Gender and History最新文献

Two major barriers interfere with writing trans histories of the premodern world: the conflict between creating a legible or foreignised past and balancing the vastness of the social system of gender against individual performances of gender identity. In this article, I propose one methodology to bypass these barriers. Additionally, this methodology reminds us that both gender and history are systems which we use to generate narratives about ourselves and that these narratives always care for and nourish certain people. Here, I issue a call for trans historians to unabashedly write histories that care for and nourish trans lives.

This article uses election addresses to consider how the early women parliamentary candidates sought to make their case to English voters. It then explores the insights that Mass Observation's election surveys offer into public attitudes to women politicians, and gender and political leadership more broadly, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. While the pioneer female candidates argued that they should have more representatives at Westminster to better uphold the ‘woman's point of view’ this approach was gradually undermined from the 1920s onwards with the growth of programmatic politics led by Labour. Mass Observation found that voters claimed to focus more on which party had the best programme rather than the personalities of candidates. However, their findings also indicate that women candidates continued to face many additional prejudices which their male opponents did not.

During the International Women's Year (IWY) of 1975, United Nations bodies made concerted efforts to ensure global awareness and understanding of the IWY aims of equality, peace and development, via the mass media. In this article, we engage with these strategies of global information distribution from the vantage point of Ghana, West Africa. Drawing from interviews with women journalists and examples from the women's pages of the national state-owned Daily Graphic newspaper, we argue that the onset of the IWY presented an important opportunity for women living under the constraints of military rule. A small but determined group of journalists capitalised on a longer history of readers writing into newspapers, and on lower levels of government surveillance of women's pages. Working with and through multi-layered forms of address, they adapted the homey, gossipy women's pages and turned them into spaces of engagement between men and women as co-citizens. During the IWY, connections were forged between international events and agendas and ‘domestic issues’. By hosting older debates about widowhood, inheritance and polygyny, and newer debates about family planning, formal education and employment, the women's pages positioned Ghanaian women as a key constituency in national development, but also enabled more assertive critiques of men's privileges.

Far from being a natural, prelapsarian state, cisness is a hegemonic ideal of gender performance demanded of all people. This article explores the construction of cisness in the field of Byzantine studies, and the historiographical tropes through which it is maintained, naturalised and made invisible. It uses analysis of hegemonic cisness in Byzantine studies to suggest new avenues of investigation for Byzantine gender history. It proposes ‘cisness’ as method; a focal point for historical and historiographical investigation. It asks, was there cisness in Byzantium? If so, did it resemble ours?

During 1925–26 and 1928, debates about birth control took place in the readers' column of North Star (Gwiazda Polarna), a US Polish language weekly. These discussions provide a rare insight into how ideas spread by the US birth control movement were received by an immigrant and ethnic working-class Catholic community. The readers’ letters showed the prevalence of socialist rationales for birth control, expectation from men to play an active role in family limitation, the lack of references to women's sexual pleasure and an ambivalence towards the teachings of the Catholic Church. In the wake of the discussion, one North Star editor established a birth control association to inform the ‘broad masses’. This role was also played by the North Star letters, which spread family planning information and dispelled the misconceptions regarding birth control possessed by many Polish-Americans at that time.

This article traces the ways in which the newly inaugurated Turkish Republic dealt with such institutional and legal ‘relics’ as the imperial harem, slavery and polygamy, that it inherited from its immediate, largely undesirable imperial past, condemned retrospectively as ‘backward’, but nevertheless continued to exist for years to come. Focusing on the immediate aftermath of the abolition of the Caliphate and the exile of the Ottoman dynasty, it examines a set of legal, governmental and discursive weapons that the new regime deployed – from expropriation and disposal of dynastic property to exoticisation and sexualisation of court practices – to severe the imperial harem and its erstwhile powerful actors from the political, social and cultural contexts they had long been closely linked with. It argues that while such measures affected a relatively small number of individuals, particularly women, they had significant implications for the republican government's reconceptualisation of citizenship and state belonging for the wider public.

‘Provincializing Europe’, derived from Dipesh Chakrabarty's work of that name, argued that an imagined ‘Europe’ was a founding myth for modernity. While not mentioning feminism, this analysis is a valuable starting point for tracing the path of the term ‘féminism’ from France to Britain to the Ottoman Empire and from the USA to the Arab world – in the contexts of each venue. This article provides a firm basis for comparing the advancement of women in the West and the Middle East. Some factors were similar, such as the influence of religious gender values, others differed, such as industrialisation.