Encountering Women’s Voices in Letters, Diaries, and Life-Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-83
Author(s):  
David Kennerley
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Conduct Literature ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter examines the extent to which the restrictive attitudes to women’s voices encountered in conduct literature are traceable in sources that give insight into the daily life of the British concert-going classes, such as letters, diaries, and life-writing. It confirms that similar attitudes to women’s voices can be found among those from evangelical, middle-class backgrounds. It also reveals, however, that a range of different, more affirmative attitudes to the use of women’s voices can be found both among members of the aristocracy, and among non-evangelical sections of the middle classes, whether Broad or High Church Anglicans, Roman Catholics, or rational dissenters and Unitarians. While some individuals were clear in their stance, this chapter also emphasises that ambiguous and conflicted attitudes were commonplace, particularly among those with mixed religious influences in their social milieu. Overall, this chapter highlights the profound divisions and diversity of attitudes towards female voices among contemporary audiences.

A divided city

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-184
Author(s):  
Alice Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Roman Catholics

Belfast’s middle classes lived in a divided city. Politically, Belfast was divided for the period under review into Conservative and Liberal camps. Religious divisions existed between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and within Protestantism itself. Society was also separated into different classes, with the middle classes positioned above the working classes and below the aristocracy. Political, religious and class tensions existed in every industrial city, of course. However, in Belfast, religious division assumed a particularly ugly and bitter hue. This chapter focuses on an elite living in a society divided along lines of both class and religion. The relationship of Belfast’s elite to the city’s working classes and the local aristocracy is explored; while a discussion of Belfast’s middle-class Roman Catholic community assesses the extent to which it was integrated into the city’s elite. The chapter also examines the relationship between the middle classes and the city’s growing sectarianism.

Dorothea Solly’s Musical World

2020 ◽  
pp. 120-155
Author(s):  
David Kennerley
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social World ◽  
Conduct Literature ◽  
Vocal Technique ◽  
Social Milieu ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Musical Creativity

This case study explores the musical and social world of Dorothea Solly, a keen amateur musician and singer. It builds on Chapter 2 by arguing that Solly’s middle-class background, combined with a Broad Church Anglican milieu and her marriage into a Unitarian family shaped her strongly affirmative approach to female voices, in ways that contrasted sharply with the attitudes on display in conduct literature. In particular, she exhibited great admiration for, and sought to acquire herself, the advanced vocal technique of leading stars of the Italian opera, such as her singing teacher, Cecilia Davies. In her advocacy of both female professional performers and composers, and in her own style of singing, Solly and her social milieu encapsulate an important, emerging section of the British musical public that was open both to the idea of female musical creativity and professionalism, and comfortable with an empowered, confident, assertive style of envoicing femininity.

Instructing Women’s Voices in Conduct Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
David Kennerley
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Conduct Literature ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Professional Singers ◽  
Female Singers

This chapter explores the guidance regarding the use of the female voice that was a common feature of conduct literature in circulation in Britain between 1780 and 1850. Such works place a heavy emphasis on the restraint of the female voice, seeing it as an aural sign of a young woman’s modesty, diffidence, and chastity. Concomitantly, they characterised the technique, power, and skill displayed by many contemporary female singers’ voices (especially, but not exclusively, the professional singers of Italian opera) as signs of moral corruption and/or the neglect of feminine domestic and religious duties. However, this chapter stresses that this conduct literature was primarily written for a middle-class, evangelical readership. Consequently, it represents a particular perspective on the female voice, one that was certainly gathering steam in these years, but which was by no means universally dominant.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

Reevaluating the Middle-Class Protest Paradigm: A Case-Control Study of Democratic Protest Coalitions in Russia

2017 ◽  
Vol 111 (4) ◽  
pp. 637-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRYN ROSENFELD
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Population Data ◽  
Case Control ◽  
Democratic Transitions ◽  
Electoral Fraud ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
State Sector ◽  
State Dependent ◽  
Selective Incentives

A large literature expects rising middle classes to promote democracy. However, few studies provide direct evidence on this group in nondemocratic settings. This article focuses on politically important differentiation within the middle classes, arguing that middle-class growth in state-dependent sectors weakens potential coalitions in support of democratization. I test this argument using surveys conducted at mass demonstrations in Russia and detailed population data. I also present a new approach to studying protest based on case-control methods from epidemiology. The results reveal that state-sector professionals were significantly less likely to mobilize against electoral fraud, even after controlling for ideology. If this group had participated at the same rate as middle-class professionals from the private sector, I estimate that another 90,000 protesters would have taken to the streets. I trace these patterns of participation to the interaction of individual resources and selective incentives. These findings have implications for authoritarian stability and democratic transitions.

The Sport Marriage

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven M. Ortiz
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Great Cost ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
Sport Industry ◽  
And Control ◽  
Insight Into

Male professional athletes captivate fans and profoundly influence today’s society as part of the $1.3 trillion global sport industry. Although these athletes’ lives and careers are widely reported, scholarly knowledge about the women who support them—their wives—is extremely limited. Because these women’s voices have historically been stifled, their marriages are shockingly misunderstood. Based on findings from the first and only longitudinal study on the sport marriage, this book corrects the abundance of misinformation reported by all forms of media, dispels undeserved stereotypes, and addresses inaccurate assumptions about the heteronormative sport marriage. It demonstrates how, despite major changes in society and sport since the end of the last century, the fundamental nature of the heteronormative sport marriage has not changed. Sport wives remain isolated and subordinate, even while they make significant contributions to their husbands’ careers. Identifying the sport marriage as a career-dominated marriage, the book allows us into these women’s public and private lives, including their need to conform to unwritten rules and codes, adapt to abundant power and control issues, cope with groupies from all walks of life, and find ways to deal with their oft-justified fears about their husbands’ infidelity. The book shares intimate stories about, and provides rare and unflinching insight into, what it is like to be married to these highly visible men, what it means to be a woman in the male-dominated world of professional sports, and why women remain in a sport marriage at great cost to themselves.

Hidden heirlooms: Keeping family secrets across generations

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Barnwell
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Family Secrets ◽  
Secret Keeping ◽  
Colonial Policies ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Over Time

This article explores how wider national narratives facilitate families’ choices about what information to keep secret over time. I argue that attention to the ways family secrets operate reveals how social and moral codes are both sustained and challenged on an intimate scale. The article also makes an argument for using life writing and literature to explore the often-illusive contours of family secrets. To illustrate, I examine Lynette Russell’s memoir A Little Bird Told Me: Family Secrets, Necessary Lies and Richard Flanagan’s novel Death of a River Guide. Anchoring the analysis within the transition from colonial to postcolonial societies, these texts lend insight into the collective practices families use to manage secrets and to construct socially sanctioned identities. The discussion foregrounds the enduring impact of colonial policies upon the intimate formation of families, and the role families play in reproducing and challenging these legacies via collective secret-keeping and silences.

scholarly journals To Leave Your Kindred and Your Father’s House. Contemporary Dutch Christian Border Narratives

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 174-196
Author(s):  
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar ◽  
Krina Huisman
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Border Narratives ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Dutch People ◽  
Christian Denomination

In this article the authors analyse a collection of essays written by young Dutch people who grew up in the Reformed Liberated Church, a small Christian denomination in the Netherlands. Traditionally, this church is characterised by its inwards nature: members strive to live their lives within the confinements that the church and its institutions stipulate. This has changed over the last few decades and the essays attest to the effects these changes have had on individual lives. We discuss the underlying narrative structure of their accounts and how the authors negotiate different lifestyles and interpretations of the Christian faith on either side of the borders that demarcate the Reformed Liberated tradition. We discuss if – and how – the essays work towards an outcome of ‘discordant concordance’ (Ricœur) where narrative identities remain whole, despite relatively drastic border crossings in the course of the lives that formed them. We address how these stories give insight into how people use the stories they tell to define what needs to be remembered and forgotten when we cross borders. Finally, we discuss the relevance of these essays and our analysis of them for our understanding of today’s globalised and multicultural societies in which many are in a permanent state of transition. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on February 17th and published on August 28th 2017.

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