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In the nineteenth-century Prohibition Party, American women ascribed new gendered meanings to party work traditionally performed by male partisans, and also drew upon their gendered roles as women, mothers, and wives to create new partisan strategies. This article investigates the political culture that sustained a remarkable departure from traditional Democratic and Republican practices, and further explores why women's contributions to the Prohibition Party declined in the early-twentieth century. In so doing, it traces how gender and gender roles shaped the meaning of party and politics, and elucidates the interplay between institutions, constituencies, and policy during one of America's most tumultuous political eras.

This paper examines several pioneering genre paintings by the important scholar painter Yun Duseo (1668-1715), with its focus on their artistic sources which have not yet been explored so far. Painted on ramie, 'Women Picking Potherbs' is one of the most intriguing examples among Yun Duseo's oeuvre, which encompasses a broad variety of themes, including genre imagery, landscapes, portraits, dragons, and horses. Even among Yun Duseo's genre paintings, 'Women Picking Potherbs' is extraordinary, as recent scholarship regards it as the earliest independent representation of lower-class women in the history of Korean art. In particular, Yun Duseo painted two women who were working ourdoors to gather spring potherbs. In a conservative Confucian society, it was extraordinary women who were working outdoors. Hence, Yun Duseo occupies a highly important place in Korean painting. Furthermore, even though Yun Duseo came from the upper-class, he often painted images of lower class people working. It is possible that Yun Duseo was familiar with the book titled "Tian gong kai wu" (Exploitation of the Works of Nature) which was published in the 17th century. By identifying the probable body of his artistic sources in the book known as "Tian gong kai wu," it will be possible to assess the innovations and limitations found in 'Women Picking Potherbs'.

Despite empirical findings on women's varied and often extensive participation in smallholder agriculture in Latin America, their participation continues to be largely invisible. In this article, I argue that the intransigency of farming women's invisibility reflects, in part, a discursive construction of farmers as men. Through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, including interviews with one hundred women in Calakmul, Mexico, I demonstrate the material implications of gendered farmer identities for women's control of resources, including land and conservation and development project resources. In particular, I relate the activities of one women's agricultural community-based organization and the members' collective adoption of transgressive identities as farmers. For these women, the process of becoming farmers resulted in increased access to and control over resources. This empirical case study illustrates the possibility of women's collective action to challenge and transform women's continued local invisibility as agricultural actors in rural Latin American spaces.

This article explores the political and social economy of care in India through a focus on childcare practices, from the viewpoint of the care giver — a perspective frequently ignored or touched on only generally in earlier discussions on development or social policy. It is argued that the care regime is an ad hoc summation of informal, stratified practices. It is shaped by the institutional context, in particular the economic and social inequalities of work and livelihoods, as well as trends and absences in state economic and social policy. Central to the dynamics of care practices in India is the ideology of gendered familialism in public discourse and policy, which reiterates care as a familial and female responsibility and works to devalue and diminish the dimensions of care. By delineating the range of institutions through which everyday childcare practices are organized, this contribution draws out the differentiations and actualities of stratified familialism and care. At one end of the spectrum are those who have the possibility to retain familial carers at home and supplement them with paid and other institutional carers; at the other are those who are neither able to retain family members at home nor fill the care gap through formal institutions.

During the past decade, efforts to promote gender parity in the healing and public health professions have met with only partial success. We provide a critical update regarding the status of women in the public health profession by exploring gender-related differences in promotion rates at the nation's leading public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Using personnel data drawn from CDC, we found that the gender gap in promotion has diminished across time and that this reduction can be attributed to changes in individual characteristics (e.g., higher educational levels and more federal work experience). However, a substantial gap in promotion that cannot be explained by such characteristics has persisted, indicating continuing barriers in women's career advancement.

Our purpose was to determine levels of role commitment, role conflict, depression, self-esteem, and life satisfaction among a community-based sample of working Filipino women. The convenience sample consisted of 87 Filipino working women, ranging in age from 18 to 59 years. Participants completed instruments assessing self-esteem, depression, life satisfaction, and role conflict. Our analyses revealed that participants who were equally or more committed to work than relationships had significantly higher depression scores, self-esteem scores, and levels of education than participants who were committed primarily to relationships. There were no significant differences among role commitment type on role conflict and life satisfaction. We found significant interactions between experiences of depression, self-esteem, and the perceptions of self. From our study findings our knowledge of working Filipina American's psychological well-being has increased and provided a foundation for future research.

This article analyzes the politics of preaching in Turkey in the last decade by focusing on the appointment of women as preachers and vice-muftis by the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), a state institution established for the protection of secular foundations through religious service. It asks what happens when women wearing headscarves become civil servants and give religious guidance in a secular state, which prohibits headscarves in public offices and schools. It shows that the context, the use and the interlocutors of preaching make ordinary religious activity a complicated political practice that interacts with gender, ethnicity and state sovereignty. It argues that exceptional integration of headscarved women into public offices would seem to be an achievement given the long lasting political activism of women over the headscarf, but in the final analysis it serves the sovereign power of the state, which aims to absorb both Islamist and Kurdish challenges by mobilizing women preachers.

Grounded in literature review and an ethnographic study, this article examines contemporary Brazilian domestic life. Relations among women (employers and maids) and between women and men are analyzed with a focus on the home as a space in which gender, race, and class inequalities are constantly reproduced. The article argues that what happens in domestic life is constitutive of wider social divisions and that the domestic is a universe integral to the national social context. A case in point is the connection between the widespread use of paid domestic labor and the naturalization of black women as subservient, complementing the pairing of whiteness and class entitlement. Another case is the buffering role of maids in the development of gender conflicts in well-off homes, thus blurring gender hierarchies at a broader scale. Locating the domestic within the recent discussion on global domestic labor, the article compares particularities of Brazilian domestic life to those elsewhere.

This article discusses Helen Safa's analyses of the impact of development strategies and social policies on gender relations and women headed families in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico. The discussion focuses on findings of a research project regarding patterns of women's employment, autonomy, marital relations, family headship and poverty in Puerto Rico in the decade beginning in the year 2000, using excerpts from interviews conducted with women workers displaced from a clothing and a tuna factory between 2001 and 2002 (Colón et al. 2008), as well as data from the Public Use Sample (PUMS) of the U.S. Census Puerto Rico Community Survey 2005-2007. It is argued that women's employment has resulted in advances in women's autonomy, gender equity, and renegotiations of the provider role, but, intensified by men's unstable earnings, it has also led to the increase of female family headship even among married women. Women's education and employment have been an important means of reducing family poverty both among dual earner families and female heads. Yet, the continuing joblessness in the Island places even higher educated sectors on the verge of economic precariousness.

This article is both a review of, and an intervention in, the literature on gender and the globalization of production. Via a discussion of six key texts analyzing export-oriented manufacturing, ranging from Maria Mies's Lace Makers of Narsapur to Melissa Wright's Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, I show that, over time, the focus has shifted from an emphasis on the feminization of manufacturing as a defining feature of globalization to an appreciation of the diverse and contingent ways in which gender matters for offshore production. While this recent scholarship highlights variability in gendered labor regimes at the global-local nexus, I argue that it is also critically important to ask what is similar about the many locations on the global assembly line that have been studied. Specifically, we must look to how gender, as a set of context-specific meanings and practices, works within the macrostructure of the global economy and its systemic logic of capital accumulation. In other words, while capitalism does not determine the concrete modalities of gender that exist in a given locale, it is essential for explaining the gendered dimension of transnational production as a patterned regularity of contemporary globalization.

This study examines the development and nature of the regulation of prostitution in Beyoğlu during the late Ottoman Empire with special emphasis on the way the regulationist regime reinforced existing patterns of class and gender domination. The regulation of prostitution became a matter of urgency in the last decades of the nineteenth century in Istanbul, particularly in Beyoğlu, the cosmopolitan centre of the city. Through this process, the protests of the local residents of the area objecting to the proliferation of prostitution in their neighbourhoods played a crucial role in prompting the governmental authorities to tighten the regulations.

This article assesses Helen I. Safa's legacy to anthropological thought in Puerto Rico. The first part of the article locates Safa's research on the Island within a long tradition of fieldwork by U.S. scholars since the early twentieth century. More recent research, conducted mostly by Puerto Rican women anthropologists and other social scientists, has expanded upon Safa's insights on gender and work. The second part of the essay analyzes Safa's major empirical work, The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico: A Study in Development and Inequality. Above all, this book helped overcome the theoretical impasse over the culture of poverty that characterized much of urban anthropology during the 1960s and 1970s. The article concludes with an appraisal of the relevance of Safa's work for the ethnography of contemporary Puerto Rico.

The "new middle class" as a political construct is valuable for feminist theorizations of international political economy, particularly those concerned with development. The rise of the new middle class is usually juxtaposed with neoliberalism, so we offer a new theorization of neoliberalism-as-event and analyze an array of new-middle-class signs and subjects in India. Questioning the repetition of the figure of the new Indian woman in resolving the sociotemporal and spatiotemporal paradoxes of the nation, we argue, first, that the figure of the subaltern woman is a necessary counter to the new Indian woman. The arrival of the gendered subaltern on the national stage is celebrated through discourses that articulate and disarticulate the subaltern woman and bear the traces of subaltern struggles. Her gendered body constitutes the line between who can be new middle class and at the vanguard of neoliberal development and who cannot. Second, we argue that new-middle-class formation is taking place in the households of diasporic returnees through class practices that involve speaking to and for domestic servants. Returnees hold in tension urges to encourage class mobility and to discipline their servants through neoliberal governmentalities that draw on global discourses of corporate responsibility, professionalism, and empowerment. These development scripts are interspersed with reflections on the poor material conditions of domestic service work. The implications of this article for feminist theorizations of international political economy are methodological, analytical, and political.

This study follows the thread of gender divisions in dairying in Denmark and the American Midwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gender organization of dairying shifted at this time in diverse European and North American contexts. As agriculture mechanized and production scale increased, access to advanced education and international markets became critical. Women, who had been in the forefront of the development of dairying, ceded their leadership to men as these changes occurred. While some scholars see this shift as a strategic loss for women, this study finds that variables of class, marital status, rural demographics, and alternative occupations mediated the rural women's experience of change. Not all women experienced the change as a loss. The question of which women were invested in dairying is critical to understanding the course of change. Increasingly, middle-class farm women were turning away from the hard work of dairying and investing themselves in new ways in the upward mobility of their family farms. Rural life shaped distinct gender patterns in European and American history, and the rural experience shaped the larger trajectory of women's economic and political evolution, even though few rural women were involved in the organized women's movement.

This article examines the life histories of women return migrants to Puerto Rico. It emphasizes the cultural aspects of return migration, especially how the narrators understood and expressed their collective identity as distinctive from Puerto Ricans born and raised on the island. These informants turned their life histories into morality fables of class mobility, gender role restriction, and social rejection on the island. These tales asserted their radical differences from both middle class-islanders, whom they had joined, and the working-class diaspora in New York City, from which they had come. The narrators also built an organization which reinforced their "Latin New Yorker" identity, invented on the island.

Scientific networks are often credited with bringing about institutional change and professional advancement, but less attention has been paid to their instability and occasional failures. In the 1970s optimism among academic women was high as changing US policies on sex discrimination in the workplace, including higher education, seemed to promise equity. Encouraged by colleagues, Shyamala Rajender charged the University of Minnesota with sex discrimination when if failed to consider her for a tenure-track position. The widely cited case of this chemist was not, however, settled easily and involved nearly a decade of university grievance procedures and litigation that grew to a class action lawsuit. As the case gained national attention and internal resistance stiffened, the clusters of women who had been encouraging flickered, faded and sometimes regrouped. A negotiated settlement (consent decree) ended Rajender's case, and it opened the door for hundreds of other to present their grievances regarding gender discrimination. Networks and support groups proved important but also unstable for individuals who sought equity before and during the implementation of the decree. The Rajender case thus exposes the painful, balky and inevitably contentious process of fighting discrimination. It also demonstrates the power and limits of institutions and litigation, as well as the possibilities and disappointments of informal and formal women's networks.

While a substantial proportion of breastfeeding women stop early in the postpartum period, some women are able to breastfeed for longer periods. The aim of this research was to explore the experience of breastfeeding with a subsample of Hong Kong women who have breastfed for longer than 6 months. Participants (n=17) were recruited from a larger infant-feeding study (n=360) conducted in tertiary-care hospitals in Hong Kong. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted and content analysis was used to analyse the data. Data analysis revealed four themes that encompassed the women's experiences: (1) making the decision, (2) maintaining family harmony, (3) overcoming barriers, and (4) sustaining lactation. Antenatally, participants anticipated that breastfeeding would be very 'difficult' and described how the practice did not fit with the image of a professional woman in Hong Kong. Despite family opposition, frequently from their mother-in-law, and lack of societal acceptance, difficulties were overcome by what the Chinese people call hung-sum or determination. This study highlights unique cultural and social findings affecting breastfeeding women in Hong Kong which may be useful to health-care providers working with Chinese women locally and internationally.

Since the economic liberalization in 1977, a large number of Sri Lankan women have entered the labour market and engaged in income-generating activities. Some women choose to travel abroad as domestic workers, while others choose to work in export-processing industries. This process has a profound impact on gender and gender roles in Sri Lanka. Young rural women have changed their traditional women's roles to become independent daughters, efficient factory workers and partially modernized women. Even though changing gender roles are identified as a positive impact of industrial work, the new social, cultural, and legal environments of industrial work have negative impacts on these women's lives. This paper explores health impacts of changing gender roles and practices of young rural women, focusing on the experiences of female workers in export-processing industries. Further, it contributes to the literature on gender and health, and on qualitative approaches within health geographic studies. A model is formulated to suggest a conceptual framework for studying women's health. The model describes the determinant factors of individual health status based on the question of who (personal attributes) does what (type of work) where (place), when and how (behaviours). These are also determinant factors of gender and gender roles of a society. The three types of health problems (reproductive, productive and mental health) of a woman, in this case a female industrial worker, are determined by her gender roles and practices associated with these roles.

This paper is concerned with events that were the subject of an inquest into the deaths of 12 children who died while undergoing or shortly after having undergone cardiac surgery at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre, Manitoba, Canada, during 1994. A notable finding of the Sinclair Inquest was that nurses involved with the pediatric cardiac surgery program were concerned about the competence of the surgeon and made sustained efforts throughout 1994 to have these concerns addressed. That the nurses' concerns were not taken seriously is the central problem of this paper. Essentially, the position articulated is that gendered and gendering discourses constituted a form of power that structured the field of nurses' possible actions. These discourses constituted a resource to make nurses knowable, to produce them as certain forms of the person, and were therefore part of what governed nurses everyday conduct. Though neither simply good nor bad in themselves, in this case, these discourses had constraining effects on how nurses were able to conduct themselves.

This article argues that examining the debates over domestic science that took place in the late 1940s can produce insights into the ways in which gender, class and domesticity were inextricably linked and understood. The article focuses on three specific examples: a social survey of domestic service produced privately, a government report on the domestic organization of private households, and a radio debate broadcast by the BBC Home Service.

Unfreedom in Indian agriculture is ordinarily associated with adult male bonded labour, and it is generally argued that unfreedom is likely to disappear as capitalism spreads/advances. By contrast, we find that workers employed on advanced capitalist cotton seed farms in Andhra Pradesh - accumulation linked to national and multinational capital - involves the employment of labour-power which is mostly unfree, female and young (7-14 years). Addressed here are the reasons for the transformations in the age and gender of unfree workers on such farms since the early 1970s. We argue that, in the context of men's emancipation from bonded labour, employers actively sought out relatively cheaper, more easily disciplined, unfree female labour. Then, in order to secure even cheaper female child labour, employers segmented the female labour market via ideologies about the superiority of female children over adult females. Corresponding changes in labourers' gender relations, which put more of the onus of family maintenance on to women and daughters, were found to facilitate the unfreedom of females.