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 An Introduction to the Challenge of Difference

Margaret D. Kamitsuka

in Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference

Feminist theology, with relatively new institutional standing within the field of Christian theology, has become divided and enriched (from it's white feminist author's perspective) by difference — ... More

Feminist theology, with relatively new institutional standing within the field of Christian theology, has become divided and enriched (from it's white feminist author's perspective) by difference — especially in light of womanist, mujerista, lesbian, two-thirds-world, and other self-named women's theologies. This chapter introduces the challenge of difference by examining one of the most historically central yet hotly contested feminist methodological themes today — the appeal to women's experience. This is followed by a discussion of two markers of difference (and sites of privilege) that will be an ongoing focus: race and sexuality. Illustrations are given of how white racial privilege and heterosexist privilege can manifest even in contexts of collegial feminist theological dialogue.Less

Conclusion

James Daybell

in Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England

This chapter draws together the strands of the book, arguing that letters are unrivalled as immediate records of Tudor women's lives and experiences, and represent by far the largest corpus of ... More

This chapter draws together the strands of the book, arguing that letters are unrivalled as immediate records of Tudor women's lives and experiences, and represent by far the largest corpus of 16th-century women's writing that is both privy and powerful. Letters shed light on female education and literacy; family, gender, and other social relations; and on women's political roles. This chapter also defines women's letters, and in so doing resists an oversimplified distinction between women's and men's letters based on content. It argues instead that despite many shared concerns, several factors distinguish women's letters from those of men, including survival, spelling, social range of correspondents, and rhetorical strategy. Moreover, the conclusion suggests that the study, taken as a whole, locates more fully female power and influence within the family, locality, and on a wider political stage, and indicates that 16th-century patriarchy was more flexible than scholars have sometimes suggested.Less

Living the connected effects of violence

Suzanne Franzway, Nicole Moulding, Sarah Wendt, Carole Zufferey, and Donna Chung

in Sexual Politics of Gendered Violence and Women's Citizenship

This chapter is about how living the connected effects of violence situates the argument that domestic violence reverberates across women's lives and erodes their citizenship. A data analysis here ... More

This chapter is about how living the connected effects of violence situates the argument that domestic violence reverberates across women's lives and erodes their citizenship. A data analysis here reveals the effects of intimate partner violence on the material, emotional, and social aspects of women's lives and how such violence disrupts and restricts their combined capabilities to participate in everyday life, very often for lengthy periods. The chapter offers insights into how women's experiences are shaped by a range of factors, such as state legislation and policy, the resilience or hostility of their own families and communities, and the availability of opportunities to gain and maintain employment. It reveals that women who have experienced violence rarely regain their place on their original life course. The quality of their housing, employment, mental health, and social participation is generally diminished.Less

Navigating Through Austerity

Vicki Dabrowski

in Austerity, Women and the Role of the State: Lived Experiences of the Crisis

This chapter reveals how women respond to and navigate through the effects of austerity measures. It highlights the commonalities in women's navigation strategies, but also where and how these ... More

This chapter reveals how women respond to and navigate through the effects of austerity measures. It highlights the commonalities in women's navigation strategies, but also where and how these approaches diverge, with particular attention paid towards the strategies employed by single mothers. Here, divergent accounts of varieties of austerity as lived come into view, from women changing their shopping habits in fairly minor ways, to the use of foodbanks and informal loans. Ultimately, this chapter discusses five sections of this book, each of which explore the different ways and the extent to which these women are navigating through austerity. It is through such a nuanced analysis that we can further understand both the commonalities and divergences in women's experiences.Less

Crafting the Everyday

Janet L. Finn

in Tracing the Veins: Of Copper, Culture, and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata

This chapter develops the theme of crafting the everyday by taking a comparative look at “working-class” women's experiences in Butte and Chuquicamata. Women's stories encode a language and practice ... More

This chapter develops the theme of crafting the everyday by taking a comparative look at “working-class” women's experiences in Butte and Chuquicamata. Women's stories encode a language and practice of class that is absent in men's accounts. Differing temporal and spatial patters molded women's lives in Butte and Chuquicamata. In Butte, the three-year cycle of labor contracts created temporal rhythms of community life that profoundly shaped women's social reality. In Chuquicamata, lives were spatially structured around the lines at the communal water pumps and company stores, where waiting was women's work. These gendered practices of daily life posed distinct challenges to consciousness and action.Less

Transforming Knowledge: The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves

in Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women's Health in the Second Wave

This chapter examines how the book Our Bodies, Ourselves provided readers with an alternative knowledge base on women's health, explaining that it allowed for a feminist reconceptualization of ... More

This chapter examines how the book Our Bodies, Ourselves provided readers with an alternative knowledge base on women's health, explaining that it allowed for a feminist reconceptualization of biology that privileged individual women's experiences over clinical research. The book provided the tools for women readers to challenge medical decision making and to seek alternative structures of care based on the notion of experiential knowledge, but it also sowed the seeds of division that would limit the extent to which its promoters could truly revolutionize health care. The book furthermore highlighted two conflicting truths: the singularity of being female and the plurality of individual experiences.Less

Introduction: We Feed Them Milk: Theological Anthropology as a Labor of Love

Jeannine Hill Fletcher

in Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious Dialogue

While Christian theological discourse on religious pluralism has tended to function in a deductive fashion (starting with ‘first principles’ of scripture and doctrine and applying these principles to ... More

While Christian theological discourse on religious pluralism has tended to function in a deductive fashion (starting with ‘first principles’ of scripture and doctrine and applying these principles to the reality of religious diversity), the inductive methodology of this book pursues an alternative method. The introduction presents an overview of this inductive methodology of feminist theology. Contrasting with traditional theological anthropologies which take male, Christian experiences and the doctrines they have formulated as the norm, this method draws on women's experiences across the religious traditions as resources for thinking about who we are as human beings. The introduction also provides an overview of the theological discipline of ‘theological anthropology’ anticipating the constructive theology of the book (engaged with Genesis and the New Testament, but also the scriptures and experiences of women of many faiths).Less

‘I worked alright, but I never got paid for my labour’: Women and Work¹

Emma Griffin

in Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy

This chapter takes a look at the trajectories of women and labour during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. It does so by exploring the autobiographies of several women, in which they detail their ... More

This chapter takes a look at the trajectories of women and labour during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. It does so by exploring the autobiographies of several women, in which they detail their childhoods and eventually their careers and how their attempts at financial autonomy were thwarted in various ways by societal constraints and prejudices. As the chapter argues, low female wages were not merely a passive reflection of a society that devalued women and their work. They also played an active role in keeping women subordinate, by forcing them into a position of dependency on men, first with respect to their fathers, then with respect to their husbands. Making sense of women's lives therefore requires moving into an unfamiliar terrain. Women's experiences were not captured by male wage rates, yet they were deeply bound up with male earnings and male patterns of behaviour.Less

Market Reforms, Global Linkages, and (Dis) continuity in Post-Socialist China

Cara Wallis

in Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones

This chapter outlines the specific socio-cultural context of contemporary China at the beginning of the 21st century. To set the stage for the rest of the text, the chapter discusses the reforms of ... More

This chapter outlines the specific socio-cultural context of contemporary China at the beginning of the 21st century. To set the stage for the rest of the text, the chapter discusses the reforms of the post-Mao period, the history of the urban–rural divide perpetuated by the hukou (household registration system), and the phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration. Though in the mid-1980s rural peasants had engaged in non-farm work, particularly in township and village enterprises (TVEs) as the urban-and eastern-centered economic reforms progressed and as the old apparatuses of state control were broken down, more and more rural residents were compelled to “leave the land.” The chapter emphasizes how shifting ideologies related to gender, class, and place play a pivotal role in shaping rural women's experience, during both the Mao-era planned economy and China's reform-era embrace of markets and global capitalism.Less

Conclusion

Heather Douglas

in Women, Intimate Partner Violence, and the Law

This final chapter affirms the importance of listening to women’s experiences when considering how legal responses to intimate partner violence might be improved to make women safe. The chapter ... More

This final chapter affirms the importance of listening to women’s experiences when considering how legal responses to intimate partner violence might be improved to make women safe. The chapter reviews key themes identified in the book, including abusers’ use of the legal system to continue abuse and the role of child protection workers, police, lawyers, and judges in facilitating that abuse. It highlights a common and continuing failure of those who work in the legal system to recognize the significance of nonphysical abuse, to persistently misunderstand the dynamics of separation and ultimately, to fail to prioritize safety. This chapter makes recommendations for law and policy reform toward making the legal system safer.Less

Feminine Virtue, Female Agency, and the Legacy of Eiximenis

Nuria Silleras-Fernandez

in Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

This concluding chapter considers the legacy of Eiximenis in the gender discourse of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. It examines how this discourse had changed during the time of the writing ... More

This concluding chapter considers the legacy of Eiximenis in the gender discourse of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. It examines how this discourse had changed during the time of the writing of the Llibre de les dones from the late fourteenth century to Vives's De institutione and Eiximenis's Carro de las donas in the early sixteenth. More broadly, the chapter asks what these literary works can tell us about ideology, gender, and religion; and how these compare with the real-life experiences of the women to whom these works referred, from Sanxa Ximenis d'Arenós to Maria de Luna, and from Isabel the Catholic to Catalina of Habsburg.Less