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The authors study the institutionalization of midwife specialization among women in Russia in the period from the 18th through the early 20th centuries. The main sources are legislative acts, clerical documents, as well as reports on the activities of medical institutions and maternity departments. The authors use the approaches of gender history, and the concept of professionalization as developed by E. Freidson. Midwifery was the first area of womens work that was officially recognized by the state. There were three main stages on the way to professionalizing the midwifery profession among women. The first stage (covering the 18th century) is associated with attempts to study and systematize the activities of midwives. The practical experience of midwifes was actively sought by doctors whose theoretical knowledge was limited. The second stage of professionalization (corresponding to the first half of the 19th century) was associated with the normative regulation of midwife work and the formation of a professional hierarchy in midwifery. The third stage (comprising the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century) saw a restriction of the midwives spheres of activity, as well as the active inclusion of male doctors in practical obstetrics and their rise to a dominant position. With the development of obstetric specialization, operative obstetrics, and the opening of maternity wards, midwives were relegated to a subordinate position in relation to doctors. In contrast to the United States and Western European countries, Russia did not have professional associations of midwives. Intra-professional communication was weak, and there was no corporate solidarity. In Soviet medicine, finally, the midwives subordinate place in relation to doctors was only cemented.

The article highlights the ways of resolving family conflicts nobles and peasants in the first third of the XIX century in the Russian Empire, against the background of the ongoing systematization of legislation. Based on examination of the letters and memoirs of the nobles and peasants we highlighted the methods, which are actually used to solve family conflicts. I conclude that nobles and peasants rarely used help of the state in resolving family conflicts. The sphere of family relations was sacred for these estates; therefore, they did not rope the authorities into family conflicts. I have identified the following ways to resolve family conflicts: duel; marriage, often in the form of a secret wedding; going to the monastery and punishing the unfaithful wife; different approaches to raising children by peasants and nobles. The author of the article pays attention to passivity of the peasants in resolving their family conflicts. The results of the study allow exploring the alternative ways of resolving family conflicts based on representatives of other classes of Russian society in the first third of the 19th century (clergy, merchants, philistines, foreigners) as well, using wider range of sources (journalism, normative acts, fiction, paperwork). This analysis contributes to the discussion about the limits of the government intervention into family affairs. The author of the article redlines that people did not trust the law and resorted to the personally legitimate sources of dealing with family conflicts. This conclusion presents a new perspective in the discussion of legal nihilism and real application of the law in life

Neither archives nor museums are neutral. They reflect particular sets of priorities: those of the institution; the collectors and curators within them; and those of their intended audiences. In th...

Contains fulltext : 232171.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Convictions for sodomy were rare in eighteenth-century Antwerp. Nevertheless, the scarce trial records offer a fascinating insight into the urban perception of sodomy as a foreign phenomenon. A sodomy trial involving several Dutch migrants infused anxieties about sodomite conspiracies across the city. Although early modern sodomy has mainly been studied from a local or national point of view, this article shows that a transregional perspective regarding the repression of sodomy can shed new light on attitudes towards early modern deviant sexuality. 20 april 2021 19 p.

In this article, the author analyzes new trends in historical science in the United States, which, during the period indicated in the article, developed on the basis of an interdisciplinary synthesis of existing methods of historical analysis with sociological ones. This trend passes through the prism of the scientific activities of the professor of the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, Mounira Maya Sharad, a researcher in the field of political sociology, comparative historical sociology, social theory and gender politics in the countries of the Islamic world. The article contains an analysis of the initial period of the formation of Mounira as a scientist, who is a prominent representative of the postcolonial Tunisian intelligentsia, defines the vector of her scientific search for the traditional social structure of the Tunisian village and the status of Islamic women. Particular attention is paid to the influence of processes in American sociological science on the further professional activities of Mounira Charrad. Since the 1970s last century, historical sociology becomes the main vector of Mounira's study of social phenomena in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa and their typology, first of all, by the methods of comparative analysis, that is, by the method of corporate history.Mounira Charrad's study of the status of Islamic women was carried out in the context of "women's history", which was a significant area of new social history in the United States. The focus of these studies was on the history of the legal system in the Maghreb countries and the differences between the family law systems of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco were shown. A qualitatively new stage in the study of women in the Islamic world was Mounira's use of the methodology of gender-historical analysis developed by representatives of the American school of women's history. Mounira Charrad publishes a number of works in which she analyses the evolution and impact of public policy on gender in the Islamic world. The fundamental monograph by Mounira Charad “States and Women's Rights. The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco”, which has received worldwide recognition among the scientific community, is a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the state structures of the Maghreb countries with tribal, ethnic formations, primarily in the context of the legal system. The scientific activity of Mounira Charrad reflects the main new trends in American historical science of the last third of the XX - beginning of the XXI century.

Despite the First World War (WWI) challenging women’s traditional sphere of work (the home) as well as Britain’s class structure, domestic service remained the largest employer of women and girls until the end of the Second World War. Why, given the reluctance of working-class women to return to domestic service after WWI, did so many take up ‘hated domestic service’ in the decade following the war?1 WWI increased working-class households’ reliance on women’s income—whether obtained through employment or unemployment benefits. While others have shown the role of state coercion in women’s employment in domestic service in the aftermath of WWI, this article highlights the extent to which working-class families were complicit in that coercion. As many British families were deprived of male breadwinners as a result of the war, some pushed their daughters to work as servants as it was one job ‘that any girl could get’.2Others turned to the occupation as a means of protecting the ‘moral health’ of a daughter, where they considered it to be in danger.3 Drawing upon a range of oral history testimonies, this article examines the role of working-class families in ensuring that domestic service remained an important feature of working-class women’s and girls’ lives throughout the 1920s.

The author investigates the possible consequences of Open Access for learned societies with their own journal like the Dutch Flemish association for gender history. For learned societies, the advantage of Open Access is that contributions in their journals become easily accessible for researchers. But it remains uncertain whether small associations are able to meet the technical requirements for Open Access. More important is the financial aspect. When the content of the journals of learned societies has to be online and freely accessible, members may no longer wish to support these associations financially. When the associations start losing members, they are affected financially and may no longer have the means to publish their journals. In this situation, they may lose more members and may in the end even be threatened in their existence. This has other consequences as well, because learned societies and their journals contribute to the diversity and vitality of the humanities and allow a wide audience to get acquainted with results from academic research.

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the communicative behavior generations of Udmurt women in the 20th and the early 21st century. The relevance of the article is due to the existing public demand for coverage of regional women's history and gender history. Main attention is paid to the requirements imposed by society on the behavior of the Udmurt woman. The result of a comparative analysis of the communicative behavior of two generations of women showed changes in premarital and marriage behavior. The author notes that the realities of modern life make their own corrections, including disproportions. And so the modern udmurt woman is not only the keeper of the home, but she becomes the main source of income in her family. She becomes less closed, more communicative. In this connection, Udmurt women have to overcome their modesty and shyness to develop self-presentation skills, which undoubtedly affects the strategies of communicative behavior implemented by them.

Purpose. The article presents a brief overview of the 30-year period of the development of Russian gender studies and reviews the state of gender studies in Siberia in the last decade. Results. The authors came to the conclusion that the gender approach in Russia was very successful in the field of historical disciplines, especially in historical feminology and women’s studies. The authors analyze the emergence of various areas within this issue, the key topics and approaches that have been developed in the Russian humanities. The main directions were reflected in the anniversary collection digest on gender history and anthropology “Gender in the focus of anthropology, family ethnography and the social history of everyday life” (2019). Conclusion. The authors describe the current position of Siberian gender studies and conclude that gender issues in Siberia are less active in comparison with the European part of Russia. In recent years, Siberian researchers have increasingly replaced the category of “gender” with neutral categories of “family research”, “female”, “male”, and so on. More often researchers choose “classical” historical problems raised in historical science before the “humanitarian renaissance”, which began in the 1990s in Russia. In modern gender studies in the Siberian region, the capabilities of critical feminist optics and gender methodology are rarely used, and queer-issues are not developed.

This article examines the first years of a charitable institution, the ‘ Ritiro o Opera pia delle Rosine’, led by a mystic woman in the eighteenth-century Sabaudian State. Through the analysis of this particular institution, this essay focuses on the so-called ‘ Opere pie’ in Savoy Piedmont, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: namely, the charitable institutions, under royal patronage and public jurisdiction, yet administrated by clerics and led by women whose sanctity was the subject of controversy, which had a key role in the politics of devotion in the baroque age.

Heuristic value of autobiographies for specialists in gender and female studies (based on the comparison of theoretical results of Russian and international autobiographical studies). The article discusses the qualitative changes in the study of autobiographies in historical works. The author focuses on the importance of gender studies in the field of complex relations between various approaches, including the philosophical, psychological, and linguistic way of analyzing life histories, in general, and women’s autobiographies, in particular (which comprises using the theory of female writing created by French feminist philosophers), as well as old and recent literature in the field of autobiographical research. The gender approach to the analysis of documents makes it possible to conclude that men report less about their family and private life and tend to give this life a different meaning and place in the system of value hierarchies. The second conclusion when comparing male and female autobiographies is the individualized and independent representation of the ego in life stories. Analysts point out that when collecting material about men’s lives, it is the gender of the story collector that is important. When talking to a female interviewer, the narrator presents the same life events in a different way than to male interviewer. When reading an egotext, a male analyst immediately forms a male community and, at the same time, hierarchies typical of relations between men. Keywords: autobiography, women, gender, gender history, history methodology, biographi- cal research, memory psychology, historiography

At the end of the nineteenth century the Romantic image of Eustahija Arsic (1776–1843) was introduced to the Serbian national pantheon as the first Serbian woman writer and philosopher of the modern age. This image was based first and foremost on her book “Useful Thoughts on the Four Seasons” which appeared in Budim in 1816 under that author’s name. In the second half of the twentieth century several scholarly studies and a biography were devoted to Arsic. More recently this image has attracted the attention of scholars of women’s literature in South Slavic countries. These scholars note that her “Thoughts”, while influenced by Western pre-romantic (sentimentalist) literature, illuminate a wide range of fields, including philosophy, ethics, history, natural science, anatomy, physics, and religion, while at the same time they introduce the genre of the “feminist essay” into Serbian literature. The poems that are included in “Thoughts” appear in anthologies of Serbian literature as original poems by Arsic. The present essay shows that the ideas about the originality, European erudition, cosmopolitanism, personal tone, philosophical gifts and poetic talent are highly exaggerated, and that the image of this author is a cultural construct that was created at a certain stage of the formation of Serbian national literature and was reconceived at a later time. The essay establishes that Arsic’s “Useful Thoughts” is a compilation of essays, tracts, and poetry that appeared in Russian journals from the late 1780s to the early 1810s. These works (including some by Nikolai Karamzin) were transferred into her book with minor orthographic and grammatical changes (e.g. masculine noun endings are changed to feminine ones) and without any indication of the source. The work of the compiler of “Thoughts” consisted solely in taking the sentimental texts of Russian male authors and attributing them to a pious female author. The essay does not simply give the direct sources of this “Slavono-Russian” book of “the first Serbian woman writer” and describe the process of adaptation of the “foreign” as a stage of the national and literary self-affirmation of the “younger” Slavic culture, but it also offers material for a more general (philological and literary-critical) study of the “Slavono-Russian” period in the history of Serbian literature in particular and “pan-Slavic” pre-romanticism more generally. The case of Arsic is likewise interesting for a comparative analysis of the formation of national literary “pantheons” and for a gender history of Russian and other Slavic literatures. DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2019.8.1.11

Entering Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one still passes through the “catalog room,” an antechamber filled with rows of card drawers. Inaugurated in 1930 by the librarian Dorothy Porter, this catalog of the “Negro Collection” served for much of the twentieth century as one of the only portals to African American print culture. This article reconstructs the creation of that catalog in order to chart the relation between infrastructure and racial imaginaries of reading. Porter contravened the routine misfiling of blackness in prevailing information systems by rewriting Dewey decimals, creating new taxonomies for black print, and fielding research inquiries from across the African diaspora. She built public access to books “by and about the Negro” at a moment when most black readers were barred from libraries. In so doing, she fueled a broader sense of what a black archive—or what Porter called a “literary museum”—might afford.

Tra X e XII secolo, nelle città tirreniche dell’Italia meridionale il fenomeno dell’assistenza femminile si presenta sporadico se non quasi del tutto assente. Napoli non fa eccezione, tuttavia le poche tracce lasciano emergere realtà vivide, come quello del monastero di San Gregorio Armeno, che nasce agli esordi del Mille, con una storia da cui emerge un universo femminile concreto e articolato, con molte donne attive nelle attività economiche e in quelle artigianali, come quella della produzione di tessuti di lino. Aspetti che fanno dell’ambito sociale napoletano un ambiente originale rispetto a quello di altre realtà urbane del Mezzogiorno e italiane. Between the 10th and the 12th century, in the Tyrrhenian cities of Southern Italy the phenomenon of female assistance is quite absent. Naples, however, presents some intersting traces, like that of the monastery of San Gregorio Armeno, founded at the beginning of the 11th century. A concrete and articulated female universe emerges, with many women active in economic and artisanal activities, such as the production of linen fabrics. Aspects that make the Neapolitan social environment original compared to other Italian cities.

At present, the study of "gender" is a young direction for Kazakhstani science. Today, the role of men and women in the concept of gender in society, their role and associated social trends are becoming more and more important. The article summarizes the cultural monuments of Shymkent, in particular sculptures, monuments, installations, exhibits and performances of the Turkestan Regional Museum of Local Lore, photographs of the Central State Archive of Turkestan, a general image of gender images in the film. Attempts have been made to demonstrate the scientific potential of these cultural monuments. The history of women in the region, their role in society, and social activity were also described. The role of family values for city residents, the level of preservation of traditions are indicated. The issues of urban agglomeration and urbanization were also considered. Trends in the development of Shymkent today. Trends in the development of culture in a modern city, new institutions and buildings that reflect the values of culture. Historical tone and harmony of ideas and inspirations that motivate the work of decorating cities with modernity. The connection between the image and the image of a Shymkent woman with the present day, the evolution of development and her place in the memory of society are revealed. Keywords: Visual images, gender history, history of townspeople, cultural monuments, southern region, composition of images.

This chapter focuses on the nature of the relationships on the ground between captives and captors at Dartmoor, and draws on prisoner narratives and official sources to build up a detailed picture of the shifting hierarchies, solidarities and conflicts that characterised daily life at the prison. Particular attention is paid to a set of rituals designed to transform inmates from free combatants into prisoners of war, including registration, roll-call and prison dress. Other subjects studied in this chapter include the central issue of the food ration, the role of the elected prisoner committees, the place of two vilified groups living on the margins of prisoner society and the ramifications of the presence of up to 1000 sailors of colour at the prison during the period 1813–1815.

Gender inequality in engineering—and other scientific and technical fields—is one of the most persistent and intractable problems in modern culture. This issue has been sufficiently explored in Western Europe and the United States, but much less is known about the situation in Russia, which has a distinct gender history. In the former USSR, women were massively educated in technical sciences and their employment in engineering professions remained unconventionally high in comparison to the West. At the same time, women’s earnings were lower than men’s, and they mostly occupied low- and middle-level jobs, rarely reaching leadership positions. What happened to the gender imbalance after the collapse of the Soviet Union? How has it changed after radical political, economic, and social transformations? The purpose of this review, by analyzing empirical studies of gender inequality in engineering in post-Soviet Russia published after 1991, is to answer these questions. In the last 15 years, there has been a growing interest and works dedicated to this topic, but they remain fragmented and disconnected. Thus, there is a need for a generalized comparison of existing studies and the linking of them to one another. This systematic and problem-oriented literature review seeks to fill this gap. First, it aims to summarize, classify, and critically analyze the existing research results, thereby forming a general picture of gender transformations that have taken place in the engineering profession in Russia. Second, the review identifies key topics, issues, approaches, and reveals contradictions and gaps in the scientific discussion that enables a characterization of gender studies in the engineering field in Russia and formulates an agenda for future research. The review follows a STEM pipeline metaphor, organizing empirical findings in three stages: general education, professional education, and employment. Responding to the need for a comprehensive analytical perspective on gender inequality, the paper develops a multilevel framework, embracing and linking macro-, meso-, and individual-level causal factors of gender imbalance in engineering. The main finding is that gender inequality dramatically increases from an individual’s educational years to employment later in life, resulting in a multidimensional gender gap and multiple disadvantages for women. Path dependency on Soviet times has both positive and negative influences on gender equality, while the transition to a market economy has had mostly negative consequences, driving women out of engineering and leading to its masculinization. Another finding is that existing studies of the gender gap in post-Soviet Russia are not balanced, concentrating mostly on engineering education and initial professional socialization. More studies of the employment and workplace period are necessary, as it remains the most troublesome for women. In addition to women-oriented comparative studies, the role of men’s clubs, and norms of masculinity that support gender inequality need to be examined. More attention to macro-level factors and, most especially, the unique features of post-Soviet context is required. Acknowledgements. The research was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) according to the project № 20-011-00690: “Engineering career in contemporary Russia: professional, organizational, and institutional transformations”.

Catholics and Protestants assumed that God instituted the family and that it had certain spiritual functions to perform. In 1985, Colleen McDannell addressed changes in Christian perceptions of the home and family in nineteenth-century America. This chapter focuses on Christian ideas of the home and family in nineteenth-century Europe and touches on similar themes to those discussed by McDannell, including new insights from gender history as well as work on lived religion and material culture. It focuses primarily on Christian denominations, discussing some trends under the umbrella terms of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’. Christian families were seen as the cornerstones of a Christian society, and thus time and effort were put into creating good Christian families. The nineteenth century was the heyday of the cult of domesticity, the idealization of the home as a calm and safe haven from the hectic and dangerous external world.

The Weimar Republic has an important place in the history of Germany democracy, but a recognition of the strength of German women’s political cultures and their role in shaping the post-war political landscape has been elusive. Women’s experiences in the First World War and Weimar Republic have been extensively discussed, but often in ways that threaten to erase women’s political agency. Moreover, the seismic shift signalled by women’s suffrage has not been foregrounded in accounts of democratic history, and women’s roles in the revolution of 1918 have been largely overlooked. Taking a gender historical approach, this article makes women’s political cultures visible in two arenas important for an understanding of the post-war era: women’s suffrage and women’s revolutionary activism. While the focus is on the German national context, it is important to note that German women’s organisations were embedded in international and transnational network organisations campaigning for women’s social, professional and civic rights, and that their political cultures developed in dialogue with and awareness of what was happening elsewhere in the world.

Women’s and gender historians over the last fifty years have not suffered such physical horrors, they have had to test their mettle on the scholarly battlefield of Civil War history. Theirs has been a dogged fight in the face of strong opposition to gendering a past that traditional historians and popular culture have preferred to see as great battles between great men. Newer narratives that document white and black women’s resistance, agency, and leadership across the Civil War era have been contesting these persistent older accounts for several decades. Recently historians have disputed traditional historical approaches even more rigorously by exposing the cultural meanings of gender during wartime. They have argued that ideas about masculinity and femininity shaped Civil War political discourse, social thought, and economic roles, ultimately affecting the nature and outcome of the war. The Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH) has long been a critical locus of support for these scholars who are challenging outmoded conceptions of the Civil War that emanate from within the profession and across mainstream American media and culture.

Books under review: Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures. The Material World Remade, c.1500-1820 (Cambridge 2018). Elif Akçetin and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds.), Living the Good Life. Consumption in the Qing and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden 2018). Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things. How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York 2016).

A new group of politicians entered the stage after the introduction of universal suffrage: female politicians. Whereas the first women in Parliament received some attention, pioneers in regional bodies or local councils have mostly been overlooked. Who were these women who stood for election in their own town or village? Were these unmarried women, as one might expect due to the resistance towards married women entering politics? And how were these women perceived? These questions are central to this contribution about female pioneers in local politics in the Netherlands (1919-1923).

From a gender history perspective, the actions of the State and the Women and Feminist Movement of Uruguay are taken into account, including the weight of the regional and international conjuncture. Through the analysis of primary sources, such as the feminist press of the time, I analyzed the transformations of the interpretative framework of the Movement of Women and Feminists of Uruguay between 1984 and 1988 related to «violence against women». The investigation traced the construction process of the domestic violence category, its problematization and transformation of private matter to political/public problem that demands the action of the State; whose first milestone was the creation of the Women’s Police Station, the second of its kind in all of South America. It was concluded that the creation of the Women’s Police Station due to special boost women’s movement and feminist in the exercise of their autonomy and synergy between a favorable international situation and the need to re-legitimization of the Uruguayan State.

This paper considers the emergence of amateur women’s rowing between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in light of contemporaneous social norms relating to gender and sport. It doe...

German MS. 2 is a previously unstudied armorial dating from the mid-sixteenth century. This article shows that it was produced in the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Younger for Elector August of Saxony, and that it was copied from an earlier armorial of c.1500 which was kept in Cranach’s workshop, probably as reference material. Much of the original content and structure of this ‘old armorial’ has been preserved in Rylands German 2. On this basis, the original armorial can be located in a late fifteenth-century Upper German tradition of armorial manuscripts known as the ‘Bodensee’ group. It was also closely linked to the Habsburg dynasty, and appears to have been dedicated to Empress Bianca Maria Sforza. The armorial therefore opens significant new perspectives on the relationships between artists and heraldry and between women and heraldic knowledge, and on ways of visualising the Holy Roman Empire through heraldry.

ASCENTS WITH LIMITS: MOUNTAINS AS SPACES FOR GENDER TRANSGRESSIONMountains and Alpine spaces are historical places where determined national, economic and cultural norms as well as practices were and still are negotiated. The article focuses on the question of gender in the mountains as a social space, which the author explores, drawing on the example of the history of climbing expeditions to the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas. Against this background she presents, from the point of view of gender history, the so-called female expeditions, i.e. mountain expeditions initiated, organised and conducted from the mid-1950s by all-female teams. They serve as analytical lenses to look into gender relations in mountaineering and their transformations in 1955–2014. Drawing on four social spaces the author raises questions about crossing gender boundaries due to socially-constructed gender norms as well as strategies for overcoming them.The first part of the article is devoted to female expeditions undertaken in 1955–1962 by British female climbers. These enterprises expanded the areas in which female mountaineers operated, without, however, questioning social gender stereotypes. The organisers of the expeditions deliberately presented themselves in accordance with social gender norms, and by choosing reasonable mountain goals, didn’t join the competition associated with the Himalayan eight-thousanders. The importance of gender based boundaries in high altitude mountaineering in the late 1950s is revealed in part two of the article when for the first time a female team set a famous eight-thousander as a goal for themselves. Press reports from before and after the expedition reflect prejudice and scepticism, presenting the female climbers in a manner that affronted them as overambitious and incompetent. It was not until the 1970s that a younger generation of female climbers openly and critically spoke against sexism and discrimination of women in high mountain climbing, as the author describes in part three. Female expeditions allowed women to avoid exclusion from male teams and attempt to climb the highest peaks on their own. The article ends with a presentation of the significance of female expeditions in the Himalayan state of Nepal, where since the 1990s such expeditions have provided Nepalese women with opportunities to made their mark on the tourist trade. On the other hand, female expeditions have been used by tourist and political institutions as an instrument of raising public awareness of issues like equality policy, climate protection or promotion of tourism.

This article reaffirms the importance of gender history as a way of understanding the history of power, and specifically power relations between men and masculinities. The historical literature dealing with this theme has been profoundly shaped by R. W. Connell’s concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Despite detailed criticism by historians, Connell’s work remains enormously influential on historical scholarship because no alternative model has delineated so clearly the significance of power relations between masculinities. This article offers a critical reading of Connell’s work and develops a new analytical framework for understanding the history of masculinity. It argues that histories of normative models of masculinity need to be accompanied by a focus on the historically specific opportunities, mechanisms or techniques that enabled individuals to identify themselves with particular normative models. It argues that power can be apprehended as a four-fold operation: cultural contestation of normative ideals; individual attempts to identify with those cultural ideals; the processes by which those attempts were accorded recognition by others; and the processes by which individuals were positioned in relation to institutional practices, rewards and sanctions. This approach would offer new periodisations of the history of masculinity with the history of power at their core.

The history of the Ukrainian Hetmanate has been studied from the perspective of war, political struggle, and diplomacy. This article studies various aspects of women’s lives in Cossack society: the...

The birth of the Low Countries is a thorny issue since the rise of history as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, and the problem is likely to haunt historians for some time to come. From the eleventh century onwards, the patchwork of principalities that had emerged between France and the German Empire acquired a distinct cachet as most of these principalities became exceptionally urbanized. As Flanders, Brabant, Guelders, Holland, and so on were all fiercely independent, scholars all agree that the increasingly structural socio-economic integration of these urbanised regions did not automatically lead to political integration, even if the ruling dynasties of these principalities were prone to intermarry. Yet, this political integration did take shape in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when a series of contingent factors – ranging from bankrupt princes to accidental deaths – allowed a collateral branch of the royal house of Valois to inherit, to purchase, or to conquer a lengthy string of principalities that eventually stretched from Frisia to the Franche-Comté. This article is part of the discussion forum 'Constructing and Deconstructing the ‘State’: the Case of the Low Countries'.

In this article, we examine how the language spoken in a country can affect individual attitudes about gender equality and subsequently the level of legal rights afforded to women. This is because the feature of a language—specifically whether it requires speakers to make gender distinctions—can perpetuate popular attitudes and beliefs about gender inequality. To test this argument, we first identify a correlation between the gender distinction of a language and individual gender-based attitudes among World Values Survey respondents. We then isolate the causal mechanism using an experiment involving bilingual Romanian–Hungarian speakers in Transylvania, Romania. Finally, we examine one observable implication of our argument: the effects of gender distinction of official state languages on women’s rights at the national level. Our results confirm the importance of the gender distinction of language on support for gender equality and women’s rights.

Much recent literature has focused on how women and men “do” (and potentially “undo”) gender when juggling home and work responsibilities. Commuter marriages—in which dual-income professionals live apart due to the demands of their jobs—present a strategic context in which to investigate these gendered processes. Drawing upon theoretical work on doing and undoing gender, prior literature about gender dynamics at the nexus of home and work, and data from in-depth interviews with 97 other-sex commuter spouses, this analysis finds that in some ways these nontraditional arrangements are unique sites for undoing gender; yet, in other respects, standard gender roles are crystallized within these relationships. Specifically, for some women, these arrangements provide a respite from domestic demands, enabling them to function as hyper-productive, “masculinized” workers. However, commuter spouses also perform gender in ways that replicate the conventional gender structure. For example, living apart crystallizes many women’s roles as caregivers. These findings have implications for broader literature on gender, family, and work. They also have implications for counselors, institutional practices, and social policy; for instance, they caution against equating female autonomy with gender parity in making family policy.

The article provides a short overview of recent research on male domesticity. Domesticity has for a long time been analysed as a female arena. Things changed when the focus - thanks to gender history - was directed to both women and men, to femininity and masculinity as cultural and social constructions. Some historians then went ‘back’ to his-story from a new perspective, looking at the history of men not as unmarked but as a particular one, and one that must also be dissected into its several components, avoiding the inclusion of all men into an undifferenciated category of patriarchy. This has led to studying men in the different arenas where they were acting, including the domestic.

Although some research considers women's participation in traditionally male-dominated jobs as an ‘undoing’ of the gender system, other scholars argue that women's participation in non-traditional roles can actually maintain hegemonic masculinity. Because women have recently entered the funeral industry in unprecedented numbers, the profession offers a unique context to study how women negotiate a sense of belonging in male-dominated fields. I draw on 22 interviews with women in the funeral industry to reveal how gender is done and undone in an occupational context. In what Hughey (2010. Social Problems, 57, 653–679) refers to as a ‘paradox of participation’, I argue that women in the funeral industry redefine the image of the ideal funeral director by using gender essentialist logic, which originally acted as a barrier to their entry to the field, to justify their participation. By showing how gender essentialism and egalitarianism can constitute reinforcing logics instead of an opposing binary, this research contributes to the literature concerning women in non-traditional roles.

Agency, activism and organisation have been central and constant themes in women’s and gender history. They provide useful lenses through which to study women’s interaction with the social world. Both separately and in combination, they constitute a valuable analytical framework for the study of women’s lives, culture and experience in past societies by foregrounding and articulating historical challenges made to patriarchy, social structure and the status quo. Agency highlights the individual action/social structure explanatory dichotomy whilst activism and organisation help focus on the specific ways in which women have challenged, resisted, overthrown or gained entrance to social structures and institutions that had tended to ignore, exclude, disadvantage or penalise them.

Over the last several decades, there has been a voluminous amount of scholarly literature about the transformation of women and gender, as well as about the reconstruction of Chinese religions in the context of twentieth-century Chinese modernity. The relationship and intersection of these two separated fields, however, remain uncharted territory. This essay is an introduction to three studies which address this lacuna. It places these writings in the existing scholarship on themes related to women, gender, and religion, and outlines the various ways in which they bring together the two hitherto disconnected facets of academic research on women and religion in the study of modern China, with a focus on the period from the 1900s to 1950s. Together they highlight the gender dynamics of the twentieth-century construction of Chinese religions, and forge new gendered understandings of Chinese modernity.

Critiquing character projections of women in Indian advertising has been one of the major areas of the content focus for research analysts in the domain of marketing and consumer behavior. Often these criticisms demonstrate the concerns that feminists have vociferously expressed regarding the flawed presentations of gender equations. Though there has been some revolutionary revamping of image attempted by some creative advertisers, it has been posited by many critics that little change has affected gender representations in advertising over decades. The authors in the present paper examine the construction of gender roles in two recent Indian television commercials that depict Indian woman essaying supervisory roles in their corporate jobs. The study uses qualitative analysis through in-depth interviews of young corporate women. The purpose is to find out whether these advertisements really act as harbingers of mutation in gender discourse or reinforce the same archetypal gender roles under the garb of liberatory postmodernist feminist mediations.

This essay uses feminist scholarship to engender African military history. It begins by examining the ways in which gender has—or has not—been integrated into African military history over the last ten years. Next, it analyzes some of the most influential feminist scholarship on gender and militarism in Africa today. Although most of this literature has not been produced by historians, it has much to teach us about how gender can be critically interrogated within our own work. The penultimate section considers the importance of cultivating a feminist curiosity and discusses what this type of critical thinking can bring to African military history. And finally, the conclusion reflects upon the future of the field, describing what needs to be done and how we might get there.

Purposeof the work.Forming the axiological system of Western society, with the intentions to establish gender equality as a guarantee of a just society being taken into account, on the one hand, and preserving the traditional gender stereotypes inherent to patriarchal gender roles in a considerable part of the world, on the other hand, is actualizing the study of the factors that have contributed to realizing the problem of gender inequality and discrimination. Therefore, the purpose of our study is to highlight the factors that stipulated the awareness of gender equality in European social and cultural space, while leaving alive the traditional gender values in a number of other cultural environments.Methodologyof the study is determined by interdisciplinary approach involving the use of general scientific methods such as analysis, synthesis, generalization, etc. The leading role belonged to the principle of the historical and logical unity. At the same time the study applies the basic principles of philosophical hermeneutics and the contextual analysis method.Originalitylies in putting forward the new theoretical statements aimed to show that in the ancient and pre-modern society, gender inequality and discrimination did not exist, because at that time gender relations were considered either as a result of the biological characteristics of a human body, or were explained by worldview ideas about the origin and structural features of the world, prevailing in a specific historical dimension. Consequently, gender roles were taken for granted and were not subject to any doubt.Conclusions. Despite all the worldview shifts that had been taking place in the pre-modern era social outlook, nevertheless, as history has shown, they failed to generate sufficient philosophical foundations either for recognizing the equality of women, or changing their social, legal and political status. This led to accumulating the unconscious internal resistance to dominant social standards, which was expressed primarily in behavioural arbitrariness that, whatsoever had not been acquiring any openness by the beginning of industrialization. The latter, having destroyed rural communities with their inherent division of labour and lifestyle, which eventually weakened significantly the mythological social structures, has opened an opportunity not only to understand but also to commence the fight for the recognition of gender equality.

School stories in contemporary China, which target a pre- and early-adolescent readership, frequently evoke representations of girlhood and boyhood in normative gender terms. The present article considers issues of femininity and gender in Tomboy Dai An (Jia Xiaozi Dai An), one among a series of commercially successful school stories by the popular female author Yang Hongying. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and sexuality with a primary focus on Judith Butler’s work, the article examines critically the text’s representations of femininity, its construction of ideal womanhood, and the strenuous labour invested in correcting gender deviations. It is posited that, on the one hand, Yang’s text, written with the overt intention to enhance children’s gender awareness, serves to guide female children into traditional feminine roles, and as such, risks reaffirming gender stereotypes and perpetuating patriarchal values. On the other hand, by revealing the contingency associated with gendered identities, and by acknowledging that deliberate—and sometimes even violent—efforts need to be made to preempt and correct gender deviations, the text sets out to question, paradoxically and inadvertently, the very stability and authority of gender as a natural fact, calling attention instead to its improvisatory and performative nature. Despite its effort to shape the thinking of young readers, the text nonetheless presents the pre- and early-adolescent years as a potentially deviant site where different possibilities of gender play out.

This essay revisits Erving Goffman’s question regarding the connection between couple relationships and gender construction, expanding upon it by examining the ambivalent relationship of couples towards gender (in)difference, in which the latter is constitutive of their formation. On the one hand, couples exploit the (in)equality of their gender composition, while, on the other, they systematically ignore it in order to establish individualized personal relationships. The article culminates in a sociological diagnosis of this ambivalence, with statistical inequalities between men and women emerging as an aggregate effect of millions of small dyadic entities, each searching for their own relational meaning. How might they reconstruct their sexual inequality in view of the fact that gender is losing its relevance? Meanwhile, what used to be thought of as homosexual and heterosexual relations are losing their meaning as gender relations.

This article examines particularities of the communist gender policies towards sportswomen and men in early Yugoslav socialism. By situating Yugoslav gender history of sport in transnational perspe...