Gender and History最新文献

This article examines women's roles in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War. For more than five decades, the history of women's support for Biafra's secessionist struggle has been marginalised in the existing literature. Much of what we know about the conflict has been based on men's exploits and perspectives, creating an imbalance in the war's narratives. With the aid of recently conducted interviews and ample archival materials, this article brings a new insight into the war, challenging the long-sustained assumption that women played marginal roles in the conflict.

This article examines the experiences of four colonial and imperial women at the Sufi tomb complex of Muin al-Din Chishti (d.1236 CE) in Ajmer during the latter years of British Raj in India. It specifically looks at the ways in which pre-modern sacred sites and their male custodians were implicated in various municipal and legal apparatuses of the early twentieth century through petitions, complaints and patronage of women as pilgrims, visitors or family members. We first look at the complaints of a courtesan from Lucknow, who petitioned the British Government to claim maintenance from the Sajjada-Nashin (the biological descent of the Sufi saint buried there). Then we move on to Muslim lady who complained to the colonial officials about being tortured and ill treated by her Sufi in-laws. The third incident pertains to the wife of the British Chief Commissioner of Ajmer, whose molestation by Khadims (keepers of the shrine) was deftly brushed under the carpet by the local administration. The fourth is Queen-Empress Mary herself, who granted royal patronage to the shrine by donating money which was then used to build an ablution tank and called the Victoria Tank. Tracing these fragmentary stories of their visits, this article argues that colonial and imperial women negotiated parallel forms of spiritual and political authorities at sacred spaces in order to fulfil their personal and public obligations. Their encounters with the bustling burial complex, its keepers and administrators also urge us to ponder on broader issues of gender, sexuality and race as they played out in such significant nodes across colonial South Asia.

In this article, we examine and historicise problems related to name and gender in biographical and cultural databases. Combining theoretical and computational approaches to onomastics, we identify contradictory naming conventions, intriguing patterns and distinct institutional vestiges in the recording and representation of artistic careers. We evaluate the affordances and constraints of naming conventions in Australian cultural databases, considering evolving trends in data collection and use, in relation to the complex lives of individual artists. We argue that this local-level analysis extends to wider transnational debates in historiography, gender studies and digital humanities research today and propose some conceptual and technical solutions for building and using cultural databases in the future.

This article analyses the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom's (WILPF) and Women's International Democratic Federation's (WIDF) fact-finding missions sent to Chile in 1974. It explains how women's international organisations presented reports and information about human rights abuses during Genera Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship (1973–1990). By using their publications, oral interviews, memoirs and press reports, the study sheds light on the extensive efforts deployed by the WILPF and WIDF to disseminate knowledge and promote actions designed to improve the lives of Chilean women. The article shows that women's international organisations promoted inclusive ideas of rights, including women's particular experiences under military rule, and that such efforts built in the organisations' previous experiences of human rights activism.

This article considers four international women's organisations – the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, the International Federation of University Women and the Open Door International – and their campaigns for the right of married women to undertake paid work. It examines how each organisation adopted and engaged with the language of human rights in the late 1920s and 1930s. It is argued that after 1948, precisely because of its formal adoption by the UN, the language of human rights became less usable as a way to make the point that women still faced inequalities, and so other framings became more significant. This article contributes to historiographies on international women's organisations, offers a detailed discussion of their activism against the marriage bar, and challenges the conventional chronology of the concept and language of human rights.

Though the slogan predates the Fourth UN World Conference on Women, ‘women's rights are human rights’ has become inextricably linked to US First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's keynote address at the 1995 Conference in Beijing. The speech turned a line socialised by transnational feminist organisers into a State Department mantra with long-lasting policy ripples still felt today. This article uses new sources from the Office of the First Lady to examine the intra-departmental dynamics, policy architecture and domestic political considerations that shaped the content of the speech and the Clinton Administration's conception of women's rights as human rights. Early documents show that a focus on human rights was not inevitable, as other policy areas were better developed with more public support. But fear of rollback from previous international standards, external pressures from civil society, a desire to link foreign policy with domestic political aims and ultimately a strong backlash to American participation at the Conference on the basis of China's human rights record all elevated women's human rights as a US delegation priority.

While recent scholarship has helped uncover specific stories of women in different commercial cinema industries, there remains a lacuna around the role of amateur women filmmakers within national amateur contexts. Where male amateur filmmaking has often been linked to a range of solitary or group-based leisure pursuits, we cannot make the same assumption about women amateur filmmaker’s involvement in social groups, not least due to the gendered nature of domestic and non-work activities in the post-war era. This article considers the representation of women's creative labour across the 1960s within a dominant and patriarchal trade journal, Britain's Amateur Cine World. Combining feminist and digital humanities approaches allows us to analyse data from this magazine to reveal recurring debates and tensions around women's amateur creativity, with particular concerns around domesticity, leisure and the gendered nature of technology.