When women come first George, Sheba Mariam; George, Sheba Mariam
2005., 20050618, 2005, 2005-07-18, 20050101
eBook
With a subtle yet penetrating understanding of the intricate interplay of gender, race, and class, Sheba George examines an unusual immigration pattern to analyze what happens when women who migrate ...before men become the breadwinners in the family. Focusing on a group of female nurses who moved from India to the United States before their husbands, she shows that this story of economic mobility and professional achievement conceals underlying conditions of upheaval not only in the families and immigrant community but also in the sending community in India. This richly textured and impeccably researched study deftly illustrates the complex reconfigurations of gender and class relations concealed behind a quintessential American success story.
This groundbreaking study explores the recent dramatic changes brought about in Japan by the influx of a non-Japanese population, Filipina brides. Lieba Faier investigates how Filipina women who ...emigrated to rural Japan to work in hostess bars-where initially they were widely disparaged as prostitutes and foreigners-came to be identified by the local residents as "ideal, traditional Japanese brides."Intimate Encounters, an ethnography of cultural encounters, unravels this paradox by examining the everyday relational dynamics that drive these interactions. Faier remaps Japan, the Philippines, and the United States into what she terms a "zone of encounters," showing how the meanings of Filipino and Japanese culture and identity are transformed and how these changes are accomplished through ordinary interpersonal exchanges. Intimate Encounters provides an insightful new perspective from which to reconsider national subjectivities amid the increasing pressures of globalization, thereby broadening and deepening our understanding of the larger issues of migration and disapora.
Opening doors Bank, The World
2013., 2013, 02-06-2013, 2013-02-06, 2013-02-07
eBook, Book
Open access
Since the early 1990s, countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region have made admirable progress in reducing the gap between girls and boys in areas such as access to education and ...health care. Indeed, almost all young girls in the Region attend school, and more women than men are enrolled in university. Over the past two decades, maternal mortality declined 60 percent, the largest decrease in the world. Women in MENA are more educated than ever before. It is not only in the protest squares that have seen women whose aspirations are changing rapidly but increasingly unmet. The worldwide average for the participation of women in the workforce is approximately 50 percent. In MENA, their participation is half that at 25 percent. Facing popular pressure to be more open and inclusive, some governments in the region are considering and implementing electoral and constitutional reforms to deepen democracy. These reforms present an opportunity to enhance economic, social, and political inclusion for all, including women, who make up half the population. However, the outlook remains uncertain. Finally, there are limited private sector and entrepreneurial prospects not only for jobs but also for those women who aspire to create and run a business. These constraints present multiple challenges for reform. Each country in MENA will, of course, confront these constraints in different contexts. However, inherent in many of these challenges are rich opportunities as reforms unleash new economic actors. For the private sector, the challenge is to create more jobs for young women and men. The World Bank has been pursuing an exciting pilot program in Jordan to assist young women graduates in preparing to face the work environment.
Born out of place Constable, Nicole
2014., 20140404, 2014, 2014-03-14
eBook
Hong Kong is a meeting place for migrant domestic workers, traders, refugees, asylum seekers, tourists, businessmen, and local residents. In Born Out of Place, Nicole Constable looks at the ...experiences of Indonesian and Filipina women in this Asian world city. Giving voice to the stories of these migrant mothers, their South Asian, African, Chinese, and Western expatriate partners, and their Hong Kong–born babies, Constable raises a serious question: Do we regard migrants as people, or just as temporary workers? This accessible ethnography provides insight into global problems of mobility, family, and citizenship and points to the consequences, creative responses, melodramas, and tragedies of labor and migration policies.
This is the first full-length history of Russian peasant women in the 20th century in English. Filling a significant gap in the literature on rural studies and gender studies of the twentieth century ...Russia, it is the first to take the story into the twenty-first century. It offers a comprehensive overview of regulations concerning rural women: their employment patterns; marriages, divorces and family life; issues with health and raising children. Rural lives in the Soviet Union were often dramatically different from the common narrative of the Soviet history, and even during the Khrushchev "Thaw" in the late 1950s and early 1960s, rural women were excluded from its reforms and liberating policies.
The author, Luibov Denisova - a leading expert in the field of rural gender history in Russia - includes material from previously unavailable or unpublished collections and archives; interviews; sociological research and oral traditions. Overall, the book is a history of all rural women, from ordinary farm girls to agrarian professionals to prostitutes and paints a unique picture of rural women’s life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.
PART I. Employment patterns among rural women 1. Unskilled labor in the countryside 2. Female mechanics and machines operators 3. Women at the animal wards 4. Women as collective farm leaders and agricultural specialists 5. Rural intelligentsia 6. Migration to cities and the position of newcomers PART II. Private Life 7. The politics of private life: the evolution and transformation of the Soviet Family Code 8. Marriages 9. Conflicts and divorces 10. Domostroi 11. Alcoholism in the countryside 12. The female face of the criminal world 13. Women of the oldest profession 14. Religion 15. Triple-burden lifestyle 16. Household chores 17. The special environment of the village life 18. Protection of childhood and motherhood in the countryside 19. Abortions
Liubov Denisova is Professor of History at the Russian State University of Oil and Gas. Her books include the bestselling Zhenshchiny russkikh selenii (Women of Russian Villages) and Sud’ba russkoi krestianki (The Fate of Russian Peasant Women).
Irina Mukhina is Assistant Professor of History at Assumption College, Massachusetts, USA. She is author of The Germans of the Soviet Union (also published by Routledge).
As mass media burgeoned in the years between the first and second world wars, so did another phenomenon-celebrity. Beginning in Hollywood with the studio-orchestrated transformation of uncredited ...actors into brand-name stars, celebrity also spread to writers, whose personal appearances and private lives came to fascinate readers as much as their work.Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Warsprofiles seven American, Canadian, and British women writers-Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield-who achieved literary celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s and whose work remains popular even today.
Faye Hammill investigates how the fame and commercial success of these writers-as well as their gender-affected the literary reception of their work. She explores how women writers sought to fashion their own celebrity images through various kinds of public performance and how the media appropriated these writers for particular cultural discourses. She also reassesses the relationship between celebrity culture and literary culture, demonstrating how the commercial success of these writers caused literary elites to denigrate their writing as "middlebrow," despite the fact that their work often challenged middle-class ideals of marriage, home, and family and complicated class categories and lines of social discrimination.
The first comparative study of North American and British literary celebrity,Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Warsoffers a nuanced appreciation of the middlebrow in relation to modernism and popular culture.
Unrivalled Influenceexplores the exceptional roles that women played in the vibrant cultural and political life of medieval Byzantium. Written by one of the world's foremost historians of the ...Byzantine millennium, this landmark book evokes the complex and exotic world of Byzantium's women, from empresses and saints to uneducated rural widows. Drawing on a diverse range of sources, Judith Herrin sheds light on the importance of marriage in imperial statecraft, the tense coexistence of empresses in the imperial court, and the critical relationships of mothers and daughters. She looks at women's interactions with eunuchs, the in-between gender in Byzantine society, and shows how women defended their rights to hold land. Herrin describes how they controlled their inheritances, participated in urban crowds demanding the dismissal of corrupt officials, followed the processions of holy icons and relics, and marked religious feasts with liturgical celebrations, market activity, and holiday pleasures. The vivid portraits that emerge here reveal how women exerted an unrivalled influence on the patriarchal society of Byzantium, and remained active participants in the many changes that occurred throughout the empire's millennial history.
Unrivalled Influencebrings together Herrin's finest essays on women and gender written throughout the long span of her esteemed career. This volume includes three new essays published here for the very first time and a new general introduction by Herrin. She also provides a concise introduction to each essay that describes how it came to be written and how it fits into her broader views about women and Byzantium.
This book examines and discusses the ordeals that women face as violence is perpetrated against them in politically conflicted and militarized areas. In conflict zones, every act is affected by, ...dependent on and mobilised by militaristic values. The militarization of both the private and public space and the use of the gendered bodies increases the vulnerability of both men and women, and further masculinises the patriarchal hegemonic powers. Through the stories and ordeals of women in politically conflicted areas and war zones, and by sharing voices of Palestinian women from the Occupied Territories, it is shown that claims such as 'security reasoning', fear from 'terrorism', nationalism, preservation of 'cultural authenticity' and preservation of the land can turn women's bodies and lives into boundary markers and thus sites of violence, contestation and resistance.
InRacialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds, Parin Dossa explores the lives of Canadian Muslim women who share their stories of social marginalization and disenfranchisement in a disabling world.
Between women Marcus, Sharon; Marcus, Sharon
2007., 20090710, 2009, 2007, 2007-01-01, 20070101
eBook
Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other’s hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal ...punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.
