Sending Away Foreign Wives in Ezra 9–10: With a Brief Reflection from a Minority Tribal Perspective

Ezra 9–10, commonly known as “intermarriage crisis” or “forced divorce of foreign wives,” has attracted a wide variety of interpretations of the dismissal of foreign wives. Some of the proposed rationales include political, social, economic, and ethnic purity. Such rationales, while having their own merits, are not evidenced in the text. This article offers a literary reexamination of what the text portrays about the protagonist group’s motivation to take such stringent action. The protagonist’s strong self-perception is the main factor behind their negative perception of the antagonist “others” and thus its stringent resolution to deal with foreign wives. I also briefly reflect on what a minority Christian tribal today could do with such a strong biblical narrative.

Gender discrimination in societal and familial realms: Understanding agency among Chinese marriage migrant women in Switzerland

To understand the agency of Chinese marriage migrant women in Switzerland in their everyday life, the present article examines the reasons why Chinese women marry European men and their post-migratory life in Switzerland. Based on interviews with Chinese marriage migrant women, the article discusses their gendered representations before migration (as “leftover women” or “divorced women”) to being “foreign wives” after migration to Switzerland. Their migration from China to Switzerland also resulted to a change in their roles from “professional women” to “homemakers.” The gender-related discrimination the women encountered from China to their post-migration life in Switzerland demonstrates a continuum of gender discrimination in which they highly exert their agency that has also been enhanced by acts of resistance.

Wives, Wages, and Regulating Breadwinners

This chapter cites Yolanda Foldes's 1937 novel about a Hungarian family in interwar Paris, in which the character Klari Barabas stumbles into the middle of a lovers' quarrel involving Greek Christos and his French wife. It analyses the misfortunes of fictional Christos and his French wife, which suggest men's work, missing wages, and marital discord that were intertwined in the mixed and immigrant working-class households sprouting up throughout France after the Great War. It also discusses the twin middle-class ideals of the male breadwinner and the femme au foyer that governed early twentieth century economic and social life. The chapter recounts how marriage became the most reliable legal means of securing access to a male breadwinner and his wages by the early twentieth century, especially in the event of the union's demise. It talks about alimentary pensions that were paid regularly by estranged husbands and were enforced by officials at the behest of French and foreign wives themselves.

Coping With Foreign Wives’ Special Needs in Korean Emergency Management

This article examines how Korea has to improve its current measures to meet the special needs of foreign wives by applying the principles of transnational emergency management. The current private-led approach and the future-oriented public-led approach are systematically compared in terms of four factors: the central government, local governments, volunteers, and family. For the methodology, literature review is utilized. The key finding is that Korea has to rapidly transform its private-led approach toward the ultimate purpose of having a public-led approach. The research is valuable because it studies, for the first time, the special needs of foreign wives in Korea from the viewpoint of emergency management.