillas in the mountains under the name of “Mariela.” She worked as an aide to Fidel Castro’s younger brother Raul Castro and helped him coordinate the guerilla operations in Oriente Province. Following the overthrow of the Batista regime, Espin married Raul Castro on 26 January 1959. The marriage produced four children (three daughters and one son). The couple later divorced. In early 1959, the International Federation of Democratic Women called a meeting on the rights of children and women to be held in Chile that year, and Espin represented Cuba at this gathering. In August 1960, Fidel Castro created an organization called the Federation of Cuban Women (Federacion de Mujeres Cubanas, FMC) and named Espin its president, a position she still held in 2007. More than forty thousand women immediately joined the organiza¬ tion, whose first significant undertaking was to create child-care centers throughout the island. With a mission of strengthening women’s rights on the island, the FMC is committed to defending the Cuban Revolution; fight¬ ing for the incorporation, participation, and promotion of women in economic, political, social, and cultural life in Cuba based on equal rights and opportunities; forming ethical and moral values in children and the family in schools and society; strengthening the development of nonsexist education at all levels of society; and establish¬ ing and maintaining links with women’s organizations and institutions around the world. From 1967 to 1971, Espin served as chair of a Commis¬ sion for Social Prevention, and since 1971, she has also held the title of president of the Infancy Institute, which works to develop children’s personality through education. Since 1973, she has been the vice president of the International Federation of Democratic Women. She has been a member of the Cuban Communist Party’s Central Committee since its founding in 1965, a member of its Politburo since 1980, and has served on the Council of State since 1976.

193

[See also Cuba.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Espin, Vilma Guillois. Cuban Women Confront the Future: Thirty Years after the Revolution. Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press, 1990. Randall, Margaret. Cuban Women Now: Interviews with Cuban Women. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1974. Jaime Suchlicki

E^TESSAMI, PARVIN (1907-1941), Iranian poet. Of the two collections of E’tessami’s poetry, Divan (1935, repr. 1974) was the first major poetry collection published by a woman in Iran. It was followed by A Nightingale’s Lament (English trans., 1985). An exceptional and versatile writer, E'tessami was influenced by her father, an author who adored literature and was empathetic toward the strug¬ gles of Iranian women. Some claim her first poem was composed in the challenging Persian classical style when she was eight years old. E'tessami first published her work in her father’s literary journal. Following these initial publications, she faced critics who claimed her poems either must have come from a man’s hand or were written by a “manly” female author. In her culture to be considered of “manly” talent pointed toward a patriarchal assumption regarding gender and literary talent. One critic, Fazlollah Garakani (1977), claimed that no woman, espe¬ cially not the “kind of ugly, timid, and cross-eyed” E'tessami, could have composed such exceptional poetry. E’tessami experimented with dichotomies and paradoxes in her poetry, utilizing imagery from the domestic sphere to metaphorically challenge the boundaries of a woman’s per¬ spective. A pioneer in her country, she planted metaphors in her poetry that encouraged women’s literary voices and demanded recognition for women writers in the Middle East. E’tessami was not associated with a particular religion, political group, or other affiliation. Some claim her poems carefully avoided influences from Romanticism and femin¬ ism. Her multifaceted identity facilitated the wide readership of her poetry and called attention to the experiences of Iranian women. In one poem E3tessami describes the Iranian woman as a caged bird in a garden who lives and dies in the cage, never named or remembered. As one of the founding members of Kanun-e Banovan, the Women’s Center, she encouraged education and unveiling among women and advocated social reform. Although she did not assert a definite position regarding the veil, as Farzaneh Milani (1992) observes, E'tessami did argue against the “veil [as] a sign of feminine modesty.” Instead, E'tessami was more concerned with education for women. This illus¬ trates the great divide among advocates for women across the globe that has begun to be addressed by transnational femin¬ ist scholars and grassroots activists in the early twenty-first

194

E’TESSAMI, PARVIN

century. The feminist movements in America in the twentieth century focused primarily on the concerns of middle-class white women. When these feminists turned their attention to other countries, especially countries where women wear the veil, their response involved a desire to “rescue” these women from their veils. Following the example of E'tessami, transnational feminists observe that women in the Middle East seek education, employment, health care, and fair wages as more important goals than freedom from their veils. The influence of E'tessami resonates in Iran in the early twenty-first century. An international conference to cele¬ brate the life and works of “Iran’s poetess” was held in February and March 2007. Conference participants gathered first in Tabriz, the birthplace of E'tessami, and then moved to Tehran, where the second Parvin Book of the Year Award winner was announced. [See also Iran and Islam.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Milani, Farzaneh. Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Leah Rediger Schulte

ETHNICITY This entry consists of two subentries: Overview Comparative History

Overview “Ethnicity,” as the term is used in the early twenty-first century, is a relatively new word in the English language. It comes from the Greek ethnos, meaning people, race, cul¬ ture, or nation, and refers to “the character or quality of an ethnic group.” In the introduction to their edited volume on the subject, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan noted in 1975 that the term with this meaning made its first appearance in an American dictionary in 1961 (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary). It did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1972 or in other major American dictionaries until 1973. By the time it showed up in the American Heritage Dictionary, the connotation of the term had evolved in unexpected ways. Though the 1961 entry conformed to the definition given above, what inter¬ ested Glazer and Moynihan was the positive connotation given in the 1972 entry. Before 1973, connotations in English of words derived from ethnos were negative, evoking a “cul¬ turally backward” or “primitive” people. Something was clearly changing in the United States, wrote the two Har¬ vard professors, in a land still referred to as the great melting pot. American English now had a word to express pride in

the nation’s ethnic diversity. The standard image, engraved on the side of the Statue of Liberty, was being replaced—in the dictionary and on the street. Americans no longer de¬ scribed their immigrant families as “huddled masses yearn¬ ing to breathe free” (Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”) but as individuals who had come from different parts of the world with ethnic identities that they wanted to preserve. Things were changing in Europe as well and in Europe s former colonies. By the late 1960s and early 1970s the West had relinquished control over most of its dominions, mak¬ ing way for the rise of new nation-states throughout much of the Third World. As Westerners departed, they left behind indigenous elites to fashion governments on the classic European model, which privileged a single national culture. But political divisions erupted almost immediately along ethnic lines, exposing the artificiality of national borders constructed to serve the geopolitical conveniences of the former colonialists. And as ethnic warfare spread, threatening the stability of the world’s newest nations, frigh¬ tened citizens fled, many of them to Europe if they had the means to do so, preferably to countries whose languages they already spoke. It was only a matter of time before the “native peoples” of the colonies had turned the slums surrounding European cities into enclaves of economic and political refugees from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. These ethnic communities introduced a new set of challenges to European nations experienced with managing cultural diversity only at a distance. To complicate matters further, as European nations tackled the problem of incorporating immigrants from their former colonies, members of their own historically repressed minorities began claiming their cultural rights, defying the idea that the old Western empires had ever created homogenous states in their territories back home. Some of these minorities mobilized peacefully, while others resorted to acts of terrorism. With the downfall of Soviet Communism, violent conflicts, based on claims of ethnicity, increased dramatically across Europe. Women’s Rights. New movements defending the rights of women emerged in the second half of the twentieth century at about the same time as those defending the rights of ethnic minorities. Before long both issues had captured the attention of the international community. In 1966 the United Nations announced its support of the rights of ethnic groups within nation-states and eventually produced in 1989 a frequently cited proclamation in favor of cultural autonomy (Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization). In 1975 the United Nations took an official stand against the oppression of women. Ringing the alarm, it convened an international meeting that year in Mexico City to report on the social and economic abuses that women experienced almost everywhere. Several follow-up meetings took place at five-year intervals in other parts of the world, offering experts and activists a

ETHNICITY: Overview

platform for urging member nations to protect the rights of women in every culture and social class. Among the many issues raised, Western feminists suggested that new nations favored “developing” the men and preserving their cultural traditions through the women. Vigorously opposing their analysis, Third World feminists struck back. As critics of classical democratic theory understood “rights talk,” it was grounded in a philosophical tradition that protected the rights of individuals, not the rights of groups. In eighteenth-century Europe, Enlightenment philosophers proposed a set of universal principles for governing a national community of abstract individuals. Everyone would be judged before the law in the public sphere, as if everyone were the same. The matter of how to deal with differences would be relegated discreetly to the private sphere and would remain essentially outside the law. These universal principles influenced the formation of both lib¬ eral capitalist democracies and socialist states. Whereas the former privileged the political rights of abstract indivi¬ duals, the latter privileged the economic rights of a simi¬ larly undifferentiated working class. In the process the rights of diverse cultures were sacrificed. For scholars and activists interested in supporting the rights of women, recognizing the claims of diverse ethnic groups created a real problem. How does one protect the traditional rights of cultures and the political rights of individuals within ethnic groups when custom mandates, as it usually does, that different kinds of people be treated differently? “Customary law” in almost every part of the world rejects the idea that males and females should have equal opportunities if by equal one means the same. Although scholars like Lila Abu-Lughod have persuasively argued the need for new ways to talk about equality and inequality in cross-cultural contexts, real tensions remain. Many feminists, for example, from both Muslim countries and the West, want women to have the legal right to choose whether they wear the veil or circumcise their daughters, not to mention whether they have the right to the same education and professional opportunities as men. It is not easy, in other words, to celebrate difference and still insist on creating societies that recognize the gains of middle-class American and European women. These gains were achieved by confronting the contradictions of a political system that claimed to protect the rights of abstract individuals but did not adequately protect the rights of individual women or individual members of racial minorities. In recognizing the rights of people to preserve their cultural autonomy, Westerners reject an argument, flawed though it may be, that served African Americans and middle-class white women well in the nineteenth cen¬ tury, during the days of the antislavery and the first women’s movements, and again in the second half of the twentieth century, in the early years of the civil rights movement and Second Wave feminism.

195

Nationalism. As noted, the word ethnos is used to iden¬ tify people who belong to the same culture. In early modern times the term was frequently translated as “nation,” but not “nation” as understood in the early twenty-first century. Before the late eighteenth century the idea of a nation was not associated necessarily with a nation-state. The evolu¬ tion of the meaning, from defining a people who shared the same culture to identifying the nature of a particular kind of state, presages a similar evolution in the meaning of ethnos. Critical to both is the emergence of nationalism as a polit¬ ical ideology and of what Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger have called “the invention of tradition.” Whereas the idea of a nation can be traced to classical times, scholars usually date nationalism and the nation-state in the modern sense to the second half of the eighteenth century. Its first great manifestation, Western historians agree, was the French Revolution, but similar experiments were taking place elsewhere as well, including in the United States. Scholars generally agree that modem nationalism developed along with the rise of popular sovereignty, the secularization of society, and the spread of industrialization. It depended, what is more, on arousing what Edward Shils has called the “primordial attachments” of a people (in modern language, their ethnicity): the sense of being of the same race, speaking the same language, sharing the same customs and territory. Nationalism also implied the nation¬ state, and the existence of the nation-state usually strength¬ ened the feeling of nationalism. The nation-state was a Western European invention. According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the modern state could depend on the loyalty of its people only if everyone identified with the cultural and emotional life of the polity, no matter how large and ethnically diverse the polity was. Instead of ruling over dominions made up of people—nations—who spoke different languages and had separate cultures, the modern state should have only one nation. The accepted ideal quickly became one nation within one state. This of course meant that other “nations” or cultures had to bow to the authority of a single dominant tradition that was invented or reinvented as circumstances demanded. At the time of the French Revolution, progressives seeking ways to extend democratic citizenship to all peoples living within the nation’s borders assumed the wisdom of estab¬ lishing a single national tradition. Before legislating that all men were created equal, they insisted on making everyone culturally the same. With this special understanding of equality in mind, progressives agreed to emancipate the Jews, the most culturally exotic and oppressed minority in France, and grant them the right to be citizens. In 1791, Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre defended the idea in a famous speech, making it clear that the Jews’ emancipa¬ tion was predicated on the assumption that the Jews would assimilate and become abstract individuals, indistinguish¬ able from other Frenchmen in the public domain. What they

196

ETHNICITY: Overview

did at home, behind the privacy of closed doors, was their own business: “We must refuse the Jews everything as a nation and give them everything as individuals; they must constitute neither a political group nor an order within a state; they must be citizens as individuals” (quoted in

the state. Instead, they demonstrated how men and women were much the same. According to arguments based faith¬ fully on the logic of liberal theory, they proved that the state was abusing foundational principles of democratic political institutions when it denied women the same opportunities

Poliakov). More than a hundred and fifty years later Jean-Paul Sartre still accepted the wisdom of the compromise, even after World War II. In his “abstract liberalism,” Sartre conceded, recognizing the obvious limitations of the contract, the democrat remained the Jew’s best friend, but as a friend he or she was “a feeble protector. No doubt he proclaims that all men have equal rights; no doubt he has founded the League for the Rights of Man; but his declarations show the weakness of his position. . . . He recognizes neither Jew nor Arab, nor Negro nor worker, but only man—man always the same in all times and all places” (p. 55). Using the same logic in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir applied Sartre’s analysis to her masterwork on women. With far less reluctance than Sartre, she pro¬ claimed that the democrat was woman’s best friend. And in order to benefit from what the democrat had to offer, women, like Jews, had to assimilate. In the case of women, they had to take their place in the world in effect as men, for to remain a woman meant accepting a relationship that was asymmetrical: “In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral . . . whereas woman rep¬ resents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, with¬ out reciprocity” (p. xv). As Michele Le Doeuff put it, “In The Second Sex, everything happens as though from the moment a minute gap is opened in the cage it becomes the duty of the woman benefiting from it to make use of the escape” (p. 288). Women in liberal states, the argument went, lived under two contradictory theories, liberalism and patriarchy. One protected the rights of abstract individuals, and the other promoted the traditional family, where women and children fell “naturally” under the authority of men. Recognizing the double standard, liberal feminist theorists called upon the state to do away with the archaic patriarchal order-—the traditions of a repressive culture—and grant the same rights to women as it did to men. Mary Wollstonecraft identified the problem in the late eighteenth century, and John Stuart Mill developed the same argument in the middle of the nineteenth, followed, as shown, by Beauvoir in the middle

it provided men. Contrary to the assumptions of most cultures of the world, European traditions, based on the logic of Enlightenment thought, turn a blind eye to differences, at least in theory. Virtually every other culture elaborates upon the differences that exist among people, between the sexes, generations, classes, and, where relevant, races, while democratic tradi¬ tions try to minimize the differences, assuming that everyone belongs to the same national culture and is therefore basi¬ cally the same. Although their track record has been uneven, the logic of the system has given aggrieved parties the legal ammunition to argue their cases against discriminatory prac¬ tices, and many have done so with considerable success, forcing legislative bodies and courts of law to be more in¬ clusive of groups that were previously excluded. Equal rights, however, came as part of a package deal, offered only to

of the twentieth. Taking their inspiration from democratic theory, liberal feminists developed moral and political explanations for why women should be treated as abstract individuals whose rights the state promised to honor. They rejected arguments that defended the idea that women were different from men in ways that justified denying their rights as full citizens of

those who agreed to blend in. Since the late 1960s and the early 1970s, progressive theorists (for example, Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer) in increasing numbers have rejected the idea that democracies should limit themselves to pro¬ tecting the rights of abstract individuals in the public sphere. These scholars are trying to rewrite the contract so that it honors the cultural rights of ethnic groups without jeopardizing the rights of individuals within them. In the process they are also trying to expand interpretations of rights already identified by classical liberal theory so that they might better protect individuals poorly served by a political system that fails to recognize difference. Others scholars (for example, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Nancy Fraser, Hobsbawm, and Mahmoud Mamdani) have ex¬ pressed skepticism about the feasibility of the project but share similar concerns about the failure of democratic states to be more inclusive. To resolve the issue, however, has remained a huge problem, particularly in a world torn apart by political movements whose claims to cultural autonomy challenge basic assumptions of democratic theorists who may be re¬ visionists but who still firmly believe in protecting the rights of individual women, no matter where they live or what ethnic group they belong to. And herein lies the rub. As shown, these rights were won in Europe and the United States by political movements that persuaded flawed democracies to bow to the logic of their own constitutions and accept responsibility for protecting the rights of ab¬ stract individuals in a more inclusive way than they had previously. But they did not challenge the fundamental assumptions of the system. These democracies, what is

ETHNICITY: Comparative History

more, remain deeply flawed not only because they still fail to protect ethnic minorities back home but because they have provoked feelings of deep hostility toward the West around the globe. More often than not in the early twentyfirst century, political movements based in the former col¬ onies are defining their opposition in cultural as well as in political and economic terms, and the cultures they defend in defiance of the West do not for the most part protect the rights of women, at least as these rights are defined by liberal democratic states. [See also Citizenship; Civil Society; Enlightenment; Feminism; Gouges, Olympe de; History of Women; Nation¬ alism; Race; and Racism.]

197

Shils, Edward. “Primordial, Personal, Sacred, and Civil Ties.” Brit¬ ish Journal of Sociology 8 (1957): 130-145. Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recogni¬ tion.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Van Cott, Donna Lee, ed. Indigenous Peoples and Democracy in Latin America. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Womack, John, Jr., ed. Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader. New York: New Press, 1999. Zolberg, Aristide R. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Judith Friedlander

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Ber¬ keley: University of California Press, 1993. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. Iden¬ tities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Barth, Fredrik, ed. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York: Bantam Books, 1961. Bodemann, Y. Michal, and Gokpe Yurdakul, eds. Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Boserup, Ester. Woman’s Role in Economic Development. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970. Fraser, Nancy. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge, 1997. Friedlander, Judith. Being Indian in Hueyapan. Rev. ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds. Ethnicity: Theory and Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. Hayden, Tom, ed. The Zapatista Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth/Nation Books, 2002. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Pro¬ gramme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Trad¬ ition. Cambridge, U.IC: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Jaggar, Alison. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983. Kymlicka, Will, ed. The Rights of Minority Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Le Doeuff, Michele. “Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism.” Feminist Studies 6, no. 2 (1980): 277-289. Mamdani, Mahmood, ed. Beyond Rights Talk and Culture Talk: Comparative Essays on the Politics of Rights and Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Poliakov, Leon. L’histoire de Vantisemitisme. Vol. 3. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1968. The History of Anti-Semitism. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vanguard, 1975. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by George J. Becker. New York: Schocken Books, 1948.

Comparative History For women, ethnicity has served as a mark of pride, a source of activism, and a trait bringing harm. As groups of people increasingly defined themselves as distinct nations or races because of culture and blood, women became involved in ethnic movements, disputes, and forms of solidarity because as reproducers they passed on ethnic blood and as caregivers they imparted distinct forms of culture to their children. Thus, women have a symbolically powerful and deeply political relationship with ethnicity, even as strong nation-states and the forces of globalization work against preserving ethnic distinctions. Social and Cultural Struggles for Ethnicity. As ethnicity became defined in terms of culture in the modern period, women writers and activists took up the cause of promot¬ ing ethnic pride. After Poland had been dismembered by Russia, Austria, and Prussia and while it was chafing under foreign domination, the Polish author Klementyna Tanska Hoffmanowa (1798-1845) wrote, “I have directed all my efforts to provide as many books as I can, in Polish, for Polish children.” Bozena Nemcova’s famed novel Granny (1855) tells of an old woman who despairs over Austria’s control of the Czechs and the resulting fashion for all things German, even in her own family. Granny leaves a good job behind her to live with her grandchildren and teach them Czech language, customs, and religion. But such a defense of ethnicity was not always easy. For example, from its founding in the 1920s, the Soviet Union targeted Muslim women for assimilation to bring about a homogeneous Communist society. Where ethnicity was threatened by the homogenizing powers of the nation-state or the introduction of modern ways, women became the defenders of ethnic identity in visible ways. Caught between competing demands for definition of an ethnicity—either as modern or as founded

198

ETHNICITY: Comparative History

on longstanding tradition—ethnicities reconciled the con¬ tradiction by means of gender roles. During the vast global migrations over the past millennium, men have often changed their languages, dress, and behavior to blend in with that of the new country and to show themselves as modern. Women, in contrast, often maintained ethnic identity in foreign lands by wearing traditional clothing and teaching children the mother tongue. Ethnic minorities have main¬ tained their traditions despite the widespread social and cultural effects of the ethnic majority. Not only are ethnic minorities under political pressure to adapt to abstract norms and actual laws of the majority; the majority also sets cultural standards of beauty, deportment, family, and parenting. Finally, in the labor market, minority women face discri¬ mination in terms of jobs offered, conditions of work, and wages. Women have faced this discrimination in various ways. In Britain, migrants sometimes earned a living by forming family businesses in which men paid into socialsecurity programs but women worked off the books for husbands, fathers, or brothers, earning no benefits and often no salary. When discriminated against in the workplace in terms of ethnicity, women have also used ethnicity as a bond. In the 1980s, Indian women in Britain’s textile industry united with other non-Caucasian women workers. Cross-ethnic bonding has served minority women in form¬ ing unions and other organizations. War and the Politics of Ethnicity. In wartime or in ethnic disputes shaped by armed conflict, ethnic violence is often perpetrated on women. During World War II, the Japanese, having for decades branded Koreans as ethni¬ cally inferior, rounded up Korean women to serve as forced sex slaves in military brothels and later added women from other conquered ethnic groups, such as Filipinos. In Bosnia in the 1990s, Serb nationalists raped women to leave them with Serb babies. Such violations of women’s chastity and marital fidelity left women victims not only physically abused but ostracized by their own families and commu¬ nities. In Rwanda, where Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups became enemies under colonialism, ethnic rivalries led to genocide and other forms of extreme violence in 1994. Most abused and killed women were Tutsi, but the violence was perpetrated on both sides. While women comprised 70 percent of the survivors in Rwanda, they were regularly raped, gang-raped, raped with weapons and rough materi¬ als, and kept as sexual slaves. Sterilization is another tool of ethnic discrimination forced on women, especially in the twentieth century. In the United States, poor black women were sterilized in the interwar years so that they would not beget inferior babies, and in the 1960s women of Hispanic, Native American, and African American heritage were pressured—often during childbirth—to be sterilized in order to receive government aid. Under the Nazis, Slav, Roma (Gypsy), and Jewish

women were sterilized to lower the numbers of new members of their respective ethnicities. After the Nazis decided during World War II actually to extinguish these groups, women were killed in greater numbers than men in extermination camps and other mass-murder sites, men more often being kept alive to perform slave labor or, in the case of German Jews, having already fled the country. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Uighur women in China charge that abortions and forced sterilization are regularly inflicted on them to keep down the ethnic minority’s numbers. Women have also acted vigorously on behalf of their ethnicities in political struggles. During World War II, Jewish and East European women served in the anti-German resistance. More recently, in 1991, the Tamil Tiger Thenmuli Rajaratnam, known as Dhanu, killed former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi of India in a suicide attack. The Tamils, an ethnic group in Sri Lanka, consider themselves an indepen¬ dent nation, and when Gandhi sent soldiers into the neigh¬ boring country to put down the Tamils, four of Dhanu’s brothers were killed in the offensive, and she herself was gang-raped. In the 1990s during the Russian invasions of Chechnya, Chechen women served their ethnicity by acting as terrorists and suicide bombers. Women have paid dearly for their activism for ethnic rights. They have not only lost their lives as suicide bombers; they have also suffered political repression. After serving as a dynamic presence at the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, the successful department-store owner Rebiya Kadeer founded the Thousand Women Movement to seek the right to employment for women of the Uighur minority in China. In 1999 the People’s Republic of China arrested Kadeer and two of her sons for articles on Uighur rights that she had published in newspapers. Convicted in a secret trial of providing information to foreigners, Kadeer was sentenced in 2000 to eight years in prison, but was released in March 2005 before a visit from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. [See also Race; Race Suicide; Race Theory, Critical; Rape; and Terrorism.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bryceson, Deborah Fahy, Judith Okely, and Jonathan Webber, eds. Identity and Networks: Fashioning Gender and Ethnicity across Cultures. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. Lynn, Stephen. Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca. 2d ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Moghissi, Haideh, ed. Muslim Diaspora: Gender, Culture, and Identity. London: Routledge, 2006. Northrup, Douglas. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. Westwood, Sallie, and Parminder Bhachu, eds. Enterprising Women: Ethnicity, Economy, and Gender Relations. New York: Routledge, 1988. Bonnie

G.

Smith

EUNUCHS

EUNUCHS. In the popular imagination, eunuchs have always been inextricably linked with women. In fact, the ancient Greeks and Romans maintained that it was a woman—most commonly identified as the mythical Assyrian queen Semiramis—who invented eunuchs in the first place. Eunuchs as Servants and Political Agents. Eunuchs were, and are, most familiar from their role of attending upon and guarding women, a function that could be played in private households but that is more usually associated with royal or imperial courts. The historical example of the role of eunuchs that comes to mind most readily is their place in the harem of the Ottoman sultans, a phenomenon that has a strong resonance in the popular imagination perhaps because of famous Orientalist paintings such as those of the French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Eunuchs also played an important part in the courts of the Chinese, Assyrian, and Persian empires; the Romans and Byzantines likewise considered eunuchs appropriate atten¬ dants for women. From their contact with the Persian Em¬ pire, the ancient Greeks became familiar with the idea of eunuchs as guardians of women, and one etymology of the Greek term eunuch is “guardian of the bed.” The popular assumption about why eunuchs were used in this role is that they were sexually unthreatening, because they were castrated. The eunuch state was achieved by vary¬ ing degrees of castration. The testicles could be crushed, or they could be entirely excised; in some cases the penis was removed, too—as in the examples of Chinese and Ottoman

199

eunuchs. However, castration did not necessarily result in the loss of desire, and even if it did, eunuchs could still serve as sexual partners. It is more likely that the appeal of eunuchs was that they could not impregnate the women they were charged with guarding. The Roman satirist Juvenal (c. 60c. 127 c.e.) notoriously reveals this attraction of eunuchs as sexual partners for women, though he has in mind those eunuchs who were castrated after attaining puberty. The true eunuch might be defined as the one who has been castrated before puberty, for only then do the classic phys¬ ical features associated with them result: the high voice, the smooth skin (the lack of a beard is often commented on), the androgynous appearance. In the Greek accounts Semiramis was said to have invented eunuchs because as a woman ruling in her own right she wanted to obscure her female condition, so she surrounded herself with womanish men. Though this story may be suspect, it does highlight the physically dis¬ tinctive appearance of eunuchs as a factor in their appeal, which modern commentators have also emphasized. One view is that because eunuchs were so visually arresting, they served as useful boundary markers, delineating the transi¬ tion from male to female space. Another view is that be¬ cause eunuchs could be understood to be both male and female, they were ideal candidates to serve in both male and female space. Indeed, eunuchs historically did not simply attend or guard women. They were just as likely (if not more likely) to be in the company of men. Further, in the male arena they

European Depictions of Eunuchs. The Sultan’s Wife Sewed by Eunuchs, Amedee Philippe van Loo, c. 1750. Musee des Beaux-Arts Jules Cheret, Nice, France/Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

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might be charged with administrative tasks and even fill key offices in government, as in the cases of Byzantine and Chinese eunuchs. A text composed at the end of the ninth century, the Iiletorologion of Philotheos, lists the special¬ ized domestic posts that were reserved for eunuchs at the Byzantine court, but it also makes clear that all other offices (with a few exceptions) were open to them. Eunuchs could even serve as generals. Famous examples are Narses (478573), a one-time treasurer for the later Roman emperor Justinian I (483-565; r. 527-565), who was instrumental in the reconquest of Italy, and Zheng He (1371-1433), who commanded a series of Chinese naval expeditions in the fifteenth century. Eunuchs could become important figures in politics even without holding important offices: those eunuchs who were the personal attendants of emperors—such as the chamberlains of the later Roman Empire—could acquire influence by virtue of their physical proximity to, and intimacy with, the ruler. A series of powerful grand chamberlains (praepositi sacri cubiculi) who were eunuchs distinguishes the history of the later Roman Empire, as in the fourth-century cases of Eusebius (under the emperor Constantius II, r. 337-361) and Eutropius (under the em¬ peror Arcadius, r. 395-408). The eunuchs attendant on royal and imperial women could also attain influence and power, whether through personal contact or through hold¬ ing office. Li Lianying (1848-1911), the hairdresser of the Chinese empress dowager Cixi (1835-1908; r. 1861-1908), acquired prominence through his intimacy with her. Among the personal attendants of the Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra VII (69-30 b.c.e.; r. 51-30 b.c.e.) who are attrib¬ uted with shaping her policy toward Rome was the eunuch Mardian, who made his way into Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Eunuchs were a key feature of the government of the empress Irene (752-803; r. 797-802), one of the few Byzantine women who ruled in their own right: the eu¬ nuchs Staurakios and Aetios were her leading ministers, conducting foreign affairs and acting as generals. Irene may have deployed eunuchs to such an extent in order to protect her own position as a female ruler: because eunuchs could not become emperors themselves, they would not attempt to replace her, as whole men might have done. However, because emperors also used eunuchs in such roles, perhaps it was a general defense strategy. It is clear, in any event, that eunuchs could be key figures in plots to overthrow both emperors and empresses. The Castrati. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eunuchs captured a conspicuous role in Europe as singers. Although the unique musical quality of the eunuch voice was known before this time, the birth of opera led to the particular prominence of the castrati, men who had been castrated before adolescence to preserve

their soprano or contralto voices. Part of the reason that eunuchs were used in music was that in Christian societies women could be forbidden from singing in church or on stage. Of course boys could also serve as singers, which suggests that the eunuch voice was appreciated in its own right. Societies as early as Byzantium featured castrati: a famous description is supplied by Odo of Deuil, who passed through Constantinople in the twelfth century as a partici¬ pant in the Second Crusade. Describing how in 1147 the emperor Manuel I Komnenos (r. 1143-1180) provided the French with Byzantine clergy to help celebrate the feast of Saint Denis (9 October), Odo remarks that this select group “made a favourable impression because of their sweet chanting; for the mingling of voices, the heavier with the light, the eunuch’s, namely, with the manly voice (for many of them were eunuchs), softened the hearts of the Franks.” Eunuchs were members of the papal choir by at least the beginning of the seventeenth century. The popularity of opera led to a phenomenon of castrati as international celebrities—though most had more modest careers per¬ forming in Italian churches or theaters. Major cities across Europe played host to them, and some performed for exclu¬ sive audiences at royal courts. In opera the castrati played both male and female roles; they were not just used as female impersonators, although Honore de Balzac’s tragic tale Sarrasine (1830) emphasizes this aspect. The gender ambi¬ guity of eunuchs apparently even enabled women to pass themselves off as castrati: the memoirs of Casanova (17251798) record the case of a woman named Teresa Lanti who posed as the castrato Bellini. The most famous European castrato singer was undoubtedly Carlo Broschi (1705-1782), known as Farinelli. (Farinelli achieved twentieth-century fame as the eponymous subject of a film by Gerard Corbiau in 1994.) A well-known anec¬ dote relates the exclamation by one of Farinelli’s many female devotees: “One God, one Farinelli!” Many women seemed worshipfully drawn to castrati. The French lawyer and educator Charles Ancillon wrote his Traite des eunuques (Treatise on Eunuchs, 1707) to demonstrate why eunuch marriages should not be allowed to be transacted, but during the era of their popularity some castrati famously had affairs with women or married them—for instance, the Italian castrato Giusto Tenducci (c. 1735-1790), who in 1766 married an Irish woman named Dora Maunsell in Cork. The heyday of the castrati was already over by the end of the eighteenth century, with a change in musical tastes and an increasing opposition to castration. In 1902 the use of new eunuchs in church music was banned by Pope Leo XIII, and the last castrato to sing in the papal choir, Alessandro Moreschi (b. 1858), died in 1922. Moreschi’s is believed to be the only castrato voice of which a recording has been preserved for posterity.

EUNUCHS

Religiously Motivated Castration. Eunuchs feature in a number of religions, usually embracing castration willingly and when they have passed puberty. In the context of religion in Greco-Roman antiquity, eunuchs tend to appear in conjunction with mother goddesses—most famously among followers of the Phrygian goddess Cybele (the Magna Mater, or Great Mother), who was served by eunuch priests known as the galli. Cybele’s cult was centered in Asia Minor, but she was especially popular among Romans, who associated her with their Trojan past, and her cult image was transferred to Rome in 204 b.c.e. in an attempt to harness divine aid against the Carthaginians. Her devotees’ self-castration may have been modeled on the story of Attis, the consort of the goddess; Attis was the human lover of Cybele, and in one version of the myth she punished him for infidelity by driving him into a frenzy in which he castrated himself. However, because the cults of other mother god¬ desses feature self-castration but not an Attis figure, there may be other explanations for the act. Suggestions include the desire to increase the generative potency of the deity, to become assimilated with the goddess, and to attain purity. Whether all galli castrated themselves is a matter for debate, but they did adopt distinctive behavior such as dressing as women, wearing makeup and jewelry, and growing their hair long—elements of worship that have parallels with modern-day hijras in India. The hijras can willingly undergo castration as part of their dedication to the Hindu goddess Bahuchara Mata (a version of the Indian mother goddess). The hijras dress and act like women, too, taking female names and using female kinship terms to describe the relationships that exist between them. Hijras can also have relationships with men, taking “husbands” or working as prostitutes. A traditional role of the hijras is to perform at weddings and celebrations for the birth of children. They sing and dance, and as agents of Bahuchara Mata they are believed to have the power to bless the couple or child, imparting fertility. Self-castration has also existed in a Christian context. In the biblical gospel of Matthew (19:12), Jesus identifies three types of eunuchs: those who are bom eunuchs, those who are made eunuchs, and those who make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. Although some early Christians understood the last category metaphorically, meaning the adoption of a chaste life, others understood it literally and modified their bodies accordingly. The most famous (reputed) example of an early Christian self-castrate is Origen (1857-254? c.e.). The practice was a matter for debate among early Christians, and in 325 c.e. the Council of Nicaea ruled that self-castrates were banned from serving as clergy, although those who had been castrated against their will or for medical reasons were exempt from the ban. Though eunuchs in the West declined with the disappear¬ ance of the Roman Empire, in the East the phenomenon of

201

Christians who were eunuchs (whether willingly or not) was kept alive by the Byzantine Empire. This was sometimes a source of tension between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. Christian eunuchs resurfaced dramati¬ cally in modern Russia in the sect known as the Skoptsy, whose name means literally “self-castrators.” Like early Christians, the Skoptsy—who first appeared in the 1770s and lasted, despite constant persecution, until their extinction during the Soviet era of the 1930s—appealed to the words of Jesus (as reported in Matthew) and saw castration as a means of securing purity and salvation. Male Skoptsy could have their testicles removed (the “minor seal”) and their penis also (the “major seal”). Female members of the community could also express their faith through genital mutilation: the removal of nipples, breasts, and external parts of the vagina. Body modification was not necessarily undertaken by all Skoptsy, but in some cases castration appears to have been enforced. In Islam, too, eunuchs historically have had a religious role, as guardians of sacred sites such as the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina and the Kacba at the center of the great mosque of Mecca. Eunuchs were still carrying out the function of guardians at these two locations as recently as 1990. Sex and Gender. The distinctive physical condition of eunuchs has raised questions about their nature and character throughout history, questions that focus in particular on issues of sex and gender. Eunuchs have been perceived as male, female, or something else entirely. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) considered them to be feminized beings, and he grouped them with women and children rather than with men. This identifica¬ tion of eunuchs with women was also expressed by the Roman poet Catullus (c. 84-c. 54 b.c.e.), in whose poem about the gallus Attis, “he” becomes a “she” once he has been castrated. The view that eunuchs were feminized had consequences for how they were expected to act: they were attributed with behavioral characteristics considered femi¬ nine, such as chattiness, emotional instability, and serving as passive sexual partners. Throughout history eunuchs have also been associated with homosexuality, or more ambiguous behavior, and their status has likewise been ambiguous. In Greco-Roman and Arabic thought, the view was that although sexually eunuchs were women with men, they were men with women. In a tract on virginity written in the fourth century, Basil of Ancyra warns Christian women of the sexual danger that eunuchs posed. The Byzantine emperor Leo VI (r. 886-912) ruled that eunuchs should not be allowed to marry because the purpose of the union was procreation. In Chinese society, however, eunuchs were permitted to marry, and although they could not have children of their own—unless they had had them before castration—they

202

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could undertake adoption or other forms of creating fictive kinship. Eunuchs could also establish strong bonds with the children of their siblings, if they had any or were able to remain in contact with them, as can be seen, for instance, in the cases of Byzantine eunuchs and castrati. Another view of eunuchs was that they were “neither man nor woman,” and modern opinion has been preoccupied with the question of whether eunuchs do form a third gender. The objectification of eunuchs is one of the problems of studying them in history; as with women—or more so, in fact—there is often a paucity of information available in the eunuch’s own voice. [See also Androgyny; China, subentries Ancient Period and Imperial; Christianity; Cixi, Empress Dowager; Islam; Sexuality; and West Asia, subentries Roman and Byzantine Periods and Ottomans.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayalon, David. Eunuchs, Caliphs, and Sultans: A Study in Power Relationships. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1999. The culmination of Ayalon’s work on eunuchs, which provides much food for thought. Barbier, Patrick. The World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon. Translated by Margaret Crosland. London: Souvenir Press, 1996. An accessible account of the castrati. Engelstein, Laura. Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. An illuminating study of the Skoptsy, which draws on significant archival material. Hopkins, Keith. Conquerors and Slaves. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1978. This includes a landmark study on the court eunuchs of the later Roman Empire. Jay, Jennifer W. “Another Side of Chinese Eunuch History: Castration, Marriage, Adoption, and Burial.” Canadian Journal of History 28, no. 3 (1993): 459-478. This article is significant in addressing social aspects of the lives of Chinese eunuchs, rather than focusing on the traditional sphere of politics. Kuefler, Mathew. The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Though not focused on eunuchs in their own right, this monograph has much of interest about perceptions of eunuchs and alternative masculinities in the later Roman Empire. Marmon, Shaun. Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Soci¬ ety. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. A brief but important work on Islamic eunuchs, which emphasizes their role as demarcators of space. Nanda, Serena. Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India. 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1999. A fascinating anthro¬ pological study of the hijras, based on fieldwork. Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. This book focuses on Ottoman imperial women but does offer important insights on eunuchs. Ringrose, Kathryn M. The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. This book is concerned with the gender identity of Byzantine eunuchs and argues that they formed a third gender, which was constructed positively.

Roller, Lynn E. In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Tougher, Shaun, ed. Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond. London: Duckworth, 2002. A collection of studies covering a broad chronological range and a range of aspects. Tsai, Shih-shan Henry. The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. A detailed survey of eunuchs in the history of this Chinese dynasty that attempts to redress the hostility of the Confucian sources toward eunuchs. Shaun Tougher

EUROPE This entry consists of five subentries: Pre-Classical Ancient Greece Roman Empire Medieval Period Renaissance and Early Modern Period Pre-Classical Women in pre-Classical Europe were integral to all parts of society. As mothers and wives, they bore children, forged ties with other families, and provided for the economy of the household. They harvested the fields and collected wild plants. Upon maturity, they practiced rites of passage, sometimes competing as athletes. Women’s innovative artistry survives in a wide array of pottery shapes and dec¬ orations, many of which preserve the patterns of their nowlost textiles. As healers, priestesses, leaders, and slaves, they engaged in the spiritual, physical, and sociopolitical health of their communities. Female deities formed part of the pantheon. The nature of the source material, the approaches for its study, and the scholarly interpretation of it are important for learning about the lives of women during this period before written history. Although the evidence for women’s lives can be rich, particularly in economic lists from the very end of the Bronze Age in Greece, often the source material from the tens of thousands of years from the Paleolithic onward does not allow for scholars to distinguish between evidence for women and that for people in general. As Ruth Tringham put it, finding “households with faces” is the “challenge of gender” in the study of women in European prehistory (1991). Those studies that make strong argu¬ ments for women’s lives in particular are the focus of this essay. History of Study. Pre-Classical, or prehistoric, Europe extends from the Upper Paleolithic (from c. 40,000 to 10,000 years ago) into the Early Iron Age of the first millennium b.c.e. and includes an enormous range of cultures. Most studies

EUROPE: Pre-Classical

Minoan Civilization. A Minoan woman, shown in a fresco from Akrotiri, Thera, Greece, c. 1650 b.c.e. National Archaeological Museum, Athens/Scala/Art Resource, NY

of women have focused on the Paleolithic (particularly the end of the Upper Paleolithic, c. 20,000-10,000 years ago), figurines and settlements of the Neolithic (c. 70003500 b.c.e.), and the Bronze Age (c. 3500-1000 b.c.e.). Only at the end of the second millennium b.c.e. in Greece is there evidence from extensively stratified societies that in¬ cludes written sources of information with the names of individual women. Until the 1980s, studies of women in prehistoric Europe were largely dominated by gender stereotypes. Women were either classified as gatherers and nurturers, in contrast with the “man the hunter” paradigm, or it was proposed that prehistoric Europe was a time of matriarchy that was overpowered by men at the end of the Neolithic period. Although contemporary studies still rarely avoid gender stereotypes altogether, new approaches have developed a more nuanced reconstruction of women’s lives before written history. Ideas of a matriarchal Old Europe are exemplified by Marija Gimbutas’s several books, including The Civilization

203

of the Goddess (1991). This and other works of the “god¬ dess school” are flawed in many ways, most particularly by placing too heavy an emphasis on the supernatural at the expense of context and on alternative explanations for human figurines and other objects. Partly in reaction to the work of Gimbutas, scholars developed alternate, more contextualized approaches to women and gender, which propose ideas about women, children, men, the family, and belief systems that are more sensitive to the variety of lifeways that existed in prehistory. An article by Ruth Tringham and Margaret Conkey in the volume Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence (1998), is a fine example of the critique of Gimbutas’s work. While there are still many instances in which nothing is known conclusively about women in prehistory, evidence increases with each new approach. Already in 1989, Margaret Ehrenberg was able to write an entire book about Women in Prehistory. By 2000 the field had advanced to the point where Marie Louise Stig Sorensen could write a broadbased critique focused on women in European prehistory. Our understanding today is rich with evidence for women as potters, weavers, farmers, healers, daughters, mothers, wives, priestesses, and goddesses. Sources of Evidence. To learn about women in pre¬ historic Europe, there are several sources, all of which depend on evidence from archaeology. In using archae¬ ological information to reconstruct ancient peoples and their societies, it is crucial to understand the context of the discovery of each piece of information as well as details of the artifacts, ecofacts, and structures uncovered. Only then can there be a hope of putting the pieces together into a meaningful interpretation. Archaeological sources for studies of women in prehistoric Europe include ancient burials and settlements, figural arts such as sculpture and painting, and early Greek texts written in a script that scholars have named Linear B. In addition to archaeological evidence for women, studies of their lives have been enriched especially by two other areas of thought. First, scholars have recognized that hier¬ archical readings of prehistoric societies stressing domi¬ nance and hierarchy do not encompass all of the rich variation that existed in prehistoric European cultures. For example, Janet Levy suggests that heterarchy, in which more than one system of power, control, and authority was present in society, may be a more useful way of thinking about Bronze Age Denmark (c. 1500-500 b.c.e.), where the evidence shows that women and men held different, and probably equal or at least parallel, forms of ritual power. Metal objects worn and wielded by women were placed in ritual contexts that are thought to emphasize fertility, whereas those of men were associated with combat. Furthermore, the fields of ethnoarchaeology and ethnohistory allow scholars to seek patterns among living

204

EUROPE: Pre-Classical

or historical societies that might suggest the meaning of prehistoric objects, places, and activities. For example, in her 2002 study of marble figures from the Early Cycladic II (c. 2700-2300 b.c.e.) culture in the Aegean, Gail Hoffman used information about modern and ancient Greek funerary customs, in which women bear responsibility for funerary rituals and mourners tear at their faces and draw blood, to suggest that the marble figures with red painted marks on their faces were used in ceremonies involving ancestors and mourning. While few of these marble figures have been found in secure archaeological contexts, it appears that sev¬ eral Early Bronze Age tombs in the Cycladic islands in Greece were designed so that they could be reopened, sug¬ gesting that these figures were used on more than one occa¬ sion, perhaps serving as permanent mourners or protectors of the dead. In addition, Karen Vitelli’s 1995 study of Neolithic pottery from the Franchthi cave in Greece incorporates the idea that women made—even invented—fired ceramics. Her proposal appears to fit with ethnographic examples, where there is evidence that women are often potters, especially in household and traditional workshop situations. Some¬ times, however, specialized potters working for a specific customer base or a central authority were men, as is attested, for example, in the Linear B texts from Mycenaean Greece. Vitelli suggests that the mixing of the clays and inclusions to form the vessels and the seeming magic of the firing process might have led to the roles of female potters as shamans or healers in the Neolithic period. Further evidence supporting the spiritual role and healing knowledge of women derives from tombs, figurines, and wall paintings. Archaeology. The most direct evidence for individual women in periods without written texts are their physical remains found in burials. With skeletal remains, women can be identified on the basis of such details as the shape of the pelvis and the absence of a bony protuberance at the back of the skull. Age ranges can be determined from details of bone size and fusion as well as dental condition. Nutrition and health can also be determined based on teeth. While sometimes women and children had access to less meat protein than did men, this has been shown to be not the case for all social groups in both the Neolithic and the Bronze Age (Lillie; Rega). In assessing studies of human remains, it should be kept in mind that the comparative information used for sexing skeletons relies on modern humans, where size, nutrition, and activity differences may lead to possibly incorrect identifications of prehistoric individuals. Understanding the gender of the individuals recovered as women beyond the biologically determined sex of their skeletal remains requires interpretation not only of their bones, but also the objects found with the body, the place in which the body was buried, the larger areas occupied by social groups, and the interaction among all of these

pieces of information. Attempting to understand women’s lives through the interpretation of objects and spaces relies heavily on ethnographic parallels for women’s roles in agriculture, crafts, and family life, which can be complicated by living people’s contexts within or their contacts with modern industrialized societies. Sometimes a strong corre¬ lation between women’s burials and objects buried with them can aid in understanding living places where similar objects such as spindle whorls, tools, and ceramic vessels were found. As promising as this approach may seem, it assumes that the objects associated by the larger social group with a person in death equate with that person’s identity and activities in life. The most successful readings of women and other gen¬ dered groups in prehistory approach the subject from several angles. For example, Liv Gibbs in 1987 considered burials and hoards from Zealand, Denmark, as well as figurines and rock carvings from the late Mesolithic through the Late Bronze Age. She was able to demonstrate changes in female and male roles over time and found evidence for women’s work in agriculture that included harvesting and work with the plough, tasks usually attributed to men. Furthermore, in a review of several studies of gender and the Neolithic peoples of Italy, Ruth Whitehouse in 2002 used burials, settlements, caves and cave paintings, and figurines to describe how social groups were differentiated by gender. Women and men were separated, at least in terms of ritually described activities, with female-oriented figurines associated with settlement areas and maleoriented cults linked with cave art. This delineation contin¬ ued even in death, for there were differences in burial orientation for females and males. Whitehouse even sug¬ gests that one burial might have been that of a female sha¬ man or “ritual specialist” based on its orientation and a figurine found in it. Figural Arts. The figural arts seem to be a more direct source of information about women in prehistory. Figurines of clay, stone, and sometimes metal appear to take on the form of corporeal bodies, whether living or dead, albeit in miniature form and often with emphasis placed only on certain parts of the body. Larger-scale wall paintings and carved images in small personal objects such as seals preserve details of costume, hairstyle, and gesture that are suggestive of age, status, and authority. However, just as with evidence from burials and living spaces, interpretation of this evidence needs to be contextualized or understood with reference to an image’s place of discovery, form of use, and the nature of perception, including any associated objects, images, and spaces. So far, no portraits of specific individuals have been identified successfully. Many interpretations for figurines have been proposed. No one interpretation suits them all. They served as teaching tools, dolls, magical aids, votive objects, and even, in some

EUROPE: Pre-Classical

cases, as images of the worshipped. Their notable lack of monumentality appears to be an important aspect of their use in allowing people in prehistory, as well as scholars today, to work out details of people’s identities and interactions in past societies. Peter Ucko’s important study, Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete with Comparative Material from the Prehistoric Near East and Mainland Greece (1968), began the branch of scholarship that sought to find ethnographic parallels for figurines and their uses. Douglass Bailey’s Pre¬ historic Figurines: Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic (2005) is innovative in its use of historical-period visual culture to suggest new avenues for the study of prehistoric material. Body types of identifiably female figurines vary greatly. Some emphasize large breasts and fleshy buttocks. Others are slim and narrow with only the slightest bulges for breasts. Incisions and paint have been taken to represent body paint, scarification, and tattoos. Burning, breakage, and wear are aids in identifying use and meaning. Details of dress, hair, gesture, and posture all must be taken into account for interpreting rank, age, activity, and so forth. Most studies reach conclusions for figurines and their significance for people within a single household or com¬ munity. A 1993 study by Lauren Talalay, Deities, Dolls and Devices: Neolithic Figurines from Franchthi Cave, Greece, however, is remarkable for identifying split-leg figurines of the Middle Neolithic (first half of the fifth millennium b.c.e.) as tokens among five different communities in southern Greece, possibly involving marriage contracts. The richest pictorial evidence comes from the frescoes and other artworks of the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures of the Aegean Late Bronze Age (c. 1650-1050 b.c.e.). In the fres¬ coes, readings of female and male depend not only on costume and body shape, but also on skin color, where the convention is usually white skin for female and red skin for male. No frescoes have been shown to represent single events; rather they appear to represent ceremonies or rituals, which would have been repeated on more than one occasion. For example, among the frescoes uncovered at Akrotiri on the island of Thera, those from building Xeste 3 reveal females in various stages of maturity, which can be read based on their hairstyles, dress, and actions. The picking of saffron and a woman who is bleeding make reference to the menstrual cycle. Some scholars have identified young women as athletes in frescoes at Knossos, where they are shown, along with young men, in ritual combat with a bull. Throughout Aegean art, Paul Rehak notes that women appear more frequently than do men; they are more elaborately costumed with more jewelry; they appear as enthroned figures; and they are often shown at a larger scale than are men. Rehak and others have identified some women in Aegean art as priestesses and goddesses.

205

Texts. Women as individuals, family members, and social beings are known in the greatest detail from texts in the Greek language, written in a script called Linear B, on clay tablets at Mycenaean palace sites on the island of Crete and on the Greek mainland. These texts range in date from about 1375 to 1200 b.c.e.; most come from the last years of that period from the destructions of the palaces by fire, which preserved the texts in the baked clay. These clay documents do not record direct narrative histories of the Mycenaean world. Instead, they preserve lists of people, food, land, and objects that were important for the palace economy. Scholars of Linear B texts study the contexts of discovery, handwriting, and subject matter in order to reconstruct Mycenaean palace life. At most, the texts themselves are considered to be protohistorical records, rather than doc¬ umentations of Mycenaean history, a subject summarized well by John Chadwick in a 1976 study that highlights the roles of both women and men in Mycenaean society. Several women’s names appear in the Linear B texts, such as Alexandra, Idomeneia, and Myrtilis. Further, there are female deities such as Hera, Athena, and Artemis, known from later Greek religion. The Linear B documents demon¬ strate that women held high positions in the religious world of the Mycenaeans, serving as priestesses and having responsibilities for land owned by deities. Outside the realm of religion, however, there is little evidence for women of authority. While queens are often assumed, they have not been located in the texts with certainty. The term “po-ti-ni-ja” (potnia), which in later Greek refers to prominent women both mortal and divine, is taken to refer to a goddess. The terms “wa-na-se-wi-ja” and “wa-na-so-i” are possibly related to wanassa, or queen, but this is difficult to prove etymologically. Even if these are taken to refer to a female counterpart of the king, or wanax, there is some question among scholars as to whether even the wanax is a human or a divine figure. While there are some records concerning women from several palaces, from that of Thebes in Boeotia to that of Knossos on Crete, the most detailed information comes from the palace at Pylos in the southwestern part of the Greek Peloponnese. There, two sets of census records were found, seemingly from a year apart, that record about 750 women with their children and provide evidence for female supervisors of women workers. Lists of men and boys, who are the sons of the women, have also been found. The women are grouped by designations that provide in¬ formation about their origins and the work they performed for the palace. They lived mainly in Pylos itself, but some were located throughout the rest of the Pylian kingdom. They came to the kingdom from various parts of the Aegean Sea region including several places along the Ionian coast such as Lem¬ nos and Miletus, possibly indicating that they were taken as captives or were refugees from some kind of conflict.

206

EUROPE: Pre-Classical

The texts show that women were palace attendants and grinders of cereals. Most of the women listed work in the textile industry as spinners, weavers, seamstresses, and other parts of the cloth industry. While not all stages of textile production can be attributed to women throughout prehistory, the textile arts are strongly associated with women’s work, which has led Elizabeth Barber to write extensively about women’s lives in European and Near Eastern prehistory and early history from that perspective. While prehistoric European textiles themselves in most cases have not survived, the texts, textile manufacturing tools, representations in paintings, and comparative evi¬ dence from Near Eastern cultures help to recreate them, and, with them, their female creators. [See also Europe, subentry Ancient Greece; Matriarchy; Prehistory; and Textiles.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailey, Douglass W. Prehistoric Figurines: Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Barber, E. J. W. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. New York and London: Norton, 1994. An accessible and enjoyable read about women in European and Near Eastern prehistory and early history with special reference to textiles. It followed her earlier, more detailed volume, Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages zvith Special Reference to the Aegean (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). Chadwick, John. The Mycenaean World. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. A good, accessible introductory overview of Mycenaean Greece with special refer¬ ence to early Greek textual evidence in the script we call Linear B, including information about women’s names and their roles in Mycenaean society, that is more accessible to the general reader than his book with Michael Ventris, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1973). He also published an important article in 1988, “The Women of Pylos” (in Texts, Tablets, and Scribes: Studies in Mycenaean Epigraphy and Economy Offered to Emmett L. Bennett, edited by J.-P. Olivier and T. G. Palaima, pp. 43-95. Salamanca, Spain: Universidad). Ehrenberg, Margaret. Women in Prehistory. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. Gibbs, Liv. “Identifying Gender Representation in the Archaeo¬ logical Record: A Contextual Study.” In The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings, edited by Ian Hodder, pp. 79-89. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. This article was republished in Reader in Gender Archae¬ ology, edited by Kelley Hays-Gilpin and David S. Whitley, pp. 231-256. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. A useful volume with other good articles about women in prehistory. Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. Edited by Joan Marler. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Goodison, Lucy, and Christine Morris, eds. Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

Hoffman, Gail L. “Painted Ladies: Early Cycladic II Mourning Figures?” American Journal of Archaeology 106, no. 4 (2002): 525-550. Levy, Janet E. “Heterarchy in Bronze Age Denmark: Settlement Pattern, Gender, and Ritual.” In Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies, edited by Robert M. Ehrenreich, Carole L. Crumley, and Janet E. Levy, pp. 41-53. Arlington, Va.. American Anthropological Association, 1995. Lillie, M. C. “Women and Children in Prehistory: Resource Sharing and Social Stratification at the Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition in Ukraine.” In Invisible People and Processes: Writing Gender and Childhood into European Archaeology, edited by Jenny Moore and Eleanor Scot, pp. 213-228. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1997. Rega, Elizabeth. Age, Gender and Biological Reality in the Early Bronze Age Cemetery at Mokrin. In Invisible People and Processes: Writing Gender and Childhood into European Archaeology, edited by Jenny Moore and Eleanor Scott, pp. 229-247. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1997. A more academic volume with a variety of articles about prehistory and gender in Europe. Rehak, Paul. “The Construction of Gender in Late Bronze Age Aegean Art: A Prolegomenon.” In Redefining Archaeology: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Mary Casey, Denise Donlon, Jeannette Hope, and Sharon Wellfare, pp. 191-198. Canberra, Australia: ANH Publications, RSPAS, Australian National Uni¬ versity, 1998. One of many articles by an author who attempted to broaden the possibilities for understanding women, men, and children in Minoan and Mycenaean cultures with references to many of his and other people’s studies. Sorensen, Marie Louise Stig. Gender Archaeology. Cambridge, U. K.: Polity Press; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Talalay, Lauren E. Deities, Dolls, and Devices: Neolithic Figurines from Franchthi Cave, Greece. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Tringham, Ruth E. “Households with Faces: The Challenge of Gender in the Prehistoric Architectural Remains.” In Engen¬ dering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, edited by Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, pp. 93-131. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991. Tringham, Ruth, and Conkey, Margaret. “Rethinking Figurines: A Critical View from Archaeology of Gimbutas, the ‘Goddess’ and Popular Culture.” In Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence, edited by Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris, pp. 22-45. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Ucko, Peter J. Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete with Comparative Material from the Prehistoric Near East and Mainland Greece. London: Szmidla, 1968. Vitelli, Karen D. “Pots, Potters, and the Shaping of Greek Neolithic Society.” In The Emergence of Pottery: Technology and Innov¬ ation in Ancient Societies, edited by William K. Barnett and John W. Hoopes, pp. 55-63. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu¬ tion Press, 1995. Whitehouse, Ruth D. “Gender in the South Italian Neolithic: A Combinatory Approach.” In In Pursuit of Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Approaches, edited by Sarah Milledge Nelson and Myriam Rosen-Ayalon, pp. 15-42. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2002. This author also edited the useful volumeGender and Italian Archaeology: Challenging the Stereotypes (London: Accordia Research Institute, University of London; Institute of Archaeology, University College, London: 1998). Joanna S. Smith

EUROPE: Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece The lives and roles of women in ancient Greece (c. 110030 b.c.e ) were reflected in the organization of the Olympian pantheon. Greek goddesses were specialized in the fields of fertility (human, animal, and vegetal) and in the nurturing and protection of heroes and cities. The chief organizing principles for the areas of power of Olympian goddesses in the archaic and classical periods (c. 700-323 b.c.e.) were their relationship to sexuality—virgin, wife, mother, sex object—and their specialization in different areas of fertility. The virgin goddesses Athena, Artemis, and Hestia, once independent manifestations of a generalized earth goddess, came under male control in myth as the daughters of Zeus (Athena, Artemis) or as his sister (Hestia). Athena maintained a faded aspect of the ancient warrior goddess in her role as protector of Athens. She supervised all crafts, especially weaving, as the primary occupation (after childbearing) of all women. This was the only nonnatural production that was supervised by a goddess. Artemis, the huntress, was the protector of the young of all animals and of humans until they reached sexual maturity; she also helped women in childbirth. Hestia was the guardian of the family hearth, protecting the purity of the male blood¬ line and the prosperity of the oikos (household). Hera was patroness of marriage; in myth she was the wife of Zeus. She protected women making the transition from daughter to wife, and she supervised the chastity of the wife and the integrity of the marriage bond. Demeter and Aphrodite were independent of any god. Demeter was the sister of Zeus and successfully maintained her freedom from him, even as the mother of his daughter Persephone and as the introducer of agriculture to humans and goddess of all the dry produce of the earth. Aphrodite was the patroness of all erotic love, both animal and human, both heterosexual and homosexual. She took over children from Artemis when they matured sexually and worked with Hera to ensure fruitful sex in marriage. In Homer she was Zeus’s daughter, but Hesiod told the more usual story: born from the foam that gathered in the sea around the severed testicles of Ouranos when Kronos castrated him, she predated the Olympians. Non-Olympian goddesses showed the same traits in myth as did the Olympian ones: Hecate, the helper goddess; nymphs like Thetis, who were raped by gods and produced heroes; or Rhea, who saved her son Zeus from death. In cults, goddesses were often worshipped independently of any male. In the cities, the lower classes worked as sellers of, for example, garden produce or wreaths in the agora (public space) or worked as midwives or nurses. In the country they raised crops and tended animals. Everywhere they

207

participated in the cults of goddesses, often supervising the cults as priestesses. Their identity was formulated through their relationships to men: they were daughters, wives, mothers, or hetaerae (courtesans). Women’s status in the community and their daily lives changed through time, however. Evidence for these devel¬ opments is scattered and incomplete. Almost all sources for the ancient periods are authored by men, and even those that purport to be factual (laws, speeches, histories) may reflect biases that skew them toward what the authors would like the situation to be rather than what it actually was. The evidence of epic, tragedy, comedy, and poetry must likewise be used with care. Late Bronze and Archaic Ages (c. 1100-500 b.c.e.). In the works of Homer (ninth-eighth centuries b.c.e.) upperclass women are important as pawns of international diplomacy, where marriage was an important element in making alliances. They move around the city freely, accom¬ panied by servants, and they converse with men other than their husbands. Their daily occupations are child care and weaving, directing the work of their slaves, tending cults, and caring for the sick and dead. The women of conquered states were regularly sold into slavery, no matter what their original social status, and were valued in the slave market for their fertility and weaving skills. Homer portrays several women as intelligent and energetic companions to the men in their lives; his attitude is respectful and admiring. Hesiod (fl. c. 800 b.c.e.) shows lower-class women having much the same occupations. They raised crops, processed food, tended animals, and apparently had considerable freedom of movement outside the home, to judge by how he criticizes their gossiping, flirtatiousness, and laziness. His attitude is one of superiority and resentment at being dependent on them. Sappho, a poet from Lesbos (fl. c. 610-c. 580 b.c.e), depicts the lives of upper-class women who gather around her from several Ionian cities. Their days seem to be spent in composing poetry, learning choral singing and dancing, and participating in cults. Their pleasure in being women in each others’ company, and Sappho’s sense of the value of her own perspective compared to that of men, is unique in historical evidence from ancient Greece. Classical Period (c. 500-323 b.c.e.). Sources for the classical period (c. 500-323 b.c.e. ) come almost exclusively from Athens and Sparta. Under Athens’s radical democ¬ racy, women lost much of their status as important links among political groups. They retained, however, their crucial role in producing male heirs for the oikos, and because the oikos was the basic social unit of the polis (city-state), through which citizenship was claimed, control of women’s sexuality was deemed vital to the proper func¬ tioning of the democracy. The attitudes here—evidenced

208

EUROPE: Ancient Greece

especially in works of tragedy—are suspicion and fear of the disruptive potential of the powerful female. In Athens girls were married at about the age of fourteen to men of about thirty. They were therefore as much children to their husbands as wives, and they were treated as minors by the law. They could not inherit or own prop¬ erty worth more than a small amount. They could not take part in the political affairs of the polis. They were seldom literate. In their childhood they were relatively free, joining cult groups that led them through successive stages of grow¬ ing up. At marriage, arranged by their father and prospec¬ tive husband, they were transferred to the husband’s oikos, taking with them a dowry—which remained theirs—and a limited number of personal items. Divorce was possible; they returned to their father’s oikos, taking their dowry, but any children remained with the father. Remarriage was frequent, again arranged by the father or other male guardian. Women could not live independently and remain respectable, free individuals. There is controversy among classical scholars over whether such strict regulation of women’s lives was good because of the security it provided or bad because of its restrictiveness. The amount of freedom of movement that Athenian women enjoyed is also contested. They were (ideally) confined to the women’s quarters of their homes, which were frequently small, dark, and unhealthy, and were not given the opportunity to socialize except when partici¬ pating in cult activities or such family occasions as funerals or marriages. They were not permitted (ideally) to speak to, or be seen by, men other than their husbands and other family members. Other classical scholars point out, however, that Athenian women went shopping daily in the agora, went to the public fountains for water, and visited friends. Public space was divided between that for men and that for women, but in many areas this division shifted dur¬ ing the day, and women were free to use any of it at certain times. Cult celebrations at which women were present were frequent, consisting not only of the large polis festivals but also of numerous smaller ones in city neighborhoods. In Sparta, citizen women were empowered by and valued for their role in producing and raising citizens. They were known for their intellectual achievements and outspoken¬ ness. As children, they were raised by their mothers, fed as well as their brothers were fed (unusual in ancient Greece), and encouraged to exercise so that they would be fit enough to bear strong children. At the age of about eighteen they married husbands who were not much older, and because all males from seven to thirty lived in barracks and were frequently on military missions, the mother was the dominant figure in the household. She maintained her importance when, at thirty, the husband took up residence at home. Spartan citizen women did not weave and make

clothing; this was done by servants. Their education consisted of athletic and artistic training; they in turn passed their education, much of which was in the context of religious cults and festivals, on to their daughters. Young girls were not always sequestered from young men in these activities, and they performed before mixed audiences. Once married and having produced children for their husbands, they were said by writers of the period to pass to a brother or friend of the husband’s for bearing further children, and the children of the mother were deemed joint among the fathers. It is unclear who controlled this sharing, but women were regularly said to be polyandrous. Citizen women in Sparta were allowed to own and inherit property, and because of their husbands’ frequent absence, they wielded considerable influence in public affairs through their wealth, education, and personal contacts. This degree of independence and power was made possible in part by the existence of the helotry, a servant class drawn from nearby conquered peoples. This differs from the situation in Athens, where the daily lives of Athenian women, slave or free, were remarkably similar: clothing production, food production, child care. The Hellenistic Age (c. 323-Late First Century b.c.e.). Changes took place in women’s status under the kingdoms that followed the demise of the polis system in the late fourth century. The connection between the development of the institutions of the polis and the restrictions put on citizen women in Athens was noted above. With the rise of the monarchical states of the Hellenistic period, the restrictions loosened. In Greek-speaking parts of Egypt there is ample evidence of women owning property, entering marriage and commercial contracts on their own behalf, running businesses and plantations, and otherwise leading lives of some opportunity. Women of all classes enjoyed freedom of movement in the cities, and several Hellenistic queens, such as Arsinoe II (c. 316-270 b.c.e.) and Cleopatra VII (69-30 b.c.e.), were noteworthy for the accomplishments of their reigns. The work of several women poets, such as Corinna (fifth century b.c.e.), Erinna (fourth century b.c.e.), Nossis of Locri (fl. 300 b.c.e), and Anyte (third century b.c.e.), has come down to us, and the philosophical movements of the period included a few women, such as the cynic Hipparchia (fl. 300 b.c.e.). [See also Codes of Law and Laws, subentry Ancient Greek and Roman Law; Deities; Marriage; and biographies of women mentioned in this article.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blundell, Sue. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. An overview of women in the ancient world, updating and expanding Pomeroy(listed below). Required introductory reading; superb bibliography.

EUROPE: Roman Empire

Hawley, Richard, and Barbara Levick, eds. Women in Antiquity: New Assessments. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. A collection of short treatments of individual issues mentioned in this article; includes a variety of methodological approaches. Lardinois, Andre, and Laura McClure, eds. Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Another collection of essays, using ethnographic studies of other cultures as comparative data; especially noteworthy for its ingenious use of available data to reconstruct the ancient situation. Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Maureen B. Fant, eds. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. A sourcebook of primary texts (translated) on which many secondary studies base their arguments. Includes all relevant legal texts and many excerpts from literary, oratorical, philosophical, historical, and medical sources. Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (1975). Rev. ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. The seminal work in English of women in the ancient world. Rotroff, Susan I., and Robert D. Lamberton. Women in the Athenian Agora. Athens, Greece: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2006. Uses archaeological data to reassess the cloistered status of Athenian women in the classical age. Skinner, Marilyn B. Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. An outstanding study of gender issues and their origins and effects in ancient Greece and Rome. Studies the psychological and emotional sources of much of the content outlined in the books above, explaining how gender worked in these societies. Ann

C.

209

never from an official position in their own right. Through family connections and marriage, women of the elite enjoyed high social status. They had property of their own and might be very wealthy, and they were often well educated with an active social life and sometimes with a religious position that ensured status and some influence. Women and especially men from the nobilitas (Roman aristocracy) were often the focus of ancient authors, who were, with few exceptions, men. Female literary portraits tend to be more stereotyped than those of men. Women who transgressed gender boundaries and, for instance, showed some interest and skill in Roman politics, an exclusively male arena, are generally described nega¬ tively in ancient texts. They were seen as manipulative, “manly” characters with an unsuitable greed for power. Fulvia (d. 40 b.c.e.), the wife of the political leader Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius; c. 83-30 b.c.e.), and Livia Drusilla (later Julia Augusta; 58 b.c.e.-29 c.e.), the second

Suter

Roman Empire Throughout Roman history and all over the Roman Empire, from the third century b.c.e. to the fifth century c.e., gender relations are reflected in a variety of media. The sources include both written evidence and material culture, with a general subordination of women in relation to men reflect¬ ing gender constructions and values in Roman society. In this strictly hierarchical society a freeborn man was the paterfamilias (head of his family) with potestas (authority) over every male and female family member, including slaves. There was no equal status for women, whose legal incapacity normally necessitated a tutor (male guardian) from infancy to married adulthood. The guardian was nor¬ mally a close male relative. Elite Roman men could be politicians, military comman¬ ders, and rulers; women of the same social level could not. Aristocratic marriages were often arranged based on male political interests, and women served as the link in estab¬ lishing political alliances between men. As wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters, women could exercise some unof¬ ficial political influence via powerful male relations, but

Livia Augusta. The wife and adviser of Caesar Augustus. A sculp¬ ture, c. 30 b.c.e-500 c.e. Ole Haupt, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

210

EUROPE: Roman Empire

wife of the emperor Augustus (originally Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus; r. 27 b.c.e.-14 c.e.), fit this model. Women who, on the other hand, conformed to socially accepted values and gender ideals are normally described in iconic terms, such as Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, revolutionary politicians of the second century b.c.e., and Octavia (69-11 b.c.e.), the sister of Augustus and the wife of Mark Antony from 40 to 32 b.c.e.. Women in this category appear in literature as virtuous, faithful, and loyal wives, devoted to traditional female duties. Marriage, Children, and Status. Freeborn men and women of all social strata were expected to marry and procreate. The important and central role of marriage for men and women from all social strata is reflected in a variety of sources such as legal texts, marriage contracts, and literature and by visual evidence throughout the Roman Empire. Roman girls were married as teenagers, from the age of twelve or thirteen, to a husband who could be anything from two years their senior to three times older than the bride at her first marriage. A bride in a wealthy family was supposed to have woven her own wedding dress, as a sign of her skills in wool work. Marriage implied a vital change of status for females, from that of an unmarried girl to a married woman, a matrona in the upper social reaches. Once married, women were expected to have children. A woman’s foremost duty in society was to guarantee the survival of the family line and to give birth to the new citizens of the state. Being a mother implied status for a woman, but childbirth was a risky undertaking, and many women died prematurely from pregnancy or childbirth. Legitimate children, the primary goal of a marriage, could be born only from citizen parents with ius conubium, the legal right to marry. A patrilinear family system made sons more valued than daughters. In elite families without a son and male heir, adoptions of males were recurrent in order to maintain the family line. To encourage all Roman citizens to marry and have children, marriage legislation was intro¬ duced by Augustus; the Lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus (19/18 b.c.e.) demanded that all men between the ages of twenty-five and sixty, and all women between the ages of twenty and fifty, be married. As a public reward, women who gave birth to three children within marriage were exempted from needing to have a guardian. If a husband predeceased his wife, the ideal for her was to remain an univira (one man’s woman), and as a widow to honor the memory of her dead husband. There was no equal ideal for men, but both men and women of all social strata remarried frequently, and the Augustan laws encouraged it. The right to marry did not go to slaves, and they could not have legitimate children, but slaves often lived together as families and had children. Male as well as female slaves were sometimes freed, especially from the first century b.c.e. onward, which implied an important elevation of their legal

and social status. Former slaves could marry legally and have freeborn children, obvious marks of their new position and status in society. Among freed men and women, a funerary monument was often used to display an individual’s success in life. Such memorials were used all over the Roman Empire, in parti¬ cular in late republican and imperial times, and especially in the Roman West. Images of married couples and family scenes are recurrent motifs in funerary art and were especially favored by former slaves to demonstrate their new rights, with an additional function of underlining the freedom itself. Visually, citizenship, marriage, and the legal right to marry were often represented by a man and a woman dressed as citizens and joined in a hand clasp, a symbolic gesture of marriage and matrimonial harmony—and a mo¬ tif found on a large number of funerary monuments of both freeborn and freed. On tombstones, family scenes, which often include one or both parents, and normally one or two children, are also frequent. Less costly memorials seldom had an image but did have an inscription with some information about the deceased person(s): usually the name and sometimes the age of the deceased, with some general characteristics. The epigraphic record provides a huge source of material covering a wide social spectrum from all over the empire that has been used for various demographic studies. In spite of the shorthand style of the inscriptions, they provide much information about gender relations such as ideals of masculinity and femininity expressed by the various characteristics listed, which are largely different for men and women. These are not to be taken as literal information but as a reflection of Roman gender constructions. Modesty, marital fidelity, industriousness, and being sweet are characteristics repeat¬ edly written of women (having a single husband also counted as a merit), whereas men recurrently were charac¬ terized as being virtuous, pious, and dutiful. Male and Female Work. Job titles could also be included in funerary inscriptions telling about the dead person’s occupation. The inscriptions include a large variety of occupational names, a useful tool to map the work of Roman men and women, although today historians may not always be able to tell exactly what a specific title meant in terms of work. The workers often are slaves or former slaves and the inscriptions mirror a distinct sexual division of labor with a greater variety of occupations for men than for women. Men’s occupations include a great range of jobs such as soldiers, butchers, carpenters, shoemakers, boatbuilders, fullers, secretaries, librarians, physicians, and architects. Female jobs tend to be more restricted, and the documenta¬ tion concentrates on work with children and household work. Working with children could imply everything from being midwives and wet nurses to being teachers of small children. For older children, the teachers were normally

EUROPE: Medieval Period

men. Both Roman boys and girls could have some years at school, but the more advanced educational stages, including rhetoric, philosophy, and law studies, did not embrace girls. These were reserved for sons of the elite families—the future Roman commanders, lawyers, and politicians. Apart from some jobs related to textile work as spinners and weavers, women very seldom were documented as being artisans. But working women could also be part of the entourage of high-class ladies, as personal attendants. In such positions female slaves and freed women were hairdressers or masseuses, or they took care of the lady’s wardrobe. There were similar types of jobs for men, in the entourage of upper-class men. Funerary imagery also reflects the work of Roman men and women by symbolic images of occupations. Among the images, male work dominates while women’s work appears in a much more restricted way. In contrast to salaried work, a woman’s primary role as housewife and being responsible for work in the domestic sphere is stressed in the funerary images and often symbolized by a spindle. This symbol refers to traditional female wool work—the emblem of female virtue—supposedly taking place in a woman’s home, as reflected in the story of Lucretia in early Rome (d. c. 509 b.c.e.), who, according to legend, killed herself after being raped. Inscriptions and images present a gen¬ dered view of men’s and women’s work, and similar ideas can be found in Roman literature. In all kinds of media the evidence of men’s work dominates, and there is a strong reluctance to document female work, a situation clearly reflecting ancient Roman views on gender. The study of women in the Roman Empire is important because of the influence that Roman gender constructions had in the former Roman provinces through the spread of the Roman law model. Not only did the law code influence the society at that time, but Roman law has had a strong impact in later times, too, and has formed ideas of male and female in post-Roman times and societies. The life cycle of women in the Roman world also bears a resemblance to the conditions for women in many developing countries today: married as a young teenager, frequent pregnancies, the experience of a premature death of one or several of the children, and with a life expectancy of around forty years. [See also Children; Codes of Law and Ancient Greek and Roman Law; Death Female Life Cycle; Livia, Empress of Rome; archy; and West Asia, subentry Roman Periods.]

Laws, subentry and Mourning; Marriage; Patri¬ and Byzantine

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dixon, Suzanne. Reading Roman Women: Sources, Genres, and Real Life. London: Duckworth, 2001. A discussion of how various ancient media have formed the modern view of Roman women, with alternative readings of the sources. Dixon, Suzanne. The Roman Mother. London: Croom Helm, 1988.

211

Joshel, Sandra R. Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome: A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Kampen, Natalie. Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia. Berlin: Mann, 1981. Images from Ostia, the port of ancient Rome, representing women at work; also includes examples of women at work from the western Roman provinces. Kleiner, Diana E. E., and Susan B. Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1996. An exhibition catalog and a collection of papers based on an exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery in 1996. Kleiner, Diana E. E., and Susan B. Matheson, eds. I Claudia II: Women in Roman Art and Society. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. A sequel, with a collection of papers on various aspects on Roman women in the visual arts. Treggiari, Susan. Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Treggiari has written extensively on related issues, but this is her most comprehensive work on Roman marriage. Lena Larsson Loven

Medieval Period The so-called European Middle Ages spanned at least a thousand years and covered a vast area, from Scandinavia in the north, Ireland in the west, Spain and Italy in the south, and Russia and the Byzantine Empire in the east. It was a period that saw enormous changes as Europe moved, at different speeds, away from a world dominated by the Roman Empire toward one of fragmented and disparate kingdoms that each had its own customs and political structures. In Byzantium, the Roman Empire continued, changing but still perceived as Roman, and the Byzantine Empire remained the largest and most powerful political entity in the region throughout the Middle Ages. In contrast, in western Europe, under the pressure of many and diverse barbarian (which is to say non-Roman) influences, a variety of states and kingdoms grew up, fought, coalesced, and fell apart again as the countries that make up modern Europe began to take shape. Over this general region and time period, women’s roles both differed and changed greatly. In each country, women’s roles were not uniform, but were influenced by different laws, customs, and beliefs. A woman’s life in seventhcentury Denmark was not the same as that of a woman in seventh-century Spain or seventh-century Byzantium, or indeed as that of a woman in twelfth-century Denmark. At no point can it ever be said that women’s experiences were the same across the whole of Europe in the Middle Ages. However, a few generalizations can be made. Throughout the medieval world, women remained relatively invisible in the historical sources; marriage and motherhood remained

212

EUROPE: Medieval Period

roles were conditioned by the norm of men and male behavior. This ideology was strongly influenced by the teachings of the Christian Church, which held that women were inferior and weak in comparison to men, and were responsible, via Eve, for the Fall of Man. As such, they were to be seen as licentious temptresses, possessing an uncontrolled and uncontrollable sexuality. However, women were also perceived by the Church as being spiritually equal to men, as a result of the redeeming actions of the Virgin Mary and because women (like men) were created in God s image. These two mutually contradictory roles underpinned wo¬

Motherhood in Medieval Europe. A nanny holds the baby at the

end of a mother’s bed, England, fourteenth century.

Mary Evans

Picture Library

as constant factors in the lives of almost all women; women’s place in the gender hierarchy was predicated on male super¬ iority and the explicit weakness of the female sex; women remained vulnerable to violence and/or exploitation. The most significant aspects of a woman’s life were her class and social standing, elements that dominated her life experience and any choices available to her. Despite these constants, the lives of women did change over time: standards of living altered; access to property increased; the expectations and constraints of marriage changed. The spread of Christianity, which was perhaps the one increasingly universalizing fac¬ tor throughout Europe during this time period, allowed for an increased availability of religious alternatives and had varying effects on women’s lives. This was particularly nota¬ ble with respect to changing attitudes about the body, includ¬ ing an increased stress on purity and the dangers of sexuality. Another common feature of the Middle Ages, one crucial in women’s lives, was the central role of dynastic and familial power, with all the implications that this had for divisions into public and private spheres and the continual struggles at all levels of society over inheritance and succession. Against the church’s stress on continence was the need for female fertility to maintain the family line. This emphasis in turn led to a stress on the significance of motherhood for women. Women in the Medieval World. It is a generalization, but nevertheless a fairly accurate one, to say that medieval society in both East and West was, in modern terms, misogynist and patriarchal, because the prevailing ideology toward women regarded them as being weak, untrustworthy, and inferior to men. Byzantine women were ranked with children, the mentally deranged, and slaves as being unfit to give public testimony. A woman’s proper place was seen to be in the home, away from any form of public life. Women’s

men’s position in much of medieval society. The few acceptable Christian roles for women were as virgin, wife, mother, and widow. To overcome the female threat to male virtue, a variety of role models for women were sanctified by the early church, ranging from holy virgin to transvestite monk to penitent whore, all models that rejected any form of female sexuality. However, the “nor¬ mal” life of a woman involved marriage and then mother¬ hood, placing ideals and reality into conflict, generating a tension between a controlled and productive sexuality and its total denial. Increasingly, therefore, marriage was per¬ ceived as being the appropriate role for a woman, closely followed by motherhood and widowhood. Based simply on this, one might assume that women’s responsibilities were severely circumscribed. Looking at act¬ ual women, however, provides a clearer idea of how ideology and reality interacted in daily life. In both Byzantium and the West, class mattered most. An aristocratic woman had more freedom in every sphere than did a peasant; a queen or an empress perhaps had the greatest freedom of all. In the West, queens could wield considerable power and influence, play¬ ing major roles in dynastic succession as mothers, sisters, and wives, and even reigning themselves. Charlemagne’s fourth wife, Fastrada, was a focus for political interaction; in eleventh-century England, Emma of Normandy (also called ./Elfgifu), wife of /Ethelred II, the Unready, had an integral place in the rule of the English kingdom and also played a major role in unifying the kingdoms that came together to form England; also in England in the twelfth century, the struggles of the former Holy Roman empress Matilda against her cousin Stephen for the kingdom almost certainly failed because she was a woman; in the fourteenth century, the sisters Mary of Anjou and Jadwiga, queens of Hungary and Poland, respectively, were key players in determining who succeeded their father, Louis I, the Great. In Byzantium, empresses appear to have held some form of political power: an imperial male was the only figure who hierarchically outranked an empress. However, the careers of Byzantine empresses reveal that, unsurprisingly, as in the West, women had access to political power through their relationship with men. This might be as sister (Pulcheria, sister of Theodosios II in the fifth century), as mother

EUROPE: Medieval Period

(Eirene, mother of Constantine VI, who blinded her son and took power for herself in the eighth century or Anna Dalassene [c. 1025-1100/02], mother of Alexios of Komnenos in the twelfth), as wife (Sophia, wife of the mad emperor Justin II in the sixth century), or as daughter (the eleventh-century empress Zoe, daughter of Constantine VIII). The role of regent was a crucial part of the position of the empress, either when the emperor left an underage heir or when the emperor was incapable of ruling. The civil government rested in the hands of the regent: the emp¬ ress regent appointed and dismissed officials and had some control over taxes and the judiciary. Nevertheless, the prevailing ideology of inferior woman served to restrict the ability of a regent to act: no empress ever commanded an army. Despite the potentially powerful standing of queens (which was still limited in comparison to that of kings), the medieval world offered little, if any, other access to public life for women. There were three key public political components: church, army, and aristocracy. In much of the medieval world (Ireland in the sixth and seventh centuries is a notable exception, as the case of Saint Brigit of Kildare [d. c. 525] demonstrates) women could not hold positions in the church because of their sex; they could not join the army because of their sex; they could not hold official positions in the bureaucracy because of their sex. As in imperial Rome, women did not operate in public office. A woman with power over a man was an object of grave suspicion. Nevertheless, women could wield influence or power through their family connections. Princesses were useful for diplomatic marriages, as is illustrated by the tenth-century case of Theophano, the Byzantine princess who married the Holy Roman emperor Otto II. Noble ladies held high positions at court in the household of the queen or empress, they founded monasteries, organized literary circles, and served as patrons of the arts. In Byzantium, for example, Anicia Juliana (461/63-527/29), a sixthcentury noblewoman who had close imperial connections, succeeded through her wealth and connections in disturb¬ ing the authority of the emperor Justinian I. Women in¬ volved with the military could be objects of grave suspicion, depending on one’s position, as in the case of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc; c. 1412-1431). In the West, it was possible, under the right circumstances, for a woman to lead troops, as did zEthelflaed, the “Lady of the Mercians” (also known as Ethelfleda and ZElfled; d. 918) in Mercia (now part of England), or Sichelgaita, the second wife of Robert Guiscard (Robert de Hauteville) in eleventh-century Sicily and Italy. This almost never happened in Byzantium. The ideology of womanhood had an effect on the reli¬ gious lives of women. Women could not hold any of the priestly offices because this would involve their having superiority over men. Being a nun was almost the only

213

specialized religious role available to women in the early Middle Ages. Developing roles outside of this circumscribed existence was not easy, as demonstrated by the case of Clare of Assisi (1194-1253), who attempted to emulate the men¬ dicant lifestyle of Francis of Assisi, but was forced back into the cloister. New forms of religious life for women did develop from perhaps the twelfth century on; there was even, with the growth of the beguine movement, a spiritual sect reserved for women. The changing nature of female sanctity illustrates changing attitudes. For example, in the early Middle Ages, female saints were almost invariably unmarried; by the later Middle Ages, in both Byzantium and the West, married female saints were more common. By the later Middle Ages, female saints were more likely to be ascetic (or anorexic) visionaries in the mold of Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) or Bridget of Sweden (c. 1303-1373). Saints such as Catherine of Siena appear to have possessed considerable influence over male religious figures, even the pope, but could never wield that influence within the struc¬ tures of the church. The scope offered to women generally was far more restricted. Within the church, women, usually those of noble birth, could found monasteries, rule con¬ vents, and hold all offices within the convent apart from that of priest. For noblewomen, the nunnery could become a family center and place of power, passed down through the family. Thus the Byzantine empress Eirene Doukaina, (c. 1066-1123) was able to stipulate who her successor as abbess should be: her daughter and then her daughter’s daughter. Nuns and abbesses, the latter usually noble by birth, might influence religious activity and interfere in court politics, often with little result. For the nonaristocrat, the nunnery might represent a haven away from the roles of wife and mother; it might also represent a prison for unwanted or unsuitable daughters. At home, however, in the so-called “private” sphere of the family, women had a larger role. The court was the household writ political and large; the nunnery the house¬ hold writ religious. In the West, perhaps more than the East, the household was replicated up the social ladder. In the West, away from Roman influences, a whole series of social partnerships existed from the more to the less formal. In Byzantium, however, and the West after perhaps the ninth century, the single monogamous marriage was privileged by both state and church, though what say, if any, the indivi¬ dual woman might have had in the choice of her life’s partner is very uncertain. The role of wife and mother was a restricted one, under the control of church, state, and parents, all of whom played a part in constructing the mar¬ riage bond. In both East and West, wives were explicitly expected to ensure the piety and Christian conduct of their household. This is best illustrated in the influence of mothers on their sons, seen, for example, in the writings of the ninth-century French noblewoman Dhuoda for the

214

EUROPE: Medieval Period

benefit of her son William (Liber Manualis: Handbook for Her Warrior Son). Praise of the good wife and mother who are involved in pious works increases throughout the Middle Ages in writing by men, suggesting an increase in the ideological status of these roles. The family born of marriage became an increasingly important social insti¬ tution. Women were responsible for the upbringing of children, sons as well as daughters, in their formative years, and for training these children appropriately. At home, however, women’s lives seem to have been secluded. Legitimate reasons for Byzantine women’s leaving the home included attendance at church services, visits to the baths, to shrines and to family members, participation in celebrations marking civil or imperial events and, occa¬ sionally, riots, most notably in the eighth century in support of icons. Women outside the home were supposed to be veiled. After motherhood, the most important role of women, of whatever class, was household maintenance. Marriage was also about property transfer. Here again, West and East differed. In Byzantium, it seems the case that despite their theoretical subordination to their husbands, women of all classes and backgrounds possessed important personal, economic, and property rights, guaranteed by law. A Byzantine woman retained possession of her dowry (though her husband administered it) and could alienate inherited property; widows had authority over their sons; judicial acts reveal women appearing in courts to testify and plead—successfully—for divorce, for the resolution of property disputes, and for control over property. Daugh¬ ters as well as sons had the right to share the inheritance of their parents, and property could be transferred along fe¬ male lines. Within the family, women were expected to be active in economic issues, and the reality of women’s own¬ ership of property is a key factor in understanding Byzan¬ tine family life. Nevertheless, women’s status was considerably inferior to men’s, and prevailing dogma helped to keep them in their place. In the West, however, marriage was about property transfers between generations. In “bar¬ barian” northern Europe, evidence suggests a strong pre¬ ference for the inheritance of landed property (as opposed to moveable wealth) by men. Roman law was influential in some areas, such as Frankish Gaul, Lombard Italy, and Visigothic Spain, but a woman’s position as property holder was not protected as it was in Byzantium. This, of course, had all sorts of implications for women’s economic security and life without or after marriage. In describing what women could do, however, one must always be conscious of what women could not do in rela¬ tion to what men could and did do. The honor of the home was vested in women, so that the virginity of daughters and the virtue of wives were highly prized and protected. Where male sexuality was acceptable, the sexual misbehavior of young women was punished; after betrothal, any girl who

lost her virginity to a man other than her betrothed could be repudiated by her fiance. Nevertheless, rape was increas¬ ingly recognized as a crime in which the rapist should be punished, as distinct from adultery, where both parties were considered equally guilty. How far women were educated is unclear. Female literacy was not common and tended to be the preserve of the upper classes. Only imperial, aristocratic, and religious women are known as bibliophiles. Although there are many refer¬ ences to mothers teaching their children the Psalms and Bible stories, these women may well have known these by heart rather than through reading. ICassia (b. c. 810), a hymnographer, and Anna Komnene (1083-1153/54), the sole Byzantine female historian, are almost the only known examples of female writers in Byzantium. In the West, how¬ ever, especially in the later medieval period, far more evidence survives of literate women who were involved in writing for themselves, and it is suggested that this is a reflection of reality. Examples include the poets Marie de France (fl. 1160-1190) and Christine de Pizan (c. 1364c. 1430), and a vast array of female mystics, ranging from Saint Brigit of Kildare and Hildegard of Bingen (10981179), to the beguine Hadewijch of Antwerp (thirteenth century), and the English laywoman Margery Kempe (c. 1373-c. 1440). To understand women’s roles in the medieval world, it is always important to keep elements of ideology and factual information in balance. Thus, while evidence exists for women fulfilling practical roles in terms of economic activity, this has to be balanced against the question of whether sources record appropriate and inappropriate activities for women, rather than what women actually did. While little is known specifically about the lives of female peasants, women seem to have participated in agricultural labor but only in certain tasks: harvesting, for example, rather than plowing. Is this because they could only under¬ take roles that kept them near the home or because it was only acceptable to record them as performing such activities that kept them near the home? In towns, they seem to have been involved in a variety of trades, ranging from doctors and midwives to tavern keepers, bathkeepers, washer¬ women, servants, bakers, sellers of food, dancers, and pros¬ titutes. However, many of these roles were not highly respected and indeed were perceived simply as variants on prostitution. Women could be involved in trade, and indeed, it was because they owned property that they could be involved in trade above the level of the street seller, investing their money in shops and even being able to act as moneylenders. However, the major trade in which women were participating was cloth manufacturing and selling; the ideological expectation that a good woman was only involved in spinning and weaving is perhaps an underlying factor here. The other major trade for

EUROPE: Medieval Period

women recorded in male sources is prostitution. Although at least two Byzantine empresses may have been prostitutes, this did not make it a creditable way of life but rather an example of the power of God to save the most depraved sinner. Repentant whores featured as heroines of spectacu¬ lar conversions and the charitable building of “houses of repentance” for those who wished to leave this way of life indicated that prostitution was a lifestyle to regret. The Study of Medieval Women. Within medieval studies, it has taken time for women’s history to become integrated into the wider social and political history of medieval Europe. The study of women in the medieval world has, in many ways, followed the pattern of the study of women more generally. It concentrated on the redis¬ covery of individual women and then on the nature of women’s lives, a methodology within history, art history, and archaeology. In the 1980s and 1990s, the study of women in the medieval world began to engage more widely with ideas about gender and the construction of the world in terms of the social interactions of feminine and mascu¬ line, rather than only individuals. This is true for the study of women in the Byzantine world and women in the medieval West. A focus on the lives of individual women, above all empresses and queens, has tended to dominate the study of women in both East and West, mainly because there is much more information about these women than about any others. In Western medieval studies, articles on the legal rights of married women in medieval England, craftswomen in Paris, and female monasticism date to the 1890s. The difference was that at that time, such research appears to have been undertaken by female scholars as a sideline; now, women in the medieval world is seen as a valid topic of study. Reexamining evidence about women from the Middle Ages from a feminist perspective has provided new ways of seeing old things. Hotly debated feminist approaches to female mysticism raised a whole series of new questions and approaches to the study of religious women in both West and East. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholarship has concerned itself more with questions of gender and gendering, and with setting medieval women into context alongside medieval men. Issues about medieval sexuality, medieval sexual identities, and medieval dis¬ courses about the body, the flesh, and desire fall into this context. All of this work offers information about women in the medieval world, and any brief article that attempts to sum¬ marize the wealth of scholarship and its approaches will necessarily make broad generalizations, so the reader is encouraged to look further. It should never be forgotten that much information about women in the medieval West and virtually all information about women in Byzantium comes through the filter of male sources, written or visual.

215

Women tend to be spoken for rather than speaking for themselves, and so it is imperative to consider not only what the sources—material, visual, and written—say but also what they do not say, the unstated assumptions about women and about gender, and the influences that color their perceptions. These sources make visible certain aspects of women’s lives, but this is a partial and biased picture that can only be understood in terms of male ideolo¬ gies about women. [See also Beguines; Betrothal, subentry Overview; Chris¬ tianity; Codes of Law and Laws, subentry Medieval Roman and Canon Law; Eve; Marriage; Mary; Property Rights; Spiritual Leaders, subentry Nuns and Abbesses; and bio¬ graphical entries on figures mentioned in this article.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennett, Judith M. Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia Uni¬ versity Press, 1988. Key text about the effect of Christianity on perceptions of the body. Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Foundation for understanding these areas. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. The key book on female mysticism—highly influential and contested. Connor, Carolyn L. Women of Byzantium. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Uses a biographical format to look at Byzantine women from all classes. Duggan, Anne J., ed. Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe: Proceedings of a Conference Held at King’s College London, April 1995. Woodbridge, U.IC, and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1997. Collection of papers exploring different aspects of medieval queenship and, through this, medieval women’s polit¬ ical positions. Herlihy, David. Opera muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. James, Liz, ed. Women, Men, and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Useful collection of papers about attitudes about gender in Byzantium. Kalavrezou, Ioli. Byzantine Women and Their World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Catalogue for an exhibition about women’s lives, with good clear essays on different aspects of daily life. Laiou, Angeliki E., ed. Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies. Washington, D.C.: Dumbar¬ ton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993. An important collection of articles dealing in particular with the legal standing of Byzantine women. Mitchell, Linda E., ed. Women in Medieval Western European Culture. New York: Garland, 1999. Collection of papers designed to be an accessible introduction for interested readers. Partner, Nancy F., ed. Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism. Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1993. A collection of articles placing gender at the center of discussion.

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Shahar, Shulamith. The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages. Translated by Chaya Galai. Rev. ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Revised edition of a useful 1983 survey book on women in the Western Middle Ages. Stafford, Pauline. Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983. On female rulership and rereading political history with a gendered lens; influential on all subsequent work on women and power in the Middle Ages. Stafford, Pauline, and Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, eds. Gendering the Middle Ages. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001. Collection of very good academic articles. Liz James

Renaissance and Early Modern Period “Renaissance,” a word meaning “re-birth,” was originally used by urban, highly educated, upper-class Italian men to describe new types of art and literature created in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that looked back to the classical past for their models. The word gradually came to be used to indicate a broad movement of cultural change that happened at different times in different parts of Europe, and eventually for the era as a whole, stretching roughly from the late fourteenth century in Italy to the early seventeenth century in England. In this intellectual schema, the Renaissance was preceded by the Middle Ages, and followed by the “modern” era. In the twentieth century, as the modern era grew longer and longer, historians began to subdivide it into “early modern,” from roughly 1450 or 1500 to 1789 or 1815, and what one might call “truly modern,” from 1789 to the present. Some historians saw the Renaissance as the beginning of the early modern period, and others as a separate epoch. These conceptualizations are debated, but what is not debated is the fact that none of them grew out of considera¬ tions of the lives of women. In 1977, at the very beginning of the growth in women’s history as a field, Joan Kelly titled an article “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” and determined that the answer was “no,” or at least that they did not have a renaissance during the Renaissance. (Her article was very influential, leading to a similar question being posed about other eras—the Enlightenment, the “golden age” of Greece, Jacksonian democracy in America—and to a rethinking of periodization in general.) The developments marking the early modern era—the invention of the printing press, the voyages of Columbus, or the Protes¬ tant Reformation at the beginning, and the French Revolution or the defeat of Napoleon at the end—all had an impact on women’s lives, but were not drawn specifically from women’s experience. Some historians argue that there are more continuities than changes for

women across the line between medieval and modern, particularly in the structures and systems that were cen¬ tral to most peoples’ lives, such as the family and the rural economy. Others argue, however, that highlighting aspects of life that were slow to change makes it appear as if women were part of a timeless realm, while men were the actors in the cultural, political, and economic developments that clearly did occur, and that are still seen as the beginning of the “modern” world, including the growth of the nation-state and the expansion of capitalism. Both those who focus on the important role of women in historical change and those who stress continuities emphasize that women’s experiences were highly varied. Women’s lives differed according to social class, geographic location, religious affiliation, ethnicity, and rural or urban setting. The life of Queen Elizabeth I of England—who ruled from 1558 to 1603 and was the most powerful and famous woman of this period—was far more similar to those of her male relatives than to that of a peasant woman in Poland or the Ottoman Empire, or even a peasant woman on one of Elizabeth’s own estates. She was highly educated, spoke many languages, held legitimate authority over many people, ate well, and lived quite comfortably, while peasant women—and men—had none of these advantages. The great changes of the period had widely varying effects on women, creating greater opportunities for some women in some places while lessening opportunities for other women elsewhere. The expansion of rural cloth production, for example, created better-paying work for single women in parts of France, but lessened the demand for cloth made by married Irish women. Leaders of the Protestant Refor¬ mation supported teaching girls to read the Bible, but also advocated the closing of convents that provided a place where learned women could study and teach. Urban women in western Europe were increasingly able to obtain cheaper and more diverse consumer goods, but these were often produced in Europe’s overseas colonies by men and women working in horrific conditions. This essay will attempt to keep this variety in mind while making some generalizations about four realms of life that were especially important in shaping women’s experiences in Europe during the long period from 1400 to 1800: intellectual structures, legal systems, work, and religious life. Intellectual Structures and Notions of Gender. All women in Europe lived in a society that regarded women as inferior to men. This idea undergirded and shaped legal systems, family relationships, inheritance patterns, reli¬ gious doctrine and institutions, educational opportunities, and structures of work throughout all of Europe. Even Elizabeth was not excluded from this, for her life—and the course of English history—would have been very different had she been a man. Many women, from Elizabeth on

EUROPE: Renaissance and Early Modern Period

down, were able to shape their lives to a great extent despite restrictive ideas and systems, but their actions did not upset the underlying hierarchy of gender. Notions of women’s inferiority had many roots. Both the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek science and philoso¬ phy taught that women were weaker, less rational, and more prone to vice than men. Increasing veneration of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages did not lessen this negative view, and may have enhanced it, as Mary represented the unat¬ tainable positive in a good/bad dichotomy whose opposite pole was represented by Eve. Misogynist views were common in popular as well as learned literature, with stories and songs full of deceitful daughters, shrewish wives, and conniving widows. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, several writers in Europe decided to answer misogynist attacks on women directly, beginning a debate about women’s character and nature that would last throughout the Renaissance and early modern period. Around 1360 Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) compiled a long list of famous and praise¬ worthy women, De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning Famous Women), in which he described women from classical his¬ tory who were exemplary for their loyalty, bravery, and morality. This served as the model for scores of similar

217

treatises by writers from many countries over the next three hundred years, who would often add women from the Bible, Christian history, and more contemporary figures to their lists. Christine de Pizan (c. 1364-c. 1430), the first female author to enter this debate, was not content simply to list illustrious women, but explored the reasons behind women’s secondary status. She wrote a series of works in defense of women, the most important of which was Le livre de la cite des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies; 1405), in which she ponders the question of why misogynist ideas are so widely held and argues that women’s inferiority comes from their lack of education, economic dependence, and subordinate status, not their nature. Some Renaissance humanists, including Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) and Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490-1546), viewed women as spir¬ itually equal, and argued for the education of at least upper-class girls, though they, and most other Renaissance thinkers, did not expect women to apply their education, other than in training their own children. Even though they were limited in their scope, these defenses of women provoked numerous responses, both satirical and serious, which stressed women’s pride, lasci¬ viousness, obstinacy, desire for mastery, jealousy, talkative¬ ness, vanity, greed, extravagance, infidelity, physical and

Women’s Tasks in Renaissance Europe. A detail from a fifteenth-century fresco shows a woman spinning wool. Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, Italy/Scala/Art Resource, NY

218

EUROPE: Renaissance and Early Modern Period

women had a special place in the cosmos because they bore children and were thus the end point of God s creative process. Legal scholars such as Jean Bodin (1529-1596) included the standard list of female vices to prove that women were naturally inferior, and so should never be allowed to rule or hold public office. Writers of poetry, drama, and fiction also expressed their position in the debate through the female characters they created and their portrayal of the relationships between women and men. In England, the convention of having female roles played by male actors before 1660 allowed Shakespeare and other authors both to call attention to gender roles and to suggest that these are man-made, not natural or

Renaissance Religious Life. Four nuns pray. The Herlin Altarpiece, a painting by Friedrich Herlin, fifteenth century. Stadtmuseum, Noerdlingen, Germany/Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

moral inferiority, and caprice. These were answered by further defenses, including Nobilta et Veccellenza delle donne, co’ difetti et mancamenti degli uomini (1600; English trans., The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men) by Lucrezia Marinella, A Muzzle for Melastomus (1617) by Rachel Speght, and L’Egalite des hommes et des femmes (1622; English trans., Equality of Men and Women) by Marie Le Jars de Gournay. The debate about women also found visual expression, with illustrations of virtuous or domineering wives reproduced on single-sheet prints, which were hung in taverns or people’s homes, or on dishes and tableware. The debate about women’s character and nature was not limited to pamphlets and prints that addressed it directly, but was also contained in works that considered larger topics, such as mystical writings, discussions of civil and natural law, and scientific works. Paracelsus (Theophrastus Phillipus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim; c.1493-1541), for example, a Swiss physician and alchemist, wrote that

divinely ordained. Beginning in the late fifteenth century this debate also became one about female rulers, sparked primarily by dynas¬ tic accidents in many countries that led to women serving as advisers to child kings or ruling in their own right—Isabel of Castile (r. 1474-1504), Mary (r. 1553-1558) and Elizabeth (r. 1558-1603) Tudor in England, Mary Stuart in Scotland (r. 1542-1567), Catherine de Medicis (ruled as regent 1560-1574) and Anne of Austria (ruled as regent 16431666) in France. The questions vigorously, and at times viciously, disputed directly concerned what we would term the social construction of gender: Could a woman’s being born into a royal family and educated to rule allow her to overcome the limitations of her sex? Should it? or stated another way: Which was (or should be) the stronger determinant of character and social role, gender or rank? Some writers, most famously the Scottish religious reformer John Knox (c. 1514-1572), argued that women’s rule was unlawful, unnatural, and “monstrous.” Robert Filmer (c. 1588-1653) carried this even further in Patriarcha; or, The Natural Power of Kings (written around 1630, pub¬ lished 1680), asserting that rulers derived all legal authority from the divinely sanctioned fatherly power of Adam, just as did all fathers. Others—especially those writing in Elizabeth’s England—argued that a woman’s sex did not automatically exclude her from rule just as a boy king’s age or a handicapped king’s infirmity did not exclude him. A queen might be female in her body and sexuality, but still exhibit the masculine qualities regarded as necessary in a ruler because of traits she had inherited or learned. This royal androgyny was used astutely by Elizabeth herself, who used both feminine and masculine gender stereotypes to her own advantage and is said to have commented, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” Law and Legal Systems. Women’s legal position in this era was shaped by a number of factors, most prominently the spread of Roman law and unchanging notions of wifely obedience. Roman law, based primarily on the law code drawn up by the emperor Justinian (r. 527-565) in 529,

EUROPE: Renaissance and Early Modern Period

accorded women a secondary legal status because of their “fragility, imbecility, irresponsibility, and ignorance.” Along with the simple-minded, women were regarded as not legally responsible for all of their own actions, and could not be compelled to appear before a court; in all cases their testimony was regarded as less credible than a man’s. Roman law was reintroduced in many parts of Europe as part of the Renaissance revival of classical culture, bringing with it gender-based guardianship. Unmarried adult women and widows.were given male guardians and were prohibited from making any financial decisions, even donations to religious institutions, without their guardian’s approval. In some cities, women who sold merchandise at the pub¬ lic market or engaged in other forms of business could declare themselves unmarried (femme sole) for legal pur¬ poses, such as borrowing and loaning money or making contracts, while others carried out business transactions that were formally prohibited to women without getting special approval. Jurists trained in Roman law prized uniformity and comprehensiveness, however, and were in¬ creasingly unwilling to let stand informal arrangements by which women retained some control over their own prop¬ erty. Court records from many parts of Europe find fewer and fewer women appearing on their own behalf. Increas¬ ing enforcement was accompanied in some places by new laws. In 1731, for example, the Parlement of Paris passed the Ordonnance des Donations, which reemphasized the power of the husband over the wife; its provisions limiting women’s legal rights later became part of the Napoleonic Code. Even in areas that never saw Roman law, such as Britain, women’s legal rights were limited, primarily because of marriage. Married women’s duty to obey their husbands was understood to prevent them from acting as indepen¬ dent legal persons; the fact that an unmarried woman or widow might possibly get married meant that they, too, were prohibited from gaining full legal rights. In many parts of Europe, all goods or property that a wife brought into a marriage and all wages she earned during the marriage were considered the property of her husband, a situation that did not change legally until the nineteenth century. This dependent legal status did not extend to criminal law. In general, women throughout Europe were responsi¬ ble for their own criminal actions and could be tortured and executed just like men. Women were often executed in a manner different from men, buried alive or drowned instead of being beheaded, largely because city executioners thought Women would faint at the sight of the sword or ax and make their job more difficult. Women could also lodge criminal complaints, especially for defamations of their honor, though middle- and upper-class women generally acted through male intermediaries in this. Work. Though the actual work that men and women performed was often very similar or even the same, their

219

relationship to work and work identities were very different. Male work rhythms and a man’s position in the economy were to a large degree determined by age, class, and training, with boys and men often moving as a group from one level of employment to the next. Female work rhythms were also determined by age and class, but even more so by individual biological and social events such as marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, all of which were experienced by women individually and over which they might have little control. Women rarely received formal training in a trade and often changed occupations several times during their lives or performed many different types of jobs at once, so that their identification with any one occupation was not strong. During this era, gender also became an important factor in separating what was considered skilled from what was considered unskilled work. Women were judged to be unfit for certain tasks, such as glass cutting, because they were too clumsy and “unskilled,” yet those same women made lace or silk thread, jobs that required an even higher level of dexterity than did glass cutting. The gendered notion of work meant that women’s work was always valued less and generally paid less than did men’s. All economies need both structure and flexibility, and these qualities became gender-identified: male labor provided the structure, in that it was regulated, tied to a training process, and lifelong; female labor provided the flexibility, in that it was discon¬ tinuous, alternately encouraged or suppressed, not linked to formal training, and generally badly paid. Despite enormous economic changes, the vast majority of people in almost all parts of Europe continued to live in the countryside, producing agricultural products for their own use and for the use of their landlords. Agricultural tasks were highly, albeit not completely, gender specific, though exactly which tasks were regarded as female and which as male varied widely throughout Europe. Gender divisions meant that the proper functioning of a rural household required at least one adult male and one adult female; remarriage after the death of a spouse was much faster in the countryside than in the cities. Women’s labor in rural areas changed as new types of agricultural products were introduced and as capitalist investors began hiring indivi¬ duals or households to engage in domestic production. Women in parts of Italy, for example, tended and harvested olive trees and grape vines and carried out most of the tasks associated with the production of silk—gathering leaves from mulberry trees, raising the silk cocoons, and proces¬ sing cocoons into raw silk by reeling and spinning. In domestic industry, they produced wool, linen, and later cotton thread or cloth. In the cities, domestic service was probably the largest employer of women throughout the period, and women also engaged in other sorts of services—cleaning, cooking,

220

EUROPE: Renaissance and Early Modern Period

laundering, caring for children and old people, nursing the sick, preparing bodies for burial, mourning the dead. The hospitals, orphanages, and infirmaries run by the Catholic Church were largely staffed by women, as were similar secular institutions that many cities set up beginning in the fifteenth century. In most parts of Europe, women contin¬ ued to dominate midwifery, the one female occupation whose practitioners developed a sense of work identity nearly as strong as that of men. The city marketplace, the economic as well as geographic center of most cities, was filled with women as both sellers and buyers, and women also ran small retail establishments such as taverns and inns. They worked alongside their fathers and husbands in craft guilds, though they were not officially members of craft guilds, and their informal participation was limited in many areas beginning in the fifteenth century. Domestic industry provided employment for increasing numbers of urban, as well as rural, women, particularly in spinning. The identifi¬ cation of women and spinning became very strong, and by the seventeenth century unmarried women in England came to be called “spinsters.” Religion. In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the domestic nature of women’s acceptable religious activities was reinforced. The proper sphere for the expression of women’s religious ideas was a household, whether the secular household of a Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim marriage, or the spiritual household of an enclosed Catholic convent. Times of emergency and instability, such as the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain, the first years of the Protestant Reformation, or the English Civil War, offered women opportunities to play a public religious role, but these were clearly regarded as extraordinary by male religious thinkers and by many of the women who wrote or spoke publicly during these times. Before the Reformation in western Europe and throughout the early modern period in eastern Europe, the most powerful and in many ways independent women in Christianity were the abbesses of certain convents, who controlled large amounts of property and often had jurisdiction over many subjects. Convents had widely varying levels of religious devotion and intellectual life; many were little more than dumping grounds for unmarriageable daughters, while others were important centers of piety and learning. In addition to living in convents, a number of women lived in less structured religious communities, supporting themselves by weaving, sewing, or caring for the sick. The Protestant Reformation both expanded and dimin¬ ished women’s opportunities. Women were part of popular groups pressuring for and against religious change. In Germany and the Netherlands, women participated in riots destroying paintings, statues, stained-glass windows, or other objects that symbolized the old religion, while in

some cities in England, they protected such objects from destruction at the hands of government officials. Sometimes women’s actions took the form of preaching or writing, though once Protestant churches were institutionalized, polemical writings by women (and untrained men) largely stopped. In some cities women were prohibited from even getting together to discuss religious matters, and their teach¬ ing was limited to their children and servants. The Protestant rejection of celibacy had a great impact on female religious, both cloistered nuns and women who lived in less formal religious communities. In most areas becoming Protestant, monasteries and convents were closed; nuns got very small pensions and were expected to return to their families. In parts of Germany where con¬ vents had long been powerful, nuns became the most vocal and resolute opponents of the Protestant Reformation; the nuns’ firmness combined with other religious and political factors to allow many convents to survive for cen¬ turies as Catholic establishments within Protestant terri¬ tories or even as Lutheran institutions, redefined as educational centers for young women. The Catholic Church affirmed the value of convent life in response to the Protes¬ tant challenge, but it also reaffirmed the necessity of cloister for all women religious. Women who felt God had called them to oppose Protestants directly through missionary work, or to carry out the type of active service to the world in schools and hospitals that the Franciscans, Dominicans, and the new orders like the Jesuits were making increas¬ ingly popular with men, were largely opposed by the church hierarchy. Some analysts see the period of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a time when western European religion was feminized, as large numbers of people turned to groups that emphasized personal conversion, direct com¬ munication with God, and moral regeneration. Many of these groups were inspired by or even founded by women, and had a disproportionate number of women among their followers. Quaker women preached throughout England and the English colonies in the New World and were active as missionaries also in Ireland and continental Europe well into the eighteenth century. In Germany, pietism developed as a grassroots movement of lay people, including many women, who met in prayer circles. [See also Celibacy; Christianity; Codes of Law and Laws, subentries Ancient Greek and Roman Law and Medieval Roman and Canon Law; Domestic Service; Education, sub¬ entry Comparative History; Islam; Judaism; Markets and Trade, subentry Local Trading; Marriage, subentry Laws and Rituals; Midwifery; Missionaries; Monarchy, subentry Types of Monarchs; Spiritual Leaders, subentry Nuns and Abbesses; and biographical entries on women mentioned in this article.]

EVE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amussen, Susan D., and Adele Seeff, eds. Attending to Early Mod¬ ern Women. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. Essays and short papers from a regular conference sponsored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, a specialized academic society. Bennett, Judith M. Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Emphasizes the role of ideological and economic factors in shaping women’s work. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Women on the Margins: Three SeventeenthCentury Lives. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Brilliant analysis of three highly unusual women, the French abbess Marie of the Incarnation, who founded a con¬ vent in Quebec, the Dutch Protestant illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian, and the Jewish merchant and memoirist Glickl bah Judah Leib. Duby, Georges, and Michelle Perot, series eds. A History of Women in the West. Vol. 3, Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, edited by Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993. A series of essays by French historians. Gowing, Laura. Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Uses court documents to investigate the way women portrayed themselves and were portrayed. Hafter, Daryl M., ed. European Women and Preindustrial Craft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Includes essays about women in many parts of Europe. Hufton, Olwen. The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe. Vol. 1, 1500-1800. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Pol¬ itical Models. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Covers many texts in the debate about women. Kelly, Joan. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” In Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, pp. 137-164. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Focuses especially on Italy and England. Kuehn, Thomas. Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Focuses on private law. MacCurtain, Margaret, and Mary O’Dowd, eds. Women in Early Modern Ireland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; New York: Distributed in North America by Columbia University Press, 1991. Marshall, Sherrin, ed. Women in Reformation and Counter-Refor¬ mation Europe: Public and Private Worlds. Bloomington: Indi¬ ana University Press, 1989. Includes essays about women in both Protestant and Catholic areas. Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1998. Sanchez, Magdalena S., and Alain Saint-Saens, eds. Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Includes essays on literary and historical topics. Strasser, Ulrike. State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Investigates the way in which the rulers

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of Bavaria used the female body in their efforts to create a stronger state. Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Analyzes the lives of middle-class women through letters, diaries, and account books. Wiesner, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modem Europe. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Includes extensive suggestions for further reading. Wunder, Heide. He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Merry

E.

Wiesner-Hanks

EVE, according to the biblical book of Genesis, the first woman and mother of all humankind. Eve (Hebrew, havva; Greek, Zoe) means life-giving, or genetrix. There are two creation stories in Genesis. In the oldest, Yahwist account (c. 1000 b.c.e.), God creates Adam, and because of Adam’s need for “a helper,” whom he could not find among the animals, Eve emanates from Adam’s side—in some inter¬ pretations, is created from his rib. Adam is pleased with his wife—“bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh”—and calls her woman (issa, a play on the word is, “man”). God forbids the couple to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but the serpent convinces Eve to disobey; she tastes the fruit and tempts her husband to do the same. As a result, and for fear that the two will eat of the tree of life and gain immortality, God clothes, expels from Paradise, and curses the couple. Eve will know anguish in childbirth and will be subordinate to Adam, particularly to his sexuality, and Adam will labor for his daily sustenance. Adam then names his wife Eve, mother of all living. They bear Cain and Abel, and after Cain kills Abel, God grants Eve another son, Seth, to take Abel’s place. A seemingly different Priestly version of the tale devel¬ oped around 400 b.c.e. in which God creates Adam and Eve simultaneously in his image, blesses them, and commands that they be fruitful. There is not necessarily disparity between the two stories; the later version may be a corrective to the mistaken impression that the earlier version gives of the earliest human as a lone male. Adam means a person formed from clay, and because it is used with the definite article (ha-adam), the word refers to a generic human being. It is only after the emergence of woman from the side of adam that the modality of “man” and “woman” is possible, meaning that man and woman come into being simultaneously from an androgynous human. Eve’s disobedience has been used to argue for the sub¬ ordination of women in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic

222

EVE

religions; however, there has always been counter-exegesis, and contemporary theology and feminist scholarship have effectively argued that the relationship of the first couple was one of fundamental parity. For Augustine (d. 430), Adam’s rib gives the woman male strength, and the absence of the rib gives the male feminine tenderness. For Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the creation story is a metaphor of equality. Woman was not made from the head of Adam to dominate him, nor from his feet to be his slave. Both biblical accounts focus on the unity and mutual dependence of the primordial pair. The story establishes marriage as an institu¬ tion that amends the polarity of male and female as they become again “one flesh.” It is likely that Eve is related to earlier chthonic fertility goddesses of Mesopotamia. The word havva is related to an Aramaic form of “serpent” (hivya), as in Hwt, the Phoen¬ ician goddess of the underworld who was worshipped in the form of a snake and called “mother of all living.” Given this, the Garden of Eden story may have been intended as a polemic on the dominance of the Hebrew God over local fertility cults. God alone has access to immortality, and he controls childbirth. In Judaism, Eve is the subject of many legends. One is that she was the second, more compliant wife of Adam whom he acquired after his first wife, the wild and independent Lilith, left him. According to Enoch, Eve was misled by an angel, not the serpent, and God—not Adam—named her. In the Aggadah God himself erected ten bridal canopies resplen¬ dent with gems, pearls, and gold, and he himself gave Eve away in marriage while angels danced and played tambour¬ ines. Satan, jealous of Adam and Eve, selected the serpent (who himself desired Eve) to tempt her. After Eve bore Cain and Abel, she and Adam parted for 130 years, after which they were reunited and bore Seth. Eve was buried beside Adam in the cave of Machpelah in Hebron. The story of the Garden of Eden is a deep well out of which many of the central metaphors of the Christian religion are drawn, and Eve has become a prism for discus¬ sions of human sexuality, women’s inferiority, the mutual dependence of the two sexes, and the promise that despite her weakness, the female is redeemable through mother¬ hood. In Catholic theology, because Eve was responsible for the fall of the created order, she is a counterpoint to Mary, the woman through whom humankind was saved. Protes¬ tants generally hold Eve responsible for human mortality, but not for original sin. The Gnostic Gospels, discovered in 1945, have made clear that there was great diversity among various Christian sects on the nature of Eve. In most Gnostic texts Eve is associated with spiritual intelligence; she awakens Adam to a deeper wisdom, and he recognizes it. For her gift Adam calls Eve his mother. God misunderstands her motives, but being wiser and braver than Adam, and knowing that the

result will be banishment, Eve eats the fruit so that humans can progress beyond their childlike state in the Garden into spiritual consciousness. Without Eve, God s plan for humankind could not have unfolded. In the Qur an, although she is not mentioned by name, Eve is created simultaneously with Adam from one soul, and both are equally guilty of transgression. In subsequent Islamic legends, the spouse of Adam is called Hawwa, and she is able to tempt Adam into eating the forbidden fruit only after she intoxicates him with wine. As a result she suffers ten punishments, including menstruation and pain in giving birth. However, a faithful woman or one who dies in childbirth will find a place in heaven with her husband. After the expulsion from Paradise, Hawwa and Adam travel to Mecca to fulfill all the hajj ceremonies. Hawwa experiences her first menstruation at that-time, so Adam stamps his foot on the ground, and the well of Zamzam bursts forth, allowing his wife to proceed with the ritual purification that menstruation requires. Both Hawwa and Adam play a role in Islamic mysticism as symbols of paradisal perfection. For many in the modern era, Eve was framed: the victim of thousands of years of patriarchy. Her self-sacrificing rebellion against God’s command, which would have limited humankind to a childlike state, makes her a heroine. This figure has promoted debate on leadership roles for women and the value of androcentric sacred texts. [See also Christianity; Islam; Judaism; Mary; and World Religions, subentry Processes of Creation.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Survey of the subject from ancient times to the present, using pre-Islamic literature and legends as well as canonical texts. Beilis, Alice Ogden. Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994. Accessible to lay readers; modern interpre¬ tations of Old Testament stories. Gimbutas, Marija. The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 7000 to 3500 BC: Myths, Legends, and Cult Images. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974. Discussion of the snake as a female deity associated with fertility. Controversial but convincing interpre¬ tations from prehistoric archaeology. Joines, Karen Randolph. Serpent Symbolism in the Old Testament: A Linguistic, Archaeological, and Literary Study. Haddonfield, N.J.: Haddonfield House, 1974. Kvam, Kristen E., Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, eds. Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Comparative analysis of three traditions through a broad range of texts from the ancient to the modern world. Meyers, Carol. Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Considers the Hebrew Bible in light of recent archaeological discoveries, and sees average women in ancient Israel to 70 c.e. as strong actors in the family and society.

EVOLUTION

Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Random House, 1988. One of the best scholarly treatments of how Eve’s role in the story of Eden became a lightning rod for discussion of human nature and sexuality. Pardes, liana. Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Critical femi¬ nist interpretation of women in the Hebrew Bible. Brings out female countervoices within the dominant patriarchal discourse. Pelikan, Jaroslav. Mary through the Ages: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. A thorough discussion of the history and impact of Mary as the anti-Eve. Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. Interprets the two accounts of the Garden of Eden story. Martha Rampton

EVOLUTION. The theory of evolution, as put forth by Charles Darwin in his revolutionary work On the Origin of Species (1859), states that species, over eons, undergo change brought about by variation, overpopulation, compe¬ tition for survival, the survival and reproduction of organ¬ isms better adapted to a niche, and the dying out of variants less well adapted. From the time of Darwin and earlier, evolutionary thinking has been governed by evidence and speculations based primarily on archaeological and physical anthropological materials. It was generally accepted that the human species too arose as part of a very long and continu¬ ous process of biological change, traced back to much earlier primate ancestors, and that humans perhaps emerged in several different regions over a long period of time. This view connected present-day humans to other species and led to numerous comparisons of the sexual and repro¬ ductive behavior of males and females, the implication being that human mating arrangements could be under¬ stood through the kinds of patterns found among crickets, fish, and mice. Yet humans share a great deal more with the living primates, especially chimpanzees and apes. When new techniques allowed estimates of the common genetic heritage, the close relationship between humans and chim¬ panzees, who share some 98 percent or more of their genomes, became compelling. Women scientists began to explore empirically many aspects of sexuality, reproductive behavior, and power relations between the genders in the species most closely related to humans. It was thought that distinctively human qualities had developed over millennia. Thus speculations about early species such as Australopithecines and Homo erectus, who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, could be put side by side with observations of the everyday life of monkeys and apes, and inferences about humans could be derived from them. Since around 2000, however, new scientific research aris¬ ing from the analysis of the human genome has provided remarkable new perspectives on the question of human

223

evolution. It is now generally accepted that Homo sapiens emerged suddenly and recently, perhaps between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago. By analyzing mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down exclusively from mother to daughter, it is possible to establish the time depth of modern humans and the lineages that connected them. It was quickly shown that these maternal lineages could be traced back to a very small number of founders, possibly as few as a hundred females or even fewer. This theory is sometimes referred to as African Eve, since it suggests that all women alive today can trace their descent directly to an original female ances¬ tor in Africa. The facts are more complex, as might be expected, but the use of mitochondrial DNA is now com¬ monplace and is unraveling all kinds of interrelationships between groups. Analysis shows migration routes and places where genetic exchange was particularly concen¬ trated, or where it was highly limited, as in Australia, whose indigenous population descended for the most part from lineages that stemmed directly from the ancestral African lineages and that arrived 60,000 years ago and sub¬ sequently became largely isolated. New information and better analytic techniques allow ever more reliable studies, and the old methods of understanding human evolution, which relied largely on skeletal material and stone-tool typologies, have been superseded. By about 80,000 years ago, humans began leaving Africa, where they first appeared, and by 60,000 years ago they had journeyed extraordinarily rapidly, probably along the southern coastlines, to Australia and north into parts of Asia. Only much later did the first humans enter Europe, where they found the Neanderthals, whose ancestors had apparently left Africa some 400,000 years before. Humans may have encountered other early species in their rapid ex¬ pansion across the planet, but the encounter best document¬ ed is that with the Neanderthals (whose physical remains and stone tools had previously been considered part of the evolutionary process that led to modern humans). Within 3,000 to 9,000 years or so, humans had completely displaced the Neanderthals. The reasons for this displacement are still being debated, but DNA analysis of Neanderthal remains suggests that there was little or no interbreeding and that all modern humans are part of a recent, distinctive species bio¬ logically unrelated to its predecessors in Europe or elsewhere. This scenario radically changes the key questions asked of human evolutionary theory. If humans emerged suddenly and were so distinctive and originally were so closely related, the key question becomes, What happened to enable this new species to consolidate its distinctiveness and rapidly colonize the planet with such success? Some areas requiring reconsideration include those of sexual selection, the role of females in mate selection, the develop¬ ment of social institutions capable of supporting human infants, the likely extension of the life of females beyond

224

EVOLUTION

their period of fertility, and the role of women in commu¬ nication and the development of language, culture, and symbolism. Key research questions need to be reframed, among them the question of the unity of human social and cultural beha¬ viors. Anthropologists have traditionally focused on cultural diversity but this needs to be balanced by concern with the common traits observed among peoples geographically dis¬ persed; these may be attributable not to independent inven¬ tion but rather to patterns of life set in place by the first humans only a short time previously (in evolutionary terms). For example, the question of sexual selection has occupied a great deal of attention over the years. Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sea (1871) proposed that reproductive compe¬ tition between members of one sex was a key to evolution¬ ary change. In most cases, he noted, it was males who vied for mating access to the other sex, using physical weapons such as antlers and powerful musculature, but also using elaborate colors or other attractive features. It was largely the females who determined who they would mate with. Females prefer to mate with the strongest and most orna¬ mented males. This aspect of his theory was highly unpopu¬ lar, and only in the 1970s and 1980s did scholars begin to focus on the importance of female choice in the mating process. As a result, female choice and male-male competi¬ tion are both seen as relevant in sexual selection. Sociobiological theory, the best known exponent of which is Richard Dawkins, focuses on the advantages to the genes of certain kinds of strategies. In this light, humans are seen as vehicles for the propulsion of genetic material through time. In spite of its unpalatable antihumanist implications, this approach has strongly affected thinking about why certain behaviors are common. On this view, male and female re¬ productive strategies are not at all in harmony. The common observation that males attempt to mate with as many females as they possibly can, while females are highly choosy about who they will have sex with, has been explained in terms of parental investment. Since it is costly biologically (and in other ways) for females to have babies, they will be very careful about whom they accept as fathers for their children. Men, in contrast, can choose to invest in one or a few women predominantly but still take a chance that their genes will be spread by having sex with many other women, including married ones, whose cuckolded husbands will then have to invest in maintaining another man’s genetic material. In species where the males, for various reasons, make greater levels of investment than do females (e.g., some crickets, seahorses, frogs, and birds), it has been shown that females in these species compete for males and the males are very choosy about mates. It is often noted that in humans, females attractive to males have attributes making it likely that they are fertile

(aged between fifteen and thirty, with a specific waist-to-hip ratio and well-developed breasts), whereas males who are attractive to women are those whose bodily attributes suggest higher status and dominance. Such observations as these have been questioned by feminists, who point to human societies where, for instance, extremely fat women are considered attractive, or where older women are sought as marriage partners. While some such societies can be identified, for most humans, the factors that make females attractive to males do have much in common and do exclude older, ugly, disabled, and unhealthy women. These preferences are often said to be hard-wired in males for evolutionary reasons. Men’s focus on visual cues permit them an almost instantaneous evaluation of whether it is worthwhile to pursue a particular female for sex. While each individual man is not thinking about reproducing with each approachable female, the cues that make one female more attractive to him than another have been determined in evolutionary history to maximize his chances of passing his genes on. Similar observations on sexual selection and mate pre¬ ference are used to account for institutions of patriarchy. Because women always know their own children but men cannot be absolutely certain of their own paternity, social mechanisms have arisen to reassure males that other males cannot inseminate the women in whom they are investing to pass on their genetic heritage. Such mechanisms include the marriage of girls at young ages, insistence on virginity, patrilineal descent, patrilocal residence, even complete sequestration of fertile females within the household. Evolutionary thought has also had a major effect on folk psychology. Men are considered active individuals gov¬ erned by high levels of testosterone, which produces aggres¬ siveness, rivalry, and competition. Women tend to be treated as passive, although they still play an important role in accepting their mates. Recent work has questioned this view and shown that women forge their own strategies and partake in rivalry, competition, indirect aggression, and infidelity—all directed toward asserting their own evolu¬ tionary success. Analysis of male sexual behaviors such as rape has been significant particularly since around the turn of the twentyfirst century. A point of contention among feminist scholars and beyond is whether rape is a naturally occurring behav¬ ior. Some male researchers have said that rape is an under¬ standable biological response by males who cannot attract breeding females to mate with. In contrast to feminist theory, which sees rape as a question of maintaining gender-based power, this view sees rape as motivated indirectly by repro¬ ductive concerns. Although social learning may have a role as an immediate cause of rape, the act of rape is considered to be a hard-wired strategy available to males in the evolutionary past. In turn, the knowledge that this is the case is another

EVOLUTION

reason for imposing patriarchal systems, since every man’s wife or daughter needs to be protected from predatory males who otherwise cannot secure their genetic inheritance. The risks of rape depend on social circumstances. As is well known, soldiers can rape virtually without risk during circumstances of war, which is why it is so prevalent at such times. Evolutionary biology and strategies of sexual selection are obviously implicated in the social expression of gender difference. A rather surprising consequence is that if men and women have different reproductive interests, they will have evolved different kinds of psychosexuality and differ¬ ent strategies to benefit their own genetic inheritances which may not be at all in harmony as far as individuals are concerned. The new findings regarding the development and spread of the human species should cause all scientists, feminist or otherwise, to pause and consider the actual conditions un¬ der which these processes occurred. While the aggressive and competitive underpinnings that eventually produced humans can be understood through evolutionary theory, the question of what enabled humans to emerge so suddenly with such a level of distinctiveness from all preceding species requires consideration of new processes decidedly different from preceding evolutionary conditions. The,human infant’s long period of dependency and the advantages of group living in extended families, in which all members are closely related, were highly significant for the emergence of human beings. Sexual selection, rather than being based on individual mate preferences or illicit rela¬ tionships, could occur as part of a group process, as is evident from the orderly kinship and marriage systems of all known tribal societies, many of them requiring marriage between close cousins, who obviously are going to have many genes in common. Individual competition would, of course, remain, but it would be tempered by familial re¬ quirements for continuing relationships across the genera¬ tions. Communication, usually more highly developed in the human female than in the male, was central to raising children and transmitting culture. In short, specific social arrangements may have greatly facilitated the development and spread of humans. The relationship between evolutionary theory and femin¬ ist scholarship has been a difficult one. From toward the end of the twentieth century, determined efforts have been made to explore how evolutionary thinking, almost univer¬ sal among scientists, can be incorporated into feminist scholarship. Many women entering universities in the 1960s and 1970s were attracted to humanities and social sciences, rather than the sciences. Issues surrounding gender and power were particularly significant for them, since they were breaking down traditional barriers and challenging men’s domination in established fields. As

225

feminist theory developed, the question of why men so overwhelmingly dominated the social, political, and perso¬ nal spheres in society became central. At that time scien¬ tists, often men, promoted evolutionary theories in popular and scientific discourse, putting forward views arising from traditional Darwinian evolutionary approaches. Evolution¬ ary and biological thought seemed to be directed toward showing why men dominated women and, by implication, would continue to do so. In response, feminists began to argue that the entire framework of evolutionary thought, and even the science on which it was based, was inherently masculinist. In the following decades, feminists promulgated the view that there were no natural determinants of human social arrangements. Taking seriously, or attempting to use, evolu¬ tionary theory became unpopular. In the growing field of women’s studies and in much cultural and social theory, it was accepted that there was no need to consider either the biological or evolutionary aspects of human life, since humans had been freed from biological constraints by their advanced cultural and linguistic practices. While feminism decries any form of biological determin¬ ism, it is impossible to ignore the scientific evidence regard¬ ing the common heritage of modern humans. It is becoming apparent, though, that the distinctive social, cultural, and linguistic traits of humans, while not fully eliminating ele¬ ments of humans’ preexisting conditions of life, neverthe¬ less brought humans into a new relationship with the world that represents a radical departure from the determinants of their preceding species condition. Untangling the rela¬ tionships between these processes and ascertaining how humans could make the giant leap into their modern con¬ dition are central questions that require consideration of both male and female life strategies, opportunities, and constraints. [See also Patriarchy and Rape.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray, 1871. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1859. Dawkins, Richard C. The Selfish Gene. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hager, Lori D. Women in Evolution. New York: Routledge, 1977. Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mother Nature: a History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection. New York: Pantheon, 1999. Kuhn, S. L. and M. C. Stiner. “What’s a mother to do? Division of labour among neandertals [sic] and modern humans in Eurasia.” Current Anthropology 47 (6), 953-980, December 2006. Oppenheimer, Stephen. The Real Eve: Modern Man’s Journey out of Africa. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003. Travis, Cheryl Brown, ed. Evolution, Gender, Rape. Boston: MIT Press, 2003. Annette Hamilton

226

EWHA WOMANS UNIVERSITY

EWHA WOMANS UNIVERSITY. Founded in 1886,

education formally accredited as a four-year university by

Ewha Womans University, a Korean women’s university, was at the beginning of the twenty-first century the largest women’s university in the world. Its campus grounds are home to more than twenty-one thousand students in fourteen colleges, including the colleges of law, medicine, and engineering. Ewha offers sixty-eight major areas of undergraduate study and includes thirteen graduate schools, thirty-seven research institutes, and two teaching hospitals. In 1995 and 2005, Ewha was ranked the number one university in the nation by the Korean Council for University Education. Each year the university confers about 3,600 bachelor’s degrees, 1,600 master’s degrees,

the new Korean government in 1946. As one of the oldest modern higher educational institu¬ tions in Korea, Ewha has pioneered many fields and produced many firsts in a wide range of areas, from the liberal arts to the fine arts, Korean studies, music, dance, and physical education. Many pioneers among more than 150,000 Ewha graduates have successfully entered tradi¬ tionally male-dominated professions. To name just a few ex¬ amples, Lee Tae-Young (class of 1935) became Korea’s first woman attorney; Han Myeong-sook (French literature 1967, women’s studies 1986) became the nation’s first woman prime minister in 2006 after serving as the first minister of gender equality; Chun Hyo-sook was the first woman judge of the constitutional court; and Kim Jae-kyung (voice 1940) was the first Korean to perform at Carnegie Hall. The Korea Women’s Institute, established in 1977 to administer the development of women’s studies, has been the central site of institutional and curricular development of women’s studies. Subsequently the Department of Women’s Studies (1982) and the Asian Center for Women’s Studies (1995) were established, and the institute also served as the incubator for the Korean Association of Women’s Studies (1984) and the Ewha School for Leader¬ ship Development (2003). The university is recognized as the leading research institution in women’s studies in Korea.

and 110 doctoral degrees. The history of Ewha goes back to 1886: modern education for women was started in Korea when Mary F. Scranton, an American Methodist missionary, founded a school for girls. Initially it was difficult to attract students because a thousand-year-old Confucian culture did not allow girls outside of the home, and parents were reluctant to com¬ mit their daughters to the hands of foreign missionaries. Helen Kim, who in 1939 became the first Korean pre¬ sident of Ewha, explained the neologism “Womans” in the university’s name as being motivated by a desire to underscore the uniqueness and individuality of each of Ewha’s students. Ewha was the first institution of higher

Ewha Womans University. The first graduating class, 1914.

Ewha College Archives

EXPLORERS AND EXPLORATION

The Asian Center for Women’s Studies (ACWS) initiated inter-Asian collaborative work to develop women’s studies programs tailored to the unique needs of each of the partici¬ pating countries (Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines), and it published eight volumes of English anthologies of women’s studies text¬ books, one from each country. In 1995 the ACWS launched the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies. The ACWS and the Korean Association of Women’s Studies hosted the Ninth International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women in 2005. [See also Education and Korea.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conrow, Marion L. Our Ewha: A Historical Sketch of Ewha Womans University. Seoul, South Korea: Ewha Womans University Press, 1956. Shipstone, Eva I., and Norah Shipstone, eds. Role of the University in the Women’s Movement. Papers presented at the Asian Women Scholars’ Seminar held in May 1978 at Ewha Womans University. Lucknow, India: Asian Women’s Institute, 1979. Chang P.ilwha

EXPLORERS

AND

EXPLORATION.

Explorer generally refers to those people who travel to places and among people about whom they and their compatriots know little or nothing—and more specifically to people who achieved public renown on the basis of their discover¬ ies and the new geographic, geologic, or ethnographic in¬ formation they gathered in far-off places. A particular geopolitical and temporal dimension clings to “explorer” and “exploration,” however, because the words typically have been applied to Europeans and those from European settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia and refer to journeys and expeditions to colonized or soon-to-be colonial spaces in the last five hundred years for the purpose of colonial mapping and conquest. The term “explorer” conjures images and tales of Europeans and later Americans and Australians who sought knowledge about a world beyond what was already familiar to them in the West. Though often prompted by a genuine adventurous spirit, such knowledge served to bol¬ ster their home states’ attempts to forge advantageous trade or military relationships in Asia and the Americas during what is sometimes referred to as the “Age of Discovery” (1450-1750), reaching a height during the modern era (1750-1950)—a time when industrializing nations were seeking to solidify their colonial power where it had already gained a foothold or to establish it in newly valuable areas such as the African continent. Supported, permitted, and motivated by such colonialist and state agendas, explo¬ ration is best understood within the context of emergent empires and global capitalism. This is true of both male and

227

female explorers, and it is true even if in many cases state concerns were secondary, wholly obscured, or even expli¬ citly contested in explorers’ accounts of their travels. As scholars have shown, the qualities of explorers traditionally celebrated in literature, popular historical treatments, and cultural narratives of exploration—individual ambition, scientific inquisitiveness, a deep curiosity about the world, and yen for adventure—served the interests of trade and conquest by mapping the world and helping Europeans form a worldview centered upon knowledge and mastery of the “other.” Gender Restrictions on Women’s Exploration. Although many women have historically traveled far from their homes, particularly as emigrants, pilgrims, merchants and traders, refugees, missionaries, slaves, servants, mili¬ tary camp followers, and wives of soldiers, “discovery” as an accomplishment and “exploration” as a vocation have mostly been the explicit reserve of men who typically combined their expeditionary ambitions with their seafar¬ ing, mercantile, scientific, military, and literary pursuits. Indeed, by the start of the Victorian era, the explorer was seen as embodying a national ideal of masculinity or manliness in Britain. This idealization reached a height in the mid- to late nineteenth century when explorers took on key roles in the transforming of large portions of territory in Africa into European colonial possessions. In the nineteenth century, explorers came to be seen as crucial to the expansion of imperial domains. The mass literary audience that had developed by the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain and the United States but also in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, was entranced by sensationalized travel accounts and chronicles of exploration. As the public pro¬ files of explorers rose along with their political influence, the emphatically gendered aspects of exploration and discovery became further accentuated. The virtues most closely asso¬ ciated with exploration, such as aggression, stalwartness, boldness, resourcefulness, fearlessness, ambition, scientific sophistication, leadership, physical hardiness, and strength, were also those traits imagined in this time period to be decidedly absent in women. Of even more significance in the gendering of exploration, the training and skills central to exploration, such as those associated with mapmaking and transportation technologies, military strategy and weap¬ onry, and medical and biological sciences, were often denied to women. So also were the opportunities to work for the colonial state in roles most likely to lend themselves to prospects for exploration such as soldier, sailor, official, representative, administrator, surveyor, scout, missionary, and trader. Further hindering the entrance of women into this field were ideological impediments including hegemonic gender ideals that counterposed women and public

228

EXPLORERS AND EXPLORATION

Female Explorers. Isabella Lucy Bishop (center) stands with another woman and a man in front of her tent, Bakhtiari, Iran, 1890.

Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

achievement. Traditionally, presses and other outlets for written expression discouraged women from publicizing their biographical accounts of themselves or celebrating their unusual pursuits in print. Perhaps even more significantly, widespread associations between “public women” and dis¬ reputableness—again particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when exploration took on heightened symbolic and functional importance—served to dissuade many women from wanting to attract the public attention and acclaim that fueled many male explorers’ ambitions. As a result of all these structural hurdles, from 1450 to 1950 only a few hundred women could accurately be described as explorers. And no women match the renown and stature achieved by the men most celebrated for discovery— Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama, James Cook, Henry Hudson, and, later, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, David Livingstone, and Henry Morton Stanley (John Rowlands). However, considering the many barriers to women’s exploration, the number of women who parlayed their roles as missionaries, nurses, and wives into opportunities to participate in discovery expeditions surprised the scholars who began in the 1980s systematically to unearth forgotten exploration texts. It also surprised researchers to find that some women had set out for the express purpose of exploration, attaining significant renown as discoverers between 1450 and 1950 thanks to their self-authored accounts and chronicles. Neither the purpose nor the purview of this entry is to list the hundreds of women explorers who have left evidence in

the historical record of their purposeful exploratory forays or scientific studies and discoveries. Some of the works in the bibliography below list compendiums and comprehen¬ sive biographical dictionaries or encyclopedias of women explorers. Furthermore, it is difficult to disaggregate women who might be considered primarily travelers from those qualifying as explorers on the basis of genuine discovery. It is, however, worth noting a sampling of those women whose writings and insights became most widely dissemi¬ nated and whose reputations as explorers were among the best founded. Notable Individuals. The most important female explorers are deemed so because they recorded their discoveries and adventures in texts that they wrote themselves. Such authorship meant not only wider public acclaim but also credit for discovery and an enduring legacy. With the renewal of public interest in women of achievement and the rise of scholarly interest in women’s history, the women who recorded their explorations are the ones about whom the most is known today. Prominent among such explorer-authors are the women who traveled to Africa in the late nineteenth century and published accounts upon their return. Mary Henrietta Kingsley (1862-1900) is often considered to have been a particularly influential explorer and traveler. Her published works, including her best-selling Travels in West Africa, Congo Franqais, Corisco, and Cameroons (1897), spoke to immediate colonial policies and trade relationships be¬ tween British mercantile interests and West Africans. West

EXPLORERS AND EXPLORATION

African flora, fauna, and peoples were further investigated by European women such as Anna Hinderer (1827-1870) and Mary Gaunt (1861-1942), author of Alone in West Africa (1912). In South Africa, Alexandrine Tinne (18361869) is often thought to be the first European woman to travel to Africa for the purpose of exploration, but it was May French-Sheldon (1847-1936) who staked a public claim to that honor for her expedition around the base of Mount Kilimanjaro and her circumnavigation of a small crater lake, Chala, in her ethnography Sultan to Sultan: Adventures among the Masai and Other Tribes of East Africa (1892). In claiming to be the first female explorer of Africa, French-Sheldon was ignoring the achievements of several of her contemporaries and predecessors such as the re¬ spected Florence Baker (1841-1916), who traveled down the Nile in the early 1870s and returned to Britain to decry the global slave trade in Africans, and Amelia Edwards (1831-1892), who recorded her journey in A Thousand Miles up the Nile as early as 1877. Not long after FrenchSheldon, Mary Hall (1857-1912) traversed some of the same territory with an eye to exploring “from Cape to Cairo” in her narrative A Woman’s Trek from the Cape to Cairo (1907) and was herself succeeded by Rosita Forbes (1890-1967), whose writings traced her journey in From Red Sea to Blue Nile (1925). The size of exploratory expeditions led by women varied widely, as they did under male leadership. Explorations in the mountainous region of Central Asia, for instance, might consist of only one or two guides and one or two porters or personal servants, whereas explorers venturing into North and East Africa often appeared at the head of caravans whose members numbered in the hundreds. Women, in far fewer numbers than men and acting in a variety of roles, appear on many member lists of such caravans, though they were more likely than men to accompany many expeditions without any formal recognition or pay. Women served as porters and guides. The most famous of such is probably the Native American Sacagawea, who helped navigate for the party of the Lewis and Clark expedi¬ tion into the American Northwest in the early 1800s. More often, women served as personal assistants to the expedi¬ tion leader and as assistants or slaves of other porters and accompanying soldiers. They also served as cooks, nurses, and laundresses. In the case of male-led expeditions, women were sometimes brought along as sex workers, and even in the case of female-led expeditions they were often called upon to help female explorers with intimate hygiene and toilette. May French-Sheldon, for instance, brought several African women along with her to serve as her per¬ sonal masseuses. Female explorers also tended to bring with them female European companions, either longtime family servants like the maid that Alexine Tinne brought with her

229

to North Africa or white women specifically hired as maid¬ servants in part to lend a veneer of respectability. Whether indigenous or brought from home, the names of women who assisted male and female explorers on expeditions almost always went unrecorded, and their experiences and contributions remain largely uncelebrated. Given the barriers to travel that even affluent women experienced, and in light of the colonialist meanings at¬ tached to the definition of exploration, it is not surprising that few women of African descent are counted as ex¬ plorers. Mary Jane Seacole (born Grant; 1805-1881) of Jamaica, with the publication of her autobiography, Won¬ derful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), represents a unique case. Seacole’s text concerns itself largely with reports of the Crimean War for which she was decorated by the English, French, and Turkish states. Other women also gained fame as explorers in their roles as newspaper correspondents and reporters. Florence Dixie (born Douglas; 1857-1905) campaigned for the restoration of the Zulu king deposed by the British in 1879 during the Zulu War. Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Seaman; 1864-1922) is

May French Sheldon.

Royal Geographical Society

230

EXPLORERS AND EXPLORATION

probably the best known of all of these journalist-explorers. She convinced editors of the New York XVoYld to send her around the world in 1889 in an attempt to break the record for round-the-world travel set by Phileas Fogg in Jules Vernes’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). A rival newspaper sponsored a female competitor named Elisabeth Bisland (1861-1929) to make the race more inter¬ esting to the general public and to increase readership. Although Bly and her editors accomplished their aims with a stunt that garnered enormous fame for Bly and record-breaking circulation for the World, neither Bisland’s nor Bly’s travel around the world added to the scientific record. The travels of another reporter, Agnes Deans Cameron (1863-1912), offered more in the way of exploration to a popular readership. Cameron, a Canadian from British Columbia, returned in 1908 from a six-month journey down the Mackenzie River to publish The New North (1909)—the first white woman’s travel account of the Arctic region. Another explorer of the icy north was Louise Arner Boyd (1887-1972), who led seven scientific expe¬ ditions to Greenland between 1928 and 1941. On her last expedition she served as a military adviser for the United States Department of War, measuring the effects of the pole’s magnetism on radio communications and offering advice regarding military strategy for navigating the polar region. Also, in 1955, she became the first woman to fly over the North Pole. Battles with cold conditions faced all the mountaineers. Of the mountain climbers, Annie Smith Peck (1850-1935) was possibly the most famous. She climbed the Matterhorn in 1895, making her the third woman explorer, after Lucy Walker and Meta Brevoort (both in 1871), to make the

(1879), Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), Journeys in Per¬

sia and Kurdistan (1891), Among the Tibetans (1894), and The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899). Only Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) may have earned as much respect and acclaim in her own time for her travels and reportage of politics and culture in Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and North Africa. Her letters home were read widely in her lifetime and have been anthologized countless times since.

Public Reception and Historical Legacy. The variety and sometimes sensational quality of these women s experiences combined with the overdetermined gender specificity of exploration to surround many of the women described above with much contemporary controversy. Public comment typically straddled a set of twinned but contradictory responses. On the one hand, often serving to obscure or distort the accomplishments and contributions made by those women who engaged in exploration, it was typical for women’s accounts to be met with skepticism or even wholesale disbelief. To a far greater degree than in the case of male explorers, women were compelled to produce proof of their discoveries, to present evidence supporting their insights, and to have their accounts endorsed by male authorities and male explorers. Even when their discov¬ eries were validated, women were often robbed of recognition when husbands or other fellow male travelers were solely credited with the discoveries. Nor did women win positions of employment or authority on the basis of their contributions. In a few cases women did receive official honors such as knighthood or induction into the many national honor associations for explorers that formed in the nineteenth century. Only the most ambitious and sensation-seeking female explorers garnered significant

decision to forego a skirt for trousers, as well as the devel¬

profits as authors and lecturers. On the other hand, the manly aura surrounding explora¬

oped state of mass-circulation daily newspapers by the

tion also meant that women who traveled abroad in colo¬

1890s, meant instant fame for her as an explorer.

nial spaces and especially those who published their

ascent. Peck was the first woman to do so in pants. Her

Often on bicycle, Fanny Bullock Workman (1859-1925)

accounts or otherwise publicized their journeys often re¬

broke records climbing mountains with her husband in

ceived attention upon their return disproportionate to the

Spain, North Africa, India, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka),

noteworthiness of their travels and their discoveries. An

as well as parts of Indochina and Indonesia. Between 1899

Orientalist eroticization of the primitive lent sexual allure

and 1902, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) became a world-class

to stories of white women, sometimes scandalously unchap¬

mountaineer and was counted among the best and most

eroned,

accomplished of her generation. She went on to become

“uncivilized.” Novelty was not the only reason for widespread comment

even better known as a commentator on the societies of

on expeditions in the “wild”

or among the

Iraq, Iran, and the Levant. Her works, including Safar

on such women. Particularly in the nineteenth and early

Nameh: Persian Pictures (1894) and The Desert and the

twentieth centuries, those women attempting to arrogate

Sown (1907), were widely translated.

the term “explorer” often found themselves at home a focal Himalayas

point for public discussions of woman’s capacities, woman’s

and Asia as well as the Americas is Isabella Bird Bishop

rights, and woman’s sphere. They were also seen as uniquely

(1831-1904), whose explorations may qualify also as the

positioned to comment on colonialist gender relations

most extensive. Her publications included The Hawaiian

abroad. They and their accounts of the “primitive” partici¬

Archipelago (1875), A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains

pated willingly or unwillingly in public debates over colonial

The best-known female

explorer of the

EYLE, PETRONA

methods and perspectives on non-European peoples and

231

EYLE, PETRONA (1866-1945), Argentine feminist.

cultures. Though scholars of women’s history initially focused

Petrona Eyle was born on 18 January 1866 in Baradero,

upon the verity of women’s travel narratives, the inspiring

Argentina. Her father was a pharmacist of German descent,

nature of their defiance of gender norms, and the unsung

and her mother, Maria Romero, an Argentine, died when

significance of their discoveries, it is the set of twinned but

Petrona was a young child. After her mother’s death she was

contradictory responses laid out above that have most re¬

sent to Montevideo to study in a Catholic elementary

cently arrested the attention of gender historians as well as

school. She received a degree as a teacher in a teacher’s

scholars seeking to understand colonial political culture.

college in Concepcion del Uruguay in Argentina in 1879.

[See also Imperialism and Colonialism, subentry Modern Period; Literature; Travel and Travel Occupations; and bio¬ graphical entries on women mentioned in this article.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Birkett, Dea. Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers. Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1989. Bloom, Lisa. Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Exped¬ itions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Boisseau, Tracey Jean. White Queen: May French-Sheldon and the Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Chaudhuri, Nupur, and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Frank, Katherine. “Voyages Out: Nineteenth-Century Women Travelers in Africa.” In Gender, Ideology, and Action: Historical Perspectives on Women’s Public Lives, edited by Janet Sharistanian, pp. 67-93. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Robinson, Jane. Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Robinson, Jane, ed. Parrot Pie for Breakfast: An Anthology of Women Pioneers. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Robinson, Jane, ed. Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travelers. Rev. ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Smith, Sidonie. Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Strobel, Margaret. European Women and the Second British Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Tracey Jean Boisseau

Still an adolescent,

she traveled to

Zurich to study

medicine. When she returned to Argentina in 1893, she recertified her medical degree at the University of Buenos Aires, becoming the second woman physician in the nation. In 1901 Eyle was among the founders of the Association of University Women, an organization she presided over on several occasions. In that capacity she encouraged Uruguyans, especially Paulina Luisi, to form a similar orga¬ nization. The Association of University Women pioneered feminism

in

Argentina,

advocating

legal

equality for

women, women’s social rights, and the protection of motherhood. Eyle played an important role in the First International Feminine Congress held in Buenos Aires in 1910 and in the 1916 Congress on Childhood. She authored several bills, including one that promoted the protection of homeless girls. She also collaborated as a writer for Union y

Labor and Nuestra Causa, two important women’s maga¬ zines that supported women’s rights. Eyle also wrote on issues of public health and women’s sexuality. She presided over the Argentine branch of the Association against White Slavery (the traffic of prostitutes between Europe and South America) on several occasions. She died in Buenos Aires on 12 April 1945.

[See also Feminism and Luisi, Paulina.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ehrich, Christine. “Madrinas and Missionaries: Uruguay and the Pan American Women’s Movement.” Gender and History 10, no. 3 (November 1998): 406-424. Dora Barrancos

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FAMILY

Even in the modern West, marriage practices and patterns only occasionally match the norm of the nuclear family. Even as the norm was establishing itself in European

This entry consists of two subentries:

and American prescriptive writing, literature, laws, and

Overview

novels in the early nineteenth century, mortality rates were

Comparative History and Evolution

still high enough that a high percentage of marriages were terminated before the end of the childbearing years

Overview

by the death of one of the spouses. In fact, U.S. demographic evidence suggests that in the nineteenth century many

The nuclear family, composed of a husband, a wife, and

households that contained only a nuclear family were not

their children as a coresidential unit, is a relatively recent and—even

in

the

contemporary

intentional; that is, they came about despite a cultural pre¬

world—statistically

ference for multigenerational households simply because

uncommon form of family life. Often the term “nuclear

many families were too poor to afford the space and

family” is used in contrast with extended families of various

resources necessary to maintain a larger household, while

forms, such as stem families (parents plus one of their adult

others found a multigenerational extended-family house¬

children and his or her spouse and children) or frereches

hold to be impossible because grandparents had died before

(households that include one or more adult siblings and

the birth of their grandchildren.

their spouses and offspring). Still, it is useful to begin a

In more recent times there are other reasons that nuclear

historical discussion of family organization and its impact

family households are not the predominant form in practice;

on women with the nuclear family as a reference point,

in particular, rising rates of divorce, themselves a product of

because the nuclear family has played a significant role in

the clash between the great expectations of modern roman¬

Western social and psychological theories about the family

tic love and the realities of long-term relationships, have

and subsequently in family history, as well as in popular

meant that a diminishing proportion of marriages survive

contemporary images of family life.

into the couple’s old age. Both situations—high mortality

The nuclear family as an ideal is arguably the product of

and high rates of divorce—produce blended family forms

nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and United

characterized by many half siblings, flexible residence pat¬

States history. As idealized, it is a type of family formation

terns, and diverse patterns of child-rearing. Nevertheless,

that begins with a heterosexual attraction between a man

several of the basic premises of the nuclear family—that

and a woman, an attraction that is viewed as the basis of a

men and women should themselves make the decision

close and lasting emotional and monogamous sexual union

about whom and when to marry, and that after marriage

between them. The idea of basing marriage on the attraction

they should start a new household and move away from

between a man and a woman is relatively recent; in most

their parents—have become more widespread over time

historical times and in most parts of the world prior to the

even if culturally associated with Western modernity. What

twentieth century, marriages were negotiated by a number

have been the other historically common forms of family

of parties including parents and other relatives; sometimes

and household structure, and what difference does it make,

matchmakers and religious or state authorities were in¬

from the point of view of women’s history, when one or

volved as well. The consent of the husband and wife was

another form is prevalent?

not always deemed necessary or appropriate. Economics,

The Politics of Definition. It should be noted that many

social class, status alliances, and other considerations were

of the technical terms that Western-influenced anthropol¬

seen as more important grounds for marriage than attrac¬

ogists and social theorists first developed to describe the

tion; love and respect were generally expected to follow

family relationships they encountered throughout

marriage but were not its premise.

233

234

FAMILY: Overview

South African Family. A South African family, Etembeni, early twentieth century. Archives, Herrnhut, Germany,

Moravian

LBS 00642

the world drew on European practices and a legal history

descriptive, but rather are themselves products of conten¬

that was based on ancient Roman law. Roman family law

tious debates about the family as shaped by the history

was decidedly patrilineal—that is, it emphasized the

of gender and geopolitical hierarchies.

kinship relations on the father’s side. Needless to say,

Family Formation and Women’s Options. Rules and

there is gender asymmetry, as well as Eurocentrism, in the

practices governing the formation of sexual unions are

very terms that have subsequently been used by historians

of enormous consequence for women. What constitutes

of the family. Moreover, these terms and theories origi¬

a marriage varies tremendously across time and place, but

nated in the nineteenth century as the new academic

nearly all societies have institutionalized some approved

disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and psychology

forms of marriage and outlawed others. There are typically

emerged in an era of rapid transformation of family life.

rules or strong norms specifying how many parties make up a

The theories and the conceptual language that social

legitimate union and who can and cannot marry each other,

scientists produced thus bear the stamp of their location

most notably according to age, sex, and degree of kinship.

and time of origin. For example, the concept of the stem

Defining and upholding these norms is a contentious matter

family is ascribed to the French sociologist Frederic Le Play

in which many parties are involved, including political and

(1806-1882). Le Play extolled the virtues of this type of

religious authorities as well as family members. In medieval

family organization, which he associated with stability and

Europe, for example, the Catholic Church solemnized

paternal authority; he worried that it was threatened by

marriage as a religious sacrament between a man and a

democratic challenges to family law and inheritance brought

woman in the process of its institutional efforts to secure its

by the French Revolution, and his theories reflect these

authority over family life against both family authority and

political perspectives. Writing in the context of imperialism,

state authority. In order to be legitimate, a Christian

some theorists assumed that European practices and norms

marriage had to be consensual and, ideally, legitimated by

were a standard that could be applied everywhere.

public vows exchanged under the watch of a clergyman.

At the same time, socialist and feminist critics and sexol¬

Such practices could offer some protection to a woman

ogists, and later cultural anthropologists, drew on historical

against being forced to marry against her will, but only in

data to argue that family, gender, and generational relations

cases where she could find clerical allies willing to support

were variable human cultural constructions, not natural

her opposition to family plans.

or universal institutions. Thus all of the inherited terms

In practice, of course, sexual unions of a less legitimate

commonly used to describe family forms, the gender and

variety existed alongside recognized marriages. These in¬

generational relations that characterize them, and their

cluded unions permitted by church dispensations granted

role in historical transformation are not neutral or simply

to relax the rules in particular cases, as well as those that

FAMILY: Overview

235

flouted the rules altogether, such as prostitution and con¬

and the Middle East. In Europe and North America there

cubinage (a stable cohabitation relationship between a man

has been a long informal tradition of same-sex unions, but

and a woman who are not officially married). Concubinage

these became institutionalized and highly visible only in

was common in a variety of settings. Until the religious

modern times.

reforms of the sixteenth century, many Catholic clergymen, prohibited by church practice from marrying, often them¬

Kinship Systems: Relationships, Family Authority, Coresidence. Families produce new human beings, nurture

selves cohabited with women to whom they were not legally

them, and instill in them their first sense of connectedness.

married; in more modern times the poor and unchurched

Families transmit names and the larger identities and

(for example, urban proletarian populations in some re¬

claims to affiliations with lineages and communities that

gions of Europe) often formed such unions. In concubinage

the names represent. Lineages also transmit material

relationships women had few legally recognized rights

resources like land or other property, as well as status.

throughout much of Europe and Asia.

In this regard it is important to note distinctions among

Throughout the world there has existed a wide variety

matrilineal, patrilineal, and bilateral systems of kinship—

of marriage systems that have typically been complex both

which favor mother’s kin, father’s kin, or an admixture,

in terms of legally recognized systems and in terms of

respectively—in assigning how identities and resources

practices. Islamic rules and practices stipulated, for exam¬

flow through families.

ple, that for a marriage to be deemed valid the bridegroom’s

For example, the kinships system of Renaissance Italy,

family had to make a ritual payment to the bride that estab¬

rooted in older Roman legal traditions and family practices,

lished a tacit contract between the two; the bride was

was decidedly patrilineal.

assumed to be under the command and protection of her

father’s lineage, which was reflected in practices such as

husband, and he owed her and her children a livelihood.

the expectation that widows who remarried would lose

Islamic law also allowed for polygyny—a woman could

custody of their children from the first marriage; these

have only one husband at a time, but a man could have up

children would be claimed by their late husband’s lineage.

to four legal wives and also concubines, provided that he

Such practices were most marked in wealthy families

could support them all. Temporary marriages have also

with a patrimony—itself a telling word that literally

been construed as consistent with Islamic law, although

means that which is bequeathed by the father—to protect.

these have been more controversial and have been disal¬

Such practices also tend to be associated with patriarchal

lowed under some interpretations.

notions of power—that is, legal and political rights of male

Traditional Chinese family systems based on Confucian ethics also allowed a man—but not a woman—to have

Children belonged to their

elders to control women as well as younger men and children.

multiple legally recognized sexual partners. In addition to

Another example of a strongly patrilineal family system

his wife, a man could legally acquire and have children

is the traditional Chinese lineage system. In traditional

with any number of concubines. Often the wife brought

Chinese family practice, lineages had a corporate nature

with her a substantial dowry, whereas concubines were

and were run by elder men; these men often held and

not expected to do so. Children of both wives and concu¬

administered property jointly, and they deliberated over

bines had claims to the patrimony. In practice, the taking

such matters as marriages, residential decisions, and house¬

of concubines was limited to elite men of considerable

hold property divisions. Ideally, sons remained within the

wealth. On the other end of the social spectrum there were

family compound after marriage, bringing their brides into

many poor families who were willing to offer their daughters

their patriline. Inheritance of household authority and con¬

as concubines either because they could not afford the

trol over land passed through the male line; succeeding sons

dowry that a marriage required or because marital pros¬

owed respect to elders and duties to elders and ancestors,

pects were limited. Sons of the poorest families often could

and so there was a strong pressure to ensure the lineage’s

not marry at all, although for women, marriage seems

continuity through the male line. Matrilineal systems instead place an emphasis on the

to have been virtually universal. All the marriage systems discussed so far are based on

mother-child relationship; this has often translated into

heterosexual unions. In some societies there have been in¬

matrifocal (mother-centered) families but not often into

stitutionalized alternatives to heterosexual marriage. For

matriarchy, or the exercise of political authority by women.

example, many North American indigenous societies such

Certainly there are important distinctions between matri¬

as the Lakota and the Navajo recognized multiple gender

lineal and patrilineal kinship systems. In traditionally

identities, and family arrangements were based on gender

matrilineal societies women typically do not leave their

rather than sexual identities.

Similar constructions of

family of origin upon marriage. Often sexual relationships

“third-sexed” or cross-gendered individuals have also fig¬

and reproduction are not tightly regulated, and the identity

ured into family practices in cultures in South Asia, Africa,

of the father of a woman’s children does not play the

236

FAMILY: Overview

same determinant role that it does in patrilineal systems.

circumstances—that is, where matrifocal households are

Many North American indigenous societies were strongly

created as a result of the default of fathers rather than as a

matrilineal; although men often dominated publicly visible

product of kinship norms and arrangements whereby re¬

tribal councils and warrior bands, the activities of house¬

sources pass through the mother’s line—the situation can

hold-based economies were largely in the hands of women.

be difficult for women and children.

Moreover, there was far less control of women’s sexuality,

All the significant dimensions of family and household

and sex and gender roles were far more flexible than among

structure—laws and practices regarding the formation

the Europeans whose recorded observations form the basis

of sexual unions, customs governing postmarital resi¬

of much of our knowledge of early Indian family history.

dence, inheritance rules, claims that women can make on

The conquest and Christianization of North America by

resources either for themselves or for their children—are

Europeans destroyed or forced underground many of the

gender asymmetrical, and all have implications for the

family and sexual practices that Europeans found objec¬

activities, power, and fate of women in world history.

tionable, such as “two-spirit” individuals who were recog¬ nized among many Indian peoples to have a special sexual nature that was neither male nor female.

[See also Concubinage; Divorce; Marriage; Matriarchy; Matrilocality and Patrilocality; Patriarchy; Sexuality; and

The Nayar in Kerala, India, were also traditionally matri¬

Stratification.]

lineal, and records indicate a strong emphasis on matrifocal families and relatively little control over the sexual unions of women. Still, despite the reputed sexual freedom of women in this system in precolonial days, there is strong evidence for increased male control over women’s sexuality in the more recent past. Moreover, in practice a Nayar woman’s brother was often considered the head of the extended family household in which the woman resided with

her

children;

his

relationships

with

his

nieces

and nephews were the focus of properly transfers, family alliances, and other family decisions. (This is also charac¬ teristic of other matrilineal societies.) Among the Nayar, class differences affected the degree of men’s power over women’s lives; where there was more property at stake, controls seemed to be more rigid. Still, matrilineal reckoning of family relationships can bring women a more secure situation. Recent experiences of Mende women in West Africa underscore the signifi¬ cance of postmarital residence and suggest that where a married couple resides has tremendous implications for a woman’s power, in terms of her power both in her rela¬ tionship with her husband and within the community more broadly. When women can reside with or near natal kin, they have allies and resources unavailable to women stranded in their husband’s patrilineage; the relatively weak position of women in traditional Chinese or Renaissance Italian patrilineages attest to the same phenomenon. Of course, in both patrilineal and matrilineal societies the experience of women can vary according not only to family position—as daughter, wife, mother, mother-in-law, and so on—but also to social status. The maintenance of patri¬ archal privileges typically depends on strong material incentives; in the absence of these, kinship practices often develop

a decidedly matrifocal tendency even where

patriarchal cultural norms are hegemonic. Under these

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Collier, Jane Fishburne, and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, eds. Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987. Ebrey, Patricia B. “The Chinese Family and the Spread of Confucian Values.” In The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation, edited by Gilbert Rozman, pp. 45-83. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Goody, Jack. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge, U.IC: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Jaschok, Maria, and Suzanne Miers, eds. Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family, and Ritual in Renais¬ sance Italy. Translated by Lydia Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Maynes, Mary Jo, and Ann Waltner. “Women’s Life-Cycle Transi¬ tions in a World-Historical Perspective: Comparing Marriage in China and Europe.” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 11-21. Maynes, Mary Jo, Ann Waltner, Birgitte Soland, and Ulrike Strasser, eds. Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdis¬ ciplinary History. New York: Routledge, 1996. See in particular Kiran Cunningham’s “Let’s Go to My Place: Residence, Gender, and Power in a Mende Community” (pp. 335-349); Lucia Ferrante’s “Marriage and Women’s Subjectivity in a Patrilinear System: The Case of Early Modern Bologna” (pp. 115-130); and Shanti Menon’s “Male Authority and Female Autonomy: A Study of the Matrilineal Nayars of Kerala, South India” (pp. 131-148). Mitterauer, Michael, and Reinhard Sieder. The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Pre¬ sent. Translated by Karla Oosterveen and Manfred Horzinger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Ruggles, Steven. Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Mary

Jo

Maynes

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

Comparative History and Evolution

237

example, the dating of the dawn of civilization was the moment when the sages granted family names that passed

World history in every epoch involves the activities of

from father to son, thus symbolically affirming patrilineage

families—that is, small groups of people linked by sexual

and the control of men over reproduction. In many other

partnership, descent, or adoption who live or have lived

ancient societies, recognition of the father-child bond

together in a common household. The historical dynamics

was also taken as a basic element of civilized human

of the family are especially critical for understanding the

community (for example, in Judaic and Roman culture),

varying roles of women in world history because, despite

even if—or perhaps because—anxieties about paternity

huge variations in particular practices and beliefs over

also permeated these cultures.

time and place, family matters are typically regarded as a

In more recent times these myths themselves became

special terrain of women. Women’s historical agency, and

evidence for theories about the historical development

limits on it, is manifested very clearly in family life. The following survey of the history of the family and its

of human societies. Nineteenth-century forays into origin myths

by

theorists

such

as

Johann

Jakob

Bachofen

implications for women focuses on several key aspects of

(1815-1887) emphasized the matriarchal; however, the

family life that are of special pertinence to women’s role in

prevalent view in Western evolutionary science from

world history: family relationships in everyday life, includ¬

Charles Darwin’s time until very recently was that early

ing the gender division of labor and the gendered aspects of

human societies made their leaps toward more advanced

family economies; the material and cultural reproduction of

forms of civilization through technologies, forms of so¬

human life across generations through women’s activities in

cial organization, and skills associated with the male

family systems; and the relationship between families and

activity of hunting. According to this view, which remained

extrafamilial institutions such as political organizations and

popular in Western historical and social-scientific studies

religion. The understandings of gender difference that organ¬

until the 1970s, “man the hunter” drove civilization forward

ize people in family life generally reinforce social and

and early human societies were organized along patriarchal

political hierarchies as well. Supposedly natural differences

principles

between men and women—differences rooted in family

privilege.

relations—roften spill over into ideas about political com¬ munity, human origins, and spiritual authority. Since European social scientists and historians began in

that

encouraged

and

rewarded

masculine

Beginning in the early 1970s, under the impulse of fem¬ inist anthropology, a trenchant critique of the “man the hunter” thesis emerged, bringing in turn a new understand¬

the nineteenth century to pay explicit attention to the place

ing of family and gender in the earliest human societies.

of family and gender in the emergence of human societies

The new evidence emphasized the cultural and evolution¬

and in subsequent human history, historical arguments

ary significance of “woman the gatherer” and revised some

have reflected presumptions from scholars’ own times and

of the major features of the earlier argument. Evidence

places. Thus our understandings of the role of women

from archeological sites in East Africa, for example, sup¬

and family organization in history have shifted not only

ports the revision: early foraging societies relied on a variety

because of the accumulation of new evidence but also

of foodstuffs, not just meat, and foraging groups were initi¬

because of new questions and perspectives brought by inves¬

ally quite mobile, which meant that both male and female

tigators. Important questions about the perceived direction

members were on the move. Absent any direct evidence

of world-historical change—for example, does it represent

for the earlier model that posed mobile hunting men and

progress or decline?—and explanations of vast historical

cave-bound domestic women, it would appear that archae¬

transformations—such as the emergence of settled agricul¬

ological evidence can support a very different view.

tural communities or the dynamics of cross-cultural encoun¬

Although there is still much debate about the evidence, it

ters or the implications of the Industrial Revolution—have

is now clear that the presumption of male dominance in

been answered at least partially in terms of their relationship

those early societies is not strongly supported and that

to changing family and gender relationships.

alternative accounts are more likely. Early human societies

Early Human Societies. Theories about the role of

most likely did elaborate a gender division of labor but

family and gender relations in human evolution are implicit

one that involved women fully in both production and

in both ancient myths and modern social-scientific

reproduction; in addition, the strongest and most persis¬

theories. Origin myths, as old as human society itself,

tent social unit was most likely the mother-offspring unit

often drew on family metaphors—the generative mother

rather than the male-dominated heterosexual pair. Thus

goddess, the rebellious son, and so on—to explain

Bachofen’s somewhat idiosyncratic view that mother-

how human society came to be. In ancient China, for

centered cultures—which he inaccurately referred to as

238

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

“matriarchy”—typified the era of the emergence of human

Lerner’s provocative 1986 study of gender relations in the

civilizations seems to be justified.

ancient world) was an intrinsic component of the emergence

Civilization and the Creation of Patriarchy. Nine¬

of Western civilization. The evidence for these arguments

teenth-century classifications of human societies mostly

is drawn from a variety of arenas. The earliest recorded

took for granted a model of linear progression that viewed

law codes show a marked patriarchal bent. Although neither

human development as marching upward from simple

unchallenged nor invariant over time, patriarchal legal prin¬

nomadic hunter-gatherer bands to complex urban civiliza¬

ciples did expand with ancient empires and lived on in

tions. The model was simultaneously historical and compar¬

subsequent legal codes affecting gender and family arrange¬

ative—that is, it charted a presumed path over time that all

ments. It seems likely, for example, that alternative and

cultures would eventually follow, and it measured contem¬

seemingly more gender-egalitarian models, such as those

porary societies on a scale of development based on an

that Tacitus described in the first century

implicit or explicit presumption that European civilization

among the Germanic tribes on the fringes of the Roman

marked the summit. The situation of women and gender

Empire, disappeared in no small part because of the even¬

b.c.e.

as prevalent

relations were among the measures of the level of civilization

tual spread of Roman law and practices into northern and

that were deployed in these comparisons.

western Europe. Roman legal precedents favoring paternal

The early-twentieth-century revisions associated initially

powers survived in European laws until the modern era.

with cultural anthropology were aimed at undoing this

In the religious realm, although goddesses—some of

Eurocentric perspective. Later in the twentieth century,

them exhibiting decidedly masculine traits—continued to

feminist analyses pointed to some major additional flaws

hold their place alongside gods in ancient Near Eastern

in the progressivist argument. Feminists argue in anthropo¬

civilizations, the role of women in the performance of

logical and historical accounts that, even though there is

religious offices tended to diminish as religious life became

little historical evidence for an epoch of primordial matriar¬

more organized and more closely associated with state

chy, early civilizations hardly represented unambiguous

authority. Ancient Judaic texts, which were in turn the basis

improvement from the point of view of women’s history.

for many early Christian beliefs and practices, depicted and

With the establishment of ancient civilizations in the Med¬

held up as a model family practices that were strongly

iterranean and elsewhere beginning around the third to

patriarchal. This and other similar developments removed

second millennium

there seems to have been a ten¬

opportunities for other than familial roles for respectable

dency toward increased restrictions on women, as well as a

women. In Athenian society, for example, the dichotomiza-

drift toward patriarchal laws, family practices, religious

tion between secluded respectable wives and publicly

ideologies, and forms of worship.

visible female slaves and concubines is drawn in both

b.c.e.,

As societies emerged that were more “civilized” accord¬

textual and archeological traces. Archeological and textual

ing to typical social-scientific measures—that is, sedentary

evidence from the Americas suggests a somewhat parallel

rather than nomadic, based in urban settlements, and

trend, although major transformations in state form and in

showing evidence of centralized forms of state or political

family and gender relations seem to have occurred more

authority such as kingship, as well as of specialized religious

recently there.

or cultural functions carried out by priests, scribes, and the

Medieval and Early Modem World. Anthropologists

like—they became more differentiated and inegalitarian

have pointed out that a crucial distinction between simple

in terms of both class and gender. Notably, the development

societies that tend to be based on local kinship relations

of military forces recruited almost exclusively from among

and more complex societies that are built on tributary

men, frequently appearing with the evolution toward state-

modes of production continued into the early modern era

centered societies, added a significant element to gender

and even into more recent times. In kinship societies of

asymmetries. Notwithstanding widespread mythological

Europe, East Asia, and parts of Central and South America

references to matriarchal or even all-female societies in

and Africa, there was much overlap between family

ancient Greece and Scandinavia and evidence of female

relations and economic, cultural, and political organiza¬

warriors in ancient societies in South Asia, South America,

tion. Thus distinctions drawn along the lines of family

and West Africa, the weight of historical evidence suggests

affiliation, gender, and age were also the primary forms of

that the building of states and armies that normally accom¬

social distinction. Competition for access to resources

panied the growth of complex societies came at the cost

tended to occur among groups defined through kinship—

of women’s power and autonomy.

clans, lineages, and the like.

Feminist anthropologists and historians argue that a new

Although scholars classify these cultures as “simple”

dynamic of gender relations was a critical dimension of

or sometimes “stateless” because they do not have highly

early state building. Some argue in a quite straightforward

differentiated organizations of rule or coercion, they are

manner that the “creation of patriarchy” (the title of Gerda

highly complex in many other respects, not least of which

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

is kinship itself. Rules governing who can marry whom, for

239

notable implications for family life and gender relations.

example, and whose families can claim offspring, could be

In both regions marriage was the result of family delibera¬

immensely complicated. Variations in the rules could have

tions informed by land availability, strategies regarding

significant consequences for women’s power—depending,

heirship, and community-enforced norms that evolved to

for example, on whether young women typically stayed near

maintain the local balance between land and population.

their own close kin or moved close to those of their hus¬

Marriage rituals emphasized the significance of transferring

band. In tributary societies in Europe, East Asia, and parts

the bride’s dowry—often movable household goods or

of Central and South America and Africa, elite classes con¬

cash—from her father’s home to her husband’s home. In

trolled resources such as land, water supply, and religious

China a newly married couple typically moved in with the

authority. They also often commanded military forces

groom’s family, whereas in many regions of Europe by the

needed to control these resources and to claim the right to

early modern era the new couple was expected to set up a

collect tribute or taxes from subject populations. Although

household of their own. Moreover, since the young couple

organized political authority in these societies was also

was not expected to begin a new independent household

rooted in part in family and gender systems, these societies

enterprise but rather joined an existing one, marriage could

developed institutions and hierarchies that were not based

and did occur at a younger age in China than in most

exclusively on kinship.

of Europe. This variation holds particular significance for

Evidence from East Africa illustrates some of these pat¬

women’s history, as described later.

terns. Although there were scattered kingdoms in ancient

Among the minority of the population who drew their

times in East Africa, most societies in this region were based

livelihoods from economic spheres such as craft production

on kinship relations. Labor was generally organized accord¬

or trade, familial relations were also closely shaped by the

ing to an age and gender division that presumed that

family business. Most artisans were male, as were the guilds

the family was the normative unit of production and con¬

that organized them in Europe and Asia, but women family

sumption. A relative equality prevailed among adult men

members played key economic roles in artisan households,

in many East African societies; nevertheless, status and

and it was not uncommon for a widow to take over her late

power differentials privileged them over younger men

husband’s business. Evidence pertaining to merchant families

and most women. In most cultures senior men controlled

in Europe and throughout the Baltic and Mediterranean

the more valued resources, such as cattle used for trade and

regions more widely suggests that merchant capital and

bride-price, even where accumulation was limited. Thus

family capital were intertwined; business alliances and fa¬

even where class formation was minimal, gender and age

mily alliances reinforced each other as bases of trust that

hierarchies still could be pervasive and significant.

facilitated long-distance commercial transactions.

Settled agriculture was the basis of more complex tribu¬

Another significant difference that is brought to light by

tary societies, for example, those that had existed for

the comparison between China and Europe is the relation¬

millennia in China or had emerged throughout Europe by

ship between political and religious organizations and ideas

the Middle Ages. Peasant families in both regions worked

in mediating family and gender relations. In China, official

the land and grew crops under systems that required them

Confucian ideology shaped family law and practice; there

to relinquish payments in labor, produce, or cash that

was no autonomous religious authority to counter its influ¬

supported both the state and the small minority of the

ence. In European history, in contrast, there were several

population not engaged in agriculture. Although conditions

periods when conflicts between state and church brought

of land tenure varied widely, in general male heads of

about changes in family life and sometimes even opened up

peasant households strategized to secure claims to farms

the possibility for women to contest male familial authority.

for themselves and their descendants. Medieval and early

For example, during the Protestant Reformation and

modem land tenure strategies reinforced the patrilineal

Catholic Reform of the sixteenth century the relationship

tendencies that were observable in much of China and

between the Catholic Church and the various states of

many regions of Europe, because land—more frequently

Europe was redefined. In many newly Protestant states

than other resources—passed from father to son.

this brought an even closer relationship between church

Land was worked primarily by family members and

and state and, historians argue, a tighter control over

others considered dependents of the head of household.

women within the patriarchal family. In Catholic areas,

As was typical of kinship societies, labor patterns followed

gender and

customary age and gender divisions. Evidence of this can be

reformed; the drive to cloister members of female religious

found, for example, in land tenure contracts that specified

congregations intensified. However, the Catholic Church

service days owed to landlords as part of the rent in “men’s

could also provide women with an alternative to the family.

days” and “women’s days.” These links between the family

In some Catholic regions—such as northern Italy, where

and the agricultural economy in China and Europe had

for reasons of doctrine (the Catholic Church insisted that

sexual relations and marriage were also

240

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

marriage was a sacrament that had to be voluntary for both parties) and reasons of politics (the church grounded its autonomy in parallel institutions such as ecclesiastical courts)—it even became possible for young women to avoid marrying against their will by suing their fathers in church courts. This last comparison is a good reminder of how the implications of family systems for women could depend on the influence of extrafamilial institutions. Woman and Family in the Processes of Global Contact, 1450-1750. Beginning in the fifteenth century the extent and density of cross-cultural contacts among the regions of the globe expanded dramatically and rapidly. Older links, including those connecting East Asia and Europe through the Silk Road and other overland trade routes, intensified with the increasing demand in Europe for trade goods such as spices and textiles from Asia. New connections were forged through the development of maritime travel across the Indian Ocean and then eventually also across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Earlier connections among the cultures of Asia, Europe, and North Africa had made people aware of the variety of living arrangements and systems of family life, gender, and kinship that could be found in the known world. However, the intensification of contact that began in the early fifteenth century circulated awareness of new worlds and cultures. Cross-cultural exchange also brought different family systems into contact with one another, and evidence from these contacts suggests the multiple ways in which family and women’s history formed a significant dimension of world history. Trade relations often involved family bonds and exchanges. On the coast of East Africa, oral history and genealogical traditions describe the origins of coastal city-state dynasties in sagas of cross-cultural marital alliance. The central metaphor of these origin myths is typically a marriage between a foreign trader who arrived by sea from the north and a local king’s daughter. Legitimate political authority was thus linked to genealogical fusion of two families: one who had ruled on land and one who came by sea to trade. The accompanying exchange of wealth through marriage cemented the political bargain. Family and political rituals and political authority in the coastal city-states continued to reinforce the links among mar¬ itime trade, family lineage, and political power. Women were crucial in the origin myths and in the ongoing rituals, but with few exceptions they tended to take passive roles both in the myths and in local power. Indeed, there is evidence that with the intensified Islamization along the Swahili coast that accompanied the establishment of mercantile city-states, women of the elite classes were increasingly sequestered. Trade built and relied on new family types elsewhere in the Indian Ocean as well. Chinese navigators who set out on voyages across the Indian Ocean in the early

fifteenth century to collect tribute were soon followed by Chinese merchants who established far-flung trade colonies. These merchants often formed ethnically mixed families by intermarrying with local women, who then played a key role in facilitating the assimilation of men into these colonies, but the colonies were, following Chinese patrilineal practices, nevertheless often subsequently iden¬ tified as “Chinese.” Early modern conquest and colonization also had a huge impact on family systems. Conquest disrupted and reconfi¬ gured family life in a number of ways: the devastation that conquest brought had effects on mortality, fertility, and family formation; the conquerors brought with them laws, religious systems, and other social formations that differed fundamentally from those of the peoples that they were conquering. And in the most fundamental way, intermar¬ riage and other sexual unions produced new family systems and colonial offspring who were neither indigenous nor colonizers. The most basic processes of social formation in colonial settings—settlement, displacement, accommoda¬ tion, resistance, racial formation—worked themselves out in families. The Spanish conquest of Mexico offers a case in point. Warfare and devastating disease brought demographic catastrophe. As in the wake of other catastrophes—such as the Black Death of medieval Europe—recovery often lent women who survived at least temporarily increased powers. There is evidence of increased control by women over property and inheritance in conquest-era Mexico, but Spanish rule soon increased the powers of male household heads. Another feature of Spanish rule in Mexico, echoing patterns already alluded to in the case of long-distance merchants in the Indian Ocean, was the formation of cross-ethnic or cross-racial unions that were asymmetric with respect to gender. Other aspects of the family system also changed after the conquest. The previously early age at marriage rose as unions with very young girls were proscribed following European customs. The establishment of Catholicism as the official religion of New Spain brought other new mar¬ riage practices as well. As was true in some regions of Europe, for example, evidence from early colonial Mexico suggests that young couples who were being coerced into marriage could appeal to clergy against their families. Even if these changes were limited largely to urban areas, a new family system, with new limits on and opportunities for women, accompanied colonization. Changing Labor Regimes: Slavery, New Serfdom, Proto-Industrial Labor. Of all the forms of impact on family life of the European expansion of the early modern era, none was more devastating than the enslavement and transport of West Africans to the New World. During the course of the eighteenth century, about sixty thousand

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

Slave Families. Five generations on Smith’s Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

captured Africans entered the Western Hemisphere each year as slaves. Those captured felt the worst consequences, of course, but the taking of slaves also devastated the regions and the people left behind. Although both men and women were captured and sold into slavery, the disproportionate enslavement of young men brought havoc into family systems in areas of widespread slave raiding. In some areas skewed sex ratios and impoverishment through the loss of labor made family formation difficult. Increased rates of polygamy and greater demands on women’s labor also ensued. Slaves who arrived on plantations in North America— after the grueling passage from Africa, during which enor¬ mous numbers died—attempted to establish a form of family life and kinship under the dehumanizing conditions of slavery and plantation life. Against all odds, slaves on many North American plantations developed durable kinship networks and a fragile family life, one that was different from that of their ancestors in Africa but also different from that of North American slave owners and the free population of North America more broadly. Many slave families from the better-documented period on the eve of emancipation were founded on apparently durable marriages, despite the constant threat (often realized) that

241

families would be disrupted through the sale of one or more members. Planters in some regions of the U.S. South promoted marital unions to encourage reproduction among their slaves, and also because they sought to justify slave ownership on moral grounds. Nevertheless, even under more paternalistic slave owners the possibility of sale loomed large, as did the vulnerability of slave women to sexual attacks by owners. Slave women bore their first children earlier, on average, than did other women in the United States. As bad as conditions on North American plantations were, in the Caribbean and in Brazil, where conditions were even worse and mortality rates among slaves were considerably higher, even a semblance of family life was almost impossible. Plantation agriculture is associated primarily with the regions of European colonies and plantation agriculture in the New World. However, other forms of reorganizing labor systems could be found in other world regions affected by the rising world (but especially European) demand for agricultural products and basic industrial products such as textiles. In the Indian Ocean, mercantile elites of southern Arabia, newly ascendant politically after the overthrow of Islamic religious rule, had begun by the seventeenth century to establish a plantation regime attuned to the expanding world demand for products such as dates and spices. Soon they, too, were relying heavily on the labor of slaves, in this case mostly slaves captured along East African caravan routes. This new form of slavery was to some extent built upon older traditions of slavery in Islamic lands. As was the case among free peoples, the social status and condition of slaves were bound up with particular local forms of kinship law and family practices. Under Islamic law, for example, free men who married slave concubines were required to free them at death if they bore children. The children of free fathers were deemed free. Thus servitude was not deemed a perpetual and inheritable status as it was in other forms of slavery, such as that practiced in the Americas. Nevertheless, the new forms of slavery that resulted from the expan¬ sion of commercial plantation agriculture in the eastern Indian Ocean was far more brutal than many earlier slave systems in the region had been. Merchant capitalism of the early modern era took many forms, and labor regimes were adapted to different political circumstances and different market niches. Slavery was preferred in the European-owned commercial plantations of the rims of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, but agricul¬ tural labor regimes were also transformed in Europe. In eastern Europe grain production controlled by aristocratic landowners evolved in the face of market opportunities created by the growth of urban populations in western Europe and fed by Baltic shipping routes. Facilitated by

242

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

political compromises between landlords and state-building dynasties, from the fifteenth century onward formerly free peasants in the Baltic and trans-Elbian regions of the Holy Roman Empire were increasingly subjected to “new serf¬ dom” on plantation-like grain estates. New rules of labor discipline and land tenure tied peasants to particular es¬ tates, put them more tightly under the juridical control of estate-owning Junkers, and eroded their ability to own and work land in their own right on family farms. In many regions of the East, a new family economy evolved that was based not on household subsistence production but on wage labor on large estates. Farther to the west, merchant entrepreneurs followed still another strategy for creating and capturing new markets for textiles. Densely settled regions of peasant agriculture in the Rhineland and parts of Switzerland emerged as clas¬ sic zones of proto-industry or “putting out”—a form of industrial organization whereby merchants advanced raw materials such as wool to rural households whose members would then work them up into finished products for sale by the merchant. State authorities throughout central Europe worked with or as entrepreneurs to establish and reg¬ ulate rural putting-out industries. In some cases they also established state “manufactories”—large-scale handicraft workshops—for the production of luxury goods such as porcelain, tobacco, and silk to sell on the world market and to prevent their own people from buying expensive imports. Growth in the commercial agricultural and industrial sectors brought to some new wealth that was visible in new consumption habits. Even the consumption habits of the poor changed; in one proto-industrial weaving village in Wiirttemberg, girls from relatively poor weaving house¬ holds were bringing the occasional silk item along with their dowries by the end of the eighteenth century. But these changes brought new tensions as well, often manifested in family and gender relations. The intensifica¬ tion of agricultural labor and the introduction of puttingout work disrupted traditional gender and generational divisions of labor and brought increasing conflict to over¬ crowded households and communities. On the one hand, the intense labor that these new industries required could be provided by peasant sons and, especially, daughters needing a portion to marry. On the other hand, the very availability of income outside of the traditional peasant household economy seems, in some regions at least, to have loosened family and community oversight of sexuality and marriage, often to the detriment of pregnant women. Even though some peasants, artisans, and putting-out workers prospered during the economic expansion that peaked in the late eighteenth century, the unevenly distributed social costs of economic growth were manifested in increased workloads, especially for women, and rising rates of infant mortality, illegitimacy, divorce, and poverty.

The Emergence of Industrial Capitalism. Historians and social theorists have long been interested in the relation¬ ship between the emergence of modern industrial capital¬ ism and the history of family life. Pioneering works on the history of the family and women’s history in Europe and the United States were structured around questions of how the disappearance of productive labor from households affected family life and women’s status. Although the long¬ term improvement in living standards in the West brought about by increases in productivity is clear, many historians point to a long period of increased class and gender inequality that industrial capitalism brought with it. It is also clear that huge regional disparities across the globe have resulted from the combination of industrial capitalism and European imperialism; thus the impact of modern industrial development on women’s history has also varied tremendously by world region. In Europe, where industrial capitalism emerged toward the middle of the eighteenth century, female labor played a key role. In part this seems to have been a result of a pattern of late marriage common in many regions of Europe in the early modern era. Widespread customs in many European peasant communities discouraged marriage before the couple commanded the resources required for economic independence. In the case of the artisan, this traditionally meant having a shop and holding the status of a master. In the case of the peasant couple, this meant having a house and land and the basic equipment required to farm it. It was the responsibility of the family and the community to over¬ see courtship, betrothal, and marriage to ensure that these conditions were met. Late marriage was also rooted in the practice of neo-locality—that is, the expectation that a bride and groom would set up their own household at or soon after marriage. As a result of relatively late marriage, European young people of both sexes experienced a significant interim between puberty and marriage. The contrast between early modern Europe and other world regions meant that teenage girls were available for employment outside the familial household (either natal or marital) to a degree uncommon elsewhere. A period of paid service, as an apprentice in a farm household or as a domestic servant in an urban house¬ hold, was characteristic of both male and female European youth in the life-cycle phase preceding marriage. Not only was girls’ work ubiquitous throughout Europe between 1700 and 1900, but girls were often and in many regions engaged in the new types of labor necessary for the economic transformations that characterized these years. Rural maids milked cows, of course, but they also were increasingly put to other tasks necessitated by the move of animal husbandry from pasture to barn that accompa¬ nied the growth of intensive agriculture beginning in the eighteenth century in many regions of Europe. Moreover,

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

Chinese Family Meal. Unattributed photograph,

they were essential as workers in the fields, where their weeding and hoeing proved crucial to the success of new crops such as potatoes and sugar beets. In the realm of industrial development, their spinning was critical to the growing prosperity of textile-producing regions. The labor of women and girls, increasingly located outside the home, was taken for granted in many industrial sectors. Even when child labor and the labor of married women came under attack throughout Europe from the middle to the later nineteenth century, women’s and girls’ labor remained a central component of both working-class family strategies and entrepreneurial strategies. This was not true in most other regions of the world before the end of the nineteenth century. The traditional Chinese family system continued to be characterized by early age at marriage, nearly universal marriage for women, and virilocal residence—that is, a newly married couple normally resided with the groom’s parents. Until the twen¬ tieth century Chinese couples married much younger on average than did Europeans. Whereas in the nineteenth century all but 20 percent of Chinese young women were married by age twenty, among European populations between 60 and 80 percent of young women were still unmarried at that age. Early marriage in China meant that the category of “youth,” which was so significant for Eur¬ opean economic history, had no precise counterpart in China. A young Chinese woman worked, but the location of her work was domestic—in the household of either her father or her husband.

243

c. 1890. Mary Evans Picture Library

The domestic location of young women’s labor in the Chinese context also had implications for the particular way in which Chinese cottage industries were organized as well as for how early modern economic development occurred in the two regions. This comparison of economic development in Europe and China suggests that, despite apparent economic similarities between the two regions on the eve of industrialization, regional differences of both timing of marriage and residency of young women before and after marriage persisted and held particular significance for subsequent forms of development. The family and mar¬ ital status of the young women who played such a signifi¬ cant a role in the workforce (and in particular in the textile industry that was key to early industrial development in both Europe and China) was a major factor in determining the varying paths to development followed in China and Europe in the centuries of proto-industrial growth and early industrialization. The particular significance of women’s labor to the pro¬ cess of European industrialization grew out of preexistent family and gender patterns. It rested as well in the compet¬ itive advantages that women’s labor outside the home brought in the global struggle for domination of various textile markets. New technologies that revolutionized tex¬ tile production beginning in the eighteenth century were developed with an eye toward a potential workforce that was imagined as young, feminine, and mobile. This puts more recent developments into a historical perspective. Some of the aspects of contemporary globalization from

244

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

a feminist point of view have been its impact on gender divisions of labor and women’s wage earning in the context of local and regional economic development. Now, as dur¬ ing the early Industrial Revolution, entrepreneurial and state activities that reorder production and construct mar¬ kets reflect and affect gender and family relations. The impact of so-called economic development on women of a particular region varies, depending on such factors as the age and gender of the workers recruited into the globalizing industries, the allocation of labor within the context of family power relations, and women’s control over their earnings. Women’s work, in particular the work of young women, continues to play a key role in economic development. Conversely, changes in gender divisions of labor resulting from global capitalism have also had enormous conse¬ quences on family structure. In some cases this has meant that, as women’s economic contributions became more valuable, paid work could serve as a basis for empowerment within family structures. But global dynamics of invest¬ ment and disinvestment can also marginalize women. For example, household-formation strategies symptomatic of or associated with poverty—the prominence of mothercentered households that do not and cannot rely on a steady male wage or male presence but instead rely on support groups based on ties of actual or fictive kinship among women—are becoming more common in the Caribbean, Brazil, urban regions of southern Africa, and other areas where economies of makeshift produce new gender asymmetries. In many such cultures, men’s economic marginality, that is, their inability to be the breadwinners, corrodes patriarchal practice even if leaving patriarchal va¬ lues intact. Women often regard men as a burden; they are relatively autonomous but at the cost of impoverishment. Modern Political Systems. Changes in economic organization have thus had enormous consequences for women and family life. So, too, have modern forms of poli¬ tical organization and authority. New ideas about political community and about the kinds of individuals needed for it—in the eighteenth century these ideals were often formulated in terms of republicanism with its particular variants in the United States and France—rested on the socialization of a new type of individual and family life. An intensified mother-child relationship was at the heart of the new family model and practices that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe and North America, especially in urban, middle-class milieus. Experts argued that children should be under the constant surveillance of trustworthy adults because their impressionable minds needed to be shaped by exposure to learning tasks commensurate with their developmental capacities. Nationalist ideologies that emerged around the time of the French Revolution and quickly spread throughout Europe by the mid-nineteenth

century typically glorified women primarily as mothers of the nation,” contributing even further to the ideological and practical relegation of women and children to domestic and “nonproductive” roles. By the early nineteenth century, mother-centered ideolo¬ gies of parenting had largely replaced earlier emphases on the father’s close control over children. Male authority remained, but it was exercised at more distance from the domestic sphere. Home and workplace were increasingly segregated; the home came to be associated with women and children and was ideologically separated from the eco¬ nomic world. In practice the two spheres were interlinked in many ways, such as through the middle-class women s dowries that financed family businesses, women’s repro¬ ductive activities that created new workers and made them fit for work on a daily basis, and sweated labor at home through which women earned cash. Moreover, the idea¬ lized family life centered on intensive mothering was hardly feasible for poorer working-class women even though they increasingly felt the weight of new expectations and of negative judgments should they fail to live up to them. Ironically, middle-class women themselves, with a confi¬ dence drawn at least in part from the self-esteem that they drew from the new emphasis on motherhood, increasingly sought to take their maternal expertise into public life through such organizations as abolitionist or alcohol reform groups in the United States and kindergarten or prostitution reform associations in Germany. Not only did such activities bring middle-class women into organizations that eventually were the basis of First Wave feminism; they also fed into support for state inter¬ vention into family life when family life was deemed defec¬ tive. State involvement in the family drew on a variety of motives and models. In some cases, where new feminist sensibilities predominated, state intervention sometimes empowered mothers through the payment of mothers’ pen¬ sions or maternity benefits. But where more masculine forms of authority prevailed, state intervention into family life aimed to support paternal authority in the form of payments to fathers of large families, social insurance for male workers, and the like. From another direction, workers’ movements such as so¬ cialist parties called for reform of family life and the creation of collective institutions such as consumer cooperatives, child-care facilities, and protective legislation for mothers. In part these demands emerged from the incompatibility between idealized roles for women and family models that were impossible to attain in working-class milieus. Socialist parties—although in practice never as egalitarian as as¬ serted in the writings of Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, and other theorists—were among the first to mobilize women workers, as well as working-class wives and mothers, around new visions of family life. The emergence

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

of modern welfare states in Europe under the impulse of both middle-class social reforms and socialist pressures is thus also in large measure a product of family and gender tensions of industrial society. Socialist states—first the Soviet Union, and later in East¬ ern Europe, China, and postcolonial Africa and Latin America—held up their alternative models of gender and the family as important indicators of their superiority over capitalist societies. The converse was also true—as argued, for example, by Elaine May, who has demonstrated how the nuclear family model was especially strongly enshrined in the United States during the emergence of the Cold War as a means of waging ideological battle against many world regions in the wake of the Russian Revolution. The case of Germany is also telling in this respect. Family life was organized very differently in capitalist West Germany and Communist East Germany between 1945 and 1989; reunification in 1989 following the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European Communist regimes brought many political conflicts around gender and family life. East German women who were involved in the democratization movement of the 1980s expected to continue their full participation in the labor market and also to be supported by generous maternity leaves and state-supported child care. They sought political reform but not the loss of what they had regarded as women’s rights under the socia¬ list gender regime. Not surprisingly, then, some of the bitterest political struggles of the 1990s revolved around divergent views on abortion, child care, and female employ¬ ment—struggles that sometimes even pitted West German feminists against their East German “stepsisters.” The ways in which family and gender relations were implicated in European imperialism have only lately begun to be recognized by historians. Recent scholarship has shown the many ways in which imperialist projects relied on the reconstruction of family life, gender, and sexuality as much as on political and economic life in the colonies. Moreover, in the context of imperialism, global inequalities, racial and gender ideologies, and colonial domination re¬ inforced one another. Family policies were critical to man¬ agement of colonies. In India, for example, British colonial authorities often justified colonial rule in terms of tradi¬ tional practices that oppressed women. Family and gender relations provided British men and women with support for the argument in favor of Britain’s “civilizing mission.” In African colonies, conflicts between various indigenous peoples and European colonizers about gender and family relations were also an important dimension of colonial regimes and anticolonial struggles. These struggles generally inserted themselves into ongoing gender and generational tensions implicit in precolonial family systems. In Ghana, for example, colonial efforts to transform the economy to the benefit of the British imperial economy and to

245

transform mother-child relations along the lines of European models exacerbated gender tensions around the relative economic contributions of men and women. In East Africa, German, British, and other European colonial powers confronted a variety of family and gender systems. Missions were a particularly charged site of contest over family and gender relations. Missionaries disrupted prevail¬ ing gender and generational hierarchies in several ways. As is demonstrated in the research of Derek Peterson, for example, in Gikuyuland (now central Kenya) this disrup¬ tion became evident with the first cohorts of converts in the early twentieth century, especially at the point of mar¬ riage. Proper, virtuous marriages were felt by many mis¬ sionaries to be the basis of the Christian society. But missionaries’ attempts to Christianize marriage challenged male elders and their prerogatives, and in particular chal¬ lenged the practice of young men who were depending on receiving a bride-price from their elders in order to marry. In the context of imperialism, Christian conversion exacerbated generational tension apparent at the moment of marriage. With the encouragement of Christian missions, Christian young women and young men opposed such traditional practices as polygamy and male elders’ control over timing and arrangement of marriages. British women in the colonies felt increasingly empowered to speak on behalf of Indian women, effectively silencing Indian women themselves, including Indian reformers— men and women—who envisioned paths toward modernity that they increasingly defined in anticolonial and nationalist terms. Among other long-term consequences of imperialist deployment of Western gender ideas to justify colonial rule was the emergence of explicitly antifeminist sentiments as¬ sociated with anticolonial nationalisms, not only in India but also in the Middle East and elsewhere. The long-term consequences have been both to attach nationalism in the postcolonial world ideologically to antifeminism—as is apparent in recent Hindu fundamentalist mobilization in India, for example—and to discourage political alliances between women’s movements in the West and those emer¬ ging in the postcolonial world. Toward Transnational Families. The large-scale global migrations that have been a common feature of world history since the fifteenth century provide another recur¬ rent link between the process of global history and women and family life. Many of the phenomena discussed earlier, such as slavery, merchant travels, and colonization, involve the movement of individuals. The slave trade that brought millions of Africans as coerced migrants to the New World between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries was, demographically speaking, the largest single move¬ ment of peoples in the early modern era. Between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, international migrations of a more voluntary sort, although driven largely

246

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

by economic marginality, brought 34.5 million people from Europe to the Americas. During the same period about 50 million Asians migrated from their native regions to distant areas of settlement in other regions of Asia or overseas. Migration patterns—whether short or long distance—are keyed to family processes. In the European case, migration has been viewed as an element of family strategy. Often sons and daughters went on the road not only to seek their own fortunes but also to earn money to send home. Again the roots of some forms of migration trace back to life-cyclic labor typical of European peasant economies. Daughters took positions as domestic servants in cities, a type of labor migration that provided a major contribu¬ tion to rural-to-urban migration in the process of Europe’s urbanization. Sons became itinerant farm laborers or arti¬ sanal journeymen. Later, unmarried young women moved to factory towns. Overseas migration to the Americas often replicated at greater distances the pattern of familychain migration noted by historians in the earlier forms of movement of people within Europe. In the late twentieth century the largest internal migration in world history took place in China when up to 200 million peasants—men and women in equal numbers—left their homes to seek work in the cities. Although young men dominated many overseas migrant streams moving out of Europe, many women migrated as well, sometimes unaccompanied by male family members. In this regard the Irish migration of the second half of the nineteenth century was pioneering. In Ireland economic catastrophe followed what had been promising develop¬ ment. The orientation toward the market centralized linen production in a small region of the north and under¬ mined the older local household strategy that rested on a combination of female industry and male agricultural employment in wider regions of the country. Increasingly impoverished households had little recourse when the fail¬ ure of the potato crops in the late 1840s brought famine. The ultimate solution for those who survived the famine was emigration. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Ireland’s unmarried young women were crossing the ocean by the thousands in search of employment in the United States and elsewhere. In doing so they set another world-historical precedent: no previous migratory stream had included so large a proportion of unmarried young women crossing the ocean on their own (although there is also evidence of a transatlantic marriage market bringing a smaller stream of prospective immigrant brides to North America in around the same era). Similar migrant streams followed this first one, from other world regions that, like Ireland, were drawn into the global economy on disadvantaged and precarious terms. Recent streams of young domestic servants from the Philippines to North America and the Middle East, and of

sex workers from Thailand to Japan, are contemporary manifestations of this phenomenon. Family systems give migration a particular shape and are in turn altered when migration on a large scale sends certain family merhbers abroad. The patriarchal structure of the Chinese family had particular consequences for Chi¬ nese migration patterns of the modern era. Intermarriage and community building among overseas Chinese male merchants in the early modern period have already been mentioned. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, huge migrations took Chinese emigrants to diverse locations throughout the Pacific, the Americas, and elsewhere. Be¬ cause of sex imbalances resulting from elite polygamy and lower female survival rates, single men from lower classes often were especially likely to migrate to seek employment as free or indentured labor on plantations or in mines in the Americas or on railroads in the Americas or Russia. Nevertheless, as Leslie Moch has cautioned scholars, it is important neither to misinterpret the evidence nor to read it from perspectives that take certain European family models for granted. As with other migrant streams, paying particular attention to women’s role in Chinese migrant communities and larger family networks—including family members who stay as well as those who move—will no doubt continue to alter our understanding of the relationships between women’s and family history in the most global of processes. The world wars of the twentieth century, increasing migration restrictions, and the Cold War altered patterns and discouraged truly global migrations of the sort that took place in the nineteenth century, but by the end of the twentieth century it was becoming apparent that a new era of migrations—legal and illegal, economic and political—was once again under way. In the new era of globalization and migration, families are restructuring themselves in many parts of the world through new patterns of mobility. Transnational family systems are more vibrant than ever in the early twenty-first century. [See also Concubinage; Divorce; Marriage; Matriarchy; Matrilocality and Patrilocality; Migration; Patriarchy; Sexu¬ ality; and Stratification.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Ann Taylor. Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800-1914. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Allen, Ann Taylor. “Feminism, Social Science, and the Meanings of Modernity: The Debate on the Origin of the Family in Europe and the United States, 1860-1914.” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1085-1113. Allman, Jean, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi, eds. Women in African Colonial Histories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Chaudhuri, Nupur, and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Bloomington:

FAMILY: Comparative History and Evolution

Indiana University Press, 1992. See in particular Antoinette M. Burton’s “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and ‘the Indian Woman,’ 1865-1915” (pp. 137-157). Clendinnen, Inga. “Yucatec Maya Women and the Spanish Con¬ quest: Role and Ritual in Historical Reconstruction.” Journal of Social History 15 (1982): 427-442. Cohen, Myron L. House United, House Divided: The Chinese Fam¬ ily in Taiwan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Collier, Jane F., and Michelle Z. Rosaldo. “Politics and Gender in Simple Societies.” In Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construc¬ tion of Gender and Sexuality, edited by Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, pp. 275-329. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Couturier Edith. “Women and the Family in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: Law and Practice.” Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985): 294-304. Dahlberg, Frances. “Women as Shapers of the Human Adapta¬ tion.” In Woman the Gatherer, edited by Frances Dahlberg, pp. 75-120. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. London: Hutchinson, 1987. De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Ebrey, Patricia B. “The Chinese Family and the Spread of Confucian Values.” In The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modem Adaptation, edited by Gilbert Rozman, pp. 45-83. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Fedigan, Linda Marie. “The Changing Roles of Women in Models of Human Evolution.” Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986): 25-66. Ferrante,- Lucia. “Marriage and Women’s Subjectivity in a Patri¬ linear System: The Case of Early Modern Bologna.” In Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History, edited by Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner, Birgitte Soland, and Ulricke Strasser. New York: Routledge, 1996. Ferree, Myra Marx. “Patriarchies and Feminisms: The Two Women’s Movements of Unified Germany.” Social Politics 2, no. 1 (1995): 10-24. Gabaccia, Donna R., and Franca Iacovetta, eds. Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Goody, Jack. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976. Hartman, Mary S. The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Jaschok, Maria, and Suzanne Miers. Women and Chinese Patri¬ archy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994. Kaplan, Marion A., ed. The Marriage Bargain: Women and Dowries in European History. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family, and Ritual in Renais¬ sance Italy. Translated by Lydia Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Germany. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Koponen, Juhani. People and Production in Late Precolonial Tanzania: History and Structures. Helsinki: Finnish Society of Development Studies, 1988.

247

Lavrin, Asuncion, ed. Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Mani, Lata. “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colo¬ nial India.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, pp. 233-253. New Delhi, India: Kali for Women, 1989. Mann, Susan. Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eight¬ eenth Century. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Maynes, Mary Jo. “Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Historical Perspective: European Spinsters in the International Textile Industry, 1750-1880.” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 47-66. Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Inter¬ pretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991. Middleton, John. The World of the Swahili: An African Mercantile Civilization. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Mitterauer, Michael, and Reinhard Sieder. The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Moch, Leslie. “Connecting Migration and World History, 1840-1940: Demographic Patterns, Family Systems and Gender.” International Review of Social History 52 (2007): 97-104. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Schol¬ arship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30 (1988): 61-88. Mushaben, Joyce, Sara Lennox, and Geoffrey Giles. “Women, Men, and Unification: Gender Politics and the Abortion Struggle since 1989.” In After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities, edited by Konrad Jarausch, pp. 137-172. Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1997. Peterson, Derek R. Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2004. Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Robertson, Claire C., and Martin A. Klein, eds. Women and Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Refor¬ mation Augsburg. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Ross, Ellen. Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Scheck, Raffael. Mothers of the Nation: Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Schroeder, Susan, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett eds. In¬ dian Women of Early Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Seed, Patricia. To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988. Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester, U.IC: Manchester University Press, 1995. Strasser, Ulrike. State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Strathern, Marilyn. “Domesticity and the Denigration of Women.” In Rethinking Women’s Roles: Perspectives from the Pacific, edited by Denise O’Brien and Sharon W. Tiffany, pp. 13-31. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

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Swantz, Marja-Liisa, with the assistance of Salome Mjema and Zenya Wild. Blood, Milk, and Death: Body Symbols and the Power of Regeneration among the Zaramo of Tanzania. Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1995. Thornton, John K. “Sexual Demography: The Impact of the Slave Trade on Family Structure.” In Slave Trades, 1500-1800: Globalization of Forced Labour, edited by Patrick Manning, pp. 133-143. Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, 1996. Tilly, Louise A., and Michael Adas. Industrialization and Gender Inequality. Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1993. Tilly, Louise A., and Joan Scott. Women, Work, and Family. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978. Waltner, Ann. Getting an Heir: Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1990. Waltner, Ann, and Mary Jo Maynes. “Family History as World History.” In Women’s History in Global Perspective, edited by Bonnie Smith, pp. 48-91. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Wildenthal, Lora. German Women for Empire, 1884-1945. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Mary Jo Maynes

FAMINES. See Diseases and Illnesses.

FANG JUNYING (1884-1923), Chinese revolutionary and educator. Fang Junying’s life was interwoven with the dramatic events that shaped her era—the 1911 revolution and the formal sanctioning of female education—and also with the lives of imposing political and cultural figures of the late imperial and early republican eras, including the female revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin (1875-1907) and the educational reformer Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940). Fang’s thirst for education took her to Japan and France, while her commitment to radical political change in her native country inspired her participation in revolutionary orga¬ nizations, assassination squads, and antigovemment upris¬ ings in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou. Her life experience was ultimately both marked by educational suc¬ cess and marred by political failure. From a learned family and recognized as gifted at an early age, Fang was among the first young Chinese women granted the opportunity to study in Japan. Arriving in Tokyo in 1901, she studied diligently, becoming the first Chinese graduate of a Japanese women’s normal school, the Tokyo Joshi Koto Shihan Gakko, in early 1911. She herself served as the head of the Fujian Women’s Normal School (Fujian Ntizi Shifan Xuexiao) in her native Fuzhou following the 1911 revolution. In 1912 she received government sup¬ port to study in France, where she not only learned the French language and earned a degree in mathematics from Bordeaux University but continued to study classical

Chinese language and poetry. She was called back to China in 1922 by one of her earlier revolutionary collaborators, Wang Jingwei (1883-1944), to teach in Guangzhou. Shortly after her arrival in Japan in 1901, Fang became a politically engaged member of the radical Chinese overseas community. She joined the first Chinese revolutionary alliance, the Tongmeng Hui, in Tokyo in 1905—the year that it was founded—and at a Yokohama factory she studied the art of bomb making. A number of the revolu¬ tionary ventures that she eventually became involved in failed, however, some dramatically. She served as part of the Hong Kong rearguard in an aborted attempt to assassi¬ nate the Chinese prince regent Zai Feng (1883-1952) in 1910, and she helped smuggle arms to revolutionaries in¬ volved in the Guangzhou Uprising of April 1911. Seventytwo of those revolutionaries, known as the seventy-two martyrs of Huanghuaguang, were ultimately killed, among them Fang’s younger brother Fang Shendong (1886-1911). This event deeply affected Junying as she struggled with survivor’s guilt and attempted to shield Shendong’s wife and young son, who were living in Japan, from the devas¬ tating news. Fang Junying’s own life ended early and tragically. Shortly before leaving France in 1922 she was involved in a car accident that left her with a severe brain concussion. When she returned to Shanghai, still suffering the effects of the accident, unable because of warlord fighting to reach the teaching job that awaited her, and possibly depressed by unrequited romantic feelings for Wang Jingwei, the weight of political disappointment apparently overwhelmed her. On 14 June 1923 she consumed a lethal dose of morphine, taking her own life at the age of thirty-nine. [See also China, subentry Modern Period; and Qiu Jin.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Keung, Lee Kam. “Fang Junying.” Translated by W. Zhang. In Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Qing Period, 1644-1911, edited by Clara Wing-chung Ho, pp. 34-37. Armonk, N.Y., and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Li Yu-ning. “Xinhai geming xianjin Fang Junying niishi” (Fang Junying, a Progressive Woman in the 1911 Revolution). Zhuanji wenxue 38, no. 5 (May 1981): 16-19. Joan Judge

FASCISM. The term “fascism” refers to a political ideol¬ ogy that assumed a variety of incarnations in the first half of the twentieth century. Between the two world wars, fascist political movements were founded in both eastern and western Europe, as well as in states of the Western Hemisphere and in Africa and Asia, although only in Europe did these movements take power. Gender ideologies shaped the ideals and goals of the movements, and, to

FASCISM

varying degrees, women participated in and were affected by fascist programs and practices. Historical Interpretations and Debates. Since the close of World War II, study of the history of fascism has increased unabated, and shifts in topics and interpretations have provoked new insights and frequent debates. An earlier focus on the highest levels of social, economic, and political power has expanded to include detailed social histories of everyday life in local settings. Additionally, the explosion of cultural history has provided insights into how the parties and regimes constructed meanings of fascism, and how those meanings were received and adapted by the populace. The result has been a much greater presence of gender and women’s history in our understanding of fascist organizations, activities, and ideas. From this energetic outpouring of research, many schol¬ ars now acknowledge that certain aspects of life under fascism represented continuities from earlier eras and cannot be explained simply by fascist ideology. Similarly, many studies now emphasize that fascist parties and states were not always monolithic or homogeneous; rather, they were often riven by rivalries and contests, with the result that fascist policies sometimes conflicted or were unevenly enforced. These realizations have encouraged debate about the nature of support for the parties and the regimes, and the degree to which individual will and agency could be expressed. This latter point has had particular resonance among historians who debate the relationship of women to fascism. Were women accomplices and supporters or victims of fascist misogynist policies and practices? Was it possible to be a feminist and a fascist? The most recent wisdom suggests that we should avoid either/or categorizations when dealing with women’s behaviors and understandings. We must factor in differences of race, class, and age among women and acknowledge that individual women can behave in contradictory ways or change their actions and beliefs over time. Simultaneously, we can recognize that there were fascist acts, ideas, and policies that in some way affected all women regardless of their differences. General Characteristics of Fascism. National histories and economic, social, and political conditions produced a variety of fascisms. The Italian Fascist Party (PNF) and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, or the Nazi Party), the largest parties, held power for a significant period of time. Because of their political success and the breadth and depth of their programs and ideologies, they are understandably at the center of studies of fascism. Other movements were often influenced by the Italian and German regimes, and the entire phenomenon of fascism was part of a broader spectrum of right-wing nationalist politics that developed globally after World War I. In the broadest possible terms, fascism was a

249

response to the crises that were a legacy of World War I; the movements promised national renewal or rebirth, abolition or resolution of class conflict in the interests of national unity, and a new social order. Propaganda, regulation, and force were tools of the one-party fascist state that opposed democracy and embraced antiliberalism and anti-Communism. Race and ethnicity became important markers for inclusion or exclusion in the national community, even as the fascists created mass organizations and attempted to mobilize all social groups, including women. Strong family life and social order were essential to national regeneration and were guaranteed in masculinist fascist rhetoric that reaffirmed differences between men and women. Public policies placed the health of children and family in women’s hands but simultaneously expected women to be responsi¬ ble to the nation, not only as mothers and homemakers but also as volunteers, social workers, and consumers, and these national duties helped to politicize the private sphere. Above all, fascist ideology was always mutable or adaptable, and its programs frequently were eclectic or pragmatic. For women, contradictions between ideology and practice and conflicting needs of fascism sometimes had unintended consequences. Fascist Mobilization of Women. Most fascist move¬ ments created women’s organizations and pulled women into national politics and programs. Women rarely had access to the centers of political power or party leadership, but they were effectively mobilized in a wide variety of affiliated women’s groups and were expected to contribute to the successes of the regime and the nation. Although never the equals of male political figures, the female leaders of women’s associations gained national recognition and influence in their own groups, and they supported fascist ideology and goals. When the first fascist band was created in Milan in March 1919, only nine women were included, but as the movement expanded so did the numbers of Fasci Femminili (women’s sections) of the PNF. By 1929 there were three thousand such sections, with more than a hundred thousand members, and by 1942 the female membership of the Fasci Femminili had reached one million. In Germany the National Socialist Frauenschaft (Women’s League) was founded in 1931 and by 1935 had more than two million members. Fascist movements in Poland and Croatia in the late 1920s made efforts to organize women’s branches, and the women’s sections of the British Union of Fascists and the Spanish Falange, founded in 1933 and 1934, respectively, became important party auxiliaries. Women joined a variety of French Fascist leagues in the 1920s, but when the extreme right came to power in the Vichy regime after 1940, women were not directly orga¬ nized, and the National Revolution, which focused on

250

FASCISM

work, family, and country, envisioned only very traditional roles for women. As parties gained strength they established more control over their affiliated organizations and, once in control of the government, would eliminate competing organizations and pull ever-broader sectors of society into their political orbit. By the late 1920s the Fasci Femminili in Italy were put under the direct control of the secretary of the PNF; their publications were monitored by the party, and their leaders chosen from above. This became the pattern for most of the fascist movements. In the constitution of the British Union of Fascists, women district leaders were subordinate to their male counterparts, and their activities were usually deter¬ mined by the male hierarchy of the party. In Germany, with Nazi assumption of power in 1933, a wide variety of existing women’s organizations (including the large and well-established League of German Women’s Associations) were given the choice of being absorbed into the Nazi women’s front or disbanding. The league’s leadership opted to disband rather than submit to fascist leadership, but other middle-class women leaders enthusiastically accepted the Nazi invitation. They often ended up competing with one another for leadership positions and interpreting and implementing directives from the male hierarchy above them. Fascists made every effort to link all “good” citizens to the state through a multiplicity of organizations and programs and to exclude others on the basis of race, ethnicity, and political affiliation. Young men and women were targeted by groups such as the Hitler Youth and the German League of Girls, the Italian association for girls (Piccole Italiane), and the fascist organization of university students. Working women were often pulled into fascist labor organizations or in some cases organized separately according to the work they did. In Italy the Massaie Rurali, an organization of housewives and farmwomen, was made a part of the Fasci Femminili and by 1939 had 1.5 million members. Such organizations educated and acculturated their members to the ideals and goals of fascism and encouraged women to participate in national programs and campaigns that would serve the state and help to build popular support for the regimes. Without question the fascists of all sorts insisted that women’s primary responsibility was to bear and raise the next generation of citizens, but they had an additional obligation; as one Nazi woman official remarked in 1940, “Woman’s place is in the home—but since the whole of Germany is our home we must serve her wherever we can best do so” (quoted in Durham). Women’s other duties included making households healthy and efficient, developing and running a variety of social welfare and leisure services, displaying and preser¬ ving national cultural traditions, and working where they were needed. The majority of women’s public activities fell

within the areas of social assistance and welfare, education, domestic science, and health care, all of which predated the rise of fascism. Most of this work fit comfortably within traditional spheres of appropriate women’s activity, but because it Yas carried out under state direction and for national interests, it was invested with public, political sig¬ nificance. As one Italian woman, Piera Gattestchi Fondelli, wrote later, in 1981, “I witnessed our nation’s most beauti¬ ful era. The twenty-year period of Mussolini. I had the honor of his trust, and I believe that until the very end, I fulfilled the lofty responsibilities assigned to me, serving with honesty and fervor” (in Luciano Garibaldi, Le soldatesse di Mussolini [Milan: Mursia, 1995], p. 137; translated by the author). Fondelli joined the Italian Fascists in 1921, served in various capacities in the women’s organizations, and then in 1944 was named general of the brigade of the Servicio Ausiliario (Auxiliary Service, SA) in the Italian Social Republic (RSI). Many of these efforts of women also constituted Fascist attempts to “go to the people” (the phrase used to describe the Italian campaign begun in 1932) as part of the push to solidify a mass base of national support for the movements and regimes. The women in the British Union of Fascists were somewhat unusual because they engaged in more directly political activities. They helped train women in public speaking, organized and participated in marches, spoke in public, and raised money for the party; and some even ran for office. No women leaders exercised formal political power at a national level in any of the parties or regimes. A few women, including Margherita Sarfatti in Italy, Pilar Primo de Rivera in Spain, and Lady Katherine Maud Mosley in Britain, had considerable influence in the fascist regimes or movements of those countries, but they were personally connected to powerful men as lovers, sisters, or mothers. During the 1920s women had independently founded and led right-wing groups, labor groups, and feminist groups, but in some countries these were eclipsed by the rise of fascism and either disappeared or were shut down. In states where women had the right to vote, particularly Germany, women voted for the Nazis in fairly large numbers but did not hold major elected office, and they rarely constituted more than 7 or 8 percent of regular party members, even as their numbers soared in the affiliated organizations. Fascist Policies and Programs. Gender discrimination in the workplace, promoting maternal and infant care and family stability, and worries about population growth and health characterized fascist and nonfascist politics in the interwar years. In the fascist states, intervention in the economy and in private life in order to increase productiv¬ ity and self-sufficiency escalated with the onset of the economic depression that followed World War I. Idealized gender and sexual goals were given concrete form in

FASCISM

251

Nazism. Ilse Koch, a German concentration camp warden, is sentenced to life in prison at the trial of former camp personnel and prisoners from Buchenwald, 1947. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

campaigns to raise rates of marriage and birth and in pronouncements that linked women’s work outside the home with inability to fulfill their maternal and domestic responsibilities. The results were programs and legislation intended to encourage and reward marriage, reproduction, and family stability and, for those populations considered less desirable, to control behavior and punish misconduct. Labor legislation designed to protect women and to restrict where they could work, family subsidies and birth and marriage loans that favored male heads of household, limited or differential access to education and professional training, and state-funded programs that provided mater¬ nity and infant care had contradictory and often negative effects for women. In a general sense the policies and programs designed to increase the birthrate and promote a vigorous and happy family life were never a great success—throughout the 1930s, birthrates did not explode, and women worked when and where they could to sup¬ port their families. These realistic responses dovetailed with state labor needs as nations began to recover from the Depression and prepare for war. The case of Italy is instructive, because the proportion of married women who worked actually increased noticeably by the end of the 1930s.

Attacks on reproductive freedoms varied from state to state and were shaped by traditional religious cultures and racial politics. In these years, while Western states across the political spectrum restricted the dissemination of birth-control information, banned abortions, and out¬ lawed homosexual acts among men, national variations are evident. For example, sex reform had made inroads in Germany before the Nazis took over, and as the historian Dagmar Herzog has pointed out, Nazi sexual policies encouraged pleasure for some people. Officials accepted as necessary access to prostitutes by soldiers and elite men and on occasion adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to homosexuality in the same populations. At the same time, antinatalist policies and punishment of “deviancy” were the treatments prescribed for the less fit. In Germany “undesirables” were not eligible for any state welfare or support, and, more brutally, between 1933 and 1945 some two hundred thousand women were sterilized as the Nazis sought to cleanse the nation of those unworthy of life. Jewish women were a major targeted population, as were Roma (Gypsies), other “alien” races, and people with emo¬ tional or intellectual defects. Fascist parties and governments had no qualms about inserting themselves in all aspects of private and public

252

FASCISM

life, often with little regard for the consequences. How¬ ever, policies and programs differed from nation to nation, officials often disagreed about the methods to be adopted, and formally stated attitudes and goals contrasted with the realities of individual behaviors. Such contradictions are increasingly evident in the new research on sexuality, as well as in studies of leisure and consumerism, entertain¬ ment and sports activities, and fashion and body ideals. In these works fascist leaders and intellectuals admit the appeal of modern consumer goods but worry about foreign influences and economic growth, and they debate the coexistence of the ideal “angel of domestic life,” the modern girl, and the active sportswoman. The impor¬ tance of women’s contributions to and complicity in the success of fascist programs and goals is spelled out in other recent scholarship. In the Nazi East after 1939, women and girls were “assiduous empire builders” who actively sup¬ ported policies that displaced and destroyed the nonGerman population (Harvey). Although women were never in charge, we cannot ignore their participation in fascist crimes and misdemeanors. Women’s Motives and Responses to Fascism. Why did women join fascist organizations and work with fascist regimes? How did they react to the regimes and feel about their experiences? Women supported fascist parties and governments after World War I and during the Depression because, like men, some women believed that fascist politics could provide social and economic stability, save the country from dangerous left-wing revolution, provide strong leadership, and reinvigorate the nation. Women patriots felt that they could contribute to national growth and progress by staffing organizations dedicated to training and education, social welfare, and health care. Many middle- and upper-class women in particular thought that they could carve out new roles for themselves in service to the state. Fascism elevated the value of feminine virtues, traditional female skills, and maternal responsibilities. Educated and intellectual women thought that the move¬ ment could unleash the purest forms of maternal vigor, or what some called “feminine virility.” The parties and regimes offered excursions, exhibitions, child care, and a variety of entertainment. Many young women saw mem¬ bership in youth groups or participation in sports programs as opportunities to get away from home, travel, and socialize with male and female peers. In many cases women had little choice but to join a fascist organization. Spain’s Falange required all women to perform a period of social service to the nation, and the card they received on completion of their duty was a requi¬ site for receipt of necessary resources. In Italy party cards were called “bread cards,” and without them one could be denied access to schools, jobs, housing, camps, and other material benefits. Once the fascists were in power, the

refusal to join an organization could carry much more serious consequences. But women did resist. Thousands of women joined resistance organizations in France, Italy, and Yugoslavia. In Germany women who said no to Nazism suffered the consequences; young Sophie Scholl of the White Rose group was convicted of treason and executed. The fascists intended to mobilize the masses of women in order to gain support for their own agendas. Many histor¬ ians consider this dimension of the fascist experience a training ground for women’s future political activism and a cautionary tale of the possibilities and dangers of maternalist politics. [See also Genocide; Germany; Italy; Nationalism; Racism; Roma; World War I; and World War II.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bock, Gisela. “Nazi Gender Policies and Women’s History.” In A History of Women: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, edited by Franpoise Thebaud, pp. 149-176. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1994. De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. This pathbreaking book is particularly important in illuminating the cultural dimensions of fascism’s relation to women. Durham, Martin. Women and Fascism. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. This volume compares fascism in Germany, Italy, and Britain; chapters are devoted to post-1945 right-wing movements. Harvey, Elizabeth. Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2003. A perceptive and useful study of how women were partners in Nazi control of eastern Europe and contributed to the success of that enterprise. Herzog, Dagmar, ed. Special Issue: Sexuality and German Fascism. Journal of the History of Sexuality 11 (January-April 2002). An important collection of new scholarship on gender and sexuality in Nazi Germany. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. One of the first major studies of women and Nazism based on impressive research and oral interviews, particularly important for acknow¬ ledging women’s complicity in the regime. Passmore, Kevin, ed. Women, Gender, and Fascism in Europe, 1919-45. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2003. This collection is notable because, along with Italy and Germany, it covers eastern Europe, France, Britain, and Spain, and because it provides an excellent synthesis of previous debates and current scholarship. Pollard, Miranda. Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pollard describes the peculiarities of French Fascism, look¬ ing closely at the continuities with earlier French politics and the fact that women were not mobilized and yet were important to the regime. Richmond, Kathleen. Women and Spanish Fascism: The Women’s Section of the Falange, 1934-1959. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. A more detailed and inclusive study than previous works in English.

FATHERHOOD

Willson, Perry. Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The Massaie Rurali. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. This study of rural women broadens understanding of popular experi¬ ence under fascism and demonstrates how the regime pulled people into its orbit. Jane Slaughter

FATHERHOOD. For most of human history paternity has been difficult to pin down. Even today, when DNA testing can identify paternity with great certainty, biology is never enough to make a man a father in the eyes of the law or of society. Fatherhood is not a fact of nature, but a social construct. The conditions that make a man a father are always changing, and every known society in every period of history has a different understanding of reproduc¬ tion and therefore of fatherhood. Much less is known about the history of fatherhood than about the history of motherhood. Fatherhood has been studied only since the 1970s, and primarily in Western societies. The history of ideas of fatherhood and the actual experience of fathers on a global scale remain obscure, but

253

any preliminary sketch of fatherhood in world history must begin by making the distinction between social and bio¬ logical fatherhood and by placing both within the larger context of patriarchy. Patriarchy is best defined as any male-centered social system in which men dominate but in which women can assume roles usually assigned to men so long as they act like men and do not challenge male dominance. An example would be early modern European monarchies, where queens exercised enormous power though women in general were regarded as inferiors. In the patriarchal family systems of the same period, wives could also wield great authority in the absence of their husbands, but they were always subordinate. Fatherhood is not a fixed relationship but a way of think¬ ing about relationships. It is a metaphor that in patriarchal social systems can be applied to many different things. Kings and emperors are considered fathers of their subjects; the Pope is the father of the Catholic Church, where the celibate male clergy are called fathers. In patriarchal sys¬ tems only some biological fathers have ever gained the status of social fathers. That belonged to men of property, capable of creating households that included many other dependents besides their own wives and children. In giving

Fathers. Marina’s Room, by Tina Barney (b. 1945), 1987. A father sits with his daughters in an upper-class American home. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, NY

254

FATHERHOOD

up their children to these patriarchs, poor men and male slaves were deprived of their paternity. Prior to the twentieth century there was no notion of fatherhood as a personal identity or as a human right endowed by the fact of biological paternity. Ancient Fathers and Fatherhood. Seminomadic huntergatherer groups are the least hierarchical of all human societies. It was not until the advent of settled agricultural societies beginning about 8000 b.c.e. that patriarchal systems began to develop. The importance of passing on landed property to the next generation encouraged the development of matrilineal as well as patrilineal systems of marriage and inheritance. In time, states arose organized around powerful military and religious masculine elites. The rise of male-centered political and military hierarchies was reinforced by the emergence of monotheisms. Earlier animistic and polytheistic religions had gods that were both masculine and feminine, but the monotheistic god was invariably a father figure. Priesthoods constituted themselves in a similarly patriarchal manner, concentrating divine powers in the hands of male elites. There were instances where women shared political and religious power, but even in preagrarian hunter-gatherer societies there never was some golden age of matriarchy, when women ruled. Patriarchy became universal in agrarian societies from 2000 b.c.e. onward. It was combined with patrilineal inheritance systems in Mediterranean, South Asian, East Asian, and West Asian (Middle Eastern) societies until the twentieth century. Only in Africa did matrilineal systems develop, but even there societies remained male-centered. In Africa, biological fathers had less control, but other men, often the brothers of the mothers, were vested with patriarchal powers. Simply defining a society as patriarchal does not tell us very much about the way fatherhood operated or was experienced from place to place or over time. In the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, patriarchy was the rule, though not every father was a patriarch. Only the most powerful were invested with that authority. They had multi¬ ple concubines and wives and had claims on large numbers of children who were not of their own blood. The offspring of their slaves belonged to them, and it was not uncommon for poor freemen to give up their daughters and sons to the custody of the rich and powerful as a way of ensuring the children’s welfare. In such a system social fatherhood trumped biological paternity at every turn. In strongly hierarchical societies like Confucian China, more deference was given to status and age than to paternal authority as such. Roman law invested enormous powers in the patriarch. In a society in which chastity and conjugal fidelity were rare, it was the patriarch’s will rather than birth that deter¬ mined which children would be recognized as his. By lifting

the newborn from its mother’s arms and walking three times around the house, the Roman paterfamilias made a child his own. Children who were not ritually adopted in this manner were subject to abandonment. Fathers had the power both to give and to take life; mothers had no rights to their own children. They could be divorced at will and their children taken away from them without legal proceedings. Patriarchs’ total authority over all members of their house¬ hold included the right to execute their own children. This authority was lifelong and extended to adult children, whose property and marriage rights were the patriarch’s by law and custom. In the latter days of the Roman Empire, patriarchy was modified somewhat, partly from the influence of Christianity, which exalted conjugal fidelity and chastity. The adoption of this monotheism reinforced most elements of patriarchalism, however. Though the god of the Jews had not been a father figure, Christianity, focused on the son of God, made him so. According to this new universalist faith, all humanity were potentially God’s children. Access to the Christian god’s grace was not given by biological birth but by the church rite of baptism, constituting a second, spiritual birth into the family of God. Worship of a god-the-father did not automatically elevate the status of biological fathers. For most of the Middle Ages, Joseph was depicted as having been cuckolded. The Catholic Church assigned highest degrees of holiness to the celibate and the chaste, while ordinary fathers and mothers remained tainted with original sin. The spiritual fatherhood, derived from God and vested in the church fathers, reinforced ecclesiastical patriarchy and encouraged lay people to give up their children and their patrimonies to the church. After the fall of the Roman Empire, during a period of considerable anarchy, patriarchal hierarchies were shaken. In peasant Europe, men and women were on a more equal level, and gender stereotypes were never quite so strong. But during the high Middle Ages, from 1000 c.e. onward, patriarchy reasserted itself throughout Europe. Great lords regained the powers of life and death over those assigned to their protection, while ordinary fathers, when unable to support their own children, were forced to send them into the church or the households of the wealthy. Slavery and conquest undermined biological fatherhood, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, where female-headed households are still numerous. Social Fatherhood, 1500-1800. Agrarian society, with its warrior aristocracies and male priesthoods, sustained the patriarchy of the few at the expense of the paternity of the many. It was not until a new commercial impulse spread throughout the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the powers of the patriarch were distributed more widely. In the West an increase in

FATHERHOOD

world trade fostered the rise of merchant houses and production for markets located within protoindustrial households. In these male-centered patriarchal units, the Hausvater, the head of the household, was simultaneously father to his own biological offspring and father to all those who were recruited into the household as servants, slaves, or live-in laborers. Located in or near cities, or on colonial plantations, these patriarchal households aimed at maximizing mobile wealth, which made possible first the commercial and later the industrial capitalist revolutions. They were characterized by a new work ethic, which had come to infuse both the Protestant and the Catholic religions from the sixteenth century onward. Merchant families elsewhere also seem to have favored similar forms of paternal authority. The imperatives of capitalist commerce reinforced but also transformed existing patriarchal institutions. Though Catholics continued to assign the greatest holiness to chaste nuns and celibate priests, Protestants sacralized marriage and assigned to ordinary mothers and fathers the virtues previously reserved for saints. For the first time worldly fathers took on something of the aura of the sacred. This was reflected both in the divine rights of the new monar¬ chies of the early modern period and also in the godly households of the new middle strata of Europe and its colonies. Hausvaters were invested with extraordinary powers and responsibilities. In the absence of systems of public security, health, and education, they were simultan¬ eously employer, judge, doctor, and teacher to those consigned to their care. Hausvaters were intimately involved with the birth and upbringing of children. The sperm of the man was consid¬ ered the source of life; women were thought of as incuba¬ tors rather than cogenitors. Men did not attend birth, but the old rites of paternity persisted. Children belonged to the Hausvater, who exercised sole authority over their existence. This was also true in Asia and Africa, where similar units of merchant and household production emerged to meet the demands of increased world trade. In China, patriarchy was more evident among merchants than among peasants in this period, and the same pattern emerged in Meiji Japan, where the development of commerce and protoindustrial production reinforced new urban forms of patriarchy, even¬ tually evolving into powerful family firms like Mitsubishi. If there was any period in Western history when social fathers truly ruled, it was between 1500 and 1800. This patriarchalism was particularly pronounced among the urban middle strata of northwestern Europe and North America. Though the landed aristocracy continued to defer to the concept of lineage, and peasants and the poor got along the best they could with more flexible gender arrangements, fathers ruled among the merchant class.

255

Modern Fatherhood, 1800 and Onward. Fatherhood as it came to be understood in the modern West and much of the rest of the industrializing world was a product of the nineteenth century, a consequence of the dual political and industrial revolutions that took place first in western Europe and North America. The effects were first felt among the urban middle classes, where the capitalist Industrial Revolution separated paid work from the household and thereby ended the role of Hausvater. As work moved out to the office and factory, the gendered boundaries between public and private life hardened. Production for the market was increasingly seen as a masculine sphere while domesticity was feminized. Previously much involved in the lives of their children, fathers became detached. Although paternal rights were initially undiminished, the discovery of the ovum in the 1840s set in motion new understandings of reproduction, which assigned new influence to women. The middle-class home became mother centered. The father’s role was rede¬ fined to that of provider, whose connection to children was through the mother. She was now the primary homemaker, nurturer, and angel of the hearth. Within the family, fathers became shadowy presences, still vested with great authority as breadwinners but also gradually ceding their authority to others. Western societies were the first to dismantle the legal foun¬ dations of the old patriarchalism. In the twentieth century, women gained rights to employment and the franchise; they acquired equal standing with men in marriage and divorce; their rights to their children were affirmed; and because they were now seen as the chief source of life and nurture, they were assigned custodial powers previously granted only to male heads of households. In what amounted to a reversal of roles, the burden of care was shifted to women, who were assumed to be naturally suited to domesticity, just as men were thought the better providers and protectors. Where mothers proved inadequate to the task, the newly created welfare state acted in a paternalist manner, supporting widows, single mothers, and the neediest children. The presumed complementarity of men and women pro¬ duced a new, strictly heterosexual norm of both masculinity and femininity. Paternity was considered the destiny of all normal men, just as maternity was the destiny of all women. For the first time, biological fatherhood became an essential attribute of male identity. Adult bachelorhood was stigma¬ tized. The old celibate professions came under considerable pressure, and at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1870s, the dons were finally permitted to marry. It was this new understanding of adult manhood that Western imperialists and missionaries brought to Africa and Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They propagated a “civilized” norm of monoga¬ mous marriage and the nuclear family that conflicted with

256

FATHERHOOD

patriarchal local cultures and practices, but they gradually made some converts among the indigenous urban middle classes, who adopted Western gender norms in the name of progress. In places like Japan, versions of fatherhood similar to those spreading among the Western middle classes gained ground. The notion of the “salaryman,” constructed around the breadwinner role and removing men from the worlds of women and children, took hold. The “New Fatherhood.” By the 1970s older forms of social fatherhood, and the notions of patriarchy that supported them, seemed to be everywhere in retreat. There was talk of a “new fatherhood,” more egalitarian, more involved with children. Paternal control of marriage and inheritance, fatherly prerogatives over wives and children, even the patriarchy of established religion and the masculinity of its god, were being questioned. Yet the new fatherhood was full of contradictions, which became more apparent in the last third of the twentieth century when the world economic system was radically restruc¬ tured and the Western model of father-as-breadwinner was threatened by falling male wages. Most severely affected were those European and American working-class men who saw their manufacturing jobs outsourced to Third World countries. But middle-class fathers also faced unemployment when their jobs were transferred elsewhere. To make up for these losses, married women entered the Western workforces in growing numbers. Their earning power made them less dependent on marriage, and as divorce rates increased, so, too, did the number of children born outside marriage. Had men responded by becoming more involved in housework, the new fatherhood might have flourished, but, instead, those men who perceived themselves as inadequate providers began to avoid marrying. Even in western Europe, where the state stepped in to support women and children, fatherless households increased in number in the late twentieth century. In the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century only about half of all children lived with their biological fathers. The new fatherhood was never fully established outside the Western world. The onset of industrialization, urbaniza¬ tion, and democratization after World War II brought radical change to many places in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but it also provoked reactions that reinforced old forms of patriarchy in many places. This is reflected in religious resistance to the introduction of female equality and the rights of children. In rural parts of the Middle East, where the seed is still considered more the source of life than the ovum is, fathers are still regarded as the sole genitors. In cities, different notions of conception have made inroads, but patriarchy and the attendant notion of social fatherhood remains powerful where Islamic law prevails.

In the agricultural regions of the world, patriarchy is sustained by an economic structure that privileges rural fathers over women and children. But globalization and the growth of low-paid industrial employment of women and children in Third World cities undermines men’s power and authority. Men without land or steady jobs find it difficult to marry. Births out of wedlock increase, and increasing numbers of men lose touch with their children. Where there is no welfare state to step into the paternal role the burden falls entirely on mothers, who, with their children, constitute the greatest part the world’s poor. The number of poor rose precipitously in the last two decades of the twentieth century and shows little sign of declining, despite declining birthrates in many developing countries. Globalization has also had its impact on middle-class men. The Japanese salaryman has been undercut as much by a stagnating economy as by new notions of male-female equality. Everywhere fatherhood is in crisis. Even as the power of biological fathers is undermined, however, most societies, including those in the West, remain male-centered. New nations have their founding fathers, as do transnational corporations. Men continue to dominate public institutions because both the state and the corporation have assumed roles that once belonged to the patriarchs. The welfare state becomes the ultimate custodian and educator of the nation’s children, while corporate media and advertising usurp the role of parents. Patriarchy, no longer vested in particular men, has found new life in the twenty-first century. Although DNA testing has finally taken the mystery out of biological paternity, paternity is still in tension with social fatherhood. The status of biological fathers is no more certain today than it was in the past. [See also Feminism; Gender Roles; Machismo and Marianismo; Patriarchy; Religion; and World Religions, subentry Gendering.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aries, Philipe, and Georges Duby, eds. A History of Private Life. 5 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987-1991. Bozett, Frederick W., and Shirley M. H. Hanson, eds. Fatherhood and Families in Cultural Context. New York: Springer, 1991. Delaney, Carol. The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Delumeau, Jean, and Daniel Roche, eds. Histoire des p'eres et de la paternite. Paris: Larousse, 2005. Griswold, Robert. Fatherhood in America: A History. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Knibiehler, Yvonne. Le peres aussi ont une historie. Paris: Hachette, 1987. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. McKee, Lorna, and Margaret O’Brien, eds. The Father Figure. London: Tavistock, 1982.

FATUMA, QUEEN OF ZANZIBAR

Ozment, Steven. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Therborn, Goran. Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900-2000. London: Routledge, 2004. John

R.

Gillis

FATIMA BINT MUHAMMAD (c. 604-632), an im¬ portant female figure in Islam and a role model for Muslim women. Known as al-Zahra (the Radiant) and al-Batul (the Virgin), Fatima was the daughter of the prophet Muhammad and his first wife Khadijah. She married the Prophet’s paternal cousin Ali and gave birth to five chil¬ dren. Two of her sons, al-Hasan and al-Husayn, reached adulthood and, as the direct blood-line of Muhammad, were considered by Shia Muslims to be the legitimate imams (spiritual and temporal leaders) of the community of believers. Sources describe Fatima as a loving daughter who nursed her father during his terminal illness, only to die distraught shortly afterward; as a suffering wife who strove to make ends meet; and as a caring mother who had premonitions about the tragic fate of her two sons. After her father’s death her role shifted to that of defender of her husband’s right to succeed the Prophet and claimant to her right to inherit her father’s property, the oasis of Fadak. The then caliph Abu Bakr firmly dismissed her claims, arguing that a prophet cannot leave an inheritance. It took almost two centuries for the dispute to be settled: in 826 Fadak was finally granted to Fatima’s descendants. Though there are no direct references to Fatima in the Quran, Shia exegetes interpret the Quranic verses 33.3233 on the privileged position of the “women of the Prophet” (nisa al-nabi), traditionally understood to refer to Muham¬ mad’s wives, to indicate instead his female descendants, particularly Fatima and her daughters. Details of her biography can be gathered from an extensive body of narratives and hagiographical works, where her role as daughter and mother appears to support the Shia descent claims of the imams and her role as wife serves to praise the virtues of her husbandc Ali. Moreover, in a number of popular and mystical works, Fatima takes center stage both as pious intercessor and ascetic and also as a woman cleansed from the physical impurities of her gender: menstruation and postpartum bleeding. Like Mary, the mother of Jesus, she is called Virgin. One account has alHasan and al-Husayn born out of her thigh, while another identifies her as the only woman to have been created equal to man. Like Mary, she is a woman of Paradise whose intercession is sought. The French Islamicist Louis Massignon has analyzed Fatima’s esoteric role and simila¬ rities with Mary.

257

One of the most successful medieval Shia dynasties, the Fatimids (909-1171), were named after her. Fatimid scholars reinterpreted narratives relating to Fatima to reflect a religio-political discourse aimed at validating dynastic claims. Moreover, with the inheritance of Fadak as a prece¬ dent, Fatimid jurists, and more broadly Shia jurists, elabor¬ ated on inheritance law so as to make it possible for women to inherit land and for daughters to inherit property to the ex¬ clusion of agnates—relatives in lines traced through males. Since the sixteenth-century Safavid dynasty in Persia and the proclamation of Twelver Shiism as its state religion, popular accounts of Fatima have been revived among Shia Muslims and enacted in passion plays in remembrance of the killing of al-Husayn, where she is portrayed as a suffer¬ ing mother and victim of injustice. In the political foment and ideological mobilization that led to the 1979 Iranian revolution, Fatima acquired the further role of female acti¬ vist. The social reformer cAli Shari ati (d. 1977) presented Fatima as a role model for contemporary Shia women, who, while maintaining traditional values of modesty, obedience, and piety, should be aware of social and political issues and actively fight for their country. [See also A’isha; Islam; and Khadijah.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cortese, Delia, and Simonetta Calderini. Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Massignon, Louis. La Mubahala de Medine et VHyperdulie de Fatima. Paris: Librairie Orientale et Americaine, 1955. McAuliffe, Jane Dammen. “Fatima.” In The Encyclopedia of the Quran, edited by Jane Dammen McAuliffe, vol. 2, pp. 192-193. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2002. Sharf ati, Ali. Ali Shariati’s Fatima Is Fatima. Translated by Laleh Bakhtiar. Tehran, Iran: Shariati Foundation, 1981. Veccia Vaglieri, L. “Fatima.” In The Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 2, pp. 841-850. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1965. Simonetta Calderini

FATUMA, QUEEN OF ZANZIBAR (fl. c. 1690), Swahili-speaking queen caught up in the dangerous political currents of the late seventeenth century. Although debates surround the historical role of women as political leaders in Swahili-speaking societies, there is evidence to document the existence of Fatuma (in some accounts, Fatima), queen of Zanzibar. Upon the death of her father, Yusuf, the kingdom of Zanzibar was divided into two regions, a southern one ruled by Fatuma’s brother, Bakari bin Yusuf, centered at Kizimkazi, and a northern region ruled by Fatuma with offices centered near what became the city of Zanzibar. Queen Fatuma was married to the son of her aunt, Queen Mwana Mwema, and the king of Otondo; his name was

258

FATUMA, QUEEN OF ZANZIBAR

Abdullah, and he inherited the title of King of Otondo from his father. Like her aunt, Queen Fatuma was caught up in the dan¬ gerous politics of late seventeenth-century coastal history. Mwana Mwema had been exiled from Zanzibar for oppos¬ ing the Portuguese in 1652, and Queen Fatuma instead sought to ally herself with the Portuguese forces following coastal rebellions. By 1696 the final siege of Fort Jesus, the fort built by the Portuguese in Mombasa, had begun. In many ways a state of war existed throughout the coast, and Queen Fatuma provided material aid to the Portuguese during this battle. One account documents that she pro¬ vided provisions to Henrique de Figueiredo after he had resupplied the besieged fort in Mombasa, and another sug¬ gests that she sent ships to aid in the battle against the Omanis. It also seems that she may have boarded one of the resupply ships and sailed to Goa, seeking additional support from Portuguese officials stationed there. In 1698, when Fort Jesus finally fell to Omani forces, those same forces sailed on to Zanzibar to expel any remaining Portuguese on the island—as well as to hold Queen Fatuma accountable for her decision to ally with the Portuguese. Fatuma was exiled to Oman, where she lived for twelve years until she was allowed to return to Zanzibar in 1710. Queen Fatuma was succeeded by her son, Hassan bin Abdullah, whose own son was the next-to-last independent ruler of Zanzibar (mwinyi mkuu) before Omani and then British rule. [See also East Africa, subentry 1500-1900; Mwana Mwema, Queen of Zanzibar; and Swahili Political Leaders.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Prins, A. H. J. The Swahili-Speaking Peoples of Zanzibar and the East African Coast (Arabs, Shirazi, and Swahili). London: Inter¬ national African Institute, 1961. A classic ethnographic study and summary of research conducted on the East African coast during the early twentieth century, focusing on European sources. Although the author supports the Shirazi hypothesis regarding Swahili origins that has since been challenged, the text remains a rich source of information. Zinjibari, Khatib M. Rajab al-. “Islam and the Catholic Crusade Movement in Zanzibar.” Available at http://victorian.fortune city.com/portfolio/543/crusades.html. The author identifies himself as the grandson of a Chief Qadhi (the highest judiciary position in the Islamic courts) of Zanzibar, and the article pro¬ vides a distinctly different perspective on Zanzibar and East African history from that of European authors. Deborah Amory

FELL, MARGARET (1614-1702), Quaker leader. Margaret Fell Fox (often known simply as Margaret Fell) is often termed the “Mother of Quakerism.” She was born Margaret

Askew into a gentry family in Lancashire, England. Her social prominence was later instrumental in furthering the standing of Quakers and provided some protection from the political and legal actions taken against them for not conforming to the established religion. She gained even greater prom¬ inence as the wife of a prominent judge in northwestern England and was converted to the Society of Friends (collo¬ quially known as Quakers for their vigorous religious dan¬ cing and movements) by George Fox, the movement’s founder, in 1652. An eloquent and convincing spokesman, Fox urged a new set of beliefs that stressed strong individual attachment to God and a fundamental belief in the basic equality of human beings. Some years following the death of her husband, Fell married George Fox and continued to assist in his mission to expand the reach of the Quaker message, supporting Friends who had been arrested for resisting restrictions imposed on groups proselytizing and operating outside the control of the Church of England. Scholars have argued that the importance of her family background and her provision of hospitality and financial assistance to Quakers in need were significant for the sect’s advancement. Her social standing in a society so grounded in social rank was a great advantage in interactions with officials and negotiations for space for Quaker activities, especially given the lesser background of George Fox, whose father was a weaver. Fell’s family home, Swarthmore Hall, became a center for Quaker recruiting and governance, and she became one of the most influential women expounding Friends’ practices. These included a profound acceptance of internal faith driven by an individual’s direct receipt of God’s word (“the light”), an egalitarian meeting structure in which each in attendance was open to revelation and able to speak to those present of his or her personal experience and belief, and an acceptance of women’s full role within the Society of Friends, finked to a separate women’s meeting. Her most well-known work is the tract Womens Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures (1666), which argued for women’s spiritual equality and for their voice to be heard in Quaker meetings and in preaching to the unconverted. In this work she argued not for an earthly equality but one based on scripture in which women who had accepted Quaker tenets were empowered to speak in public. In her words, “where Women are led by the Spirit of God, they are not under the Law [Pauline strictures on women’s public speaking]; for Christ in the Male and in the Female is one; and where he is made manifest in Male and Female, he may speak.” Not only should such women be permitted to speak, but they represent the truth of God’s word, unlike the “blind Priests” who resist women’s speak¬ ing, preaching, and prophesizing in public. Fell and her children were instrumental in establishing a foundation for the expansion of the Society of Friends in

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION

the later seventeenth century. Her lobbying, along with James II’s Catholic loyalties, resulted in his issuing an Act of Toleration in 1686, which gave greater religious free¬ dom to all, including Quakers, who operated outside the orthodoxy of the Anglican faith. [See also Religion.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seven¬ teenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Kunze, Bonnelyn Young. Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1994. Hilda

L.Smith

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION. “Female circum¬ cision” and “female genital mutilation” (FGM) are highly charged, politicized English phrases for practices that involve the partial or total cutting away of the external genitalia of females for nonmedical purposes. “Circumcision,” the seemingly more benign term, equates practices of removing the clitoris with the removal of the male foreskin but fails to account for the differing physical and psychological ram¬ ifications. The abbreviation FGM has been widely used in the international arena, including by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations Population Fund, and regionally by the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children. International women’s human rights advocates adopted the term “mutilation” because, they argued, the removal of any healthy organ is mutilation and should be equated with torture. Christine Walley has observed that both terms are problematic, with “circumcision” suggesting relativis¬ tic tolerance and “mutilation” suggesting moral outrage. Mutilation also carries at least an implicit assumption that parents and other relatives are somehow child abusers, a charge that many Africans find highly problematic; some are even working diligently to eradicate these practices. Attempting to move beyond what some view as ethno¬ centric and polarizing terminology, some academics have taken to referring to these practices as “female genital cut¬ ting,” “genital surgeries” or “operations,” or “female genital modification.” According to Elizabeth Heger Boyle this last term was adopted as a way of retaining the widely recognized acronym FGM. Range of Procedures. Female genital cutting incorporates a range of procedures on a continuum, with the least extensive form of genital cutting commonly referred to as sunna, an Arabic word meaning “tradition” or “duty.” Although such

259

procedures are rare, sunna technically refers to the cutting of the prepuce (the hood) of the clitoris. It often includes the partial or entire removal of the prepuce and the clitoris and is usually referred to as clitoridectomy. This form of cutting is categorized as type I in the WHO typology. Excision, or type II cutting, involves partial or complete removal of the clitoris and often partial or complete removal of the labia minora as well. Because it is difficult to draw clear distinctions between clitoridectomy and excision, the two have often been incorporated into a single category in other systems of classification. Pharaonic circumcision, or infibulation, is the most radi¬ cal form of female genital cutting. Both terms hark back to ancient times; “Pharaonic” refers to ancient Egyptian prac¬ tices, and the Latin term fibula refers to the ancient Roman practice of fastening a fibula, or clasp, through the labia majora. Infibulation, then, entails the complete removal of external genitalia, including the clitoris and the labia minora and majora. The edges are then stitched together so that the urethra and the vaginal opening are covered, leaving only a small opening about the size of a pencil point to allow for the passage of urine and menstrual blood. Bettina Shell-Duncan and Ylva Hernlund have described an intermediate variation of infibulation called matwasat. Occasionally practiced in Sudan as a compromise between extreme cutting and not cutting at all, matwasat usually involves a similar extent of cutting but less extreme stitch¬ ing, thus leaving a larger opening. Both infibulation and matwasat are classified as type III by the WHO. Yet another variation of infibulation, known as “sealing,” is occasionally practiced in parts of West Africa. In this variation the geni¬ tals are excised, but instead of the cut area being stitched, the blood is allowed to coagulate to form an artificial hymen. Type IV includes rare and much less well known variations of genital cutting. Among these are pricking, piercing, or incising the clitoris or labia or both; cauterizing the clitoris and surrounding tissue; scraping or cutting the tissue around the vagina; and introducing corrosive substances or herbs into the vagina either to cause bleeding or to tighten or narrow the opening. Mairo Usman Mandara, a Nigerian physician, has de¬ scribed several procedures that involve introcision, or the cutting of the internal genitalia. These include hymenectomy, practiced among the Hausa, which is excision of a hymen that has been deemed too thick. In another Hausa practice, a gishiri cut, or yankan gishiri (literally “salt cut”), is made on the anterior or posterior vaginal wall with a razor blade or penknife in such circumstances as obstructed labor and amenorrhea. The Kare-Kare perform a similar procedure, called zur-zur, during obstructed labor. In these cases the incision is made on the anterior or posterior lip of the undilated cervix so that a vaginal delivery can be achieved.

260

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION

Female Circumcision Ceremony. Maake women in Lesotho participate in a female circumcision

ceremony, January 1987. U.N.

Photo/John Isaac

There have been occasional reports of symbolic cir¬ cumcision, which in some cases involves only nicking the clitoris to draw blood but not permanently alter or remove any part of the external genitalia. Forms of sym¬ bolic cutting have been proposed by people in the West as an alternative to traditional forms or a compromise be¬ tween those who wish to continue these practices and those who advocate eradication, but for the most part such sug¬ gestions have been poorly received by those on both sides of the issue. Health Consequences. It is often argued that female genital cutting has serious potential health consequences for girls and women. Extensive and thorough research in this area is needed to obtain a clear understanding of the associated physical, psychological, and sexual complica¬ tions; the existing accounts are poorly documented and may be incomplete. Most reports cite immediate and long¬ term physical complications and possible psychological effects. Immediate complications include severe pain, bleeding (sometimes hemorrhage), shock, and infection caused by the use of unsterilized cutting instruments. Sometimes the genital area becomes infected within a few days of the procedure because of contamination by urine or feces; septicemia may develop if the bacterium reaches the bloodstream. If there is swelling and inflammation around the wound, acute urine retention can result, leading to urinary tract infections.

The most severe complications are usually associated with types II and III genital cutting, particularly infibulation. Common complications include urinary tract and chronic pelvic infections; stones in the urethra or bladder; excessive scar tissue or cysts at the site of the cutting; and fistulae, or holes, between the bladder and vagina or between the vagina and the rectum, resulting in contin¬ uous leakage of urine or feces. Women may also suffer pain during sexual intercourse and menstruation. In addi¬ tion, deinfibulation—cutting open the sewn labia—may be required to accommodate childbirth. Often this is followed later by reinfibulation, for a husband’s enjoyment. Although few studies have been done on the psychologi¬ cal effects of genital cutting, it is often assumed that such procedures have an adverse impact on girls and women. Some reports indicate that girls may experience distur¬ bances in eating, sleeping, mood, and cognition immedi¬ ately following the procedure. Some argue that there may be suppressed feelings of anxiety, anger, bitterness, betrayal, and loss of self-esteem. It has also been suggested that all types of genital cutting have an adverse impact on the sexuality and sexual responses of women, although the procedures do not necessarily eliminate the possibility of sexual pleasure and climax. Again, the need for extensive research in this area is critical to developing a more grounded and nuanced understanding of the possible consequences of female genital cutting.

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION

Prevalence. Estimates of the prevalence of the practice have not generally been reliable, but Anika Rahman and Nahid Toubia have estimated that more than 130 million girls and women have experienced some form of genital cutting. Amnesty International estimates that some 2 million girls a year are at risk—approximately six thousand per day. Female genital cutting is reportedly practiced in about twenty-eight African countries. Rahman and Toubia report that although most of those countries have generated national estimates of the prevalence of these practices, the figures are based on limited studies or anecdotal information. They note that only seven of the twenty-eight countries—the Central Africa Republic, the Ivory Coast, Egypt, Eritrea, Mali, Sudan, and Tanzania—have developed reliable statistics that are based on specific questions in their Demographic and Health Survey. The authors also report that based on current estimates the prevalence rate in eighteen African countries is at least half. Those rates vary widely from country to country, however. For example, Egypt, Eritrea, Mali, and Sudan report rates as high as 90 percent, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda report rates as low as 5 percent. Furthermore, the rates can vary widely within a country—in the Timbuktu and Gao regions of Mali the rate is less than 10 percent, whereas in Bamako and Koulikoro the rates are 95 percent and 99 percent, respectively. It appears that the Western media has most frequently focused on infibulation, the most severe form of female genital cutting, but only an estimated 15 percent of all cut¬ ting fits into that category. Infibulation occurs chiefly in the Horn of Africa—Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia—and in Sudan and Egypt. Infibulation has also been found in north¬ eastern Kenya, parts of Mali, and in a small area of northern Nigeria. Between 80 percent and 85 percent of genital cut¬ ting performed in Africa can be classified as either clitoridectomy or excision, the less radical procedures. These procedures are performed over a larger area of Africa, with the southernmost extent usually identified as northern Tanzania. The practices are spread discontinuously in a belt that crosses the midsection of Africa from Senegal to Kenya and Tanzania, and there have been a few reports in south¬ ern Africa. However, many people in countries where clitoridectomy is practiced have never engaged in any of its variations. For example, the Akan people in Ghana and the Ivory Coast have never engaged in any genital cutting. Some Igbo in Nigeria continue to practice clitoridectomy, but others stopped doing so in the 1920s. Female genital cutting has been documented in Oman, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. It has also been reported among Muslim populations in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia, although little is known about the practice in these countries. The Daudi Bohra, a small Muslim sect in India, is reported to

261

practice clitoridectomy. Although little information is available, there have been accounts of genital cutting among certain indigenous groups in Central and South America. As recently as the 1960s physicians in the United States and the United Kingdom were performing genital cutting—usually clitoridectomies—as a “treatment” for hysteria, lesbianism, and masturbation, to “cure” nonorgasmic women, and for other forms of so-called female deviance. More recently Cheryl Chase has advanced the argument that pediatric genital surgeries performed in the United States to correct or alter what medical professionals deem socially unacceptable genitals of infants is also a form of genital mutilation. Anecdotal information suggests that many immigrant African women and girls living in the Uni¬ ted States, Canada, Australia, and Europe have undergone genital cutting, but no systematic effort has been made to document the prevalence of such cases. Although genital-cutting procedures are commonly per¬ formed on young girls between the ages of four and twelve, in some cultures the procedures are carried out as early as a few days after birth and as late as after a first pregnancy. Some groups perform the procedures before puberty, some groups perform them at puberty as part of initiation rites, and some perform them upon contracting marriage or in the seventh month of the first pregnancy or after the birth of the first child. A traditional practitioner, using crude instruments such as razors, knives, or broken glass, usually works without administering anesthesia. Sometimes the more affluent have the procedure performed in a health-care facility by medical personnel, which, because of the use of anesthesia and sharp cutting instruments, may result in more extensive damage than the traditional methods. Explanations. It is impossible to cite a single explanation for female genital cutting; each practice must be carefully analyzed within its own cultural, historical, and political context. Rationales for these practices are listed here, but it must be understood that rather than reflecting discrete distinctions, the reasons are interrelated, mutually reinfor¬ cing, and best understood as forming a continuum. Female genital cutting is practiced in a wide array of cultures for a variety of reasons at various ages, either individually or in groups. Cleanliness, aesthetics, hygiene, birth control, and fear that an “untrimmed” clitoris would grow past a woman’s knees are among the many reasons cited. The most frequently mentioned rationale is the need to control women, especially their sexuality. Rahman and Toubia argue that genital cutting is “a single way to demonstrate physically otherwise socially constructed concepts like gender and sexuality” (p. 5). Reasons for performing female genital cutting are com¬ plex and deeply embedded in the beliefs and value systems of the cultures in which it is practiced. In many cultures circumcisions for females (and males) are performed as a

262

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION

rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. Initiation rites provide young girls with crucial information necessary for becoming a woman according to the standards of a particu¬ lar culture. Passed down through the generations, this knowledge includes skills for managing marriage, husbands, and children. It serves to integrate young girls fully into their cultures through establishing strong connections with their age-mates—the group that shares a specific circumcision event—and strengthening the bonds with their families, other members of the community, and their ancestors. In short, it serves to help preserve the cultural identity of a particular ethnic group. The need to control women’s sexuality by reducing their sexual desires is another often-cited reason for female genital cutting. In some cultures family or clan honor is dependent on a woman’s sexual purity. In Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia, for example, genital cutting has been used to quell incidents of premarital sex and to preserve virginity. Rahman and Toubia note that in Kenya and Uganda less emphasis is placed on controlling premarital sexual activity through female genital cutting. Rather, it has been practiced as a way of reducing a woman’s sexual demands on her husband so that he might be able sexually to accommodate several wives. Although religious beliefs have been cited as another reason for genital cutting, it is important to note that the practice predates the arrival of both Islam and Christianity on the African continent. However, as Islam spread across Africa, Muslims encountered people who were already practicing female genital cutting and chose not to challenge the practices; to a lesser extent some Christians made simi¬ lar decisions. Despite the fact that neither the Quran nor the Hadith (the collection of the prophet Mohammed’s sayings) specifically calls for female genital cutting and that such procedures are not practiced in Saudi Arabia, Muslims con¬ tinue to debate the interpretation of one of the Prophet’s admonitions that seemingly supports the practice, albeit with limitations. Thus some Islamic groups justify their practice of female genital cutting on the basis of their interpretation of Islam. When genital cutting is practiced among a particular group, a girl or woman is compelled to conform by her family, friends, and neighbors, and indeed often insists on undergoing the procedures to ensure acceptance in her culture. In that context not being cut can lead to ostracism within the community and severely jeopardizes a woman’s opportunities to marry. In close-knit traditional societies in which marriage is essential to their identity as women and to their economic well-being, it is essential that girls and women comply with the practice of the community. Efforts at Eradication. Activists and scholars are engaged in efforts to eradicate female genital cutting at the local and state levels and internationally. Under the auspices of international human rights, female genital

cutting was addressed as an instance of child abuse in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which went into force in 1990, and as an instance of violence against women at the fourth U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Some have also made the argument that female genital cutting could be defined as torture according to the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1987). Perhaps the most reasonable argument against female genital cutting being advanced at the international level is the right to health and bodily integrity. Some countries, notably Egypt and Sudan, have attempted—more or less successfully—to address the issue through the promulga¬ tion of laws against genital cutting. Ultimately the success of any effort to foster change in this area is dependent on engaging local activists who are thoroughly versed in the historical, political, and social context of their cultures to envision and implement appropriate strategies for the eradication of female genital cutting. [See also Health; Pregnancy and Childbirth; Sexuality; United Nations; and World Health Organization.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyle, Elizabeth Heger. Female Genital Cutting: Cultural Conflict in the Global Community. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Dorkenoo, Efua. Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation, the Practice and Its Prevention. London: Minority Rights Group, 1994. El Saadawi, Nawal. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. Translated by Sherif Hetata. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980. James, Stanlie M., and Claire C. Robertson, eds. Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. See especially Cheryl Chase’s “ ‘Cultural Practice’ or ‘Reconstructive Surgery’? U.S. Genital Cutting, the Intersex Movement, and Medical Double Standards,” pp. 126-151, and Christine Walley’s “Searching for ‘Voices’: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global Debates over Female Genital Operations,” pp. 17-53. Obiora, Leslye A. “Bridges and Barricades: Rethinking Polemics and Intransigence in the Campaign against Female Circumci¬ sion.” Case Western Law Review 47 (1997): 275-378. Rahman, Anika, and Nahid Toubia, eds. Female Genital Mutila¬ tion: A Guide to Laws and Policies Worldwide. London and New York: Zed Books, 2000. Shell-Duncan, Bettina, and Ylva Hernlund, eds. Female “Circum¬ cision” in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2000. See in particular Mairo Usman Mandara’s “Female Genital Cutting in Nigeria: Views of Nigerian Doctors on the Medicalization Debate,” pp. 95-107. World Health Organization. “Female Genital Mutilation.” http:// www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en/index.html. Stanlie

FEMALE HONOR. See Honor and Shame.

M.

James

FEMALE LIFE CYCLE: Overview

FEMALE HUSBANDS. See Marriage.

FEMALE LIFE CYCLE This entry consists of four subentries: Overview Menstruation and Menopause Pregnancy and Childbirth Motherhood

Overview The female life cycle is influential in every culture and historical period. A female’s fertility, interests, and capabil¬ ities affect how she interacts with her immediate environment. Gender roles, rigid or relaxed, are powerful from the very beginning of a woman’s life. These roles can determine daily jobs, reproductive strategies, religious in¬ volvement, leadership opportunities, suggested clothing, and more. Childhood and Adolescence. A female’s childhood, the time between infancy and menarche, is a time of intense learning as the child observes and begins participating as an important member of society. Most of her learning begins at home with her family and extends into a formal educational setting, marriage, and work. Child labor was used extensively in history, but has fallen out of favor as children’s rights and educational opportu¬ nities have increased. The use of children as workers greatly increased during the Industrial Revolution in Europe, gradually coming to an end by the early nineteenth century. The current trend in most of Europe and the West is to reserve childhood for formal education and play. Though laws exist to protect the rights of children, as in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child, the use of child labor is often economically driven and occurs in sectors that are difficult to regulate. Nineteen percent of children work in the Asian and Pacific regions, while in sub-Saharan Africa 29 percent of children work. Adolescence for a female begins with menarche, the onset of menstruation and fertility, and lasts until adulthood. Menarche occurs between the ages of eight and sixteen, usually around twelve years old, when all parts of a female’s reproductive system are developed and when she reaches 17 percent body fat. The duration and frequency of the menstrual cycle can vary across cultures. Many cultures respond to menarche and other phases in adolescence with elaborate rituals. For example, the Atayal women of Taiwan traditionally tattoo stripes on each cheek to signal menarche, and some young girls in Sierra Leone are decorated with elaborate costumes and body paint.

263

Western culture tends to remain private about sexual matters, though in some Latin American cultures, families throw a large party called a Quinceanera when a girl turns fifteen, signaling the end of her childhood. Sexuality. Discussions of fertility and sexuality are complex and include issues of identity, morality, emotional development, religion, body image, politics, and relation¬ ships for females. Rituals of sexuality often accompany or closely follow the celebrations of a female’s fertility. These rituals can take many forms; some are open while others remain private or even restrict a female’s sexual options. Some of the earliest art and writing that celebrate female sexuality in the world are the Venus figurines of ancient Europe and the Kama Sutra of India. Historically, in male-dominated systems, a female’s sexuality was viewed as something to be tightly monitored and controlled. In ancient China, foot-binding of female children was common among wealthy families and was seen as a sign of total submission, as well as physical attraction. In other societies, as with the San people of Africa, sexual play and multiple partners throughout life are accepted as common practice. Marriage. Marriage usually involves a binding commit¬ ment between a woman and a man with social, economic, sexual, and religious influence. Other forms of marriage occur, such as polygamy and same-sex unions; laws governing the legitimacy of these vary by culture. Almost all cultures observe a universal incest taboo. Western culture typically allows dating and courtship for individuals to choose each other for marriage. Arranged marriages occur in other countries, sometimes even during childhood, as in Hindu India, Japan, China, and parts of the Middle East. In some cultures, for example the Taramiut Inuit of the South Pacific, the marriage is not considered official until a baby is born. Most marriages are for intimate and economic advantage and are assumed to be permanent. Pregnancy. Full-term pregnancy usually lasts about forty weeks, a time period broken into trimesters. The first trimester involves multiple changes including discontinued menstruation, fatigue, and often nausea, while the outward signs of pregnancy usually begin in the second trimester. The third and final trimester features the greatest increase in size of the uterus and abdomen, visible movement of the fetus, possible Braxton-Hicks contractions, and more frequent urination. Most women, typically between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, give birth to one baby at a time, although ethnicity and age affect the possibility of multiples. Cultures explain conception and pregnancy in varying ways. Roman Catholics believe that upon conception, the baby’s spirit comes alive. Eskimos, as well as the AngloSaxons and some Aboriginal groups, believe that once the

264

FEMALE LIFE CYCLE: Overview

mother feels the baby move inside her, the mother receives the baby’s spirit. Childbirth and Motherhood. At the end of a pregnancy, a woman may deliver a child, or children, vaginally or by cesarean section. There is a higher rate of cesarean section in the United States and Canada than anywhere else in the world. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the rate of cesarean sections in the United States exceeded 27 percent in 2003. The San people of Africa regard childbirth as a private experience for the mother, who leaves the tribe at the first signs of labor to deliver alone in the bush. After cleaning the child and burying the placenta, she returns to the tribe. Mothering styles often reflect the economic and individ¬ ual needs of the family and society. Some women who work in a professional setting return to their job soon after giving birth while others stay home with the child(ren). Regardless, motherhood is a life-changing event for all women. Some people believe that women are more religious than men based on their experiences bearing and rearing children. Goddess religion, which lasted over 25,000 years, is thought to have been heavily influenced by the motherhood experiences of women. Widowhood and Spinsterhood. Widowhood begins when a female’s spouse dies. As women typically live longer than men, and men often choose younger women to marry, widowhood is not uncommon. Widowhood may incite complex rituals in many cultures. A Hindu tradition, that is no longer practiced in India today, once exhorted the widow to throw her body on her husband’s as it was burned. Some cultures (in Africa, India, and ancient Judaism, for instance) require a widow to remarry within the same family, based on practical and economic grounds. This practice has complicated some public health initiatives by increasing the transmission of such diseases as HIV. Some women, usually in patriarchal societies, are allowed to pursue a more aggressive professional track upon the death of a spouse, or even greater sexual experiences. A female who never marries or has a family may be labeled a “spinster” or an “old maid.” The term “old maid” is generally deemed derogatory, and the term “spinster” is fading from use, as it evolved from a woman’s occupation as a spinner around the fourteenth century. Hundreds of years later, it came to refer to an unmarried woman who was often regarded as highly moral and religious, as well as emotionally reserved. In nineteenth-century New England, many spinsters began to regard their lives as holding a higher purpose than marriage and chose to pursue their own independence and autonomy. As women’s rights have progressed, the term “spinster” is used less and un¬ married, elderly women are viewed as individuals who

have chosen not to marry or have children. There is some debate, however, whether a spinster is one who never found love in partnership and/or marriage, or one who never chose it. Old Age. Qld age for the female involves not only multiple physical changes, but also changes in societal roles and expectations. Menopause, the time when fertility decreases and menstrual cycles end, happens at about fifty years old. In response to the hormonal changes of menopause, a female is more susceptible to osteoporosis, heart disease, strokes, and hypertension. Some predominantly matriarchal cultures regard these changes in a postmenopausal woman as celebratory. The role and influence of a woman in some Indian, South American, Italian, Chinese, and Jewish families is strengthened after menopause. Worldwide, the female life expectancy is about sixty-six years. Those years hold a full cycle of changes that influence family, culture, environment, and history. [See also Aging; Foot-Binding; Marriage; Sexuality; and Widows and Widowhood.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

“The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.” http://www.acog.org/departments/dept_notice.cfm? recno=20&bulletin=264. Shostak, Marjorie. Nisa: The Life and Words of a ,'Kung Woman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. A study of the !Kung San of Botswana, Africa, using stories told to Shostak by Nisa while living among the San people. Stoppard, Miriam, ed. Woman’s Body. London; New York: Dorling ICindersley, 1994. An overview of the female’s anatomical, physiological, emotional, sexual, and psychological experience throughout life, in many time periods and across cultures. This book tends to be dated in vocabulary and some statistics, but offers a good introduction. “UNICEF.” Child Protection from Violence, Exploitation, and Abuse. http://www.unicef.org/protection/index_childlabour.html. Zsuzsa, Berend. ‘“The Best or None!’ Spinsterhood in NineteenthCentury New England.” Journal of Social History 33, No. 4 (2000) 935-957. An in-depth study of a woman’s thought processes in the nineteenth-century northeastern United States surrounding idealizations of marriage and vocation while redefining the connotations of spinsterhood. Mollie

L.

Erickson

Menstruation and Menopause Menstruation is generally defined as the phase of the men¬ strual cycle during which the endometrium—the lining of the uterus—is shed and expelled from the body. It was not until the advent of modern biomedicine that the biological basis and function of menstruation were identified. Prior to the nineteenth century, menstruation was understood as

a process that affected the entire female body, not one confined to the uterus and linked directly to reproduction. That said, medical interpretations of and beliefs about men¬ struation varied widely across time and space. In much of premodern Europe and the Middle East, menstruation was explained according to the principles of humoral theory. Menstruation was usually viewed as a healthy and beneficial process because it enabled the purification of women’s bodies through the regular and consistent expulsion of excess or decayed blood. According to the Greek physician Galen’s widely held theory of conception, menstrual blood was also the womb’s way of providing nourishment for the fetus during pregnancy. It was believed that childbirth caused such blood to be redirected to the breasts, where it was converted into milk. Because menstruation was thought to restore women’s humoral balance, its cessation—called amenorrhea—in the absence of pregnancy was considered perilous and was linked to a variety of ailments. Hence premodem medical texts often included numerous prescriptions for eliciting menstruation. Even medical systems that were not founded on humoral theory—such as classical Chinese medicine, which under¬ stood the human body (both male and female) in terms of yin and yang relationships—subscribed to the belief that the interruption of the menses was dangerous to the health of a woman and that menstrual blood nourished the fetus and was transformed into milk after the birth of the child. In the contemporary West, the average age at which menarche—a girl’s first menstrual period—occurs is younger than thirteen. Such precise statements about the premodern period cannot be made. Some evidence exists that—because of a combination of factors like nutritional deficiencies, the environment, and the volume of physical labor exerted by girls—in many societies menarche has historically occurred later than it does today. For example, the average age of menarche has been estimated at sixteen or seventeen in seventeenth-century England and at fifteen and a half in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Furthermore, it is reasonable to assume that in most societies, girls born into wealthier strata, being less subject to the factors mentioned, might have experienced menarche at an earlier age than their less-affluent counterparts did. At whatever age it occurred, menarche has usually signaled adulthood, the transition from girl to woman. In many cultures, such as the Islamic world, such signs of sexual maturity have denoted the legally marriageable age for girls. Regulations about Menstruation. Historically, most religious systems have subjected menstruating women to special regulations and restrictions. However, within each tradition the enforcement of such measures has varied substantially. Jewish law is among the strictest in these matters: it regards menstruating women as ritually unclean and recommends that they be avoided altogether.

265

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FEMALE LIFE CYCLE: Menstruation and Menopause

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