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This chapter looks at the representation of women's Holocaust testimonies. It shows how studies of women's lives during the Holocaust, in attempting to portray women in a specific manner, seek a homogeneity of experience that did not exist and overlooks testimonies which do not fit with preconceived gender roles. These studies often project their own concerns, rejecting testimonies that reveal experiences outside the dictates of collective memory – such as the female Jewish Kapos (heads of work commandos) who came to mimic the behaviour of their SS captors. This chapter looks at some of the women who resist easy categorisation.

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.

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.

This chapter examines the value of longitudinal data and longitudinal approaches for examining women's lives. In particular, the chapter focuses on the role of part-time work in the context of British women's work histories. In addition to presenting the outcome of longitudinal analyses of women's work histories, the chapter also places emphasis on the need to take a more reflexive approach to the use of qualitative life history data. It focuses on the manner in which longitudinal research on women's life has concentrated on the behaviour of mothers after the birth of their first child. In addition, the chapter also focuses on the implications of conflating all women with the subgroup of mothers for reifying the concept of gender from the perspective of feminist theory. The first section of this chapter concentrates on conceptualising women's employment. The first part discusses recent research on women's behaviour and highlights the importance of understanding the role of part-time employment in the dynamic context of women's work histories. The second part outlines some theoretical debates on the concept of ‘women’ within feminist writings. The second section of the chapter discusses the results of event history models, based on the data from the National Child Development Survey (NCDS). The final section considers how the recent feminist theory informs the manner of conducting and presenting longitudinal analyses.

This chapter focuses on a sphere of women's lives that highlights the normalization of gender hierarchies in San Alejo. It particularly focuses on the institutional and structural dimensions of women's suffering. This encompasses not only the role of markets and governments but also the reproduction of inequalities and power differentials at an intimate level. Hence this chapter traces the association between the women's internalized humiliations and indignities and the legitimations of gender inequalities in San Alejo. This chapter begins with violence of robadas, wherein during courtship men take the women to be their partners even when the will of the women was unclear. Then the chapter focuses on the three sources of violence that take place within the marital union. Such sources of violence include alcoholism, infidelity, and violence in the context of marital relations.

This study is concerned with how gender shaped conflicts in early modern German communities, and with the lives of women on the social margins of society. It deals with the ways in which women experienced the law. It explores this world through an imaginative engagement with the stories of women who were gossiped about, accused, and punished. It observes the changing cultural, confessional, and political attitudes which determined how transgression was regarded: the history of prosecution, trial, and punishment is understood in these broadest contexts. The book also aims to record the large social consequences of the perception of femininity as embodiment of unruly desire.

The problematics of change have always occupied central position in sociological thought, and the modern social sciences have emerged in response to an era of rapid social change and the consequent need for greater understanding of social, economic and political processes. In the study of society, change is a feature of social reality that any social-scientific theory must sooner or later address. Change is a complex process involving many factors, all of which are interwoven and dependent upon each other. And one of these changes is the macro-social and economic changes which interact with the life courses of women, men and family, producing changes at the micro-level. This chapter offers a discussion of social change, and the forces that have moulded and shaped social change in the last century. It also discusses the implications of these changes on women's lives and the role the women have played as actors of this change. In addition, the chapter also provides a conceptual framework for the theoretical and policy discussions that are examined and discussed in the subsequent chapters that report empirical analyses.

The study highlights the feminine public sphere that represents a locus of middle-class women's public lives and elite women's contribution to a middle-class identity rooted in public service. Notions of women's complementary nature, feminine moral superiority and an evangelical interest in actively pursuing the conversion of others—ideas which might have been mobilised to justify the sexual division of labour and an idealised female domesticity—could have been subverted by middle-class public women to encourage the formation and expansion of women's reforming associations in the 1870 to 1914 period. Furthermore, a belief in the social and moral importance of the maternal and domestic was integral to middle-class women's culture, and the women's temperance movement illustrates the importance of gender and social class to the feminine public sphere. Female temperance reform was further influenced by middle-class women's participation in the public world of voluntary philanthropy, and the movement of women from charity to social reform cross-pollinated women's associations with similar reforming strategies. This study's fresh perspective on women's public lives further emphasises the breadth of the constitutional suffrage movement.

This concluding chapter offers some recommendations for increasing and improving the role of longitudinal data in researching and analysing changes in women's lives and life courses. Change, such as has already been discussed, is a highly complex process which involves many factors. Some aspects of change are seen as systematic and predictable, others are seen as random or coincidental. Within this context, a key issue is to highlight how women are conceptualised in longitudinal studies, and how longitudinal research can probe deep into women's life courses. It is argued in this chapter that there must be an attempt to understand whether gender inequality is effectively investigated within longitudinal studies and whether it has potential to be investigated in the first place. It is also argued that the final aim should be to go beyond the ‘indirect gender indicator’ model, and replace it with a research approach that is able to highlight important aspects of women's roles, and the ways in which these are changing. Among the recommendations discussed in this closing chapter are: research on women should be contextualised with information on other actors within the private domestic sphere and outside households; topics and questions should be compiled in a gender-sensitive manner; a connection between the concepts of dependence and unpaid work, including gender equality and economic autonomy should be analysed; there should be inclusion of topics relevant to the analysis of gender differences as they open broader avenues for researchers; and gender-sensitive research should combine the ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ dimensions.

This chapter brings together three overlapping concerns--embodiment, affect, and citizenship--by focusing on how this women-dominated group claimed a public space integrally tied to citizenship practice. We feel, emotionally and bodily, the ways that we are granted or denied citizenship. Citizenship is an emotional and embodied experience as well as a legal and political process. By marching on Washington, participants brought this complex web of experiences, what I call embodied affective citizenship, to a site central to how U.S. citizenship is imagined. Marchers representing different approaches to establishing reproductive freedom interacted, transforming the national mall into a site for negotiating how citizenship practice would be understood during and after the event.

This chapter looks at how space is domesticated inside and outside the house for Jewish purposes. It considers the consequences of constructing an eruv in London and the controversies that this engendered. Structurally, the eruv (technically, eruv ḥatserot, meaning ‘a mingling of courtyards’) is an urban space whose disparate areas are regarded halakhically as forming a single unit by virtue of the contiguity of its boundaries. Here, the chapter examines the experience of the structure as built, rather than discussing the detail of its planning and construction. Furthermore, it focuses on ordinary Jews rather than on the Jewish leadership, and on women's lives rather than men's. Of methodological interest here is the investigation of space objectively and subjectively by inviting participants to draw cognitive maps of their public and domestic spaces.

Virginia Woolf transformed her paternal family’s legacy of memorializing their public and private lives, the first for print, the second for private circulation within the family. Woolf shifted the ground from male achievement to private experience, including the territory of family conflicts. It became a lifelong project, first in polished pieces for an empathetic audience of friends, relatives, and close allies calling itself the Memoir Club and eager to share the record of their liberation from Victorian standards, later in private documents like “A Sketch of the Past,” written for herself rather than others, permitting her to record the legacy of shame and grief buried in her own family history, in the hope that some later version might reach an empathetic audience like the one Rousseau hoped to find.

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.

This chapter examines two portraits of Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, Duchess of Cleveland (1641–1709), and one of Charles II’s numerous mistresses. Painted between 1660 and 1668 by Sir Peter Lely, the portraits functioned as important sites for self-presentation in early modern England. The chapter analyses the portraits within the context of early modern ‘life writing’, and how women’s lives during the period have been occluded by the conventions of traditional ‘biography’.

Beginning by recognizing that the idea of female divinity in Hinduism has been a mystery from the inception of Hindu theology, this Introduction proceeds to an overview of the contents of this volume. Presenting the chapters, arranged thematically and historically into four related parts, this Introduction shows how Hindu philosophy and worship practices have expounded the idea of the divine feminine by conceptualizing it as a personified goddess at once singular and manifested in multiple forms. Drawing upon a variety of Hindu philosophical traditions, the authors relate the goddess as an abstraction to belief systems that render the goddess as humanized figures. In both formal theology and popular belief, this conception has resulted in an emotional and spiritual closeness to goddesses that continues deeply to influence Hindu social life and its cultural expressions, especially in its impact on the lives of women.