Search Results

Novelists as well as reformers in the interwar period depicted three competing versions of companionate marriage. The most widespread was “flapper marriage,” which modernized but did not really confront male dominance. Its proponents acclaimed flapper wives who had rejected demure styles of femininity, but they demonized powerful matriarchs and independent career women. African Americans imagined “partnership marriage,” in which marital roles were less distinct, wives were often employed, and marriage was more anchored in wider kin and community networks. Black and white feminists sought “feminist marriage,” in which not only sex but also paid work and household labor involved greater equality between women and men. Although all versions accepted more individual freedom in style and public behavior than Victorian mores allowed, only African Americans seriously supported individual freedom to choose marriage partners across racial lines.

This chapter focuses on Chava Weissler's book on the personal devotional prayers of early modern Jewish women, Voices of the Matriarchs. Blending previously published articles, new material, and important methodological insights, this book brings to the reader a fully developed picture of the context, concerns, and religious lives of a previously invisible group. It also raises serious questions regarding our ability to know about and understand the past. The chapter shows how the author is candid about her own purposes, reservations, loyalties, and aspirations. Throughout the book, the author presents distinct texts, often several concerning the same function, in order to portray the variety of religious personalities exposed in these Yiddish prayers.

In ‘her’ book, Ruth is linked to Rachel, Leah, and Tamar, bringing Ruth into the assembly of matriarchs and tricksters. Sexuality is a significant component of Ruth's trickster‐ness. The ‘did they or did they not’ question raised by the threshing‐floor encounter between Ruth and Boaz has been much discussed among scholars. A comic reading of Ruth 3, however, does not require an ‘answer’, but instead revels in the tantalizing possibilities. Following the events of chapter 3, the story shifts away from being the story of Ruth and Naomi into the all‐to‐familiar patriarchal territory of men defining the destinies of women. For feminist critique, Ruth's movement from woman to matriarch remains problematic, yet the Moabite Ruth's entry into patriarchal society and into the line of David remains a comic triumph. The comedy emphasizes and celebrates the attributes of Ruth and Naomi, as it also undercuts the patriarchal context into which it is subsumed.

This chapter attempts to move beyond traditionalist notions of the Australian Aboriginal person. It accepts that personhood is porous and likely to change as general social conditions change. It explores this idea through mini-biographies of four Warlpiri matriarchs who have moved to diaspora locations and deliberately placed themselves at some distance from the social norms operating in their remote homeland settlements. Accounts of traditional Aboriginal personhood emphasised the spiritually emplaced and socially embedded person. In contrast, the lives of the four Warlpiri matriarchs demonstrate the extension of social networks beyond kin, pursuit of their own projects and the rejection of some aspects of traditional law that constrained them. The vectors of these changes include Western education, religious conversion and escape from traditional marriage.

This chapter examines sacred conventions, consolations and mediations in Toni Morrison's novel Paradise. It suggests that Morrison structured this novel as the highlight of the negotiation of spiritual tensions in her use of spiritual amplification. It explores the notion of spiritual balance, the re-construction/resurrection of the matriarch, and the nature of spiritual transcendence and analyzes the nature of female spiritual traditions and the manner in which African women have redefined, restored, reclaimed and recovered identity through a symbiotic relationship between themselves and the land.

This chapter examines the radical matriarchal identity of Margaret Fell (1614–1702), an indispensable figure in early Quakerism who promoted, funded, defended, and monitored the growth of the movement both in the north of England, where she was based, and across Great Britain. Fell’s identity as the ‘mother of Quakerism’ has been frequently associated with more apparently private roles, such as that of wife and mother. Fell instead lived as a Spiritual Mother in the context of the arrival of ‘the New Jerusalem’, an apocalyptic framework that challenged gendered social constraints and freed women from the curse of mother Eve. Various vignettes from Fell’s biography reveal matriarchal activities that were countercultural and politically assertive. Fell emerges as an autonomous and powerful mother, wife, and Spiritual Matriarch, free from the strictures of seventeenth-century society.

The main theme of this chapter is the tension that exists between the close church-based ‘family’ and external people, the outside ‘community’. The ‘family’ mirrors the nuclear family, with the priest as the male head/husband/father, Generation A as the matriarch, and they and other women performing the kinds of domestic labour found in nuclear families. The inclusion of women priests complicates that family structure—in the eyes of Generation A, they can be seen variously as family members or interlopers. The ‘church family’ creates a strange, somewhat contradictory insularity in an institution that otherwise professes ‘community’ and global outreach. The tangibility of ‘place’ provided important fieldwork insights.