̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - feminism

Women are ‘running with leaded shoes’ when promoted at work, says study

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 07:13:24 +0000

Women and men feel different at work, as moving up the ranks alleviates negative feelings such as frustration less for women than for men, says a sweeping new study on gender differences in emotion at work.

̽��ֱ��study, led by researchers at Yale ̽��ֱ�� and co-authored by Jochen Menges at Cambridge Judge Business School, finds that rank is associated with greater emotional benefits for men than for women, and that women reported greater negative feelings than men across all ranks.

Because emotions are important for leadership, this puts women at a disadvantage akin to running with ‘leaded shoes’, according to the study, which is based on nearly 15,000 workers in the US.

̽��ֱ��results, published in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, tie the different ways women and men experience emotions at work to underrepresentation at every level of workplace leadership.

Little previous research on gender and workplace emotions

̽��ֱ��study notes that, while the glass ceiling for women has been extensively documented, there has been surprisingly little research on gender differences in emotions at work. Understanding this is particularly important as emotions influence job performance, decision-making, creativity, absence, conflict resolution and leadership effectiveness.

̽��ֱ��practical implications of the study are that organisations must provide support to women as they advance, including formal mentoring relationships and networking groups that can provide opportunities to deal with emotions effectively while supporting women as they rise within organisational ranks.

“It would be hard for anyone to break through a glass ceiling when they feel overwhelmed, stressed, less respected and less confident,” said Menges, who teaches at both the ̽��ֱ�� of Zurich and Cambridge Judge Business School.

“This emotional burden may not only hamper promotion opportunities for women, but also prevent them from contributing to an organisation to the best of their ability. More needs to be done to level the playing field when it comes to emotional burdens at work,” said Menges, whose research often focuses on leadership, motivation and other workplace issues.

Women feel more ‘overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated’ at work

̽��ֱ��study finds gender does make a difference for the emotions that employees experience at work. Compared to men, women reported feeling more overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated, tense, and discouraged, and less respected and confident.

Women reported greater negative feelings than men across all ranks. Although these feelings decreased for both men and women as they moved up in rank, the extent to which rank diminished negative feelings differed between the sexes. For instance, moving up rank did alleviate frustration and discouragement in both men and women, but it did so more for men than for women.

̽��ֱ��study says that because women experience more negative and fewer positive feelings in climbing the organisational ladder, this puts women at a disadvantage in attaining leadership roles.

At the lowest levels of employment, women reported feeling significantly more respected than men, yet this reverses as people climb within an organisation, resulting in men feeling significantly more respected than women at higher levels.

̽��ֱ��research used data from 14,618 adult US workers (50.7% male, 49.3% female) reflecting a diversity of race, ethnicity and industries, to test the following factors:

--Differences in the emotions that men and women experience at work.

--If gender interacts with rank to predict emotions.

--Whether the association between gender and emotions is mediated by emotional labour demands.

--If this relationship differs as a function of the proportion of women in an industry or organisational rank.

Feelings ranging from ‘inspired’ to ‘stressed’

Emotions were assessed using two different methods. Participants used a sliding scale to indicate how often they had experienced 23 feelings at work in the previous three months. ̽��ֱ��items included ten positive emotions such as “interested”, “proud” and “inspired”, and 13 negative responses including “bored”, “stressed” and “envious”. Participants were also asked to report their typical feelings about work in open-ended responses about how their job had made them feel over the past six months.

In addition, to assess positional power, participants were asked to place themselves on a ladder with ten steps representing where people stand in their organisation.

Inhibiting negative emotion is not the answer

̽��ֱ��study concludes that simply smothering emotion in the workplace isn’t the answer: Inhibiting negative emotions for a prolonged time increases burnout, and negatively impacts performance and personal well-being.

It recognises there are areas of future research which include how gender interacts with other categories of identity, such as race and ethnicity, social class, and sexuality. Women of colour face stronger glass ceiling effects than white women and have to simultaneously navigate bias and discrimination based on their gender and race.

̽��ֱ��authors also suggest further investigation to establish whether women’s negative experiences can impose an emotional glass ceiling because obstacles such as unequal treatment at work causes emotions such as feeling disrespected, which in turn can become an additional barrier to advancement.

Reference:
Christa L. Taylor et al. ‘Gender and Emotions at Work: Organizational Rank Has Greater Emotional Benefits for Men than Women.’ Sex Roles (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s11199-021-01256-z

Adapted from a story on the Cambridge Judge Business School website.

Promotion at work has greater emotional benefit for men than women, says a new study on gender and workplace emotion.

Maskot

Colleagues sitting at conference table

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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What next for Japan's women?

ta385 — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 05:00:00 +0000

Japan's women are experimenting with new femininities in challenging times, a new book reveals

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library unveils the rich histories, struggles and hidden labours of Women at Cambridge

sjr81 — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 10:27:39 +0000

Opening to the public on Monday 14 October, and curated by Dr Lucy Delap and Dr Ben Griffin, the exhibition will focus on the lived experiences of women at the ̽��ֱ��, the ongoing fight for equal educational rights, recognition, and inclusion in university activities, and the careers of some of the women who shaped the institution – from leading academics to extraordinary domestic staff and influential fellows’ wives.

̽��ֱ��exhibition will showcase the history of women at the ̽��ֱ��, the persistent marginalisation they were subject to, and the ongoing campaigns for gender justice and change since the establishment of Girton College in Cambridge in 1869, the first residential university establishment for women in the UK. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore rarely seen collections from across the ̽��ֱ�� and colleges. Through a mix of costume, letters and audio-visual material, the fascinating and little-known stories of individual women will be illustrated.

Dr Lucy Delap, exhibition co-curator and Fellow of Murray Edwards College, said: “From the founding of the first women’s college to the present day, the experience of women at Cambridge has differed greatly from their male counterparts.

"Though Girton College was established especially to give women the opportunity to study at the ̽��ֱ��, there were still many barriers that women faced – the first female students were required to ask permission to attend lectures, were not allowed to take exams without special permission, and usually had to be accompanied by chaperones in public until after the First World War. It was still not until 1948 that Cambridge began to offer degrees to women – the last of the big institutions in the UK to do so.

“Through ̽��ֱ��Rising Tide we hope to illustrate an all-encompassing picture of the incredible fight for gender equality within the ̽��ֱ��, while portraying the fascinating journeys of some of the militant, cussed and determined women of our institution too.”

Visitors to the exhibition will learn of the deep opposition and oppression women faced, including the efforts made to keep women out of student societies, the organised campaigns to stop women getting degrees, and the hostility faced by women trying to establish careers as academics. Surviving fragments of eggshells and fireworks illustrate the violent opposition to giving women degrees during the vote on the subject in 1897, as does the note written by undergraduates apologising for the damage that had been done to Newnham College during the riot of 1921.

̽��ֱ��exhibition will also reveal the creativity and courage of the women who defiantly resisted such opposition to establish lives and careers within the ̽��ֱ��. Resistance included: the signing of the 400 page petition demanding women’s degrees in 1880, which will be displayed over the walls of the exhibition; setting up new student societies for women; and finding opportunities for women to lecture.

Sometimes, resistance meant finding ways of avoiding the rules that discriminated against women – between 1904 and 1907, Trinity College Dublin offered women from Newnham and Girton the opportunity to travel to Dublin to graduate officially and receive a full degree. ̽��ֱ��robes of one of the graduates, which have been stored for many decades, will be displayed in the Women at Cambridge exhibition.

Dr Ben Griffin, exhibition co-curator and Lecturer in Modern British History at Girton College, added: “By telling the story of women at Cambridge, this exhibition also tells the story of how a nineteenth-century institution, which served mainly to educate young men for careers in the church, transformed itself into a recognisably modern university devoted to teaching and research.”

̽��ֱ��Rising Tide is a culmination of exhibitions, events and displays exploring the past, present and future of women at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Curated by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library in collaboration with students and staff, the events programme, pop-up exhibitions and displays will run at the Library and across the city. Women at Cambridge is the centre-piece of the programme and will launch on Monday 14 October, and run until March 2020. Entry is free.

One hundred and fifty years since the first women were allowed to study at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library will be sharing the unique stories of women who have studied, taught, worked and lived at the ̽��ֱ��, in its new exhibition ̽��ֱ��Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge.

From the founding of the first women’s college to the present day, the experience of women at Cambridge has differed greatly from their male counterparts.

Lucy Delap

Girton College

Domestic staff of Girton College, 1908

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When beauty matters: the politics of how we look

amb206 — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 13:31:16 +0000

We live in a world brimming with images. But the pictures that perhaps most powerfully evoke our individual life stories are seldom seen. Stored in personal albums or pushed to the back of drawers, these are not the images that we necessarily choose to share on social media. Taken on occasions that are both special and ordinary (the first day at school, that family trip to the beach), these photographs are imbued with feelings, many of them complex and complicated. Looked back on from a distance of time passed, they reveal our vulnerability: how we were and how we are, how we and others saw us and see us.

When sociologist Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa interviewed a group of Mexican women about their lives, she invited them to share their photo albums and reflect on their feelings about their bodies and the multiplicity of connections developing around them over time. Her objective was to explore women’s lived experiences and reveal the powerful role that ideas about beauty and race play in shaping individual lives. Moreno Figueroa sought a complex account from her interviewees, but the route those narratives took and the depth of their emotions surprised her. So much so, that she decided, on publishing her work, not to reproduce any of the women’s photographs.

Much has been written about women and beauty. Far less has been written about the ways in which notions of beauty, femininity, age and race intersect to create strongly perceived ‘differences’ which have profound and enduring effects. To be deemed beautiful confers immediate advantages – yet beauty is fleeting and fragile. A state of being beautiful is either displaced to the past or deferred to the future. As Moreno Figueroa has written, in a paper with her colleague Rebecca Coleman, “beauty is not a ‘thing’ which can be experienced in the present, but is that which is felt in different temporalities”.

Next week (30 August to 3 September 2016) Moreno Figueroa and colleagues (Dr Dominique Grisard from the ̽��ֱ�� of Basel & the Swiss Center for Social Research and Dr Margrit Vogt from the ̽��ֱ�� of Flensburg) will stage a ground-breaking summer school and conference titled ‘ ̽��ֱ��Politics of Beauty’. Participants will include academics and artists who will share professional and personal experiences to encourage wide-ranging debate on topics related to beauty.

As a sociologist concerned with understanding the ‘quality’ of inequality, the depth and feeling of racism and sexism, Moreno Figueroa argues that beauty should be understood as an “embodied affective process” – not so much a state of being as a feeling about being. “We’re inviting our participants to engage with the politics of beauty and its ramifications. How does beauty travel? What kinds of beauty discourses are created and transmitted in such journeys? How are the politics of beauty reconfigured both through its travels and its locatedness? When do they matter and to what effect and extent? These are important questions because they go to the heart of many human experiences,” Grisard, Vogt and Moreno Figueroa write in their invitation to this event.

Moreno Figueroa has written extensively on beauty and race – especially in the context of Latin America – and has helped to raise awareness of the ways in which they contribute to the reproduction of pervasive forms of racism and sexism and the reinforcement of structures of inequality. ̽��ֱ��Mexican women who shared their photographs were educated lower and middle-class professionals. They were also, like the majority of Mexico’s population, mestiza (racially mixed). ̽��ֱ��interviews revealed the strong concern with appearance, skin colour, physical features which are in turn deeply intertwined with notions of acceptable femininity and national belonging – and the words that cropped up again and again was morena (dark-skinned) and fea (ugly). One woman reported that, as a child, she used to ask her uncles, when they teased her about her looks, “Why am I so morena?”

“This question sounds naïve but it’s not, as it comes from a context where racial mixture has given a sense that different physical features are possible. Some get ‘lucky’, some don’t,” says Moreno Figueroa. “Mexico is a highly racialised society in which issues of racism, and particularly prejudices about skin colour, are neither acknowledged nor addressed – but have remained hugely influential both in the intimate environment of the family and in the wider world outside it. Deeply embedded in Mexican society are notions of beauty that have their origins in deliberate moves to ‘improve’ indigenous races. Improving meant encouraging marriages that would result in children with lighter skins and ‘fine’ features. Hand-in-hand with notions of improvement come ideas about degeneration.”

In interviewing contemporary mestiza women about their life stories, Moreno Figueroa was asking them to describe the form of racism that exists within the majority population and not the more familiar type of racism directed by a majority to a minority.

“In the context of everyday experience framed by the racial logics of mestizaje, there are no fixed racial positions and people are not engaged in processes of identity politics as found in other parts of the world. This is what is so striking about mestizaje: people are not white or black, but rather, they are whiter than or darker than others,” she says. “ ̽��ֱ��category of mestizo which epitomises Mexican national identity is relative. As the historian Alan Knight has pointed out, mestizo represents an achieved and ascribed status underpinned by whitening practices and promises of whiteness as privilege.”

It is within this framework that the racialisation of understandings of beauty comes to the fore. ̽��ֱ��infamous Mexican Caste Paintings (Pinturas de Castas) give a sense of how during colonial times artists recreated highly composed scenes that represented the routes for racial and class improvement underlined by aspirations of beauty, refinement and leisure. A union between a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman would produce a mestiza child; one between a Spanish man and a mestiza woman, a castizo child; and between a Spanish man and a castizo woman a Spanish child. In this rationale, in three generations, with careful planning and no mixing with Indigenous or Black blood, people could whiten themselves by ascription and make sure their descendants would fare better in life.

While Moreno Figueroa is careful not to claim a direct line between the Colonial period (1521-1810) and contemporary Mexico, it cam as no surprise that one of her participants shared stories of unease when young whiter women were courted by darker men, or of exasperation when a relative decided to marry a woman as dark as him. ̽��ֱ��reported dialogues are revealing: “How come he married her? Can’t he see what she looks like? And even nowadays he’s like 70 years old and his kids are in their 30s, they still ask him ‘If you can see you’re so dark, why did you marry such a dark woman?’. Why didn’t he think about ‘improving the race’.”

While the Mexican racial project is specific to its context, it shares some similar experiences of colonisation with other Latin American countries, as well as strong responses to 19th-century scientific racism, such as the trend to develop official ideologies of racial mixture (for example, Mexican Mestizaje or Brazil’s racial democracy) as part of nation-building strategies. As Moreno Figueroa explains: “These racial projects, and many others around the world, are tightly entangled with ideas about femininity where notions of beauty, its oppressiveness and fascination, play a central role in filtering privilege and crystalising paths of purity and belonging.”

Beauty might not be tangible, not a ‘thing’, but the promise of it underpins a global business worth many millions of dollars, generated by an industry that trades on vulnerability as well as pleasure. “It would be easy perhaps to dismiss the cosmetics and beauty treatment industries as somehow superficial and exploitative,” says Moreno Figueroa. “But beauty lies in a difficult terrain – it is also a question of hope and pleasure, pain and shame. These are profoundly felt human emotions for both women and men. They deserve our full attention.”

Participants in the summer school and conference include: Diane Negra ( ̽��ֱ�� College Dublin, Ireland); Francis Ray White ( ̽��ֱ�� of Westminster, UK); Jackie Sanchez Taylor ( ̽��ֱ�� of Leicester, UK); Joy Gregory (Slade School of Fine Art, UK); Marcia Ochoa (UC Santa Cruz, USA); Meeta Rani Jha, ( ̽��ֱ�� of Winchester, UK); Mimi Thi Nguyen ( ̽��ֱ�� of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA); Ng’endo Mukii (independent film maker, Nairobi, Kenya); Paula Villa (LMU Munich, Germany); Rosalind Gill (City ̽��ֱ��, London, UK); Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory ̽��ֱ��, USA); Sarah Banet-Weiser (USC Annenberg, USA); and Shirley Tate, ( ̽��ֱ�� of Leeds, UK).

For details of the Politics of Beauty summer school and conference go to https://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/about/events/beauty-summer-school

Questions of beauty and its politics will be discussed at a summer school and conference next week (30 August to 3 September 2016). Participants will examine the ways in which perceptions and experiences of race, ethnicity, sexuality and colonialism converge to exert powerful influences on our lives.

Deeply embedded in Mexican society are notions of beauty that have their origins in deliberate moves to ‘improve’ indigenous races. Improving meant encouraging marriages that would result in children with lighter skins and ‘fine’ features. Hand-in-hand with notions of improvement come ideas about degeneration.

Monica Moreno Figueroa

Pinturas de Castas

Mexican Caste Paintings from the 18th century

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Mistress, Miss, Mrs or Ms: untangling the shifting history of titles

amb206 — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 07:00:00 +0000

In July composer Judith Weir was named as the first woman to hold the post of Master of the Queen’s Music, following in the footsteps of dozens of eminent male musicians with the same title. ̽��ֱ��Guardian reported that 'the palace never even suggested "mistress" of the Queen's music and neither did she'.

When the role Master of the King’s Music was created in 1626, the words master and mistress were direct equivalents. Today mistress carries multiple connotations, one of which the Daily Mail alluded to in a headline before the announcement asking if Weir might be the Queen’s first Music Mistress.

Research by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� historian Dr Amy Erickson, published in the autumn issue of History Workshop Journal, unravels the complex history of an extraordinarily slippery word and suggests that the title of Mrs, pronounced ‘mistress’, was for centuries applied to all adult women of higher social status, whether married or not.

Erickson’s inquiries into forms of female address emerged from her study of women’s employment before the advent of the national census in 1801. What she found in registers, records and archives led her to question existing assumptions and track the changes that have taken place in the history of titles.

She says: “Few people realise that ‘Mistress’ is the root word of both of the abbreviations ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’, just as Mr is an abbreviation of ‘Master’. ̽��ֱ��ways that words derived from Mistress have developed their own meanings is quite fascinating and shifts in these meanings can tell us a lot about the changing status of women in society, at home and in the workplace.”

Throughout history ‘mistress’ was a term with a multiplicity of meanings, like so many forms of female address. In his Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson defined mistress as: '1. A woman who governs; correlative to subject or servant; 2 A woman skilled in anything; 3. A woman teacher; 4. A woman beloved and courted; 5. A term of contemptuous address; 6. A whore or concubine.'

Neither ‘mistress’ nor ‘Mrs’ bore any marital connotation whatsoever for Dr Johnson. When in 1784 he wrote about having dinner with his friends “Mrs Carter, Miss Hannah More and Miss Fanny Burney”, all three women were unmarried. Elizabeth Carter, a distinguished scholar and lifelong friend of Johnson’s, was his own age and was invariably known as Mrs Carter; Hannah More and Fanny Burney were much younger and used the new style Miss.

Erickson’s investigations have revealed that ‘Miss’ was adopted by adult women for the first time in the middle of the 18th century. Before that, Miss was only used for girls, in the way that Master is only ever (today increasingly rarely) used for boys. To refer to an adult woman as a ‘Miss’ was to imply she was a prostitute.

She explains: “Until the 19th century, most women did not have any prefix before their name. Mrs and, later, Miss were both restricted to those of higher social standing. Women on the bottom rungs of the social scale were addressed simply by their names. Thus, in a large household the housekeeper might be Mrs Green, while the scullery maid was simply Molly and the woman who came in to do the laundry was Tom Black's wife or Betty Black.

“Historians have long known that Mrs indicated social status, but they normally assume it also shows that the woman was married. So they have wrongly concluded that women like Johnson's friend Elizabeth Carter were addressed as Mrs as an acknowledgement of distinction, to grant them the same status as a married woman.”

Erickson suggests that this interpretation is mistaken: “Mrs was the exact equivalent of Mr. Either term described a person who governed servants or apprentices, in Johnson's terms – we might say a person with capital. Once we adopt Johnson's understanding of the term (which was how it was used in the 18th century), it becomes clear that ‘Mrs’ was more likely to indicate a businesswoman than a married woman. So the women who took membership of the London Companies in the 18th century, all of whom were single and many of whom were involved in luxury trades, were invariably known as ‘Mrs’, as the men were ‘Mr’. Literally, they were masters and mistresses of their trades.”

Historians have often misidentified women as married because they were addressed as ‘Mrs’ – when they were actually single. “It's easy enough to identify the marital status of a prominent woman, or those taking the Freedom of the City of London (since they had to be single),” says Erickson. “But it’s much harder to identify whether those women described as Mrs in a parish listing of households were ever married - especially the ones with common names like Joan Smith.”

A 1698 tax list from Shrewsbury lists from the top: William Prince Esqr Mm [Madam] Elizabeth Prince Wdd [widow] Mm Mary Prince Wdd Ms [mistress] Mary her daughter Mm Judeth Prince Mr Philip Wingfield Bat [baronet] Ms Gertrude Wingfield [who is either the wife or the daughter of Mr Wingfield above] followed by a number of women below with only a first and last name. This example shows that not all women had a title in front of their name, and demonstrates the use of Ms for an unmarried women (Mary Prince) and for a woman whose marital status is unclear (Gertrude Wingfield). Madam appears to be used here as the title for married/widowed women of social standing.

Erickson’s research into the 1793 parish listing for the Essex market town of Bocking shows that 25 heads of household were described as Mrs. She says: “Female household heads were by definition either single or widowed and, if Bocking was typical of other communities, around half of them would have been widows, and the other half single. But two thirds of these women in Bocking were specified as farmers or business proprietors. So Mrs is more reliably being used to identify women with capital, than to identify marital status. Only one woman was Miss: the schoolmistress.”

It seems that it was not society’s desire to mark either a woman’s availability for marriage (in the case of ‘Miss’), or to mark the socially superior status of marriage (‘Mrs’) which led to the use of titles to distinguish female marital status. Rather, socially ambitious young single women used ‘Miss’ as a means to identify their gentility, as distinct from the mere businesswoman or upper servant.

This trend was probably fuelled by the novels of the 1740s such as those by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Sarah Fielding, which featured young gentry Misses and upper (single) servants titled Mrs. ̽��ֱ��boundaries between the old and new styles are blurred, but Mrs did not definitively signify a married woman until around 1900.

In the course of her research, Erickson has also looked at the way in which from the early 19th century married women acquired their husband’s full name – as in Mrs John Dashwood (Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility, 1811). Austen used this technique to establish seniority among women who shared the same surname. England in the early 19th century was the only place in Europe where a woman took her husband's surname

To many women in the late 20th century, the practice of replacing her first name by his first name added insult to injury. That's why this form of address was satirised as “Mrs Man", and why it has dropped out of use in all but the most socially conservative circles – except of course where a couple are addressed jointly. ̽��ֱ��introduction of Ms as a neutral alternative to 'Miss' or 'Mrs', and the direct equivalent of 'Mr', was proposed as early as 1901.

“’Those who objected to ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ argue that they define a woman by which man she belongs to. If a woman is ‘Miss’, it is her father; if she is addressed as ‘Mrs’, she belongs to her husband,” says Erickson. “It’s curious that the use of Ms is often criticised today as not 'standing for' anything. In fact, it has an impeccable historical pedigree since it was one of several abbreviations for Mistress in the 17th and 18th centuries, and effectively represents a return to the state which prevailed for some 300 years with the use of Mrs for adult women – only now it applies to everyone and not just the social elite.”

̽��ֱ��question of which titles are appropriate for which women is likely to remain hotly contested. In 2012 the mayor of Cesson-Sevigne, a town in France, banned the use of ‘mademoiselle’ (the French equivalent of ‘Miss’), in favour of 'madame' (the equivalent of ‘Mrs’), which would be applied to all women, whether married or not, and regardless of age. ̽��ֱ��proposal has not met with universal favour. Some women protested that calling an adult woman ‘mademoiselle’ was a compliment.

Dr Amy Erickson's paper, ‘Mistresses and Marriage’, is published in the autumn 2014 issue of History Workshop Journal.

In a paper published in the autumn 2014 issue of History Workshop Journal Dr Amy Erickson unravels the fascinating history of the titles used to address women. Her research reveals the subtle and surprising shifts that have taken place in the usage of those ubiquitous M-words.

‘Mistress’ is the root word of both of the abbreviations ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’, just as Mr is an abbreviation of ‘Master’. ̽��ֱ��ways that words derived from Mistress have developed their own meanings is fascinating and shifts in these meanings can tell us a lot about the changing status of women."

Amy Erickson

Shropshire Record Office

1698 tax list from Shrewsbury

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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“Nudity does not liberate me and I do not need saving”

amb206 — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year the radical feminist group Femen turned its attentions away from Europe to North Africa, targeting vast swathes of the Arab and Muslim world with its uncompromising messages. Up until this point the protestors, who dub themselves as “sextremist”, had focused their activities on Europe and primarily on issues affecting white European women.

Emerging in the Ukraine around five years ago, Femen made its name with its own brand of attention-grabbing publicity. Images of its topless protests, nipples blurred, appeared in media throughout the world and, to some extent, conformed to passively-held assumptions of what “radical feminism” might look like. In other words, it knowingly plays up to feminist stereotypes in the quest for publicity.

Femen argues that the female body can re-assert itself, and the meaning attached to it, through anti-patriarchal messages scrawled on bare breasts. ̽��ֱ��group seeks to challenge norms by inverting the hyper-sexualised signal that exposed breasts typically send. Whether you believe in its value or not, this mode of protest plays out in the real world as a dangerous strategy. ̽��ֱ��political message is often lost, indeed undermined, by the same widespread salacious interest in the naked female body that garners Femen so much media coverage.

Given the flurry of sensationalised media surrounding Femen’s nude protests, it’s not surprising that many feminists have distanced themselves from the group, arguing that its tactics reinforces the notion that women can only get attention for (and by means of) their physicality, not on the strength of the inherent merit of the feminist cause.

̽��ֱ��catalyst for the shift in Femen’s focus was Amina Tyler, 19-year-old founder of the group’s Tunisian branch. In March this year Amina posted topless photos of herself on Femen’s Facebook page. One image, in the style that has become characteristic of Femen’s activism, depicts Amina with the slogan “My body belongs to me and is not the source of anyone’s honor” written in Arabic across her bare chest. Another shows her with “F**k your morals” in the same bold style.

These images triggered immediate reactions within Tunisia, with Amina reportedly receiving threats of death by stoning. Rumours circulated that she had been arrested by the local authorities; these turned out to be false. Femen’s rapid response was the organisation of “Topless Jihad Day” in support of Amina – and what began as feminist activism quickly slipped into what appeared to be anti-Muslim protest.

It became apparent that Femen is waging a campaign that shows little consideration for the vast majority of the community whose rights it claims to promote. ̽��ֱ��group that spoke up against Femen, Muslim Women Against Femen, sought to challenge the narrative that Muslim women are de facto oppressed by dressing a certain way or subscribing to a particular theology.

As many other commentators have noted, Femen have obvious representation issues outside Europe. White European women represent the vast majority of its supporters and, furthermore, they seem committed to advancing a particular brand of feminism as universal with little regard for local histories and efforts.

Many observers too baulked at the language of “Topless Jihad Day”. Jihad is not a word to be used lightly. One can only imagine how frustrating it must be for Muslims, who regularly insist that jihad is misunderstood by both terrorists and Western commentators, to have it thrown back at them in this effectively hollow sense. It seemed another instance of Femen prioritising attention-grabbing publicity over coherent message. But beyond this, seeking to “save” others implies superiority.

̽��ֱ��Femen protests are more than simply unnecessarily provocative and culturally insensitive: they also expose deeper truths. In response to Femen, Muslim Women Against Femen instituted “Muslimah Pride Day”. ̽��ֱ��group described Femen as perpetuating and promoting Islamaphobia and accused it of cultural imperialism. Many individual voice spoke about issues of freedom and choice. One post displayed the message: “My hijab is my pride. Islam is my freedom. This is my choice. I don’t need you to be my voice. I have mine.” Another one tackled feminism head-on: “Feminism comes in many forms! You bare up, I cover up.”

̽��ֱ��manager of Muslim Women Against Femen’s Facebook page regularly warns members against “slut shaming” Femen activists. Hundreds of responses illustrate complex, multi-faceted responses to Femen’s actions, not outright rejection. ̽��ֱ��message is clear: freedom has to involve choice, and respect for the choices of others. ̽��ֱ��posts engage with feminist debates, while exposing how such protests ultimately struggle to engage with multiple forms of oppression. Two of the many messages that illustrate this are: “Nudity does not liberate me and I do not need saving” and “Let me tell YOU how oppressive your culture is.”

̽��ֱ��issue with Femen’s representation is not just that white, European women are campaigning on ‘behalf of’ Muslim women. By its actions, Femen (perhaps unintentionally) deepened racial and religious divisions within the communities it sought to liberate. These tensions led to the alienation of many women who came to see themselves as having no place within the Western feminist movement, which they now associate with Femen’s radical protests.

Worse still, Femen, in the eyes of many Muslim and Arab women, has come to symbolise oppression. While attempting to liberate Muslim women, Femen has succeeded in oppressing them along religious and racial lines.

Femen misrepresents the complexity of both individuals and groups. A woman’s identity is shaped by an intricate web of influences – economic, cultural, sexual and religious, to name but a few. Many would argue that feminist movements do provide space for diversity among women. ̽��ֱ��problem, in Femen’s case, was that a woman could only be “in” – and by implication only be free – if she subscribed to a particular set of values that does not sit well with the lifestyles of many communities.

Across the political spectrum struggle, there is debate about what it means to be “free”. Whichever aspect is grasped, we commonly fail to see how we are simultaneously disadvantaging freedom in another respect. Femen is an archetypal example of this common occurrence. Its alienation of those it seeks to empower does not stem from uncharitability; indeed, often it comes from an overwhelming abundance of concern.

Femen activists mobilised in opposition of patriarchal control and the subjugation of women they perceived in North Africa. Many of these activists were horrified to find so many women speaking out against their campaign, and often insisted that there had been a misunderstanding.

Such a narrative ignores messy historical and political dynamics that make female empowerment different from place to place. People are products of different circumstances and choices. Can we honestly call the banning of the veil an advancement of freedom – or is it just the advancement of a particular view of what it means to be “free”? Similarly, does demonising women who choose (and also those who choose not) to wear a headscarf really liberate them? Or does it just place them in a category of “repressed”; a category that they have little power to escape without our consent.

Hardest for us to acknowledge is our own place in structures of injustice, and, at times, the place of a very particular concept of what it means to be free in those structures. While we seek to improve the lives of women by liberating them from dressing a particular way, we both willingly and unconsciously overlook that in other respects we play a role in their inequality.

A large part of this stems from our weakness at grasping multiple forms of oppression and inequality. Tunisian women are oppressed not just because they are female; this oppression intersects with poverty, religion, education, culture and other factors that may disadvantage them. It is naïve to target one aspect while refusing to see that you are simultaneously reinforcing another. Femen protests do just this; they seek to empower a group of women, and simultaneously worsen their oppression as Muslims.

When it comes to advocacy, protest and many kinds of charitable action, the start must be a long hard look in the mirror – honest self-reflection. This has to include understanding and admittance of the ways in which our position disadvantages those who we seek to help in other ways.

For the feminist movement, it is tempting to isolate sex as the crux of repression, which conveniently negates our role as wealthy (globally speaking), often white, often middle class, often Christo-agnostic, often well-educated individuals. We have to acknowledge the privilege and difference these factors endow to us, and that the women we are talking to, and often simply talking about, may also be affected by other factors, potentially to a greater degree.

We should start by working with people, with the awareness that they are as intricate, perhaps as contradictory, as we ourselves are, and that their situations are subject to personal and historical change as well. If you agree with a cause, support it – but rhetoric and ideology must flow from the repressed to the repressor. ̽��ֱ��other way around ultimately reinforces what we are seeking to overcome.

This is an edited version of an article by Raffaella Taylor-Seymour for the online magazine King’s Review. http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/

When radical feminists took their cause from Europe to North Africa, the outcome was a deepening of the divides they sought to break down. Social anthropology student Raffaella Taylor-Seymour argues for greater reflection about the meaning of freedom.

When it comes to advocacy, protest and many kinds of charitable action, the start must be a long hard look in the mirror.

Raffaella Taylor-Seymour

PLANETART (Flickr Creative Commons)

Inna Shevchenko of Femen

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Who mops the floor now? How domestic service shaped 20th-century Britain

amb206 — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:51:18 +0000

Throughout the 20th century, domestic service had a compelling presence in British economic, social and cultural life. For the first half of the century, it employed the largest numbers of women of any labour market sector in Britain. Predominantly female, these servants worked in other people’s homes, where they did not only the dirty work but also formed deep attachments to those they worked for, and lived out their lives under the same roof as their employers.

In Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� historian Dr Lucy Delap suggests that domestic service has not only survived the profound changes of two World Wars and the social revolution of the 1960s – but remains right at the heart of everyday British life, as increasing numbers of households juggle full-time work and demanding dual careers with parenting. Domestic service was no feudal or Victorian institution, but should be seen as thoroughly modern, constantly reinvented and remodelled as an integral feature of 20^th-century Britain.

̽��ֱ��upheavals of the First World War, combined with alternative work such as retail and clerical employment for women, saw a dramatic fall in numbers of residential servants. However, the interwar depression, state welfare policies and media pressure combined to push many women back into the domestic service sector in the 1930s. Nonetheless, many felt that the end was in sight and servants were increasingly unwilling to ‘live in’. Domestic service, J B Priestly had declared with breath-taking bluntness in 1927, was “as obsolete as the horse” in an era of motor cars.

After the Second World War, the popular press became preoccupied with a new concept for middle-class living: the servant-less home. This was a home in which labour-saving devices took the place of the people who had once cooked, mopped and scrubbed – and uncluttered furnishing styles promised to make cleaning quick and easy. Servants – whether imagined in rosy hues, or distrusted and demeaned– were apparently no longer needed. Far fewer working women chose this occupation, and it became dominated by informal cleaners, refugees and migrants, occupying new roles such as the ‘au pair’.

But middle class households were still permeated by talk of servants and how to live without them, while an unseen and largely unsung army of cleaners, nannies and au pairs continued to perform housework and childcare. And in the 1980s, as unemployment rose and the gap between rich and poor widened, numbers of domestic workers rose sharply again. As Margaret Thatcher advised an audience of professional women in 1990: “You have to seek reliable help—a relative or what my mother would have called ‘a treasure’.”

With the nomenclature used for those who served changing – from maid or the more colloquial Mary Ann to the more neutral ‘help’, and from mistress to ‘hostesses’ or ‘housemistresses’, ‘knowing their place’ became increasingly uncertain for all concerned. Nonetheless, the same negotiations of power, status and deference can be seen through the generations– for example, through the revealing issue of toilet paper. What quality of paper should one provide for staff? And what do they do with all that toilet paper anyway? These concerns caused as much angst in a 2005 thread discussing au pairs on the internet forum ‘mumsnet’ as in interwar households.

̽��ֱ��housewife identity which developed after the Second World War was accompanied by a rebranding of domestic work as ‘scientific’ or ‘household engineering’, as houses began to gain plumbing, and move to gas or electricity for heat and light. But the old practices (sweeping rugs with tea leaves, jugs of water for personal washing, the dolly and mangle for laundry) remained common well past the 1940s, and the modern devices purchased were often marketed as for use by servants, or evoked their haunting presence. It is no co-incidence that many of the appliances launched to fill these gaps had carefully chosen female names: the ‘Our Susan Mop’, the ‘Sheila’ Clothes Airer (still available), the Marigold rubber gloves that kept middle class hands soft and free of the smell of dirty dish water.

Countless British homes still featured dark basement kitchens and labour-intensive furnishings throughout the last century. Even avowedly modernist visions of the home were slow to evolve away from the idea of service, and depicted maids bedrooms and staff quarters. In 1930, Good Housekeeping presented the telephone as making domestic service more efficient: “the voice of the mistress can be clearly heard by the maid, who transmits her reply by telephone.” ‘Modern’ and ‘up-to-date’ inventions of the 1960s such as take-away food were marketed as aiming to “fill the gap left by the vanished race of servants”. ̽��ֱ��absent servants - who maintained a level of comfort and stability that allowed for professional careers and elaborate social schedules among middle class women - left holes behind them akin to ghosts.

Delap charts the encounters of servant-keeper and servant, seen from both points of view, by looking at three generations of women: those born in the late Victorian period, those entering adulthood after the First World War, and those coming of age after the Second World War. As the century unfolded, bringing with it the rise of the suburbs and new intimacies of family life, the home was the setting for an intimate drama, the housewife (a hotly debated term across the entire 20th century) negotiated the physical labour of running a house, and the symbolic meaning of such work. Delap argues that our relationship with domestic labour has never been just practical: “ ̽��ֱ��discomforts and encounters of domestic service have been taken to stand in for the ‘spirit of the times’. Domestic service has served as a foundational narrative among the stories British people tell about the last century and its changes.”

These households represented a huge diversity of environments and workplaces. Knowing Their Place describes the Edwardian Barnsley coal merchant who required his maid to take off his dirty boots and place his slippers on his feet; the dead infant found in the trunk of a servant of a working-class Hull family; the Birmingham bungalow in which a Second World War mistress attempted to impose an ‘upstairs, downstairs’ regime, despite the intimacy of her confined domestic space; the 1950s London Jewish home where master, mistress and servant all cooked and laughed together in the basement kitchen; the 1940s Rochdale suburban house where another Jewish family were ostracised by their neighbours for daring to take on a cleaner; the Hendon au pair forbidden from taking a biscuit from the plate she passed round to guests in the 1960s.

Fascinating for the contemporary reader is Delap’s detailed analysis of the shock and loss (and this is not to overdramatise the case) that middle class families felt at the absence, or much curtailed presence, of domestic service in the post-war years, when those brought up by nanny became expected to look after their own households . ̽��ֱ��necessity of “doing for oneself” had far-reaching social consequences that were reflected in the marketing of domestic gadgets and revised social conventions to disguise the lack of help, new models of child raising, new styles of cooking - the simple recipes ̽��ֱ��Times still referred to as ‘servantless dishes’ in 1970. And this also went with an intensifying frustration among middle class women, who rarely identified wholeheartedly with the housewife identity, and began to demand changes in the behaviour of their husbands.

Many women were not easily persuaded that housework was ‘scientific’ and satisfying. One mother of a large family, employing a ‘daily girl’ commented in the 1950s: “My own life at the moment seems a dull waste, a vale of (unshed) tears, an empty vessel, a froth of frustration… I am bored, bored, BORED.” It was partly this frustration that led to the rise of feminism in the 1970s. Nonetheless, the feminist movement rarely produced much fresh thinking on alternatives to domestic service. One servant wrote furiously to an Edwardian feminist advocate of cooperative living that “Methinks that this common ownership of domestic drudges would not be quite so satisfactory from the domestic drudge’s point of view.” Late in the 20^th century, Germaine Greer famously advocated in the Female Eunuch that feminists should live collectively in an Italian farmhouse, assisted by a live-in “local family”.

Being servantless was never embraced among the middle classes as a sign of modernity, but was something to be masked by elaborate subterfuge, clever interior design (serving hatches, lobbies and passages all acted as devices for separation and buffers to the odours of cooking), and a pretence that there was a cook in the kitchen and a maid to wait at table. In one example of the charade played out to disguise the absence of a maid, on hearing the door bell, the lady of the house would pick up her hat and gloves and appear to be going out just at that very moment, in which case propriety allowed her to greet her visitor herself.

Our enduring fascination for domestic service runs through literature, film, comedy pornography and popular history in contemporary Britain. Delap is intrigued by the rise of the domestic service costume dramas, reality TV series and heritage attractions, starting with Upstairs, Downstairs in 1971. Why did domestic service suddenly come to feature so prominently in our broadcasting and heritage houses? ̽��ֱ��erotic appeal of service – the imagined seduction, sexual vulnerability – is clearly part of this, and Delap charts the strong presence of domestic servants in pornography and erotica – from the Edwardian ‘what the Butler saw’ machine, to the 1970s Carry On Emmanuelle and more recently, Servants. Upstairs, Downstairs was originally written to show class inequalities, but the production company marketed it as revealing “a preponderance of frustrated females below stairs... love affairs of every sort were unrestrained”. Others wanted to see a nostalgic vision of a servant-keeping society where all ‘knew their place’. This meshed well with the 1980s conservative political mood.

More recent depictions of domestic service – Gosford Park, ̽��ֱ��Remains of the Day, ̽��ֱ��1900 House – have been less rose-tinted, and more interested in the emotional and physical demands of the job. ̽��ֱ��Remains of the Day depicted both servants and employers as scarred and stunted by their experiences of domestic service. But viewers have sometimes retained their nostalgia. With an apparent absence of irony, a London hotel took its employees to see the film in 1994, hoping to inculcate more deferential behaviour. One of the staff commented “It was so gracious the way the staff worked together… ̽��ֱ��butler was so at ease with himself, so professional. It does make you think you want to be like that.”

Lucy Delap is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain is published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press, 2011.

From the fictional Downton Abbey to the modest suburban semi, domestic service has had a prominent role in the story, whether real or imagined, of British society over the past 100 years. In Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain, Cambridge historian Dr Lucy Delap navigates the shifting drama played out in that most intimate and domestic workplace: the home.

̽��ֱ��discomforts and encounters of domestic service have been taken to stand in for the ‘spirit of the times’. Domestic service has served as a foundational narrative among the stories British people tell about the last century and its changes.

Dr Lucy Delap

Daily Mail Ideal Labour-Saving Home

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