A female perspective on Christianity and modernity: Maude Petre (1863–1942) and the history of Catholic Modernism

Women have always played an important, though not always fully perceived and properly exposed, role in the history of our nation. They were active participants in many significant events, engaged in armed struggle and took part in political and social life. They supported soldiers and political activists. This has given them an important place in the public consciousness. It is hard to imagine discussing any event today without taking into account the participation of women and the female perspective on the event. This also applies to Poland’s regaining of independence in 1918. It is worth looking at these events through the prism of not only famous writers, but also other women (among others: Zofia Romanowicz, Countess Maria Lubomirska), who, by taking part or observing, recorded them as written accounts.

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HISTORY FROM A FEMALE PERSPECTIVE - (A.) Richlin Arguments with Silence. Writing the History of Roman Women. Pp. x + 414, ills. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014. Paper, US$40 (Cased, US$90). ISBN: 978-0-472-03592-2 (978-0-472-11925-7 hbk).

The Classical Review ◽

10.1017/s0009840x1600281x ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 67 (1) ◽

pp. 183-185

Author(s):

Kelly Olson

Keyword(s):

University Of Michigan ◽

Ann Arbor ◽

History Of ◽

Roman Women ◽

The University ◽

Female Perspective

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Gender and the politics of war historiography in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature ◽

10.1177/00219894211031803 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 002198942110318

Author(s):

Sarah Jilani

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Lived Experiences ◽

Narrative Approach ◽

Gendered Politics ◽

History Of ◽

War Experiences ◽

Points Of View ◽

Nigerian Civil War ◽

Gendered Expectations ◽

Female Perspective

Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses on how Emecheta deploys a dual narrative approach that weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse Nigerian women’s points of view in order to position their lived experiences and subjective knowledges as collectively amounting to the definitive history of the Civil War. This draws the reader’s attention to the gendered effects of the civil war as the lens whereby which all facets of the war can be understood - even and especially its macro causes in neocolonialism and petrocapitalism. By writing women who know the economic imperatives behind the conflict; exercise agency under dangerous circumstances; and employ methods of survival that safeguard others, Emecheta reveals the gendered politics of war historiography, and tests these politics by collapsing distinctions between what is habitually conceived of as the war front (and therefore to be narrated by active combatants), and everywhere else (to be narrated by witnesses, refugees, or survivors). Destination can therefore be understood as an attempt to intervene directly in historiographical method, as it rejects the designation of women’s war experiences as mere addenda and questions gendered expectations of where to look for and find historical truths.

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