Perceptions of work by pious Muslim students: a comparison between the Netherlands and Turkey

There are widespread ideas about Muslim women being oriented to life at home and not participating in paid labour. This article explores notions of work in the groups of practicing Muslim, veiled Turkish-Dutch students of higher education in the Netherlands and Turkish veiled higher education students in Turkey, as the best-prepared group of women for a future in paid work. The primary objective of this article is to see how respondents think about their futures with regard to paid work. Their views are compared drawing on in-depth interviews analysed using grounded theory. The article shows that respondents in both settings have a keen interest in taking up paid work while also raising families. However, ideas of work differ in the two settings. As the Turkish-Dutch are faced with rather gendered expectations in their local community, for them paid work is perceived more along gendered lines taking into account one’s roles as wife and mother. Their choices of profession are rather gender-specific. However, Turkish respondents do not encounter gendered discourses of marriage and homemaking as strongly. Their choices of profession are less gender-specific; rather they choose their professions regarding perceptions of how much money they would make. The article shows that the different discourses regarding gender roles and work shape how they think about paid work differently in the two settings.     

Gender and the experiences of local elected members – a focus on Wales

This article explores issue of gender in relation to the experiences of local elected members. Member experiences are important as this may be one of the factors which lie behind the under-representation of women in political life at all levels. This article is focused on Wales where women make up 26% of local councillors, hold only 20% of cabinet positions and occupy one Leader position. This article reports on the views of male and female councillors from a number of Welsh authorities who, when interviewed, identified very different experiences of elected office. Central to their experiences are their routes into office, personal circumstances and societal influences. The existence of a dominant male political culture is evident and this may have an impact on the participation of women in local political life.     

The relationship between physical activity and mental health among adolescents in six middle-income countries: A cross-sectional study

Physical inactivity and poor mental health are emerging worldwide youth problems. Using the Global School-based Health Survey, this secondary data analysis study examined the link between physical activity and adolescent mental health among 23,372 adolescents between 11 and 17 years of age in six middle-income countries. The authors assessed physical activity by participation in (a) exercise for 60 min and (b) walking/biking in any day of a week in the past 7 days. The authors assessed mental health by the presence of (a) loneliness, (b) anxiety, (c) depression, (d) suicidal ideation, and (e) suicide attempts in the past 12 months. There was a low prevalence of physical activity among the participants. In general, there was a low prevalence of 12-month mental health problems among adolescents. Further research may incorporate physical activity to promote positive youth mental health for possible cost-effective interventions.     

‘So that my soul may have time to grow’: Joy and Happiness in Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Solitary Summer

Abstract

This article discusses the Romantic and Transcendentalist roots of Elizabeth von Arnim’s joyful retreat from the world in The Solitary Summer (1899). By exploring how von Arnim incorporates themes and ideas from William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau, it situates von Arnim’s concepts of joy and happiness in the Aristotelian tradition of eudaemonia and shows how the practice of mindfulness turns Elizabeth’s garden into an ongoing project of self-cultivation.     

Why does it happen? Explanations for men’s violence against women by women with interpersonal victimization histories

Men’s violence against women (MVAW) has been identified as a critical sociocultural problem. Gaining a better understanding of perspectives on the etiology of violence held by women with histories of male-perpetrated interpersonal violence provides insight into the processes of victimization and recovery. Furthermore, emerging research suggests that feminist beliefs may facilitate recovery and impact how survivors of MVAW perceive it. In this study, we aimed to explore, in women with histories of interpersonal violence, (1) the ways they explained the high prevalence of MVAW and (2) associations between the strength of their feminist beliefs and the participants’ explanations. Female college students (N = 32, ages 18–22) participated in qualitative interviews in which they were first presented with published statistics about the frequency of MVAW, then asked to provide explanations for the high prevalence of this phenomenon. Individual responses clustered into one or more of four factors: (1) societal influences, (2) blaming women, (3) familial influences, and (4) characteristics of men and women. The extent to which participants identified with feminist beliefs was associated with how they perceived their own victimization. Women who endorsed strong feminist beliefs more frequently cited societal influences on MVAW, whereas women who endorsed feminist beliefs less strongly were more likely to blame women for it and offered stereotypical views of women as passive and fragile.     

For lust or gain: perceptions of prostitutes in eighteenth-century London

This paper examines perceptions of lower-class female prostitutes in eighteenth-century London. This study challenges the prevailing argument that these perceptions fundamentally changed from ‘lusty whores’ to victims of poverty. An examination of Bridewell records, sermons, pamphlets, and the newspaper press, reveals that commentators believed that lust, poverty, and greed collectively explained what drove women to prostitution. Commentators recognized that, unable to make ends meet, many women turned to prostitution to survive, while also suggesting that others turned to prostitution because they believed they could gain considerable wealth by doing so. These same commentators asserted that some women were unusually lustful and that only prostitution would satisfy their insatiable desires. The simultaneous depiction of prostitutes in contradictory ways suggests that prostitution was not offensive to Georgian Britons solely because it involved women exchanging sexual favours for money, but because prostitution transgressed Britons’ deepest sensibilities about morality.     

Transnational Reception: Nordic Women Writers in Fin de Siècle Finland

Abstract

This article investigates the transnational and translingual reception of Nordic women’s writing (among authors writing in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish) in a multilingual country, Finland, around the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This contribution is a component of our work for the international Joint Research Project, Travelling TexTs. We concentrate on the presence of Nordic women’s writing in various languages in fin de siècle Finland by investigating a library collection from that time. We look at the complexities in the reception of Nordic women’s writing in translation in Finland, making use of the concept of the Nordic dimension of translation history, and introducing the notion of intranational reception. We emphasize the role of women translators as cultural transmitters, and the intertwining of national and transnational (or, even, in today’s terms, feminist) agendas. We also investigate the reception of Nordic women’s texts in the press of that time, by examining both literature written for adults and literature for girls. Working with large-scale digitized sources has enabled us to examine the question of reception broadly.     

Gendered discipline,gendered space: an ethnographic approach to gendered violence in India

ABSTRACT

Why are Indian women’s lives at fatal risk in the public sphere, when Indian democracy is inclusive in terms of gender? Addressing this question reveals a methodological and theoretical blind spot in political science scholarship – a blind spot which results in the reproduction and legitimization of gender-blindness. To understand how and why political science reproduces and legitimizes gender-blindness I reflect on a particularly horrific case of sexual and gender-based violence, the 2012 Delhi gang rape. This analysis is significant because it provides insight into the difficulty of understanding gendered violence in political science and achieving gender equality within democratic societies.     

How do gender quotas affect public support for women as political leaders?

Gender quotas have shown themselves to be an effective means of getting more women into political office. Less clear is the broader effect of gender quotas on egalitarian attitudes. This article uses a cross-national dataset of 48 countries worldwide to examine the role of gender quotas in the generation of individual-level attitudes to women as political leaders. Firstly, gender quotas appear to improve perceptions of women’s ability as political leaders in countries where they are present, having controlled for a range of individual-level and contextual influences. Second, this effect differs by sex. For women, the presence of gender quotas alone increases their support for women’s political leadership, something theorised as a ‘vote of confidence’ effect. Thirdly, this effect is not dependent on the type of quota implemented and holds for quotas adopted voluntarily by political parties and those that are brought about via a broader legal change.     

The masochist's masquerade: Kōno Taeko's ‘Beautiful Girl’ (Bishōjo)

Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when historical contexts are also brought to bear. In reading closely ‘Bishojo’ (Beautiful Girl, 1962), a story that appeared at the same time as Kōno's most famous award-winning stories in the early 1960s, I contend that Kōno's fictional world can best be grasped with attention to two key factors: the impact of Kōno's wartime girlhood on her fiction; and, in ‘Bishōjo’ in particular, the Occupation Period (1945–1952) context, which serves as more than mere background to the story's revenge plot. Girls, or shōjo, form the core of the story and expose the disavowed shōjo at the core of protagonist Shōko's psyche. To survive, Shōko must cloak her masculine strengths in a masochistic masquerade indistinguishable from femininity itself. She threads her masochistic masquerade between two abusive men whose efforts to humiliate her cannot be separated from the national Occupation context and postwar masculinity. Finally, this essay demonstrates that Kōno's masochism functions as a literary technique for constructing subjects differently by gender in historical contexts, thereby exposing the psychic distortions that only fiction, as a light into the darkened interior world of human beings, can illuminate.