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Archaeologists and students working at the Classic Maya site of Aguateca in the rain forest of Guatemala unearthed objects that Classic Maya courtiers made and used, perhaps left behind because an enemy attack had brought Aguateca to a sudden and violent end. Among the numerous artifacts discovered during the excavations were beautiful figurines of noble women, some of them holding a child. Excavators also unearthed bone needles, spindle whorls, and grinding stones, which may have been used by women for textile production and food preparation. They provide tantalizing traces of women's life at court. This chapter examines the visibility of Classic Maya court women as a window to their power and role in the court. First, it provides an overview of Classic Maya royal courts, then looks at the depiction of court women in documents and images. It also considers women in court architecture and space, focusing on three cases: elite residential structures at Aguateca, the palace in Complex A-V at Uaxactun, and the center of Yaxchilan.

The Byzantine Empire is an easy target for the historian's orientalizing reflexes. Long accused of oriental decadence and overlaid by centuries of Western perceptions of the oriental harem, the Byzantine court has been stereotyped by observers as a place where women lived in harems—in oriental seclusion guarded by fierce eunuch guards. Like aristocratic women elsewhere in Byzantium and in many other aristocratic societies, Byzantine court women lived in settings segregated from men. They did not, however, live in enclosed communities of wives and concubines available for the emperor's pleasure. In the first place, the Christian Byzantine emperors were, in accordance with church law, allowed to have only one wife at a time. The two most powerful empresses of middle period Byzantium were Irene and Theodora. This chapter shows that Byzantine women's access to power was possible despite the specially gendered nature of palace space and that this access was facilitated through the mediation of eunuchs, who were uniquely able to transcend the boundaries between the gendered spaces in the palace.

The extraordinary story of Emperor Zhenzong and Empress Liu reveals much about the interaction of gender, pleasure, and power at the Chinese court. Although Empress Liu was unusually successful in parlaying her entertainment skills into political power, she was far from unique. Yet entertainers—especially female entertainers—were highly anomalous figures at the court during the Song dynasty of China: they fell outside (or in between) regular categories of court women; they moved freely between the court and the outside world; they were among the most despised of social groups, but they circulated among the highest reaches of Song society. They were deployed as symbols of power and prestige, and invoked as signs of decadence and decline. The power of entertainers to attract imperial attention, together with the helplessness of the outer court in the face of such attraction, is nowhere more evident than in the biographies of two women who entered the court as entertainers and rose to become empresses of the realm: Empress Liu and Empress Yang.

In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an investigation first into New York City’s lower court system and then into its entire government. The investigation, known by the name of its head, retired judge Samuel Seabury, had a dramatic impact on the city’s politics and its powerful Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall. Because the investigation began with an inquiry into the entrapment of women for alleged sex crimes and their subsequent treatment in the city’s women’s court, it attracted great interest from the city’s women civic activists. These women played significant roles in encouraging and later broadening the Seabury investigation and in making decisions about its consequences.

New York City women civic activists avidly followed the Seabury investigations’ hearings and revelations. They passed resolutions demanding reform and traveled to Albany to confront legislators and urge Governor Roosevelt to take action. When the investigations’ focus turned from the women’s court to city governance, women were on the front lines of discussions of the city’s future and then helped bring a reform administration into power under the leadership of independent Republican Fiorello La Guardia. Women were thus engaged in not only the specifics of the corruption Samuel Seabury exposed but also the consequences of that exposure for New York City’s future.

This chapter describes how women’s relationship to Japanese language has been defined, assessed, and exploited within the field of Japanese linguistics. After a brief history of language studies in Japan in the Introduction, the second section analyses the norms for women’s speech in conduct books (etiquette manuals) since the thirteenth century. The third section summarizes the arguments concerning women’s contribution to the development of kana script in the Heian period (794–1185). The fourth section examines the changing values assigned to two speech styles linguists have prominently attributed to women: jogakusei kotoba (‘schoolgirl speech’) of the late nineteenth century and nyōbō kotoba (‘court-women speech’) since the fourteenth century. The last section considers the shifting evaluations assigned to the works by two individual women, the Japanese translation of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) by Wakamatsu Shizuko and the codification of Ainu oral narrative by Chiri Yukie. Conclusions outline three major findings of the chapter.