Documents found
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3101.More information
AbstractMary Hays believed that "in the intellectual advancement of women […] is to be traced the progress of civilization." This essay traces the trajectory of Hays's own "advancement," focusing on Robert Robinson's tutelage from 1781 to her initial encounters with Wollstonecraft. The rational culture of late-eighteenth-century radical Dissent encouraged Hays to venture into the masculine strongholds of Enlightenment understanding, but here, as in the larger world, the "insuperable barriers" of gender obtained. Despite these obstacles, Hays forged an identity as female autodidact in the 1780s, readying herself to embrace Wollstonecraft's "revolution in female manners." Hays's initial contribution was to urge a new cognitive freedom, the recognition that women, too, may aspire to "the emancipated mind [which] is impatient of imposition, nor can it, in a retrogade [sic] course, unlearn what it has learned, or unknow what it has known." Hays's unfinished transition from sheltered puritan to Nonconformist apprentice to ardent feminist provides the missing link in our appreciation of her collaboration with Wollstonecraft and Godwin in the 1790s. I show how Hays was transformed into the obvious candidate for public denunciation as chief living "unsex'd female" in Wollstonecraft's stead.
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3102.
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3103.More information
In the sixteenth century, sumptuary laws regulated not only the use of garments and personal adornments but also extended to banquets, marriages, baptisms, and funerals, in order to guarantee the traditional values of austerity and decorum. Established authorities were therefore anxious on two counts, almost antithetically opposed: on the one hand they were concerned about the circulation of money, on the other about potential contamination between social groups. By investing clothing with a symbolic value, the regulation of permissible attire could also be used to help distinguish and identify marginalized groups, such as Jewish women and prostitutes. The proliferation of women’s resistance to sumptuary legislation is important evidence of a growing consciousness of female marginalization, but also of the comforting and compensatory value of appearances. The paradoxical poly-functionality of female dress and its symbolic power is that, depending on the norms in place in a given city, it may indicate either privilege or marginalization. This shows the ambiguous significance that was attributed to female appearances.
Keywords: Discipline du luxe, Assujettissement du corps féminin, Mode, Identité féminine
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3105.More information
This article attends to the connections between neo-liberal and neo-developmentalist labour regimes, asylum and immigration management, and the exploitation of undocumented, refugee, and migrant women, based on the experiences of Syrian refugee women in Turkey. The concept of precarity is explored as a selectively applied strategy by states to people who lack “status” or who are unable to benefit from “membership rights.” Forced migrants, illegal migrants, and asylum seekers are directly implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets across the Global South, becoming trapped in forced labour and human trafficking arrangements. The article establishes a link between extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious life worlds and gender-based profiling of life chances.
Keywords: Political Economy of Crisis, Precarity, Forced Migration, Gender and Migration, Gender and Precarity, Middle Eastern States
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3106.More information
Using government reports produced by one of Ontario’s pioneering women physicians and leading eugenic crusaders, Dr. Helen MacMurchy, this article interrogates the significance of disability as a central paradigm within first-wave feminism and its promotion of eugenic reforms. I examine how conceptualizations of race were reconstituted through the construct of disability to generate not only inter- but also intra-racial distinctions between differently classed white women. I argue that it was ultimately by leveraging a range of social categories —gender, class, race, and transgressive forms of sexuality—into a disabling paradigm that not only racialized women, but also poor white women were disempowered by eugenics.
Keywords: Eugenics, First-Wave Feminism, Disabling Representations
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