Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History: 4 Volume Set [3, Illustrated] 0195148908, 9780195148909

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RASMUSSEN COLLEGE LIBRARY

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ENCYCLOPEDIA of

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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

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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 University of Hawaii Franchise Dussart University of Connecticut Theda Perdue University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Anne Walthall University of California, Irvine Merry Wiesner-Hanks University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Judith P. Zinsser Miami University

THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

WOMEN IN WORLD HISTORY Bonnie G. Smith Editor in Chief

Volume 3

Kaffka-Service Sector

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

K KAFFKA, MARGIT (1880-1918), Hungarian poet and

marriage, but faced with the hardships that a modern woman encounters in Hungarian society, the heroine’s struggles lead to suicide. The new woman finds liberation in Kaffka’s novel Allomasok (1916; Stations), which depicts emotionally stable, creative female characters who are the equals of men. Kaffka’s last work, Hangyaboly (1917; Eng¬ lish trans., The Ant Heap, 1995), reveals the bitter memories of her years spent at a convent school as a student, high¬ lighting the internal tensions of a closed world, as convents also served as part of the educational system, mainly for women, without the students joining the order. Kaffka was treated as an equal by her male contempo¬ raries and was favorably and respectfully reviewed by contemporary critics. Highly respected among Hungarian intellectuals, she was a major contributor to the legendary literary journal Nyugat (The West) and became part of its inner circle. Margit Kaffka died as a victim of the influenza epidemic of 1918, along with her only child, the 12-year-old Lacika.

novelist. One of the first Hungarian feminist writers, Margit Kaffka is considered a key figure in modern Hungarian literature. Her groundbreaking works portray women who strive to define themselves not through their relationships with men, but through self-identity. Born on 10 June 1880 at Nagykaroly into an impoverished noble family, Kaffka grew up in a strict Catholic environment. She received a scholarship to attend a convent school in Szatmar; after completing her education at an Erzsebet secondary school for women in Budapest, she worked as a teacher until 1915, first in Miskolc, then in Budapest. Following the outbreak of World War I, she concentrated on her literary work and spoke out openly against the war. She was married twice, first to forest engineer Bruno Frohlich in 1905, and then, after their divorce, to biologist Ervin Bauer in 1910. Kaffka entered the literary scene in 1901, at the age of twenty-one, with the publication of her poems in the lit¬ erary journal Magyar Geniusz; her first book, a collection of poems, was published two years later. Although Kaffka earned fame first as a poet, her most significant contribution to Hungarian literature is her prose. She is best known for her groundbreaking novel Szinek es evek (1912; English trans., Colors and Years, 1999); after its publication, some of her male contemporaries publicly acknowledged that a woman might choose, like a man, to devote her life to writing. Through the internal struggles of her heroine, who is forced into the performance of a social role in marriage, Kaffka gives a detailed account of women’s subordination and lack of alternatives in a patriarchal society. Despite her attempts at revolt, the character fails to break out of the traditional role that is imposed on her, and she looks back on her life with cynicism. However, the emergence of the “new woman” is signified by the material and emotional independence achieved by the heroine’s daughters. In her next novel, Maria evei (1913; The Years of Maria), Kaffka deals with the problems of women’s independence in a restrictive environment. Although she takes the con¬ cept of the new woman a step further, from intentions to action, the result for the heroine is again failure. Her main character chooses education and a career instead of

[See also Hungary.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Czigany, Lorant. The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature from the Earliest Times to the Present. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Fabri, Anna. “Hungarian Women Writers, 1900-1945.” In A History of Central European Women’s Writing, edited by Celia Hawkesworth, pp. 165-182. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2001. Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven. “Kaffka Margit prozaja. Az irodalmi feminizmus kezdete Magyarorszagon” (The Prose of Margit Kaffka: The Dawn of Feminism in Hungarian Literature). Regi es uj peregrinacid: magyarok kulfoldon, kiilfoldiek Magyarorsza¬ gon (Peregrinations Old and New: Hungarians Abroad and Foreigners in Hungary), edited by Imre Bekesi, Jozsef Jankovics, Laszlo Kosa, and Judit Nyerges, vol. 2, pp. 1185-1194. Budapest: Nemzetkozi Magyar Filologiai Tarsasag, 1993. Dora Vargha

KAHLO, FRIDA (1907-1954),

innovative Mexican painter. Throughout her life Frida Kahlo was known first and foremost as the wife of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957). In time, her flamboyant “indigenous”

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KAHLO, FRIDA

appearance and dramatic life story made her famous not merely as a spouse but also as a colorful character. These twin roles—of “wife” and of “exotic personality”—over¬ shadowed Kahlo’s identity as a serious painter. During the 1970s feminist scholarship shed light on previously over¬ looked women artists. Since then, Kahlo has become the focal point of numerous academic and popular publications, exhibitions, artworks, and films. Ironically, in spite of her posthumous fame, her art is still overshadowed by melodra¬ matic renditions of the events of her life, particularly her tumultuous relationship with Rivera. The complexity and profundity of Kahlo’s paintings—which are often reduced to simplistic illustrations of physical and emotional pain—are frequently ignored. Kahlo’s biography is indeed an extraordinary tale. She was born Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo in the town of Coyoacan, south of Mexico City. Her mother, Matlide Calderon, was a Catholic mestiza. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was born in Germany and, according to the artist, his maternal forebears were Hungarian Jews. He emigrated in the late nineteenth century to Mexico, where he became an architectural photographer. Frida’s avid devotion to

Mexican culture and her self-identification as the paradig¬ matic Mexican woman—La Mexicana—coexisted with her strong sense of being the daughter of an immigrant and the hybrid offspring of a mixed marriage. The intricacies of this multifarious sense of identity are cogently expressed in Kahlo’s painting My Grandparents, My Parents and I (1936), as well as in other works. Kahlo’s adult family life was no less complex. In 1929, at age twenty-two, she married Diego Rivera, who was twentyone years her senior. Their marriage—marked by mutual infidelities and childlessness but also by shared artistic and political passions—ended in divorce in 1939, followed by remarriage a year later. Kahlo’s art reflected both her initial attempt and her ultimate failure to comply with the tradi¬ tional roles of wife and mother, as revealed by a comparison between her 1931 marriage portrait and Las Dos Fridas (1939). The artist’s systematic exploration of numerous alternative roles and her subsequent espousal of “nontraditional selves” (e.g., her self-portrayal as an androgynous being) reflect a deep understanding that identity is a com¬ plex, mutable, and multilayered configuration rather than a static and monolithic “given.” Kahlo’s art also reflected her ambivalent position vis-a-vis motherhood. Although she was pregnant several times, she never gave birth owing to multiple abortions and a near-fatal miscarriage in 1932. After this traumatic miscarriage, her paintings began to expose taboo aspects of the female body—-genitalia, pubic hair, menstrual blood, and internal organs—in totally innovative and unprecedented ways. Kahlo’s physical ordeal—exacerbated by the miscar¬ riage—began much earlier and included polio, a horrify¬ ing automobile accident, numerous hospitalizations, spinal fusion operations, and the amputation of her right foot. A continual deterioration led to her untimely death on 13 July 1954, just one week after her forty-seventh birthday. Kahlo's paintings clearly reflect her own pain, but they also express a profound sense of the fragility and mortality of the human body, which goes beyond the artist’s individual suffering. Elements relating to Kahlo’s life story undoubtedly informed her art. However, her meticulously rendered paint¬ ings were not merely spontaneous or naive illustrations of specific episodes from her life. Diverse and sophisticated nonbiographical sources were deliberately chosen by the artist and interwoven with autobiographical features to create the complex fabric of her art. The art of Frida Kahlo transcends biography, as she brilliantly reconfigured lived experiences into visual images that move from autobiogra¬ phy to ontology, visually articulating profound insights about the fragility and resilience of human life. •

Frida Kahlo. The Broken Column, a painting by Frida Kahlo, 1944. Fundacion Resource,

Dolores

NY

Olmedo,

Mexico

City/Schalkwijk/Art

[See also Art and Architecture, subentry Artists and Architects.]

KANG KEQING

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ankori, Gannit. Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Iden¬ tity and Fragmentation. Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. A comprehensive analysis of Kahlo’s painting, with emphasis on self-portraiture, that goes beyond the usual auto¬ biographical reading. Dexter, Emma, and Tanya Barson, eds. Frida Kahlo. London: Harry N. Abrams, 2005. A comprehensive catalog published by the Tate Modern in conjunction with the Frida Kahlo retro¬ spective. Includes numerous articles, up-to-date information, and color reproductions. Kahlo, Frida. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Journal. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. A facsimile edition of Kahlo’s diary with an English translation and commentary by Sarah Lowe and an introduction by Carlos Fuentes. Herrera, Hayden. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. The most thorough and profusely documented biography of Frida Kahlo. Prignitz-Poda, Helga, Salomon Grimberg, and Andrea Kettenmann. Frida Kahlo: Das Gesamtzverk. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Neue Kritik, 1988. A catalogue raisonne of Kahlo’s oeuvre. Gannit Anicori

KAIRI, REBECCA NJERI (1895-?), Kenyan political activist and educator. During the 1950s, Kenyans fought a long war of independence against the British. More than ten thousand Africans lost their lives. Although the rebel¬ lion was suppressed by 1959, it is credited with being a key factor in the attainment of Kenyan independence in 1963. Women played significant roles in what has come to be known as the Mau Mau movement. Rebecca Njeri Kairi was an early leader of the movement. She was recognized as being the preeminent woman in the Kikuyu African Union, the leading African political organization in the 1940s. In the 1920s when the Kikuyu independent schools movement started as a countermove to mission-controlled education, Kairi opened the first school for girls as a wing of the school for boys. She persuaded her father-in-law to donate the land for the girls’ school at Githunguri in Central Province. According to Kairi, “Girls were having problems with the missionaries in the few schools which existed” (Mungai and Awori). Kairi was the treasurer of the building committee and supervised the construction of the school. She was the first headmistress of the school, overseeing its curriculum, instruction, and fund-raising. When a state of emergency was declared, the British rounded up all known leaders of the freedom struggle. Kairi was one of the first activists arrested and was detained in October 1952. Be¬ cause of her visibility in local district politics, she was held as a political prisoner until her release in 1960. Both before and after the rebellion, she was known as an outspoken woman who challenged European colonial officers at the barazas (Swahili for open-air public meetings called by

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colonial officials to explain rules and policy to African villagers). By 1961, Kenya’s independence was inevitable. When the Kenya African National Union (KANU) began preparing for independence, Kairi was recognized as the leader of the women and was given the responsibility of organizing them and preparing them for independence. According to Kairi, “It was a difficult task to bring women together. The wives of the Mau Mau whose husbands were killed or detained considered the rest collaborators and, therefore, resented contact with them” (Mungai and Awori). Kairi worked to eliminate the divisions among women that had occurred because of the war, saying, “We were fighting for uhuru [freedom] and there was no need of the continued difference” (Mungai and Awori). In the 1961 elections, KANU became the majority political party and Kairi was elected as a member of the KANU executive council. Kairi’s post-independence work focused on economic development for women. She orga¬ nized women in the Gatundu area to purchase land and farm it cooperatively. The years of detention and the torture she endured took their tool on Kairi. In the late 1970s she was reported to be suffering a breakdown as a result of the lingering effects of torture. In 1983, Kairi was recog¬ nized by other nationalists and Kenyan scholars as one of the most important women leaders in the fight for Kenya’s independence, one who left a legacy of activism for social change for future generations of women. [See also Kenya.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kanogo, Tabitha. African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-50. Oxford: James Currey; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. This book examines the ways in which women in African cultures were affected by colonialism, focusing on social changes in education and gender relations. Mungai, Evelyn, and Joy Awori, eds. Kenya Women Reflections. Nairobi: Lear, 1983. A series of biographical profiles of women leaders in Kenya. This book is based on interviews of prominent women leaders in politics, education, law, and women’s orga¬ nizations in the postcolonial period. Presley, Cora A. Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992. Based on oral interviews with surviving Mau Mau activists, this book is the first monograph on women’s participation in the nationalist movement. It argues that women’s roles and gender roles changed significantly because of the creation of a nascent feminist movement. Cora Ann Presley

KANG KEQING (1911-1992), Chinese national leader prominent in the women’s movement. Kang Keqing, a leader for more than forty years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, was born on 7 September 1911

4

KANG KEQING

into a poor fisherman’s family in Dawuchang, Wan’an County, Jiangxi Province. One of ten children, she was sold to a poor, childless family in infancy. At fifteen she cut her hair to signify her commitment to the revolution, and although illiterate at the time, she was a leader in the local Communist Women’s Organization, the Peasant Union, and the Youth League. At seventeen she joined the Chinese Red Army. The next year she married Zhu De, the commanding general of the army. Theirs was to become a model revolutionary marriage. In 1931 they moved to Ruijin, Jiangxi, the base of the Chinese Communist Party central government. Kang joined the Communist Party and worked at various political jobs in the army. From 1934 to 1936 she participated in the sixthousand-mile Long March. She was political instructor directly under military headquarters in the First Front Army, doing ideological and mass work among the soldiers, and commanding soldiers in at least one battle. Later she was transferred to the Fourth Front Army Party School as general secretary. On the Long March she crossed the snowy mountains three times—once while ill with malaria—and the treacherous grasslands three times. After the Long March, Kang attended the Anti-Japanese University (Kangri Daxue) and the Central Party School in Yan’an. During the war against Japan (1937-1945) she traveled with her husband, who was commander in chief of the Red Army, and she worked as director of the political bureau under the Eighth Route Army Headquarters. Although Kang’s major interest was working with soldiers in the army, she also held positions in women’s and children’s organiza¬ tions, served on the Women’s Committee of the Communist Party Central Committee, and was a member of the Com¬ munist Party Congress. In 1949 she attended the first All China Women’s Federation Congress and continued to serve on the federation’s steering committee until 1983, except during the Cultural Revolution, when the federation was not functioning. Several times she was a member of the standing committee of the National People’s Congress. In 1976 Kang’s husband died, after a loving but childless marriage. In 1978 she chaired the committee that revised the national marriage law passed in 1980. Before and after the Cultural Revolution, she traveled abroad, presenting papers, and in 1980 she attended the Copenhagen U.N. Women’s Conference. From 1978 she served continuously in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, of which she was vice chair from 1983 to 1986. In 1980 Kang signed, on behalf of the Chinese government, the United Nations Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. She chaired the All China Women’s Federation, the Chinese Children’s Fund, the Song Qingling Foundation, and other organizations relating to women and children, and she greeted inter¬ national guests as diverse as Mother Teresa (1910-1997)

and the American Observer Group (the Dixie Mission). When Kang Keqing died on 22 April 1992, her will, in keeping with the simplicity and frankness that character¬ ized her life, stipulated no state funeral nor any ceremony for paying last respects. [See also China, subentry Modern Period; Yingchao; Soong, Ching Ling; and Wu Yi.]

Deng

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lee, Lily Xiao Hong, and Sue Wiles. Women of the Long March: The Never Before Told Story. Saint Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1999. Young, Helen Praeger. Choosing Revolution: Chinese Women Soldiers on the Long March. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Young, Helen Praeger. “Threads from Long March Stories: The Political, Economic, and Social Experience of Women Soldiers.” In Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective, edited by Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski, pp. 172-193. Munich: Lit, 2005. Helen Praeger Young

KANITKAR,

KASHIBAI (1861-1948),

pioneering woman novelist in the Marathi language, and biographer and activist for women’s rights and education in the region of Maharashtra in western India. Born as Kashi Bapat into an upper-caste Brahman family, she had a grandfather who had served the native Peshwa rulers of Pune, and her father worked in the British colonial administration’s land revenue department. As per the prevailing custom, her marriage was arranged at the age of nine to the sixteen-yearold Govindrao Kanitkar, who later got a law degree and worked as a sub-judge in the colonial legal system. Initially a rocky marriage because Kashibai was considered unattract¬ ive and dark-skinned and because she was not the educated wife that the Western-educated Govindrao had hoped for, the marriage came to symbolize the new, modern compan¬ ionate marriage of educated equals in upper-caste society. Kashibai taught herself to read and write Marathi and English without any formal education and with only occasional help from her husband. Through Govindrao’s social circle she came into contact with some of the major Brahman reformers and writers advocating socioreligious reform in Hindu society, including the novelist Hari Narayan Apte. In 1884 she began publishing her first Marathi novel, Rangarao, in serialized form in the pe¬ riodicals Manoranjan and Nibandhachandrika; the novel was published in book form in 1931 as Anant Vinayak Patzoardhan. Her Dr. Anandibai Joshi Yanche Charitra (1889) was the first known Marathi biography of a contem¬ porary written by a woman, and it paid a reformist and feminist tribute to the tragically short-lived first woman doctor of Maharashtra, Anandibai Joshee. Kashibai also

KARTINI, RADEN AJENG

wrote another novel, Palkhicha Gonda (A Palanquin’s Tassel, 1928), wrote a short-story collection entitled Chandanyatil Gappa (Conversations under the Moonlight, 1921), edited Hari Narayan Apte’s correspondence with Kashibai and Govindrao Kanitkar (1929), and published numerous essays in the leading Marathi literary journals of the time, such as Vividh Dnyan Vistaar, Subodh Patrika, and Navayug. She wrote on Marathi literature and matters of religion, and her writings on women’s rights gave voice to the lives and concerns of middle-class, upper-caste women, concerns such as access to education, remarriage of widows, and the strict, stifling codes of conduct for women within patriarchal, joint family structures. Kashibai’s advocacy for women’s issues included supporting the Age of Consent Bill of 1891, which fixed the age for sexual consent for girls at twelve, and participating in the remarriage of a widow arranged by the reformist organi¬ zation Prarthana Samaj, where she and Govindrao gave away the bride. She was also one of the earliest women’s delegates to attend the Indian National Congress, as well as the reformist Social Conference associated with it in its early years. In 1904 as a delegate Kashibai wrote the report of the first All-India Women’s Conference, held in Bombay (now Mumbai). In 1909 she became the vice president of Seva Sadan, a vocational training school for women in Pune. Kashibai was also influenced by the teachings of Theoso¬ phy, a philosophical movement of the late nineteenth century that viewed all religions as equally truthful attempts to ascertain the divine, and she joined the Theosophical Society herself later in life, the cause of some estrange¬ ment from her husband. After Govindrao’s death in 1918, Kashibai taught Marathi at the Benares Hindu University until 1924. She wrote an autobiography intermittently between 1924 and 1947, and it was posthumously edited and published in 1980. Kashibai Kanitkar died in Pune on 30 January 1948. [See also India and Joshee, Anandibai.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kosambi, Meera. “Reality and Reflections: Personal Narratives of Two Women from Nineteenth-century Maharashtra.” In From Myths to Markets: Essays on Gender, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Uma Chakravarti. New Delhi, India: Manohar, 1999. Kosambi, Meera. “Feminist Utopian Visions: Kashibai Kanitkar’s Creative Writing.” In Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History, pp. 172-233. Delhi, India: Permanent Black, 2007. Raeside, I. M. P. “Agarkar, Apte, and the Kanitkars.” In Writers, Editors, and Reformers: Social and Political Transformations of Maharashtra, 1830-1930, edited by N. K. Wagle. New Delhi, India: Manohar, 1999. Vaidya, Sarojini, ed. Shreemati Kashibai Kanitkar, Atmacharitra ani Charitra, 1861-1948. Bombay, India: Popular Prakashan, 1980. Prachi Deshpande

5

KARTINI, RADEN AJENG (1879-1904), campaigner for women’s rights, schooling for girls, and personal freedom, and an important commentator on colonial society. Kartini is celebrated in Indonesia as a pioneer of schooling for girls and as a forerunner of nationalism. Shorn of “Raden Ajeng,” her Javanese title, and repackaged as “Ibu” (Mother or Mrs.) Kartini, she was declared a national heroine by President Sukarno in 1963. Western researchers highlight Kartini’s opposition to child marriage and polygamy and her ambition to remain single to devote herself to improving women’s health and education. In Kartini’s lifetime such goals conflicted with conduct expected of Java’s female elite, and they continue to be controversial when Indonesians, citizens of the world’s largest Muslim country, debate public behaviors and roles for women in the early twenty-first century. In the decade of Kartini’s birth in Jepara, north-central Java, the Dutch integrated islands to the west and east of Java into a single colony through conquest, treaty, and commerce. Colonial rule offered novel opportunities to Javanese open to interacting with the colonizer. Male members of Kartini’s extended family learned Dutch, en¬ rolled in schools for Europeans, and climbed the ranks of the colony’s bureaucracy. They hired Dutch governesses for their girls and allowed them a Dutch primary education. School confronted Kartini with the career expectations of her Dutch girlfriends, while the sole career for Javanese elite girls was marriage to a man of aristocratic lineage holding a government post. The seclusion imposed on marriage-age elite girls impelled Kartini to make use of her knowledge of the Dutch language. Books and ideas were open to her as were friendships via correspondence with Dutch men and women who were committed to Holland’s new colonial policies of tutelage and uplift. Kartini also initiated corre¬ spondence with a young woman who worked in the indus¬ trial world of Holland’s railways with the words, “I have so longed to make the acquaintance of a ‘modern girl’” (25 May 1899; On Feminism and Nationalism, p. 1). While her male relatives were busy writing reports and cementing careers, Kartini charted her personal encounter with the West in her letters. Dutch admirers, who saw Kartini as the flowering of “ethical colonialism,” preserved her letters and published them after her death to raise funds for girls’ schools on Java. Her letters were republished in many translations, including Indonesian. However, Dutch admiration makes Kartini a complex figure for Indonesians. Editors pruned her letters to present a Kartini critical of the Dutch, while her family made her birthplace into a shrine. She is the sainted nation¬ alist of a 1983 Indonesian film. Kartini fought a short struggle to remain single and accept scholarships offered to her by the Dutch, then laid more

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KARTINI, RADEN AJENG

pragmatic plans to influence girls through homeschooling in the households of her father and her husband Raden Adipati Djojoadiningrat (both of them polygamous men with established careers in the colonial civil service). Child¬ birth brought Kartini’s early death, so her significance lies in the written word. A woman’s voice speaks for the elite women of photographs and the ordinary Javanese of statis¬ tics. Her writings show the intellectual impact of Europe on well-off young women at a time when ordinary women were the colony’s new wage laborers on plantations and in factories. The letters contain her plans, gossip about Dutch officials, descriptions of Javanese ceremonies, and much material for social historians of early-twentieth-century Java. Her legacy remains ambiguous for compatriots in early-twenty-first century Indonesia pulled between Western and Islamic ideals of womanhood. [See also Education and Indonesia.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kartini, Raden Ajeng. Letters from Kartini: An Indonesian Feminist, 1900-1904. Translated by Joost Cote. Melbourne, Australia: Hyland House, 1992. An unabridged translation of all of Kartini’s letters preserved by the Abendanon family, with a biographical introduction, family tree, and bibliography of all of Kartini’s published works and academic studies. Kartini, Raden Ajeng. On Feminism and Nationalism: Kartini’s Letters to Stella Zeehandelaar, 1899-1903. Edited and intro¬ duced by Joost Cote. Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1995. An unabridged translation from the original Dutch of Kartini’s letters to a Dutch correspondent, with a biographical introduction and commentary. Taylor, Jean Gelman. “Once More Kartini.” In Autonomous His¬ tories, Particular Truths, edited by Laurie J. Sears, pp. 155-171. Madison: University of Wisconsin, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993. A review of scholarship on Kartini and a discus¬ sion of historical contextualizing. Jean Gelman Taylor

KARVE, ANANDIBAI (1866-1950), a remarried Brah¬ man widow who embodied social reform in western India. Anandibai Karve’s life reads like a narrative of social reform whose pivotal issues were women’s education, abo¬ lition of the custom of child marriage, and rehabilitation of widows through either remarriage—allowed by British law since 1856, though not by Brahman tradition—or occupa¬ tional training, especially as a teacher. Anandibai Karve (nee Godavari Joshi) and her sister Parvatibai Athavale were the daughters of a poor Brahman farmer and retail shopkeeper in a coastal village south of Bombay (now Mumbai). Anandibai was married at eight but was widowed within a few months. Brahman widows were not allowed to remarry, although widowers—and all men—could marry more than once. Anandibai returned

to her parents to continue a life of household drudgery. But her affluent parents-in-law invited her back and en¬ couraged her to manage their family farm, which she did successfully until she was about twenty-one. Before she reached this age she had been spared the ritual purification mandatory for Brahman widows—who were considered to have outlived their wife-mother functions—which entailed repeated shaving of the head and a totally homebound existence sustained by a meager diet and ritual austerities. Social pressures now compelled Anandibai to submit to this treatment and confine herself to dark corners in her marital home, but within a few years her brother took her to Bombay with him to manage his household. He also enrolled her at Pandita Ramabai’s new residential school, the Sharada Sadan, as its first widowed pupil. After she was at the school for four years, Anandibai’s father arranged a remarriage for her, with Dhondo Keshav Karve (1858-1962), a college professor in Poona (now Pune) and himself a widower. The remarriage, which took place in 1893, created a furor in which the newlyweds and their families were socially ostracized in their native villages. Nevertheless Anandibai now returned to a normal life as a wife and mother, bearing three sons who grew up to have distinguished careers. Her husband established in 1896 and then ran the Hindu Widows’ Home Association, and later he ran a school and college for women; in 1916 he founded India’s first women’s university, now known as S.N.D.T. Women’s Uni¬ versity. Anandibai acquired some education and obtained a diploma in midwifery in order to earn a regular income. But ironically she was not allowed to participate in her husband’s educational institutions for fear that he would seem to be encouraging widow remarriage. Thus Anandibai, redeemed in the cause of widow remarriage, was sacrificed at the altar of women’s education. She traveled widely within India to sell copies of her husband’s Marathi autobiography (1915), later translated as Looking Back (1936), and to raise funds for the Widows’ Home, and later she went with him to Africa, where their eldest son practiced medicine. Although Anandibai Karve is best known for her success¬ ful remarriage, it is important to recognize that she created emancipatory spaces for herself within the confines of a constricted life, as her own autobiography reveals. She exercised agency at several stages in her life, making important decisions, such as returning to her in-laws’ house as a child widow, agreeing to remarry, insisting on earning her living, and raising three sons almost as a single parent while her husband was busy with his reform endeavors. [See also Athavale, Parvatibai; India; Ramabai, Pandita; and Widows and Widowhood.]

KATO SHIDZUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Karve, Anandibai. Maze Pura. Edited by Kaveri Karve. 2d ed. Bombay, India: Keshav Bhikaji Dhavale, 1951. A terse and matter-of-fact autobiographical account of an eventful life. Kosambi, Meera. “Women for All Seasons: Anandibai Karve and Parvatibai Athavale.” In Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History, pp. 336-68. Delhi, India: Permanent Black, 2007. An assessment of Anandibai Karve’s role in the interlocking social reform initiatives. Meera Kosambi

KATO SHIDZUE (1897-2001), a founder of Japan’s birth-control movement in the 1920s and 1930s and a So¬ cialist Party legislator from 1946 to 1948 and from 1950 to 1974. Born into an upper-class family and educated with the titled elite, Kato Ishimoto Shidzue married a successful engineer, Baron Ishimoto Keikichi, in 1914. Keikichi, steeped in socialist-humanist thinking, left home in 1919 for America in search of likeminded radicals. Shidzue soon followed, leaving their two young sons with her mother. Shortly after Shidzue arrived in New York City, Keikichi abandoned her, telling her to associate only with Westerners and to study to become an independent woman. For help Shidzue turned to one of Keikichi’s associates, Agnes Smedley, who in turn introduced Shidzue to the birth-control activist Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). This meeting generated instant mutual admiration, and from that time forward Shidzue determined that her life commit¬ ment would be to campaign for women’s independence by advocating birth control. Upon her return to Tokyo in the fall of 1920 she defied opposition and ridicule from family members and friends and began a lifetime as a leader of Japan’s birth-control movement. In the late 1920s Keikichi reversed course and joined the imperialist bandwagon, seeking his fortune through the exploitation of China. Though an abandoned wife responsible for two children, Shidzue persevered in her liberal ventures, and in the early 1930s she joined other activists in campaigns for women’s rights. She earned a livelihood from two lengthy lecture tours of America, during which she guardedly expressed opposition to Japan’s imperialist actions. She also solidified her relationship with Margaret Sanger while studying at Sanger’s New York clinic. Another friend, the historian Mary Beard (18761958), assisted Shidzue in writing her first autobiography in English in 1935. In return Shidzue completed the research for Beard’s publication The Force of Women in Japanese History (1953), even though Shidzue held an antifeudal and profeminist position that contrasted with Beard’s theoretical perspective.

7

July 1937 marked the escalation of Japan’s war with China and the consolidation of militarist power at home. In August, while Japan bombed Shanghai, Shidzue opened a birthcontrol clinic in Tokyo. Sanger, the guest of honor, praised Shidzue’s courageous act. By December 1937 Shidzue’s activities could no longer be officially overlooked. Together with almost five hundred left-wing men, Shidzue was arrested and taken to jail. There she was interrogated by the special higher police about her birth-control activities and about the more dangerous activities of her confidant and future husband, the radical politician Kato Kanju. Though she com¬ plied with the government’s demand that she close her clinic, Ishimoto Shidzue quietly continued her birth-control work from her home for another three years. In 1945, shortly after Japan’s surrender and occupation, Shidzue—now married to Kato—publicly declared her intention to run for political office. The next April she became one of the first women ever elected to the Japanese Diet. She served two terms as a representative, and from 1950 she spent four six-year terms as a senator from the Socialist Party. For the rest of the century, within the gov¬ ernment when possible and as a grassroots activist when not, Kato Shidzue was a leader in the advancement of women’s and children’s rights, environmental and conser¬ vation legislation, and international humanitarianism. Both through her position on the Upper House foreign relations committee and through private channels, she specifically pressed for a formal apology to and reconciliation with Japan’s wartime colonies. Even in her last decades Kato Shidzue lectured and wrote in support of human rights and encouraged young women to become social activists. She continued as president of Japan’s Family Planning Association until her death at age 104 in 2001. [See also Beard, Mary; Contraception; Hiratsuka Haruko; Ichikawa Fusae; Japan; Sanger, Margaret; and Tamura Toshiko.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hopper, Helen M. Kato Shidzue: A Japanese Feminist. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. Hopper, Helen M. “‘Motherhood in the Interest of the State’: Baroness Ishimoto (Kato) Shidzue Confronts Expansionist Policies against Birth Control, 1930-1940.” In Japanese Women: Emerging from Subservience, 1868-1945, edited by Hiroko Tomida and Gordon Daniels. Kent, U.K.: Global Orien¬ tal, 2005. Hopper, Helen M. A New Woman of Japan: A Political Biography of Kato Shidzue. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996. Extensive bibliography of archived materials, Japanese sources, and Kato Shidzue’s own books in Japanese. Ishimoto Shidzue. Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (1935). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983. Helen

M.

Hopper

8

KAUR, RAJKUMARI AMRIT

KAUR, RAJKUMARI AMRIT (1889-1964), a devoted follower of Mahatma Gandhi and a powerful presence in many important Indian political organizations, including the Indian Congress Party and the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), which she served as chair in 1932. Kaur was born into the royal Ahluwalia family of the princely state Kapurthala, in the Punjab. Her family’s wealth enabled her to go to school in Britain. Although her father had converted to Christianity and was quite anglicized and loyal to the British, he maintained ties with nationalist leaders who were guests in his home. Kaur came to know of Gandhi from such visitors, and she had the opportunity to meet him when he recuperated at her family home following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, when the British general Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire on a defenseless crowd of protesters. She worked closely with Gandhi and served as his secretary for sixteen years at his Sevagram Ashram after both her parents had died. Kaur relinquished the opulent clothing of her childhood in favor of homespun khaddar, which symbolized the nationalist struggle against British colonialism. Kaur felt passionately about many women’s issues, including child marriage, lack of women’s education, and purdah (seclusion of women), and she gave her support to many women’s organizations. She considered the Women’s Indian Association the country’s first feminist association. As president of the AIWC in 1932, Kaur turned down the offer of direct assistance from the British feminist Eleanor Rathbone in the aftermath of the uproar over Katherine Mayo’s book Mother India, in order to maintain the point that Indian women were already crusaders for the improve¬ ment of women’s status. But Kaur was interested in creating international alliances among feminists; she made contacts in Britain when she traveled there in 1933 to give evidence to the joint parliamentary committee concerning the franchise, and she maintained contacts with an AIWC liaison group until after India gained its independence. Although Gandhi himself sidelined the women’s movement in favor of the anticolonial nationalist struggle, Kaur main¬ tained her own commitment to legal reforms and rights for Indian women. Along with other women leaders, Kaur offered testimony on women’s franchise to the Linlithgow commission on behalf of women’s organizations for the proposed Government of India Act of 1935. In 1936 she criticized Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress president, for not including a woman member on the working committee for examining the planned economy. He made amends by appointing a large all-female subcommittee to examine women’s employment and education. Kaur especially en¬ couraged Nehru to include women on all committees and to create alliances with Muslim women, normally sheltered by purdah. She also lobbied the all-male Rau committee in 1941 on the issue of women’s property

rights. Kaur continued to play a role in post-independence affairs, and she was appointed Union Health Minster in 1947 as part of Prime Minister Nehru’s first cabinet. [See also India.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ali, Aruna Asaf. Resurgence of Indian Women. New Delhi, India: Radiant Publishers, 1991. Forbes, Geraldine. Women in Modern India. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Kumar, Radha. The History of Doing. New Delhi, India: Kali for Women, 1993. v Anne Hardgrove

KEITA, AOUA (1912-1980), colonial midwife and Afri¬ can political activist and feminist. Keita became a militant in the liberation movement against French colonial power in the French Sudan (now Mali). Her active career as a midwife and political militant from 1931 to 1968 coincided with the transition from colonial domination to national inde¬ pendence in Mali. Born into an aristocratic family in Bamako in 1912, Keita attended the first girls’ school in that city and was one of a small cohort of women who received an education in the Franco¬ phone African colonies. Keita graduated from the Ecole des Sages Femmes in Dakar in 1931 and was employed by the Colonial Health Service at various medical posts throughout the French Sudan. Keita identified with the small influential literate elite—the evolues—whose edu¬ cation and new occupations led them to develop a modern¬ izing worldview and to resist repression. The critical spirit and progressive values of the evolues are reflected in Keita’s autobiography, Femme d’Afrique (1975), in which she recorded her political activities and struggles to oppose her era’s prejudices against women taking an active role in political life. Keita’s political interests were awakened by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. When African trade unions were legitimated in 1944, Keita joined the Symevotopharsa, an umbrella organization that included the unions of each health care profession; she participated in major strikes in the period leading up to independence. Political appren¬ ticeship as a union activist led Keita to become one of a handful of women militants in the Sudanese branch of the Rassemblement Democratique African (USRDA), a radical party opposed to French colonialism. The French colonial administration disciplined Keita for her political activism by sending la petite sage-femme (the little midwife) into exile for two years. Later Keita and Aissata Sow, president of the Teachers’ Union, founded the Union of Salaried Women of Bamako. As leader of this organization, Keita attended trade union conferences in West Africa and

KELLER, HELEN

abroad. She achieved national leadership in the USRDA in 1958, when she was the first woman ever appointed to the party’s central committee. Keita headed the women’s branch of the party and in 1960 was the first woman elected deputy to the independent Republic of Mali’s national assembly. Keita, who strongly opposed polygyny, was the only woman to par¬ ticipate in drafting the Malian Marriage and Guardianship Code in 1962. According to Keita, “the evolution of a country is a func¬ tion of the place women occupy in its public life” (p. 240). She had great respect for the courage and dignity of her less privileged “sisters,” whose children she delivered and whose participation in political life she facilitated in many practical ways. Informal sewing circles she led in maternity centers in towns where she worked across the French Sudan became spaces for women’s political education. In addition to participating in traditional local women’s or¬ ganizations, Keita sold party memberships and the party newspaper and registered women to vote. Keita’s life provides a model to all progressive women who continue to promote women’s rights and social justice through democratic means. [See also African Liberation and NationalistMovements.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ebosse, Cecile Dolisane. “La renaissance panafricaine: Les femmes sont-elles silencieuses?” Paper presented at the Colloque sur la necessiare refondation du panafricanisme, Nantes, France, 29 September-1 October, 2000. Available at www.grila.org/ cecile2-body/htm Keita, Aoua. Femme d’Afrique: La vie d’Aoua Keita racontee par elle-meme. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1975. First published auto¬ biography by an African woman. Jane Turrittin

KELLER, HELEN (1880-1968), American deaf-blind writer, lecturer, and activist. Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on 27 June 1880. At the age of nine¬ teen months she contracted an illness, either scarlet fever or meningitis, that left her totally deaf and blind. Her par¬ ents were convinced that she could be educated, and even¬ tually they contacted the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, the leading school of its kind in America. In 1887, Anne Sullivan, a recent Perkins graduate, joined the Keller household as Helen’s teacher. She taught Keller to commu¬ nicate using the manual alphabet for the deaf. Accounts of Sullivan’s success with Keller were widely circulated, and soon teacher and pupil were worldwide celebrities. Keller went on to attend Radcliffe College, from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1904. She published her first book, The Story of My Life, while still a student and went on to write nearly a dozen other books, as well as numerous articles, essays, tracts, and poems. Her work

9

was primarily autobiographical, but she also wrote on such subjects as women’s suffrage, education and health issues, the labor movement, and religion. Her writing frequently drew parallels between the condition of women and the condition of people with disabilities. For example, in her writing on women’s suffrage she claimed that without the right to vote being a woman was a more disabling condition than being deaf-blind. She exhorted the growing number of American women with college degrees to use their educa¬ tion for the betterment of society through careers in teaching and settlement work. Between the world wars Keller’s work centered on pro¬ moting programs for the blind. She traveled widely, both in the United States and throughout the world, as a lecturer and spokesperson for the American Foundation for the Blind, which she helped to found in the 1920s. During a speech in 1913 she said, “I plead guilty to the charge that I am deaf and blind. ... I have the advantage of a mind trained to think, and that is the difference between myself and most people, not my blindness and their sight.” She encouraged governments around the world to open schools for blind children and to develop vocational training for blinded veterans. She also toured on the vaudeville circuit for two seasons and appeared in several film documentaries on her life. In the first half of the twentieth century Keller’s name frequently appeared on lists of prominent Americans, where she was usually the only disabled person—and often the only woman—mentioned. For many, Keller’s story is the quintes¬ sential narrative of overcoming. Through the sheer force of will and the self-sacrifice of her devoted teacher she overcame her disability, and she continues to serve as an inspiring symbol of the resilience of the human spirit. For this reason her image appears on the state quarter of Alabama. However, many in the disabled community, during her lifetime and today, have criticized Keller for the way that she remained aloof from other disability organizations and causes. Disability-studies scholars have begun to reexamine her life and work in an attempt to separate the myth from reality, for a better understanding of her legacy. [See also Disability and Education.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Koestler, Frances A. The Unseen Minority: A Social History of Blindness in the United States (1976). New York: American Foundation for the Blind, 2004. Lash, Joseph P. Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy. New York: Delacorte Press, 1980. A double biography. Nielsen, Kim E., ed. Helen Keller: Selected Writings. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Includes excerpts from Keller’s published works and many unpublished letters and other writings. Georgina Kleege

10

KELLEY, ELORENCE

KELLEY, FLORENCE (1859-1932), American intellec¬ tual and social reformer. Florence Kelley was born into an elite Philadelphia family tied to Quaker and Unitarian reform traditions. Her father, William Darrah Kelley, was a radical Republican congressman who served fifteen conse¬ cutive terms between 1860 and 1890. From him she learned about the connection between social justice and positive government. Her mother, Caroline Bonsall Kelley, was the grandniece of Sarah Pugh (1800-1884), a leading abolition¬ ist and close friend of Lucretia Mott (born Coffin; 17931880). From her mother’s side of the family Kelley learned about the power of women’s collective action. Kelley began reading government reports at the age of ten and began using the Library of Congress two years later. After graduating from Cornell in 1882, Kelley studied law and government at the University of Zurich. There she married Lazare Wischnewetzky, a Russian socialist medical student. She gave birth to three children in three years, converted to socialism, and translated classic writings by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Ever after she viewed the world through the lens of “scientific materialism,” but she imbued that vision with a very American form of opti¬ mism, calling herself the world’s “most unwearied hoper.” Returning to the United States and settling in New York City in 1886, Kelley failed to find a place in the GermanAmerican socialist movement. When Wischnewetzky began beating her, she fled with her children to Chicago, where she joined the dynamic community of women reformers at Jane Addams’s Hull-House. There she became one of the nation’s leading authorities on the passage and enforcement of labor legislation for women and children, drafting, lobby¬ ing for, and (as Illinois’ chief factory inspector) enforcing pathbreaking eight-hour legislation for women and child workers. One resident of Hull-House called her “the toughest customer in the reform riot, the finest rough-and-tumble fighter for the good life for others.” In 1899 she moved back to New York City, becoming the general secretary of the National Consumers’ League (NCL), a position she held until her death. As head of the NCL Kelley tirelessly organized local consumer leagues to carry forward her vision of labor legislation as a social justice tool for wage-earning people, especially women and children, creating sixty-four local leagues by 1906. Kelley saw labor legislation for women and children as a lever for achieving laws that protected all workers. Thus her 1908 success in defending state hours laws for women in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon was followed by the NCL’s success in 1917 in Bunting v. Oregon in establishing the constitutionality of state hours laws for men in nonhazardous occupations. One of Kelley’s greatest achieve¬ ments was the enactment of state minimum wage laws for women between 1912 and 1923, beginning with Massachusetts in 1912, followed by sixteen other states by 1923. These laws

for women became the basis for the inclusion of min¬ imum wage legislation in the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which continues to provide a floor beneath which wages cannot legally drop. [See also Socialism.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. “The Consumers’ White Label of the National Consumers’ League, 1898-1918.” In Getting and Spending: American and European Consumption in the Twentieth Century, edited by Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthais Judt New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: the Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. “The Historical Foundations of Women’s Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 18301930.” In Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, edited by Seth Koven and Sonay Michel. New York: Routledge, 1993. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. “Two Political Cultures in the Progressive Era: The National Consumers’ League and the American Association for Labor Legislation.” In U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays edited by Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Kathryn Kish Sklar

KELLY, PETRA (1947-1992), feminist activist and a founder of Die Grunen (the German Green Party, or “Greens”). Kelly became prominent in Germany during the 1970s in the new women’s ecology movement and the peace movement, and by the late 1980s she was inter¬ nationally known for her fight for human rights. Kelly was of the first generation born after World War II and brought up in the realities of a new West German state. Her mother, after a divorce in 1954, married an American lieutenant colonel, John Kelly, in 1958. The next year the family moved to the United States. Kelly graduated from high school in Virginia and attended American University in Washington, D.C., where she received a BA from the School of International Service in 1970. These were forma¬ tive years for Kelly, who worked in Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign and witnessed the growing strength of the civil rights and antiwar movements. She concluded that the violence of this activism was neither imaginative nor effective. After graduation Kelly spent a year studying in Amsterdam and then was an intern at the European Community in Brussels, where she worked until 1982. She began writing and lecturing on women’s rights in the 1970s and joined the antiwar and ecology movements emerging in Germany. In 1980 she helped to found a new political movement—the Greens—that linked feminism, environmentalism, and

KENT, VICTORIA

pacifism. Kelly envisioned the new group as an “antiparty party” that rejected traditional political hierarchies. In 1983 the Greens successfully elected twenty-seven members to the West German lower house (the bundestag). Kelly was one of their leaders and served in parliament until 1990, when the Greens failed to win enough votes to hold office. In 1980 she met Gert Bastian, a former Nazi officer and retired major general who advocated international disarma¬ ment and who was, for a time, a Green-elected representa¬ tive. They soon formed a somewhat unorthodox but enduring political and personal relationship in which he was the steadfast supporter of her dynamic public career. Throughout this period Kelly traveled constantly and wrote prolifically. In the essay “Women and Power” she described the “links between violation of nature and the violation and marginalization of women” and called on both men and women to reject all “systems of male domination” (Kelly). By the time the Greens had lost their parliamentary seats, Kelly was disillusioned with the party, whose members seemed more interested in staying in power than in fighting for causes. Her colleagues, in turn, resented her interna¬ tional prominence and felt that she represented the past rather than the future of Green party politics. Demilitariza¬ tion, sustainability, and ecological concerns had become mainstream by then, and Kelly focused more and more on international human rights struggles. In October 1992 the bodies of Bastian and Kelly were found in their home in Bonn. Bastian had shot her while she was sleeping, then killed himself. This tragic and violent end to Kelly’s life does not overshadow her significance in shaping the global convergence of feminist, antinuclear, and environmental movements in the late twentieth century. [See also Ecofeminism.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kelly, Petra K. Thinking Green! Essays on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Nonviolence. Berkeley, Calif.: Parallax Press, 1994. Published posthumously. Earlier collections include Wohin denn Wir? Texte aus der Bewegung (with Manfred Coppik; 1982) and Fighting for Hope (1984). Parkin, Sara. The Life and Death of Petra Kelly. London: Pandora, 1994. Biography by a comrade and friend; includes a valuable bibliography of Kelly’s writings and speeches. Talshir, Gayil. The Political Ideology of Green Parties: From the Politics of Nature to Redefining the Nature of Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Jane Slaughter

KENT, VICTORIA (1892-1987), republican and the first woman lawyer in Spain. Though little known even among Spaniards, Victoria Kent Siano was the first woman to study law in Spain, the first woman to practice

11

law in Spain, and the first woman to argue a case before a military court in Spain. Victoria Kent was born in Malaga, the daughter of a middle-class textile merchant family of liberal leanings. After private instruction Kent attended the Escuela Normal Super¬ ior de Maestros de Malaga (Normal School for Teachers), and in 1917 she moved to Madrid, taking the Bachillerato at the Instituto Cardenal Cisneros. Taking her law degree in 1924, she entered the Colegio Oficial de Abogados (College of Lawyers), the first woman in Spain to obtain this profes¬ sional standing. As the defense lawyer for the politician Alvaro de Albornoz—accused of instigating the republican rebellion in Jaca of December 1930—she became the first woman to argue before the Tribunal Supremo de Guerra y Marina (Supreme Tribunal of War and Marine). Her perfor¬ mance gained her much attention, and Albornoz’s exonera¬ tion won her great prestige. Elected a Radical-Socialist Republican deputy to the Cortes in Madrid, she joined the constituent assembly of 1931 that was charged with writing a constitution for the new Spanish Republic—an especially noteworthy achieve¬ ment considering that women, though allowed to run for election, could not legally vote. Kent gained notoriety for her 1931 opposition to a provision that would have given wo¬ men the vote, arguing that women—semiliterate and under the influence of fathers, husbands, or confessors—required education to understand the importance of the republic. Also in 1931, President Niceto Alcala Zamora named Kent the Directora General de Prisiones (director general of prisons). Kent initiated a radical program of reform, closing 114 jails judged to be substandard, banning harsher aspects of punishment, improving the food and introducing heat into prisons, and creating Ventas, the women’s prison in Madrid, with special provisions for mothers. Kent also founded the Instituto de Estudios Penales (Institute of Penal Studies). In 1936, Kent was elected deputy of the Popular Front government. As civil war came, she organized relief centers for children and joined the defense of Madrid. In its final throes, the republican government in Valencia named her Spanish ambassador in Paris, where she worked on behalf of Spanish refugees. The victorious Franco regime gave her name to the Vichy government, and Kent went into hiding, where she remained until the war’s end. Her diary was published in 1947 as Cuatro ahos en Paris, 1940-1944 (Four Years in Paris). Leaving Paris in 1948, Kent spent two years in Mexico teaching and lecturing and another two years in New York at the United Nations. Kent once likened a man outside his country to a tree lacking roots and leaves, and her ever¬ present concern for exiles led her to found the journal Iberica, which appeared from 1954 to 1975, to fight for a liberal and democratic Spain. Kent remained a permanent

12

KENT, VICTORIA

exile in New York, where she had found both deep personal friendship and financial support in her relationship with Luisa Crane. She died there on 25 September 1987. [See also Spain and Portugal.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gutierrez-Vega, Zenaida. Victoria Kent: Una vida al sewicio del humanismo liberal. Malaga, Spain: Universidad de Malaga, 2001. Moiron, Sara. Cuando el arbol daba frutos. Mexico City: Ediciones Gernika, 1986. Ramos Palomo, Maria Dolores. Homenaje a Victoria Kent. Malaga, Spain: Universidad de Malaga, 1989. Villena, Miguel Angel. Victoria Kent: Una pasion republicana. Barcelona: Debatte, 2007. Victoria

L.

Enders

KENYA. In 1890 the area of East Africa that came to be a British colony and then Kenya was occupied by a number of semisedentary horticultural groups in the fertile highland region, with livestock herders in the deserts and savannas at the margins. All these groups were patrilineal (tracing descent through the father’s line), acephelous (without cen¬ tralized political leadership), and male egalitarian. House¬ holds in most societies were polygynous and extended (including two to three generations). With variations, most had a gender system characterized by a complementary sexual division of labor and a certain degree of autonomy and agency for women. For a nation of such varied cultures, it is difficult to gener¬ alize adequately about women’s rights, powers, and status. Women made a major productive contribution to local economies. Besides primary responsibility for firewood and water collection and domestic tasks, horticultural women performed most routine farming tasks, except for clearing the forests to create fields for cultivation. Polygyny was the ideal. Men married in their late twenties and women at puberty. Having several wives was both a cause and an effect of wealth and influence. In these typical polygynous or extended households, wives headed their own semiautonomous “houses” within the patrilineages. Their marital allocations of land or livestock formed the core of their sons’ inheritance. Wives controlled their own granaries, had unalienable, usufructuary rights to land under the corporate ownership of their husbands’ patri¬ lineages, and had indisputable rights to the retention of their milking herds. Women had rights to trade their surplus agricultural production (in horticultural systems) or milk from their milking herds (in pastoral societies). Typically women used this surplus to buy small stock—the wealth in a nonmonetary system. The politics was locally run either by age-set systems (men grouped into age cohorts, each with particular duties)

or by councils of elders. Only in some societies were there local chiefs with some superordinate power. Women were not without access to the public sphere, however. Among the Kikuyu, women in the older age sets adjudicated in disputes between women and between women and men. In most horticultural groups women engaged in cooperative efforts to cultivate and harvest their crops. Such gender solidarity groups supported women’s interests. Though men were certainly considered superior to women, women had status and power because of their important roles in reproduction and in the local economy. In many societies premarital sexuality was accepted; premarital pregnancy did not attract much opprobrium. Mafriages were negotiated by fathers and children. Women’s position in society might be symbolized by the custom of bride-wealth—a payment from the groom’s family to the bride’s to validate a marriage and compensate for the loss of the woman’s labor and the loss of her children to her lineage. This has been interpreted either as recognition of the critical importance of women (in production and reproduction) or as an indication of gender inequality. That women continue in the early twenty-first century to approve of bride-wealth would seem to underscore the former interpretation. Female circumcision—sometimes termed female genital mutilation—was practiced in some cultures. This custom has also been variously interpreted as the oppression of women and as an important initiation ritual that constructs moral adults. Women in Colonial Africa. In 1896, Britain began building a railway from Mombasa to Uganda through the East African Protectorate (1895), which became the Kenyan Colony (1920). The railway assisted colonization, bringing white settlers to alienate land in the highlands. Within ten years colonial authority was established. Colonialism had profound effects on men’s and women’s lives "and existing gender power systems. First, the introduc¬ tion of money, wage labor, and cash crops for men gave them a new resource while simultaneously creating more work for women. Absent men meant that women had to do all the farm tasks. Women’s unpaid family labor raising men’s cash crops added to their existing workload raising food crops. For example, Gusii men were anxious to grow maize to pay hut taxes, and tending the maize increased women’s workloads. Demands for food for urban areas created a market for food crops, women’s province. Second, the introduction of a hut tax constructed a legal male head of household responsible for his dependents. This undermined the semiautonomy of wives in precolonial households. The imposition of a British idea of a male¬ headed household enhanced patriarchal familial control. Third, Kenyans’ access to land and land tenure systems were affected. In the highlands, land was alienated from such groups as the Gikuyu, Meru, and Embu. Consequently many

KENYA

13

HI

Mau Mau Movement. Kikuyu women renounce their Mau Mau oath during a cleansing ceremony, Nyeri, Kenya, 1952. They lick Mundo Mugo’s paraphernalia, which he dipped in the blood of a slaughtered goat to imbue it with magical cleansing properties.

Prints and Photographs Division,

Library of Congress

Gikuyu were forced to take up migrant labor or to live as squatters on European farms. Individual land-tenure reform was promoted in place of the previous corporate ownership. Because holdings were allocated to male household heads, women lost their use rights to their husbands’ land. Fourth, missionaries brought Western-style education to create a literate male workforce for colonial authorities. What little provision there was for girls focused on hygiene, nutrition, and child-rearing to make them suitably “civilized” (in missionary terms) partners for educated men. Fifth, Christianity spread throughout Kenya, except in the Muslim coastal region. Missionaries inveighed against female circumcision, polygamy, nudity, widow inheritance, premarital sex, and indigenous religious practices. In central Kenya in the 1920s the furor over female circumcision fea¬ tured in the cultural nationalist rhetoric of the breakaway African churches. Young women could not be circum¬ cised and continue in school. The impact of colonialism on gender relations was com¬ plex and sometimes contradictory because of contradictory policies. Two generalized outcomes were that women were converted into “bearers of tradition” and that many of the changes skewed gender power relations in favor of men, who gained access to new resources, including cash, educa¬ tion, employment, and new political positions as colonial appointees on local native councils, native tribunals, and local chiefs.

Women faced a mutually reinforcing British-African dou¬ ble patriarchy. Colonial authorities, in collaboration with local male elders, scrutinized and legislated many aspects of women’s lives, such as domesticity, motherhood, sexuality, reproductive rights and health, maternal health, education, bride-wealth, marriage, mobility, and economic participa¬ tion. The authorities instituted regulatory restrictions on women, and they faced opposition from women. Tabitha Kanogo has said that women’s bodies became sites of strug¬ gle. Colonial authorities anxious to keep male elders happy accepted the elders’ versions of “traditional” culture. Women never ceased resisting this patriarchal partnership. Controlling women’s movements was a constant area of concern. Complaints from Kikuyu men about their women taking vegetables into neighboring Nairobi flared up con¬ tinually throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Nairobi authorities were torn between the need to keep the food markets of Nairobi stocked and pacifying the elders. These concerns about the mobility of women, who were ostensibly trading, were not limited to the Kikuyu. In 1940 the Nandi local native council passed a Lost Woman Ordinance, which stated that women could travel only with the written permission of the local chief. Urban Luo associations forced independent urban women to return home to their fathers or husbands. Women were not passive victims of male domination, whether British or African: they fought back. For example,

14

KENYA

women were often in the forefront of active political resis¬ tance to colonial domination. The first nationalist political riot in Kenya occurred in 1922 when crowds gathered to protest the arrest of the political organizer Harry Thuku. The crowds were mobilized into violence by a woman, Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru, who cursed and insulted the native police and urged the demonstrators to free Thuku. She was the first demonstrator to be killed, of twenty-five. Women were also involved in the Mau Mau war for independence (the so-called state of emergency between 1952 and 1960), in which an estimated twenty thousand Mau Mau rebels died. Though only a few women were guerrilla fighters, they were central to the struggle as purveyors of information, food, and funding to the guerrillas fighting in the forest. Women resisted patriarchy and colonialism not only politically but also in their everyday lives, taking advantage of new opportunities and protecting their rights and powers. Travel, as an expression of modernity, was a focus of gender conflict. Though previously women in many societies had undertaken trading trips, in the colonial per¬ iod it became a male obsession to criminalize women’s mobility. Yet women persisted in travel and trade. From the earliest years of Nairobi’s foundation, single women set up residence as sex workers, often to earn money for their fathers to rebuild the herds decimated in the rinder¬ pest epidemic of the early twentieth century. During the first four decades of the century, many women obtained a foot¬ hold in the informal economy in Nairobi, forming a cohort of female heads of households in the African quarters of towns and supporting themselves through sex work, beer brewing, and house rental. With varying degrees of success, rural women, including the Gusii from 1930 to 1960, used the new legal structures to renegotiate marriage by contesting forced marriages and unreasonable bride-wealth demands in the new courts, suing for divorce from violent or sterile husbands, and tak¬ ing their abductors and rapists to court. Increasingly women appealed to the colonial courts to be allowed to marry men of their choice despite their father’s increasingly greedy bride-wealth demands. Postindependence Kenya. Kenya experienced no violent coups after achieving independence in 1963, and it remained a so-called parliamentary democracy with a free capitalist economy. However, soon after independence President Jomo Kenyatta declared Kenya a one-party state, and the first multiparty elections were not held until 2002. Despite the absence of violent turmoil, the postindependence era was marked by spectacular state corruption, a badly run¬ down infrastructure, a depressed economy, and increasingly serious disparities in wealth. Kenyan women since independence have eagerly and widely mobilized in groups, but their effectiveness at a national level has been minimal. At a grassroots level, to

address socioeconomic problems unmet by the state, Kenyan women have set up a multitude of local solidarity groups, such as cooperatives, self-help groups, and community groups. These organizations have contributed to women’s productive capacity and their ability to raise their families despite an increasingly unviable economy that reduces the economic contributions of their husbands, who are often migrant workers absent from the family setting. In the 1970s local harambee (self-help projects) cultivated grassroots development and assisted the expansion of education and health care in the highlands rural area, building community schools and health clinics. Educated urban women at this time were fighting hard to set up a powerful national women’s movement. Their efforts were hampered by the difficulty of reaching a common poli¬ tical vision and by the conservative establishment’s fear of these organizations. By the 1970s many of the largest and most influential groups—such as Maendeleo ya Wanawake (Women’s Progress), a radical organization established in the 1950s to support poor women; the Women’s Bureau, set up and funded by the state in response to the United Nations Decade for Women; KANU-MYWO, the women’s wing of the official party, the Kenya African National Union; and the National Council of Women—had become conservative, elite-run groups that largely did not challenge the establish¬ ment. They proved ineffective in mobilizing women, perhaps because all too often their leaders were effectively co-opted by party and state. For example, it is accepted that in the national elections of 1989 key party officials ensured that their female relatives were elected to the leadership of KANU-MYWO. The first women’s group openly to challenge male state authority was the Green Belt Movement, dedicated to tree planting, founded by Wangari Maathai. In the 1990s Maathai courageously battled the government despite the punitive measures meted out to her and her followers. In 2002, after she had been heaped with international honors, her own government finally recognized her worth and appointed her a cabinet minister. Kenyan women, like women everywhere, have had difficulty making headway in the patriarchal structures of national politics and the state. In 1990 there were six women in the 220-seat parliament. In 2002 the number rose to eighteen, still far short of the 30 percent recommended by the United Nations. In 2002 two of the thirty-five cabinet ministers were women, including the once vilified Maathai. Kenyan women are workers; they have always been pro¬ ducers as well as reproducers. Even though they have made gains, they still have a long way to go to achieve an equal footing with men in the formal economy. Women hold only 15 percent of the jobs in manufacturing and 35 percent of those in services. Kenya is a poor economy, with 60 percent of its citizens working in the informal sector. That sector is

KENYA

60 percent women, but they are confined to less lucrative activities, working as house servants, beer brewers, and vegetable traders, as opposed to in the small-scale manu¬ facturing and other microenterprises, where men dominate. Perhaps because Kenyan women’s groups are largely ineffectual in the political arena, little progress has been made in addressing the many legal issues that have a nega¬ tive impact on women’s lives. Women are campaigning to reinstate the Affiliation Act, which made men financially responsible for children conceived outside of marriage, a law that was removed from the statutes in 1969. Women are also calling for passage of the Law of Marriage and Divorce, which would rationalize the complex marriage situation that allows five kinds of marriage (customary, three types of religious unions, and civil marriage) and would give equal rights to men and women in matters of custody, divorce, and division of marital property. This act was proposed in 1985 and rejected on the grounds that it did not recognize the rights of men to “chastise” their wives. Though the courts have been active in redefining the prop¬ erty rights of women, there is no legal aid, and many women are unaware of their rights in law. The Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), begun in 1995, effectively addresses viola¬ tions of women’s rights in Kenya. Among other actions, the group’s members have written a women’s guide to law, provided legal aid and free legal advice, launched a national campaign to stop violence against women, and monitored issues of women’s rights. Women’s property rights are minimal. Many widows in Kenya are excluded from inheriting their husbands’ property. When men die, the widows’ in-laws often evict them from their lands and homes. Divorced and separated women are frequently expelled from their homes with nothing more than their clothing. Married women can seldom stop their husbands from selling valuable family property. Men are typically the registered landowners hold¬ ing title deeds, and there is no legal bar against selling family land without their wives’ consent. Women seldom inherit from their parents on an equal basis with men. All these issues are on the agendas of women’s groups, but male resistance is strong. Women have made the best progress in removing gender inequalities in education. Literacy rates for Kenyan citizens are high: 90 percent of men and 80 percent of women. Since 2002 primary education has been free, and 70 percent of Kenya’s children are in school, with equal numbers of boys and girls represented, except in the marginal semiarid regions. The sex ratio is less favorable in secondary schools and universities, where women make up 40 percent of each, but the improvements are laudable. Kenyan women are on the march. Endowed with a powerful sense of their worth, empowered by education, and inspired by human rights discourse, they have been

15

enthusiastic participants in international forums promoting gender equality, particularly the United Nations Decade for Women. Women are organizing to deal with the HIV/ AIDS pandemic, to contest gender inequalities in the law, to improve women’s access to education, health, and family planning, and to increase women’s meaningful participa¬ tion in national politics. [See also African Liberation and Nationalist Movements; East Africa; Female Genital Mutilation; Imperialism and Colonialism, subentries Modern Period and Anticolonial Protests; Maathai, Wangari; and Nyanjiru, Mary Muthoni.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahlberg, Beth Maina. Women, Sexuality, and the Changing Social Order: The Impact of Government Policies on Reproductive Behavior in Kenya. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1991. A medically oriented socioeconomic history of the Gikuyu people with good data on women’s groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Davison, Jean. Voices from Mutira: Change in the Lives of Rural Gikuyu Women, 1920-1995. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1996. Kanogo, Tabitha. African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-50. Oxford: James Currey, 2005. Mackenzie, Fiona. Land, Ecology, and Resistance in Kenya, 18801952. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the Inter¬ national African Institute, 1998. Nelson, Nici. “How Women and Men Got By and Still Get By (Only Not So Well): The Gender Division of Labour in a Nairobi Shanty-town.” In Cities in the Developing World: Issues, Theory, and Policy, edited by Joseph Gugler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Oboler, Regina Smith. Women, Power, and Economic Change: The Nandi of Kenya. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985. A comprehensive historical overview of changing gender relations among the Nandi. Presley, Cora Ann. Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992. Robertson, Claire C. Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890-1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. An analysis of the role of petty trading in women’s resistance against indigenous and colonial patriarchy. Shadle, Brett L. “Girl Cases”: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890-1970. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2006. A history of Gusii gender relations in the twentieth century through a historical examination of social and legal contestations over forced marriage, elopement, abduction, adultery, and divorce. Shaw, Carolyn Martin. Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Elegant analysis of the ways colonial consultations and local scholarship in the colonial period produced an unrealistic perception of Kikuyu male dominance over women. White, Luise. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Discussion of women’s agencies and increasing autonomy in an urban setting. Wipper, Audrey. “Kikuyu Women and the Harry Thuku Disturb¬ ances: Some Uniformities of Female Militancy.” Africa 59, no. 3 (1989): 300-336. Nici Nelson

16

KEY, ELLEN

KEY, ELLEN (1849-1926), Swedish author, teacher, and visionary theorist of motherhood, women’s work, the edu¬ cation of children, and war and peace. Educated at home, Ellen Karolina Sofia Key was well traveled as a young woman. Key never married, and after her father lost his fortune she became self-supporting as a teacher in a girls’ school and at the Stockholm Workers’ Institute. In 1896, Key began to lecture on “the misuse of women’s power” (Missbrukad Kvinnokraft, 1896). The horrible shock of visiting child-care centers established for women workers, and also asylums and reform schools, provoked her exploration of the complex problems posed for women and children by the conditions surrounding motherhood in modernizing industrial societies. Key diverged from other women then promoting state-organized, state-subsidized in¬ stitutional child care for women in the workforce, arguing that women’s energy should not be “misplaced” in paid work outside the household. She opposed the notion that employment was the sole route to women’s independence and fulfillment, in the 1890s an idea dear to many, such as Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) and other socialist women active in the Second International Workingmen’s Association. Key strongly opposed the outsourcing of child care advo¬ cated by the American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). Key was equally scandalized by those who claimed that women’s emancipation could only be realized by avoiding childbearing, countering that “real liberation for women is... impossible; the only thing possible is a new division of burdens” (1904; English trans., Love and Marriage, 1911). Opposing what she called “a-maternal” thinking, Key pro¬ moted eugenic and evolutionary interpretations of mother¬ hood, arguing that women’s energy should be channeled into a new and powerful type of home-based mothering, accompanied by a recognition of the power of women’s love and sexuality. Thus even as she celebrated the import¬ ance of one-on-one mothering as women’s highest and most rewarding calling, Key called boldly for open recogni¬ tion of the sexual side of love, including acknowledgment of women’s erotic nature and sexual pleasure—a feature of her arguments that endeared her to sexual radicals but scandalized those who defended conventional morality. The strategic significance of Key’s contribution lay in her successful synthesis of a “relational” feminist approach to sociopolitical problems, based on acknowledgment of women’s difference, with “individualist” claims for women’s fulfillment and self-realization. Although Key argued that women could achieve their maximum development as indi¬ viduals through their contributions to society as mothers, she also insisted that the conditions for motherhood must be totally restructured in order for this to occur. Motherhood

must be revalued and sanctioned, both politically and economically, by the nation-state. Economic support of individual women by individual men during their child¬ bearing years, which Key viewed as the ultimate founda¬ tion for women’s subordination, should be removed one step from individual male control by providing mothers with governmental economic grants and by drastically changing family law to empower mothers, including single mothers. Though supported by the collectivity, child care should take place in the home, in the biological mother’s charge, not in institutions run by others. Indeed Key argued—developing the logic of earlier “civic motherhood” arguments—that the state ought to recognize formal train¬ ing of women for this motherly role as women’s equivalent of men’s military service. Key’s theoretical work appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and books, including the world-famous Century of the Child (originally published in Swedish as Barnets arhundrade, 1900), Love and Marriage (1904), The Woman Movement (.Kvinnororelsen, 1909; English trans., 1912), The Renais¬ sance of Motherhood (English trans., 1914), and War, Peace, and the Future (English trans., 1916). Her contro¬ versial analyses and proposals on the dilemma of combining motherhood and women’s employment, originally pub¬ lished in Swedish, were quickly translated into many languages and had a major impact on feminist and antifemi¬ nist thought throughout Scandinavia, in Germany, in the English-speaking world, and in Japan. [See also Female Life Cycle; Feminism; and biographies of women mentioned in the article.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Ann Taylor. Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Anthony, Katharine. Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia. New York: Holt, 1915. Unsurpassed as an account of Ellen Key’s transnational influence and her importance for early twentiethcentury American women. Bell, Susan Groag, and Karen M. Offen. Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, 1750-1950. Vol. 2: 1880-1950. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983. Sets texts by Ellen Key in comparative historical context. DeAngelis, Ronald. “Ellen Key: A Biography of the Swedish Social Reformer.” PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 1978. The most extensive study in English. Manns, Ulla. “Gender and Feminism in Sweden: The Fredrika Bremer Association.” In Women’s Emancipation Movements in the 19th Century: A European Perspective, edited by Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Offen, Karen. European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political His¬ tory. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Important for context of the debates circulating around Ellen Key’s work. Includes additional bibliography.

KHADIJAH

Wetterberg, Christina Carlsson. “Equal or Different—That’s Not the Question: Women’s Political Strategies in a Historical Perspective.” In Is There a Nordic Feminism? Nordic Feminist Thought on Culture and Society, edited by Drude von der Fehr, Bente Rosenberg, and Anna G. Joasdottir. London: UCL Press, 1998. Provides a broader context for understanding the contro¬ versies that have swirled around Key’s proposals. Karen Offen

KHADIJAH (c. 555-619 or 620

or Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, wife of the Muslim prophet Muhammad (570632 c.e.). Khadijah’s significance can best be grasped from Ibn Sacd’s famous ninth-century biographical dictionary, the earliest such work to survive. The opening chapter of the section on women is devoted entirely to Khadijah. All of Muhammad’s other wives—he had nine when he died—are discussed together following chapters on the Prophet’s daughters, aunts, and cousins. Khadijah, some¬ times known as “the Pure” (al-Tahira) or “the Grand” (al-Kubra), is first, alone, and exceptional. Khadijah was the daughter of Khuwaylid ibn Asad and Fatima bint Zalda ibn al-Asamm, members of the Quraysh tribe that enjoyed prominence in Mecca, an important com¬ mercial center in the Arabian Peninsula. She participated in this mercantile economy, increasing the wealth inherited from her merchant father through her own business acu¬ men, employing agents to handle her caravans. Muham¬ mad’s reputation for trustworthiness reached her, and she commissioned him to take a caravan to Syria. When he returned with twice the expected profit, she compensated him handsomely and was so impressed that she proposed marriage to him, using a woman as a go-between. Although she was the first woman Muhammad married, Khadijah herself had been married twice previously. She bore two sons, Hala and Hind, to her first husband; after being widowed, she married again and gave birth to a daughter, also named Hind. Khadijah was called Umm (Mother of) Hind. Ibn Sacd reports that Khadijah had al¬ ready reached menarche before Muhammad was born; accounts say that she was forty and he twenty-five when they married. Khadijah bore Muhammad two or three sons. They died in infancy, as did Muhammad’s only progeny from a woman other than Khadijah, a boy named Ibrahim borne by his Coptic concubine Mariya. Khadijah also bore four daughters: Zaynab, Ruqaya, Umm Kulthum, and Fati¬ ma. Fatima was the only one of these daughters to survive her father; she married cAli (the son of Abu Talib) and continued Muhammad and Khadijah’s line with sons Hasan and Husayn. Ibn Sacd’s claim that Khadijah bore Muhammad seven children two years apart—making her around fifty when c.e.),

17

the last was born—suggests that perhaps the age of forty is metaphorical, signaling that she had reached the full bloom of social maturity. Others seeking to explain her extraordi¬ nary fecundity have suggested that the children were more closely spaced or even that her daughters apart from Fati¬ ma, the only child to survive her father, might have been daughters of her second husband, though most consider this latter claim to be incorrect. This speculation about basic facts of Khadijah’s biography is notable given the wealth of accounts—sometimes conflicting—for later periods of Muhammad’s life but pales in comparison to the questioning of the entire early Muslim historical record that some schol¬ ars have proposed. The chronology of Muslim history that remains standard in the early twenty-first century, however, puts Muhammad’s birth in the year 570 c.e. and his marriage to Khadijah in 595. As the years went by, Muhammad periodically devoted himself to retreat and prayer, something Khadijah’s wealth enabled him to do. After the first revelation of the Qur an in 610 during one such period of retreat, Khadijah was the first to accept Muhammad’s prophetic status and embrace Islam. She supported him both emotionally and financially in the face of hostility from powerful Meccan opponents. Khadijah died in 619 or 620, ten years into Muhammad’s career as a prophet, around the age of sixty-five. Her death in the same year as Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib meant Muhammad’s simultaneous loss of two protectors; this blow was one factor leading to the hijra or emigration of the Prophet and his followers to the oasis town of Medina, resulting in the establishment of the first Muslim commu¬ nity in 622. Although most of the traditional literature focuses on Muhammad’s subsequent marriages and resultant domestic and communal intrigues and alliances, Khadijah is uni¬ formly portrayed positively in classical sources, both Sunni and Shia. Khadijah and her daughter Fatima are tradition¬ ally viewed as two of four perfect women. The other two are Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Asiyya or Asya, the wife of the wicked pharaoh. These women, whose excellence is established in the Quran (60:11-12), are said to be among the Prophet’s heavenly consorts, along with his earthly wi¬ ves; according to the medieval scriptural commentator Ibn Kathir, Khadijah’s dwelling in paradise will be between their houses. Khadijah has also become a figure of interest for modern Muslim thinkers, who look to the Islamic past for authentic female role models. The rise of key themes of domesticity, motherhood, and women’s religious activism has won Kha¬ dijah prominence in conservative discourses. She also figures in apologetic literature, her independent nature serving as proof that the Prophet was not a misogynist—though

18

KHADIJAH

paradoxically these authors also lament the deplorable status of women prior to their liberation through the coming of Islam, raising the obvious question of just how Khadijah came to be wealthy and powerful. Some Muslim feminists lay claim to Khadijah as well, stressing her monogamous and companionate marriage to Muhammad as presenting an ideal model; his multiple later marriages, in this view, are exceptional rather than norma¬ tive. Leila Ahmed sounds a cautionary note, though, arguing that though Khadijah is often referred to as the first lady of Islam, in reality it is Muhammad’s young wife cA3isha who exemplifies Islamic marriage practices, such as virilocal polygyny and seclusion. Khadijah’s life was instead shaped by pre-Islamic norms that give her a greater degree of autonomy, especially in marital matters, than later Muslim women had. [See also 'Alsha; Fatima bint Muhammad; and Islam.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbot, Nabia. “Women and the State in Early Islam.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 1, no. 1 (1942): 106-126. Ahmed, Leila. “Women and the Advent of Islam.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 11, no. 4 (1986): 665-691. Ibn Sad, Muhammad. The Women of Madina. Translated by Aisha Bewley. London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 1995. From the Kitab tabaqat al-kabir. Roded, Ruth. Women in Islamic Biographical Collections: From Ibn Sad to “Who’s Who.” Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1994. Stowasser, Barbara Freyer. Women in the Quran: Traditions and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Kecia Ali

KHANSA3, AL- (c. 575-c. 646), the most famous female poet of the classical Arabic literary tradition. Umm cAmr Tumadir bint Amr bn al-Harith bn al-Sharid of Bani Sulaym is known by the poetic epithet al-Khansa3, “the snub-nosed one,” earned and applied during her lifetime. Her life spanned the end of the pre-Islamic era into the age of Islam, even the caliphate of cUmar (r. 634-644). The extant corpus of her poetry is the largest of any female poet from the classical tradition. Estimates place the birth of al-Khansa' around 575 c.e. The few narratives that deal with her early life concern social situations in which her linguistic flair and sharp wit became manifest. It was during her adulthood in the preIslamic era, however, that her full brother Sakhr and her half-brother Mucawiyah were killed in intertribal warfare, and these deaths marked the onset of her poetic career, which lasted well into the age of Islam. The majority of her diwan (collection) of more than ninety-five surviving poems records thirty years of mourning over Sakhr, with whom she apparently was particularly close. A much smal¬ ler portion of her elegiac output is dedicated to Mucawiyah.

Although her four sons—who died in the Islamic wars of conquest in the region of Iraq—and her father are also mentioned in her poetry, most of her surviving poetic out¬ put concentrates on her brothers. Medieval sources contain narrative anecdotes about the life of al-KhansaJ that describe a character of remarkable will, strong personality, and competitive spirit. Stories revolve around her poetic prowess, whether set against the talents of male poets or other female elegists. In one of these stories al-KhansaJ inspired the admiration of the famous pre-Islamic poet al-Nabighah al-Dhubyani, who acted as a judge of poetic talents in the contests^at cUkaz market out¬ side of Mecca, suggesting that he preferred her work over some of the most famous poets of the day. The attestations of the reputation of al-Khansa3 even include one in which the prophet Muhammad himself rated al-Khansa" over the great Imrul Qays, the most famous poet of the classical Arabic tradition, as the one with greater poetic abilities. Whatever its truth, the existence of this narrative points to a profound respect for the poetic skill of al-Khansa3, as well as for the social values expressed in her poetry. When al-Khansa3 converted to Islam along with her tribe in 8 a.h. (the eighth year after Muhammad’s hegira from Mecca in 622 c.e.), her continued public mourning of her brothers with her elegiac poetry began to conflict with the values of the new age, which disdained the pagan past and hoped for future salvation for those who lived and died in Islam. Several anecdotes record how some of al-Khansa3’s coreligionists complained of her stubborn mourning in preIslamic fashion. The remarkable quality of her poetry and the faithful sincerity of her feelings, however, convinced those who looked into the matter to leave al-Khansa" uncensured. Her piety, moreover, is expressed in another anecdote, for al-Khansa3 used her poetic gifts to inspire her sons with religious fervor before they entered battle on the side of the forces of Islam. All four died in battle; al-Khansa3 remarked on her hope that they would receive the reward of martyrs and that she would soon join them in enjoying divine mercy after death. Most sources argue that al-Khansa3 died about 646 c.e. (24 a.h.). Her posthumous reputation dating from the clas¬ sical period puts her among the second string of poets in the Arabic literary tradition. With a diwan more extensive than that of any other female poet from the corpus of classical poetry, al-Khansa3 did much to define—some say per¬ fect—the genre of women’s elegy from the classical period. Using elegy’s major themes, al-KhansaJ could exhort her listeners to acts of social responsibility toward the unfortu¬ nate and needy, just as well as she could argue for the status and excellence of her tribe and her family. Al-Khansa3 re¬ mains a paragon of feminine, familial, and poetic virtue in Arabic literary culture.

KING, BILLIE JEAN

[See also Islam and Literature.]

19

statement of how senior women collaborated in the process of the promotion of kings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jones, Alan, Early Arabic Poetry. Vol. 1: Marathi and Suluk Poems. Oxford Oriental Institute Monograph. Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 1992. Khansa, al-. Diwan al-Khansa ’. Translated into English from the text of Karim Bustani by Arthur Wormhoudt. Oskaloosa, Iowa: William Penn College, 1973. Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. “The Obligations and Poetics of Gender: Women’s Elegy and Blood Vengeance.” In her Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

[See also Gulbadan Begam and South Asia, subentry Medieval Period.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beveridge, Annette Susannah, trans. The History of Humayun: Humayun Nama. 1902. Reprint, Delhi: Idarah-I Adabiyat Delli, 1972. Lai, Ruby. Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Ruby Lal

Clarissa C. Burt

KING, BILLIE JEAN (b. 1943), U.S. tennis player who KHANZADEH

BEGAM (1478-1545),

member of the family of the Mughal emperor and senior woman at the Mughal court. Khanzadeh Begam Miranshahi, the daughter of Umar Shaykh Mirza and Qutluq-Nigar Khanum, emerges frequently in the accounts of her brother, the Mughal emperor Babur (r. c. 1525-1530), as well as in the account of her niece Gulbadan Begam (1523-1603). But Mughal histories indicate little more about Khanzadeh Begam than that she partook of the power and status avail¬ able to senior women. They emphasize the “sacrifice” she made (voluntarily or not) by marrying Shaibani Khan in order to establish peace between the Mughals and the Uzbiks. (She was married thrice, but we hear little about her other two husbands). Thus Khanzadeh Begam is imag¬ ined no differently from her Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman counterparts. But though she shared in this inheritance of Central Asian political traditions, it is important to underline that her life was lived in its own distinct idiom. The trusted wisdom ascribed to Khanzadeh Begam in writings about her comes with age. In 1501, at twenty-three, she “fell” to Shaibani’s horde of captives. She came back ten years later, “elderly” given the life expectancy of the time. This seniority is underlined in Gulbadan Begam’s rendering of Khanzadeh’s special status, the akeh-janam, “my dearest akeh,” marking privileged status, enhanced age, and deference. As far as Khanzadeh Begam is con¬ cerned, any agency that she might have displayed in impor¬ tant moments is not documented. Yet the eminent position that she acquired in later life is clear from later comments and references in the contemporary texts. At one point in his conflict with Humayun, the second Mughal emperor, Kamran Mirza (another of Babur’s sons) sought Khanzadeh out as an elder to be consulted, asking her whether he should have the khutba (decree for the declaration of his kingship) read in his name. Khanzadeh’s guidance in the matter of reading the khutba in the conflict for power between these sons of Babur is memorable, yet unnoticed. It would be difficult to find a more striking

was ranked first in the world in the 1960s and a powerful advocate for girls’ and women’s sports. Billie Jean King revolutionized the world of female sports. Though her results in tennis were unmatched at the time, her activism on behalf of female athletics had an even bigger impact, making King a pioneer in women’s rights. Billie Jean Moffitt was born 22 November 1943 in Long Beach, California. She first gained international recognition in 1961 when on her first attempt at the tournament at Wimbledon (England) she won the women’s doubles title with Karen Hantze, making them the youngest team to do so. From then on King was unstoppable and compiled an unprecedented record. In a career that encompassed both the amateur and open eras, she won 37 amateur and 67 professional singles titles and was runner-up in 38 other professional finals. Between 1959 and 1983 she played in 51 Grand Slam tournaments in singles and won 12 of them: 6 at Wimbledon, 4 at the U.S. Open, 1 at the French Open, and 1 at the Australian Open. Only two women—Margaret Court Smith (62 titles) and Martina Navratilova (56 titles)—won more Grand Slam tournaments than King’s 39 titles in sin¬ gles, doubles, and mixed doubles. In 1971 she became the first female athlete to win more than $100,000 in a year. King was the driving force behind the founding of the professional women’s tour in 1970, and once the pro tour took flight she worked assiduously to promote it. In 1973 she founded and became the first president of the Women’s Tennis Association and fought for equal prize money for women. After winning the U.S. Open in 1972 and receiving $15,000 less than Ilie Nastase, the men’s champion, King stated that unless the prize money was made equal she would not play in the tournament the following year. In 1973 the U.S. Open became the first major tournament to award equal prize money to men and women. In 1974, with her husband Larry King and Jim Jorgensen, she founded womenSports magazine and also started the Women’s Sports Foundation. It was the Battle of the Sexes challenge match against the former Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs in 1973 that

20

KING, BILLIE JEAN

ultimately made King a legendary figure. By defeating Riggs in a heavily publicized game with an estimated worldwide audience of 50 million people in thirty-seven countries, King earned recognition for women’s tennis and for women’s sports in general. In 1972, King became the first tennis player and the first female athlete to receive the Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year award. In 1975, according to Seventeen maga¬ zine, King was the most admired woman in the world, coming ahead of Golda Meir, Israel’s former prime minis¬ ter. Life magazine in 1990 named her one of the hundred most important Americans of the twentieth century. In 2006 the U.S. Open’s venue in Flushing Meadows, New York, was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, making it the largest sports facility in the world to be named after a woman. In 1981, King became the first prominent American ath¬ lete openly to acknowledge having a homosexual relation¬ ship. Divorce ended her marriage in 1987. In 1995 she became the captain of the U.S. Federation Cup team and guided it to victory in the following year. As the coach of the U.S. Olympic team at the 1996 summer Olympic Games at Atlanta, King led Lindsay Davenport in singles, and Gigi Fernandez and Mary Joe Fernandez in doubles, to gold medals. [See also Sports and Recreation.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lannin, Joanna. Billie Jean King: Tennis Trailblazer. Minneapolis, Minn.: Lerner Publications, 1999. Roberts, Selena. A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game. New York: Crown Publishers, 2005. Anita Kurimay

KINGSLEY, MARY H. (1862-1900), British traveler and ethnographer of West Africa. Like other adventurous women travelers in the late nineteenth century, Mary Henrietta Kingsley was enabled by European imperialist expansion, especially by what was termed the scramble for Africa. Kingsley’s three extended trips to West Africa in the 1890s resulted in numerous lectures, articles, two sub¬ stantial books—Travels in West Africa: Congo Franqais, Corisco, and Cameroons (1897) and West African Studies (1899)—and participation in heated debates about Britain’s political course in West Africa. In her words, Kingsley’s purpose was “to collect fish and fetish.” She sent fish to the British Museum, contributing several specimens previously unknown to them. Three spe¬ cies were named for her. Her greater contribution, however, was in ethnographic studies, collecting “fetish,” which she

defined as “the governing but underlying ideas of a man’s life” (Kingsley, p. 68). With no formal education, Kingsley was a gifted autodidact. She had extensive knowledge of contemporary anthropological literature and initiated correspondence with Edward Burnett Tylor, now widely considered the father of modern anthropology. He became a friend whom she named her “great juju,” or wise one. Kingsley was able to gather information on spiritual and cultural systems among West African tribes primarily be¬ cause of the way in which she traveled. With modest means she made her way as a trader, bartering small useful goods such as fishhooks and lucifer matches. She hired guides along the way, generally having a crew of only four or five— Royal Geographical Society expeditions could require as many as seven hundred bearers. When in 1896, Kingsley'returned to England to launch a public career on West African affairs, she was a sensation, largely because of her unusual style. Travels in West Africa was published a year later; in the meantime she contributed to newspapers and journals and embarked on a demanding lecture schedule. Somewhat quirky, with an engaging, col¬ loquial mode of storytelling, she captivated audiences with her discursive wit and perspectives deemed unusual for a woman styling herself as a maiden aunt. She criticized missionaries and colonial policies, instead favoring West Coast traders, even supporting the liquor traffic and naming as her favorite tribe the cannibalistic Fan. Kingsley argued for the coherence of West African practices and beliefs and called for governmental policies that would least interfere with them. In her optimistic view West Africans would hold their own in a climate of free trade. Kingsley has always fascinated biographers; retellings of her life and travels began to appear not long after her death in 1900 while she was working as a nurse during the Boer War. Critical attention in the past several decades has been uneven, however, often serving particular purposes. Initially she was featured in rediscoveries of plucky women travelers. Some feminist critics have argued for her gendered representations of nature; others have found her self-deprecating wit and statements decrying women’s 1890s political activism to be a form of feminine self-hatred. Politically she has been seen as a “conscience of imperial¬ ism” or, alternatively, as furthering imperialist interventions in Africa. If Kingsley was a somewhat baffling figure in her time, she has remained so for many scholars. More recent work has focused on her private political influence. Extended examination of her contributions to anthropology would be welcome. [See also Travel and Travel Occupations.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blunt, Alison. Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford Press, 1994. Examines the

KINSEY REPORTS

difficulties for women within the imperial project and in post¬ colonial theory. Early, Julie English. “The Spectacle of Science and Self: Mary Kingsley.” In Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science, edited by Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir, pp. 215-236. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. An essay on Kingsley’s self-presentation and her place in late-nineteenthcentury ethnographic studies. Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. A sound work that uses archi¬ val material to expand on previous biographies. Kingsley, Mary H. Travels in West Africa: Congo Franqais, Corisco, and Cameroons. London: Macmillan, 1897. Middleton, Dorothy. Victorian Lady Travellers. New York: Dutton, 1965. Drawn both from travel accounts and from records of the Royal Geographical Society, where Middleton was for many years a journal editor. Schneer, Jonathan. London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1999. Con¬ tains a useful discussion of women’s influence among London’s imperialist policy makers, with attention to Kingsley. Julie English Early

KINGSTON, MAXINE HONG (b. 1940), Chinese American author. “Ha!” declares the protagonist in Maxine Hong Kingston’s legendary The Woman Warrior, “You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn’t work.” What a great gift to the world that it didn’t! The Woman Warrior (1976), a memoir/novel that defies categorization, was lauded by Time magazine as one of the decade’s top ten nonfiction books in 1979 and launched Kingston’s career as an American literary legend. Since then her books have inspired and given voice to generations worldwide with tales of travails and triumphs, mother-daughter relation¬ ships, war and peace, ghosts and generational gaps, and the strong human will to survive—in part through the power of stories. Maxine Hong Kingston was born on 27 October 1940 in Stockton, California. Ying Lan and Tom Hong, her parents, had emigrated from China, and Maxine was the oldest of six siblings (two of her siblings had died in China). Much of her life is woven into the fabric of her work, including “talk-stories” she heard as a child in her family’s Stockton-based New Port Laundry shop. Motifs of Kingston’s work explore China—with its great transna¬ tional arms extending around the world via the Chinese diaspora—mother-daughter relationships, matrilineal con¬ nections, gender relations, search, loss and reunion, and the mystical, mysterious, and mundane morsels of everyday life, familial relations, and the ongoing tensions of past and present. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston writes, “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family,

21

your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” With fellow writers Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gary Snyder, Kingston first visited China in 1984 with the Chinese Writers Asso¬ ciation in sponsorship with the University of California, Los Angeles. Kingston’s lively, bold wit and creative literary flair have transcended time and space, influenced generations of artists and writers worldwide (Phoebe Eng, Amy Tan, and Helen Zia among them), sparked lively debate, and touched the lives of millions with the gift of hope and heal¬ ing. Her impressive oeuvre includes The Woman Warrior (1976), China Men (1980), HawaVi One Summer (1987), Through the Black Curtain (1987), Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), and The Fifth Book of Peace (2003). As a youngster, her essay “I Am an American” won the 1955 Girl Scout magazine contest and five dollars. Since then, her prestigious honors have grown to include the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (1976, for The Woman Warrior), the Mademoiselle Magazine Award (1977), the National Education Association Writing Fellow¬ ship (1980), the Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship (1980), the PEN USA West fiction award (1989, for Tripmaster Monkey), an American Academy of Arts and Sciences induction (1992), the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award (1993), the National Humanities Medal (1997) presented by President Bill Clinton, and the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award (1998). In 1990 the University of California at Berkeley ap¬ pointed Kingston the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor in the English department. At Harvard University, Kingston delivered the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization in 2000, and, based on her lectures, she published To Be the Poet in 2002. The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, houses the Maxine Hong Kingston Papers, a special archival collection of her life’s work. [See also Literature and Tan, Amy.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Huntley, E. D. Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Skandera-Trombley, Laura E., ed. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: G. K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall International, 1998. Jennifer Jue-Steuck

KINSEY REPORTS. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), better known as the Kinsey Reports, were major scientific and cultural events in the mid-twentieth-century

22

KINSEY REPORTS

United States. The two volumes, intended to disclose the patterns of everyday sexuality, were the brainchild of a Harvard-trained professor of zoology at Indiana University, Alfred C. Kinsey (1894-1956). Kinsey began his career as an expert on gall wasps, but became increasingly interested in human sexuality, teaching a marriage course beginning in 1938 and collecting sexual case histories from his students. His questionnaires soon grew into a full-blown research project, and in time, three other investigators—Warded Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard—joined Kinsey’s team at Indiana’s newly established Institute for Sex Research. Support for the surveys, based almost entirely on thousands of one-on-one interviews, came in large part from Rockefeller Foundation funds, channeled through the National Research Council’s Committee for Research in Problems of Sex. For the two Reports, Kinsey employed a taxonomic approach in order to arrive at “an objectively determined body of fact about sex” (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, p. 5). Using the device of “sexual outlet” (divided into six types: masturbation, nocturnal emissions, hetero¬ sexual petting, heterosexual intercourse, homosexual rela¬ tions, and relations with animals), he tabulated behavior by twelve factors: sex, race, marital status, age, age at adoles¬ cence, educational level, occupational class, occupational class of parents, rural-urban background, religion, religious adherence, and geographic origin. The published statistics were derived from detailed interviews with approximately 5,300 white men and 5,940 white women. The Kinsey Reports were not the first sex surveys to be conducted, but they constituted the most extensive studies of “normal” American sexual behavior yet available. They attracted extraordinary media attention, generating wide¬ spread public interest and controversy. Kinsey was keenly interested in sexual variation, and in undermining the very concept of normal sexual behavior. His volumes show¬ cased a tremendous diversity of practices, the majority of which contravened the social norms of the day, shocking many readers. Among the Reports’ better-known statistics about men were the findings that 92 percent masturbated, that 37 percent had engaged in homosexual relations, and that 4 percent were exclusively homosexual. Even more alarming to many were the findings that approximately 50 percent of women had engaged in premarital sex, and 26 percent in extramarital sex. Kinsey unsettled many other conventions, arguing for example that females and males differed little in their phy¬ siological experience of sex. Anticipating the conclusions of later sexologists William Masters (1915-2001) and Virginia Johnson (b. 1925), he labeled the belief that women derived primary sexual satisfaction from vaginal intercourse a myth. Kinsey also proposed that heterosexuality and homosexu¬ ality were points along a continuum rather than separate

categories, and developed a seven-point scale to express this spectrum. (One finding, that lower- and upper-class men differed dramatically in their sexual practices, received less attention but was one of the most striking conclusions of the research.) The 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was an instant bestseller. The study drew praise for its scientific rigor and its unflinching expose of real, as opposed to ideal¬ ized, sexual behavior. It also had many critics, who found fault with its strictly behavioral and quantitative approach to sexual matters, its statistical methods (i.e., its neglect of random sampling and overreliance on prison populations in particular), and its potentially damaging effect on public morals. Five years later, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was greeted with equal interest but more vehement condemnation. Female subjects were heavily criticized for volunteering their sexual histories. Although women’s reported rates of premarital and extramarital sex were lower than were men’s, the public release of statistics about women’s sexuality was much more disruptive. This was especially true during the Cold War, when sexual and national character were routinely conflated. Ultimately, a congressional investigation headed by Representative B. Carroll Reece led the Rockefeller Foundation to with¬ draw Kinsey’s funding. Until the 1990s, when Edward Laumann at the University of Chicago spearheaded a major national study, there was no survey of American sexual mores that matched the Kinsey Reports in scope. Kinsey’s statistics, although frequently challenged, are still referenced by researchers and laypeople alike. Fifty years after publication, the Sexual Behavior surveys and their lead author remain topics of great cultural significance, as a recent spate of films, plays, musicals, documentaries, and novels attest. The Kinsey Reports have been credited by their admirers with ushering in the U.S. sexual revolution and inspiring the gay rights movement. Conservative organizations such as the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, on the other hand, have targeted the reports for their purported role in legitimizing homosexuality, sex educa¬ tion, and a morally permissive society. The very nature of these debates—in which details of sexual acts and desires are publicly aired—is itself a lasting legacy of the Kinsey Reports. [See also Daughters of Bilitis and Sexuality.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ericksen, Julia A., with Sally A. Steffen. Kiss and Tell: Surveying Sex in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. A compact history of sex surveying in the United States in the twentieth century. Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan. Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex, the Measure of All Things: A Biography. London: Chatto and Windus, 1998. A biography of Kinsey, admiring of his work and accomplishments.

KINSHIP

Igo, Sarah E. The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Two chapters examine in detail the reactions contemporary readers and subjects had to Kinsey’s statistics. Jones, James H. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life. New York: Norton, 1997. To date, the most comprehensive biography of Alfred Kinsey, critical of the accuracy of the reports, and controversial for its designation of Kinsey as a homosexual and masochist. For a contrasting account, see Gathorne-Hardy. Kinsey, Alfred C., Warded B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948. Kinsey, Alfred C., Warded B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953. Reumann, Miriam G. American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. An interpretation of the Kinsey Reports’ relation to and impact upon mid-twentieth-century U.S. sexual, gender, and marital norms. Robinson, Paul. The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson. Rev. ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Corned University Press, 1989. A valuable intellectual history of the Sexual Behavior studies’ underlying themes of human variation and tolerance. See the chapters on the reports specifically. Sarah E. Igo

KINSHIP. Kinship is a tie of emotion and obligation, be¬ yond friendship, that connects individuals to one another and to a larger entity, such as a family, lineage, or clan. Kinship ties are generally based on biological relations—often thought of as shared blood—or sexual relations—usually marriage— but kinship can bring together a wide variety of biologically related and unrelated people. This diversity stems from the fact that although all societies past and present have a con¬ cept of kinship, each society has a different concept of who is and is not related, how they are related, and what that relation means in terms of social groups, economics, politics, religion, and networks of social support. Kinship shapes the worldview of individuals in all socie¬ ties. It plays a vital role in determining the role and position of the individual in a society, often in the spiritual world as well as in the physical one, and shapes identity, lived experience, and gender relations. This is especially true for women, who are defined by their kinship ties to others even more than men are. Marriage patterns, the production of children, and recognition of heirs have a major impact on the distribution of resources and power within the family and are inextricably linked to the economics and politics of a society. Kin Relations. Anthropologists have traditionally exami¬ ned kinship patterns in a society in one of two ways: through descent or through alliance. The first approach connects people based on their ties to a common ancestor, real or imagined. The second puts greater emphasis on marriage

23

relations and the ways that they enlarge or consolidate the family group. In actuality, both forms of kinship are employed by all societies and are important on their own and for the ways in which they interact. Descent is not simply any tie across generations; it is the path along which family identity travels. It can be either matrilineal, through the mother, or patrilineal, through the father. Each of these systems is agnatic; it recognizes descent through only one parent. A cognatic or bilineal system recognizes descent from both matrilineal and patri¬ lineal kin. Family identity, property, and hereditary posi¬ tions all pass through the line of descent, but people do recognize kinship ties beyond these lines of descent. For example, boys in the patrilineal Nuer society in contempor¬ ary Sudan often have much more affectionate relationships with their maternal than with their paternal uncles, likely stemming from the affectionate bond between the boy’s mother and her brother(s) and lack of competition for resources between them. The ties to kin beyond the descent group might not be as strong as those within it, but they certainly existed. Descent relationships often also exist between indivi¬ duals not seen to be related, at least in a Western, biological sense. Scholars now differentiate, for example, between biological parentage (genitor or genetrix) and social paren¬ tage (pater or mater). A biological parent plays a role in the child’s conception, whereas the social parent nurtures the child. This differentiation is valuable in understanding in¬ fant adoption, and it also affects concepts of parentage among groups such as the Sudanese Nuer, in which any child born to the legal wife of a man is that man’s son, even if it is common knowledge that the child was conceived with another man. The social obligations and ties generated between fictive kin are no less important than those be¬ tween biological relations. Relationships formed by marriage—affinal ties or alliances—are also vitally important to determining kinship roles. This is especially true for women because women generally marry younger than men and are more likely to move out of their natal home and into their husband’s natal home (patrilocal residence) than the reverse (matrilocal residence). This means that in many cultures affinal kin are very present in the lives of women through adulthood. The formation of marriage, and hence the creation of affinal ties, is itself dictated by kinship. Incest taboos are universally present in all societies, but the parameters of incest differ greatly. Some societies are strongly exogamous, requiring people to marry out of their lineage, and even out of their wider community, such as the village or tribe. Others are endogamous, encouraging marriage within the broader kin network as a way to keep people and resources together, while still condemning certain unions as incestuous. In numerous societies—including Hindu India—marriages

24

KINSHIP

between at least certain types of cousins are permissible and are even sought after. In other societies, however, all mar¬ riages between cousins are seen as incestuous. In addition to the choice of partner, the limits of legitimate marriage are also dependent on local culture. Some societies are polygamous, permitting a person to take more than one legal marital partner. There are a very few societies that are polyandrous, in which women can take multiple legal husbands. Among the Nyinba people in contemporary Nepal, for example, one woman is often married to a group of brothers. Most polygamous societies, however, are polygynous; men can take multiple wives. Because polygynous unions are expensive, most marriages in polygynous societies at any point are monogamous, between only two partners, although there is a great deal of variation in the relative frequency of the two types of union. For example, Islamic law permits a man to take up to four wives, but only if he can afford to do so and will treat them all equally. In Middle Eastern countries, few Muslim men decide to many more than one wife, whereas African Muslim men are much more likely to be polygynous. Women in polygynous societies also have very different opinions on being a part of a multiple-wife household, even within the same society. Some value the social prestige and added labor that additional wives bring, and even appreciate the reduction of sexual duties; others are strongly resistant to the new wife’s demands on resources and spousal attention. Among the majority of marriages worldwide that are monogamous, women have to integrate themselves not among their husband’s other wives but among his natal kin, the woman’s in-laws. In some cases, as in imperial China, women sever ties with their own natal kin at mar¬ riage and become members of their husband’s kin network. In other cases—for example, among the Mende people in contemporary Sierra Leone—women continue to rely on the casual support of their natal families when instances of conflict arise in their marital homes, even though they are no longer formally part of their natal homes. Finally, some women remain members of their natal families, and not of their husband’s, even when living with the husband’s family, as was the case among the elites in imperial Rome. The kinship networks of married women differed greatly, even among these thoroughly patrilineal societies. In addition to affinal and descent ties, people in numerous societies feel a strong connection to deceased members of a kin network. These men and women continue to exist as spirits or ancestors who influence events in the world of the living. They must be properly cared for, often through sacrifice or the maintenance of altars honoring their memory. The responsibility of this care falls to the living in the line of descent. For example, in China one of the reasons that sons are so much more valued than daughters is the belief that only male descendents can properly care for ancestors.

The need for sons, therefore, prompted adoptions and concubinage. Kinship and Social Structure. Kinship shapes and orders the world in which people live. It dictates, to a large extent, the individuals to whom a person will be tied, but it also determines the nature of these bonds. These kinship ties are often viewed as extending from this life into the next, structuring the individual’s entire worldview. Beyond religion, kinship structures are vital to economic transfer, politics, and the role and status of women in a society. Economics. In most societies throughout history, prop¬ erty was owned by lineages or kin groups rather than by individuals; in such cases the. head of the kin net¬ work simply controls the wealth. Thus at least once per generation there is an economic transfer between kin in the form of inheritance. This transfer of wealth generally corresponds with descent principles in the society. That is, in a patrilineal society, wealth passes from father to child; in a matrilineal society, wealth passes to children through their mother, often from their mother’s brother; in a cognatic society, children inherit from both parents. In some societies, sons inherit more than daughters, or inherit the goods that constitute the basis of the familial wealth, but this does not necessarily mean that daughters are left with nothing. Some inherit along with their brothers, some inherit from their mothers while their brothers inherit from their fathers, and some serve as the conduit through which wealth passes from their natal families to their chil¬ dren. Daughters may receive wealth at the time of their mar¬ riage rather than at a parent’s death. Renaissance Florentine fathers, for example, provided their daughters with dowries of cash and goods sometimes amounting to a significant share of the familial wealth. Fathers did this to provide for their daughters but also in the hopes of raising the status of the patriline through marriage to a higher-status family. In Florence, as in many other societies, women retained legal rights to this property while married or upon the termination of the marriage. Wealth could also flow from the groom’s family at mar¬ riage, in the form of bride-wealth or morning gift. The former is a payment to the bride’s family, generally seen as compen¬ sation for the reproductive properties of the bride, whereas the latter was a gift from the groom to the bride, designed to support her in the case of widowhood. In the majority of societies, it was men who controlled wealth, regardless of its origin or purpose, even when women owned it. In some cases this was only a legal formality, but in others it was the reality. Politics. Often closely related to economic exchange, kinship also plays an important role in political systems and the passing on of political power in various societies. This is certainly true in monarchies, where power passes directly from one person to his or (much less frequently) her direct heir. Kinship was also important, however, in many

KINSHIP

republics, such as ancient Rome or Renaissance Venice, where political power was efficiently limited to a small oligarchy of patrilineal families tied to one another through marriage and descent. In both monarchies and republics, as well as in other forms of government, kin groups have used marriage, adoption, and education of children to consolidate and maintain both wealth and political power and to determine who within the network had access to it. Even in patrilineal societies, women of the highest social ranks often played an important role in kinship politics. Even when they were not direct rulers, they could be conduits for power, unite lineages through marriage and childbearing, and influence their powerful male kinsmen. Women played these roles, for example, during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The issue at stake was whether the crown of France should pass to the nearest male relative of the late king, even if their relationship was through a woman, or to a male relative through all male connections, even if he was further removed from the previous king. At several points during this long periodic conflict, the leaders of the two factions attempted to mend the dispute by proposing marriage between the two factions and even by the adoption of heirs. At the heart of this conflict was the issue of descent and the role that women could play in it. Gender roles. Indeed, examination of the position of women within the kinship networks and the ways that they could manipulate them reveals a great deal about the roles and limitations of women in a particular society. In many societies, the lineage and not the individual was of primary concern; those interested in furthering their own goals at the expense of the lineage were seen as disloyal and dishonorable. This meant not only that individuals had to submit themselves to the goals of the lineage but also that preference and resources had to be given to those who would eventually carry on the lineage. In many cases this was done by sons. But even where daughters were not able to fulfill the duties required of sons for carrying on the family, they often played important roles in the kin network through influence and action, and in turn they found support from the network. Kinship in World History. Little is known about social organization, including kinship, in the prehistoric period. It is difficult—although not impossible—to understand abstract concepts like kinship through archaeological remains. Of course, any written records come from a later period, after the introduction of writing, which was often accompanied by many other cultural changes. This has not, however, kept scholars from hypothesizing about the structure of early human societies. Based on his work with the Iroquois, a matrilineal North American society, the nineteenth-century anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan argued that matrilineal systems of descent had at

25

one point been universal but were gradually replaced by patrilineal descent and also patriarchy (male dominance). Matrilineal cultures, he argued, were less civilized and existed in the modern world only in underdeveloped cul¬ tures. This argument—with roots in social Darwinism and, indeed, racism—has since been rejected. Furthermore, although many societies, past and present, have been matrilineal, there is no documented matriarchal society, past or present. This does not mean that women have been universally downtrodden; in many societies, both matrili¬ neal and patrilineal, women have exercised considerable control over property, have exerted significant influence over politics though direct participation or indirectly, and have been largely responsible for making decisions about their own lives and those of their children. The rise of complex societies. All societies before the rise of agriculture—and a great many after that—were what scholars call kin-based societies. These social groups were defined through real or fictive kinship relations. All indivi¬ duals had to contribute to survival. There was little surplus, and so no one individual or kin group could accumulate wealth or commandeer the labor of others. Society was fairly egalitarian; distinctions between individuals were simply made on the basis of gender, age, and ability rather than through inherited status or wealth. Societies became more complex with the advent of agri¬ culture beginning about ten thousand years ago. Agriculture allowed for a far larger number of people to be supported on the same area of land than did hunting and gathering. This, in turn, allowed for a population boom and ultimately for the rise of cities and complex civilizations. With the advent of agriculture, land became a valuable commodity, and the possibility of surplus began to exist. Individuals and kin groups accumulated land and surplus in order to gain political and economic power. Societies thereby became more complex, with the development of ruling classes and with individual roles that became more formalized and less flexible. The nineteenth-century social theorist Friedrich Engels argued that the rise of complex societies led to the “world historic defeat of women” in the face of patriarchy. This assertion fits more closely with the idea of cultural evolution than it fits with the evidence; preagricultural societies were not necessarily utopias for women, and women have enjoyed significant rights in many complex societies. However, it is true that with these devel¬ opments, kinship networks began to consolidate, increase, and perpetuate their power, and the needs or opinions of individuals were increasingly subordinated to those of the kin group. For societies that fell between the two extremes of preag¬ ricultural kinship-based organization and complex states, kinship provided structure. It organized members toward collective goals, whether those goals were the accumulation

26

KINSHIP

and protection of resources, continuity of the line, or atten¬ tion to spiritual needs. A respected elder made decisions for the good of the group with the consent of—and often input from—group members. The Hopi people, for instance, who continue to live in what is now the southwestern United States, were organized into groups of endogamous villages. Each village consisted of several matrilocal and matrilineal, lineage-based clans, which controlled the land worked by their members. Each clan had a “mother,” generally the eldest woman, and a “father,” often her brother, who served as leaders of the clan. The village also had a “mother” and “father” who were the eldest members of the most elite clan. This was an effective form of social organization for the Hopi and in many societies. As the state began to grow, tension between traditional kin structures and the growing state was inevitable. For example, the early Roman Christian church—itself a state—fought against the established marriage customs of the newly converted Germanic peoples. The church backed one of the strictest incest taboos of all known cultures, prohibiting marriage within seven degrees of relation, including those relations formed by marriage and godparentage; prohibited polygyny, widely practiced by the Germanic nobles of northern Europe; declared children by concubines illegitimate; and insisted that both the bride and groom consent to the marriage as adults, not as minors. These regulations restricted the rights of family heads to use women in making alliances or strengthening extended kin networks through endogamy, although both certainly still occurred. It also allowed both men and women who claimed that they had been forced into marriage or were too closely related to their spouse occasionally to end unsatis¬ factory unions. The queen Eleanor of Aquitaine successfully argued that she was too closely related to her first husband, Louis VII of France, thereby obtaining an annulment in 1152 and remarrying Henry II of England, a man of her choice. Women could therefore exploit the conflict between the two systems to their advantage, although it was rare that they could do so in actuality unless they had considerable resources and powerful male supporters, usually kin themselves. Kinship and the age of global contact. Both kin-based societies and state societies function well in their own settings. In world history, however, state-based societies developed a major advantage. These societies were able to use state structures to accumulate more resources, allowing for expansion and conquest, which, in turn, allowed for the accumulation of even greater resources. This colonization had a significant effect on the existing kinship systems in conquered areas and, in some cases, also on the colonizing societies, as the example of the Maya culture in Mexico shows. In pre-Colombian Maya societies descent was patrilineal and residence patrilocal, but one’s mother and her kin also

played an important role in an individual’s identity. The woman contributed the life force or blood that was neces¬ sary for the continuation of the line. The marriage forma¬ tion process for Maya began with a significant transfer of resources from the groom’s family to the bride’s, including cloth and a chocolate beverage (bride-wealth) and the labor of the groom for an extended period (bride service). There was also a transfer of goods in the other direction, but this tended to be smaller. The goods provided by the groom’s family to the bride’s were also those goods provided by subjects to the king in tribute, perhaps indicating the respect and importance assigned to the wife’s family in the marriage transaction. This is further supported by the fact that the king referred to himself as a source of life, the same lan¬ guage used to describe wives and mothers. When the Spanish arrived, they altered Maya kinship in several ways. First of all, the Europeans introduced diseases to the Americas that led to a huge and sudden reduction of the population and, in turn, to disruptions in residence, inheritance, marriage, and, ultimately, kinship patterns. Beyond that, Europeans imposed their religion and social patterns onto the American Indian nations in an effort to “civilize” them. In the case of the Maya, this meant the imposition of several changes in marriage formation. The Roman Catholic Church imposed its standards for consent, monogamy, and exogamy, and the Spanish introduced a dowry system in lieu of the practices of bride-wealth and bride service, which they viewed as the purchase of a woman. This reversal in the flow of wealth, as well as the Spanish effort to impose their own ideology of a society run by a male head rather than a life giver, led to a devaluation of the mother-wife role. In addition, Maya lineages as a whole gradually lost their prestige as the Spanish settled and formed a new layer of elite lineages. “Mestizos,” largely descended from unions between Spanish men and indigenous women, fell into a second tier of New World society. Formerly elite Maya lineages, as well as the majority of Maya whose lineages had consisted of peasants, eventually made up a third tier. In this way the Spanish colonization altered both the structure of lineages and the position of lineages within a society in a way that facilitated Spanish governance. Industrialization. In Europe beginning in roughly the same period as American colonization, marriage patterns were also changing in ways closely related to economics. From the sixteenth century on, opportunities increasingly existed for young people, and especially women, to work as day laborers, domestic servants, or pieceworkers. This gave them the chance to earn money and establish their own household at marriage, rather than living with relatives and waiting to inherit. As this pattern of life-cycle labor became more common, it reinforced itself; young people were soon expected to establish their own household first and marry later, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty for both men

KINSHIP

and women. Many men and women also did not many at all, remaining only members of their natal families and earning money for themselves and their families rather than producing children. These changes accelerated through the early modern period (roughly 1500-1800) and into the modern period, when, some scholars argue, they were closely tied to indus¬ trialization. Because women delayed marriage and child¬ bearing to work during their early adulthood, the workforce encompassed a larger portion of the population. Further, the increased number of financially stable households created a growing market for goods. This combination of a labor force (including women) and a market (driven in part by women’s wages) created economic conditions that were ripe for industrialization. This was not the case in other areas of the world. China, for example, was an equally complex society with an equally, if not more, developed state, but there women almost all married, usually before the age of twenty, and moved in with their in-laws. The labor they did was within the family and did not yield money that they could return to the economy. Further, the labor of Chinese women was more limited than that of European women, because Chinese women spent more years pregnant and caring for young children. The European move toward later marriage meant that the role of the kin network in marriage formation was declining and the role of the couple, and especially the bride, was increasing. Because a poorer woman accumulated on her own the cash and household goods that formed her dowry, her family could not financially compel her to marry a man of their choosing, although wealthier families still wielded control over their children. The extended family still pro¬ vided assistance, depending on status, region, and indivi¬ dual situations, but by the modern period the nuclear family was increasingly the foundation of a woman’s identity and was the basic unit of society in terms of economics, childrearing, and emotional support. The increased economic power of Western women within the family had mixed results. Despite the social ideal of the family run by the male patriarch/provider, men in the lower classes frequently abandoned their families, leaving women to run their households alone. In the nineteenth century in urban areas of Brazil—a decidedly patrilineal and patriarchal society—lower-class families were distinctly matrifocal; raised in a world of women, where fathers and patrilineal kin were largely absent, children developed stron¬ ger bonds with their mothers and their maternal kin than with their patriline, to which they supposedly belonged. This was also the day-to-day situation among the lower classes of nineteenth-century Germany. Such arrangements often came with severe economic and social disadvantages for these women, disadvantages that were likely to be passed on to their children.

27

Modem world. Throughout most of history, and in some societies today, the continuation of the lineage and the maintenance and increase of familial wealth depended on having a large number of children. Infant and child mortality was high, making it necessary for a couple to have many babies if they wanted any to grow up. As both children and adults, the labor of these sons and daughters was necessary to the family economies of all but the wealthiest. For the most part, numerous children were a boon to their lineage. In societies that experienced industrialization, urbaniza¬ tion, and the growing correlation between education and high-wage employment, however, the need to produce many children was superseded by other factors. In the developed world, healthy babies now generally live to adulthood. Par¬ ents no longer benefit financially from the labor of the chil¬ dren they are raising but rather invest in them, especially in their education. This economic reversal, combined with widespread access to reliable birth-control methods, means that couples in the developed world generally wait longer to begin having children and then have fewer children than they did in the past. In twenty-first-century Italy, for example, the high price of housing and the scarcity of highpaying jobs mean that young adults remain single and continue to live with their parents into their twenties and thirties. Even once established in a new household, women are often not willing or financially able to stay home and care for children. As a result, Italian women now bear an average of only 1.33 children each, far below the populationreplacement level of 2.1. Though Italy is an extreme example of the phenomenon of plunging birthrates, it is not unique; in many areas of Europe and North America population growth continues only because of an influx of immigrants. In the West, these collective declines in rates of childbear¬ ing have occurred almost entirely as a result of families responding individually to social and economic pressures. In China, however, the government has actively enforced a national agenda to limit the birthrate for economic reasons. Governmental efforts began in 1970 with the “late, long, few” campaign, which encouraged young people to delay marriage, space children widely, and have fewer children. This campaign caused a drastic drop in the number of births per woman (from 5.9 to 2.9) even before the 1979 imple¬ mentation of the one-child policy. This policy, still in place in the early twenty-first century, limits urban, Han-majority couples to one child, with few exceptions. Rural couples and ethnic minorities have different, less stringent, restrictions. Although generally regarded as successful in limiting population growth in China, the policy has had unintended consequences. Most notably, the ratio of men to women has become unnaturally high in some areas; in 2001 there were approximately 117 men for every 100 women in China, but in some areas this figure rose to as high as 130.

28

KINSHIP

This imbalance, already causing social problems, is largely blamed on a millennia-old preference for boys as an eco¬ nomic asset to the household and as the ones who will carry on the family name and honor the ancestors. Though the economic preferences for boys may no longer be justified, kinship traditions still clearly survive. Kinship structures in sub-Saharan Africa have also changed drastically since the late twentieth century, but there the reason for the change is the devastating effect of HIV/AIDS on the population. Traditionally in these areas, as elsewhere around the world, children were cared for by their parents in the nuclear or extended household. In the past, orphans had been taken in by members of the larger kin network. With rising mortality rates from HIV/AIDS, however, combined with increased mobility of individuals away from the family, a situation has emerged in which the number of orphans is overwhelming the physical and economic capacity of the kin network to care for them. Those who do take the orphans in are often not able to support the enlarged family without making use of the chil¬ dren’s labor. Additionally, child-headed households, often consisting of groups of orphaned siblings with no one left to care for them, are becoming increasingly common. The situation in sub-Saharan Africa in fact represents not a changed kinship system, but the wholesale destruction of the system. Kinship is a component of all societies. It affects nearly every aspect of a society and is comparable across space and time. In the study of kinship systems, women are as impor¬ tant as men, which means that a kin-based approach to world history incorporates women in a way that other thematic approaches cannot. This not only reincorporates women into world history but presents a fresh, comparative perspective for the study of all topics.

Hajnal, John. “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective.” In Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, edited by D. V. Glass and David E. C. Eversley. London: E. Arnold, 1965. This article introduces the concept of the European marriage pattern, which other scholars have argued makes Europe fundamentally different from the rest of the world and gives it an economic advantage. Hartman, Mary S. The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Examines the changing struc¬ ture of family and kinship in Europe after 1500, arguing that these changes led to major shifts in governmental and social structures in the larger society. Hesketh, Therese, Li Lu, and Zhu Wei Xing. “The Effect of China’s One-Child Policy after 25 Years.” Nezp England Journal of Medi¬ cine 353, no. 11 (2005): 1171-1176. A short, readable, and informative overview. Maynes, Mary Jo, and Ann D. Waltner. “Family History as World History.” In Women’s History in Global Perspective, edited by Bonnie G. Smith, pp. 48-88. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Provides a world-historical narrative for the post-1500 period by focusing on family history. Examples are mainly from China, Germany, East Africa, and Mexico. Maynes, Mary Jo, et al., eds. Gender, Kinship, Power: A Compara¬ tive and Interdisciplinary History. New York: Routledge, 1996. Short articles on the role of gender in kinship, and its intersec¬ tions with legal and political power, drawn from cultures from antiquity to the present and from across the globe. McAnany, Patricia Ann. Living with the Ancestors: Kinship and Kingship in Ancient Maya Society. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Examines the role of kinship in the spiritual world of the Maya, with some focus on gender. Parkin, Robert, and Linda Stone, eds. Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Case studies covering societies across the world, gathered in the last century. Stone, Linda. Kinship and Gender: An Introduction. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. Each topical chapter within this volume contains both clearly written explanatory material and case studies from across space and time. Tovah Bender

[See also Adoption; Children; Demography; Dower Sys¬ tems; Family; Inheritance; Marriage; Matriarchy; Matrilocality and Patrilocality; and Patriarchy.] BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eastman, Lloyd E. Family, Fields, and Ancestors: Constancy and Change in China’s Social and Economic History, 1550-1949. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Includes extensive sections on notions and practices of kinship in imperial China. Eggan, Fredrick. Essays in Social Anthropology and Ethnology. Chicago: Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1975. These essays, by a renowned anthropologist of North American Indian nations, date as far back as the 1930s but provide excellent details and assessments of a variety of cultures, with a focus on kinship and power. Goody, Jack. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Examines marriage and family patterns in the long run, arguing against the idea of a radical difference between premodern and modern families and between European families and families elsewhere.

KISAENG. Kisaeng (or kinyo) were low-born women who functioned as entertainers at the Korean royal court and in provincial centers. Their origin is unknown, but it has often been speculated that the institution of kisaeng had shamanic roots dating back to the founding of the “flower boys” (hwarang)—a group of unmarried youths who underwent special martial and religious training and, representing the fighting spiri of the kingdom of Silla, were instrumental in the wars uniting Korea under Silla in 668. Another source alleges that the kisaeng originated from families of base wicker-ware artisans (yangsuch’ok) of Later Paekche (892-934) who resisted the incorporation of their kingdom into Koryo (918-1392). Whatever the

KISAENG

truth, throughout Korean history the kisaeng belonged to a socially despised base people (