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Nursing Fathers and National Identity: James I, Charles I, Cromwell and Milton

Trubowitz Rachel

in Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

The biblical figure of “the nursing father” (Numbers 11:12 and Isaiah 49:23) is a starting point for this chapter. Organized thematically, the chapter explores how the newly evolving discourse of ... More

The biblical figure of “the nursing father” (Numbers 11:12 and Isaiah 49:23) is a starting point for this chapter. Organized thematically, the chapter explores how the newly evolving discourse of maternal nurture informs the construction of male political authority, royalist and anti-royalist. In Basilkon Doron, James VI/I's monarchical self-image as a “nourish father” translates reformist amalgamations of maternal nurture and national identity into royalist terms. In Eikon Basilike, Charles I depicts himself as a pious king and nurturing father to encourage his subjects’ charitable rehabilitation of his shattered royal image. Cromwell's speeches equate “the nursing father” with the new affective bonds unifying the reformed nation. In Of Education, Milton relies on the new discourse of nurture to repudiate the universities’ outmoded, authoritarian approach to learning. In Areopagitica, Milton associates nurture with both ancient Greek liberty and England's divinely inspired reformation.Less

Woman the Gatherer

Erika Lorraine Milam

in Creatures of Cain

This chapter considers the research of women anthropologists during this period. It shows how many anthropologists had fought to refute the picture of universal male authority implied by common ... More

This chapter considers the research of women anthropologists during this period. It shows how many anthropologists had fought to refute the picture of universal male authority implied by common narratives of human evolution were women, often at the very beginning of what turned out to be long, notable careers. Their research gave fuller form to a rhetorically powerful alternative to Man the Hunter in reconstructions of human origins—Woman the Gatherer. Like her partner, Woman the Gatherer found intellectual support in research on long-extinct human ancestors, studies of human cultures today, and animal behavior, with a new emphasis on field research among primates.Less

Was the Traditional East European Jewish Family in the Recent Past Patriarchal?

Shaul Stampfer

in Families, Rabbis and Education: Essays on Traditional Jewish Society in Eastern Europe

This chapter assesses whether the traditional Jewish family in eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was patriarchal. In traditional east European Jewish families, authority over ... More

This chapter assesses whether the traditional Jewish family in eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was patriarchal. In traditional east European Jewish families, authority over children was not monopolized by fathers; mothers also had a great deal of authority over minor children. Fathers often spent more hours a day out of the house than did mothers, and often they had to work far from their homes. As such, mothers usually determined what went on at home, and even when this was in accordance with their husbands' wishes, it does not imply that it was under their husbands' authority. Perhaps the greatest potential for paternal authority can be found in the marital patterns of their children. Meanwhile, in the area of relations between the male head of the family and his wife in traditional east European Jewish families, male authority could not be taken for granted and male heads of families could not simply force wives to do their bidding. The chapter then defines patriarchy, arguing that the dynamics of the traditional Jewish families in eastern Europe complicate the utility of the term.Less

Impudent Puppies: Sisters in the Household of the Faith

Lee V. Chambers

in The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family

This chapter assesses what some viewed as the impudence of the Weston sisters and the significance of this construction of political womanliness for understanding the import of horizontal kinship ... More

This chapter assesses what some viewed as the impudence of the Weston sisters and the significance of this construction of political womanliness for understanding the import of horizontal kinship structures and the language of fictive kinship in antebellum reform. Gendered female impudence meant the women were seen as having a very confident attitude, insolent disrespect, obstinate disobedience, and contemptuous disregard for male authority. They challenged all habits of subordination and deference in the American church and social order. Within the horizontal structures of their sibling families, the female authority of their households and their connections to voluntary associations, they constructed a sorority of overlapping blood and fictive kin that helped abolish slavery.Less

Authority and Collaboration

Elisabeth van Houts

in Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900-1300

This chapter discusses topics such as husbands’ authority and wifely advice, marital violence and collaboration, and shared responsibilities. Once married the husband became the head of the household ... More

This chapter discusses topics such as husbands’ authority and wifely advice, marital violence and collaboration, and shared responsibilities. Once married the husband became the head of the household and the wife fell under his authority. Patriarchal society was based on this inbuilt inequality that consisted often in a precarious balance between the husband, having to show that he was up to his authoritarian role, and the wife understanding her submissive position. A mutual sense of responsibility for their life together was often the glue that kept a couple together. This sense of mutual responsibility was naturally stronger the more affective the relationship was. Both men and women had a role in marriage, and increasingly society recognized that durable indissoluble unions had more chance of success if the couple were compatible, attracted to each other, and prepared to give the relationship a chance.Less

Revising the Sexual Contract

in Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism

This chapter demonstrates some men's struggles to produce more equitable property arrangements and marital relations, concentrating especially on the problem of the femme coverte, or legal status of ... More

This chapter demonstrates some men's struggles to produce more equitable property arrangements and marital relations, concentrating especially on the problem of the femme coverte, or legal status of the married woman. The radical men who took up the cause of marriage reform with the goal of curbing male authority were engaged in a delicate operation. The “companionate” model of marriage gained increasing popularity over the course of the eighteenth century. It is noted that the laws regarding women and regulating the domestic site, contra Blackstone, were highly contingent. The proposals for legal reform of marriage were the efforts to awaken the family so as to mirror the contractual arrangement founded between the ruler and the people one hundred years earlier.Less

Introduction

Meghan J. DiLuzio

in A Place at the Altar: Priestesses in Republican Rome

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the role that women of ancient Rome played in public cult. Historians of Roman religion have generally supposed that women were excluded from ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the role that women of ancient Rome played in public cult. Historians of Roman religion have generally supposed that women were excluded from official priestly service at Rome. In recent years, however, a number of important studies have challenged specific aspects of this general picture, including the theory of female sacrificial incapacity. There is ample evidence that women could communicate with the gods through sacrifice. Laywomen are recorded as officiants as well. Meanwhile, the question of women's subordination to male authority in the ritual sphere is less easily settled. It indeed seems that married priestesses were subject to the authority of their priestly spouses. However, other priestesses were more independent. The administration of cults under female control seems to have been left to the women themselves, particularly where men were actively excluded. Such self-government was naturally an “internal autonomy” that relied upon the continued consent of the people and the senate.Less

Rebecca's Womb: Irony and Gynaecology in Rebecca

Madeleine K. Davies

in The Female Body in Medicine and Literature

This chapter explores the issue of aberrant sexuality in Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938). Rebecca is about a physically diseased woman who is fearless in the face of male authority and who ... More

This chapter explores the issue of aberrant sexuality in Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938). Rebecca is about a physically diseased woman who is fearless in the face of male authority and who defies the rule of patriarchal law. The chapter argues that Rebecca invites the interrogation of a range of encoded meanings and invites readers to read it as a ‘narrative stab at the heart of the rule of law’.Less

Pain of Privacy: Purdahnashin

Susmita Roye

in Mothering India: Women's Fiction in English Shaping Cultural History (1890-1947)

If the rite of widow-immolation fired Western imagination at the turn of the nineteenth century, then purdah (life in seclusion) held captive the West’s attention at the turn of the twentieth. Purdah ... More

If the rite of widow-immolation fired Western imagination at the turn of the nineteenth century, then purdah (life in seclusion) held captive the West’s attention at the turn of the twentieth. Purdah took on a special connotation especially during the British Raj. With the gradual rise of the novel ideas of nationhood across religions, languages or cultures of the subcontinent, purdah became more than the sceptre of male prescriptive authority for upholding religious/cultural precepts of a community. It became further charged as the confrontational ground of conflicting authority—for one race to rule and for the other to forge its identity as a self-ruling nation. Not only is women’s representation of purdah in their writings considered more authentic but they also often challenge the stereotyping of a purdahnashin and reject the broad-brushed, mono-toned portrayal of their existence. Although Hindus too practised purdah of a sort, this chapter focuses on two Muslim women writers (Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Iqbalunnissa Hussain).Less

Insurrection and Imagination: Idiocy and Barnaby Rudge

in ‘The Most Dreadful Visitation’: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction

This chapter examines Dickens' Barnaby Rudge. It compares representations of madness and idiocy within the novel with the concepts and images running through contemporary non-fiction writing, to show ... More

This chapter examines Dickens' Barnaby Rudge. It compares representations of madness and idiocy within the novel with the concepts and images running through contemporary non-fiction writing, to show that it draws on conventional and sometimes rather punitive conceptions while simultaneously revealing preoccupations in common with the later, ‘reformist’ writing by Dickens and others. In this way, Dickens criticises the idiocy of political uprising, whilst at the same time rescuing the idiot from blame. The chapter also discusses how the concept of idiocy allows Dickens to explore concerns about the power of the creative imagination and the dangers that ensue when male authority is divorced from responsibility.Less