Chastity, Foreign Theories, and National Heritage Reorganization: Hu Shi (1892-1962) Addresses ‘The Woman Problem’

NAN Nü ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-300
Author(s):  
Selena Orly ◽  
Louise Edwards

Abstract This article examines Hu Shi’s view of “The Woman Problem” (funü wenti) through his tripartite approach for achieving a Chinese Renaissance as enunciated in his 1919 article “The Significance of the New Tide” (Xinsichao de yiyi). Our reading of the 1919 article reveals that Hu conceived of the twentieth-century Chinese Renaissance as a meticulously planned reform project based on a tripartite approach that involved: (1) researching concrete problems (yanjiu wenti), (2) importing foreign theories (shuru xueli), and (3) reorganizing national heritage (zhengli guogu). The article aims to demonstrate how Hu applied each of these interconnected methods to “The Woman Problem.” Previous scholarship on Hu’s views on women has failed to notice that it was methodologically integrated into his overarching Chinese Renaissance project and simultaneously underpinned by his academic program to reorganize national heritage. This essay also probes the quality of Hu Shi’s ‘feminism’ by expounding how his analysis of “The Woman Problem” was integrated into his overarching program to achieve a Chinese Renaissance.

Author(s):  
Christel Lane

This chapter examines the impact of rapid urbanization and industrialization on food and eating out. It draws attention to the growing standardization of food and, with greater class differentiation, to the growing diversity in eating-out venues. Class, gender, and nation are again used as lenses to understand the different eating-out habits and their symbolic significance. Towards the end of the twentieth century, pubs moved more fully towards embracing dining. However, the quality of food, in general terms, began to improve significantly only towards the end of the century, and hospitality venues also moved towards selling food from diverse national origins.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 374-379
Author(s):  
Peter J. Spiro

One can hope that the convening of the Tokyo Olympics will be a cause for global celebration. Tokyo could prove a focal point for international solidarity, a moment of relief and release after all of humanity faced down an insidious, invisible, and largely indiscriminate attacker. Unified as we otherwise may be, athletes will still come to the Games as representatives of nation-states. That may be an unavoidable organizing principle. Less justifiable will be the requirement that athletes be nationals of the states they play for. Under the Olympic Charter and the rules of particular sporting federations, athletes are subject to a non-state nationality regime that restricts the capacity of individuals to compete for countries for whose delegations they would otherwise qualify. This regime looks to maintain the putative integrity of Olympic competition by maintaining the unity of sporting and sociological national identity. But that legacy of the twentieth century no longer works in the twenty first. Nationality and associated criteria for participant eligibility undermine the autonomy of athletes and the quality of participation. The rules can no longer guarantee any affective tie between athlete and nation, instead arbitrarily enabling some, but not all, to compete on the basis of citizenship decoupled from identity. We don't require that athletes playing for our professional sports teams hale from the cities they represent. There's no reason why we need to require more of our Olympic athletes.


Author(s):  
Olesya Yaremchuk

This article studies the use of field research as an anthropological tool in literary reportage which is a comprehensive element of the creation of journalistic content. Based on the examples of journalistic texts of the 20s by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth, we have analyzed the anthropological methods which were used by this author in his reportages, that is the main objective of this study. Using diachronic comparison, qualitative method and content analysis to evaluate and to explain the concept of Joseph Roth’s texts, as well as the methodology of textual, syntagmatic (by Volodymyr Propp) and paradigmatic analysis (by Claude Levi-Strauss), we have examined the generated meanings in the texts of the mentioned author. As a result of the study, we have identified four methods that Joseph Roth used writing his news reportages in the 1920s, including “In Midday France” and “White Cities”. Those methods are as follows: overt observation, in-depth interviews, fixing details and gaining empirical experience. The modern authors call these methods as classic ones, without which it is impossible to work in this genre. As we have seen from the examples of literary reportages of the French cycle by Joseph Roth, the anthropological tools used by this author for his works contributed to deepening and improving the quality of his texts which is of great significance for our study. Joseph Roth created a panoramic picture of the twentieth century in his texts through watching, communicating and studing. However, it is worth to add that he was often too subjective, suffering harsh criticism for this.


2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-388
Author(s):  
Paul Philip Marthers

At the moment of its founding in 1911, Connecticut College for Women exhibited a curricular tension between an emphasis on the liberal arts, which mirrored the elite men's and women's colleges of the day, and vocational aspects, which made it a different type of women's college, one designed to prepare women for the kind of lives they would lead in twentieth-century America. Connecticut was a women's college that simultaneously embraced the established brand of education practiced by its prestigious Seven Sister neighbors and forged its own path by integrating elements of home economics, municipal housekeeping, and professional/clerical training into its academic program. For forty years Connecticut College for Women achieved a balance between those two opposing poles of its curriculum.


Author(s):  
Christopher Gerrard

This overview traces early engagements with the medieval past in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the impact of the Landscape Movement in gardens, Romanticism in poetry and fiction, the Picturesque in painting, and particularly the Gothic Revival in architecture. It discusses the seeds of later medieval archaeology in the twentieth century, framed by war and new ideals of a common national heritage, and picks out the influential people, projects, and institutions that have shaped the subject.


Author(s):  
David C Wohlers

This article identifies potential structural deficiencies and safety concerns pertaining to the Gokteik Viaduct railway bridge in Shan State, Burma. The colossal Gokteik Viaduct, which spans 2260 ft and boasts of a superstructure height of 320 ft, was constructed by an American steel company under British contract with the intent of expanding the Burma Railway into Yunnan, China at the beginning of the twentieth century. The author investigates the historical aspects of the Gokteik Viaduct and summarises structural concerns related to the technical design, quality of construction, weathering and wartime damages sustained during the Burma Campaign. The author concludes that an in-depth structural inspection is necessary to ensure the future safety of train passengers.


Author(s):  
SUZANNE COLE

This chapter examines the revival of interest in early English choral music that took place in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It pays particular attention to the religious agendas driving this revival, and to the role of the Tudor Church Music edition, published in the 1920s by Oxford University Press, in promoting this music as a ‘national heritage’ of which all Englishmen could be proud.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Deakin ◽  
Justin Davis Smith

This chapter overturns the simplistic characterisation of the twentieth-century Labour party as antagonistic to voluntarism. As it sets out, while opposition to voluntarism has indeed been a theme throughout Labour's history, particularly on the hard left, the notion of a broad and consistent antagonism is largely a myth, based upon a confusion of charity and philanthropy with other forms of co-operation, mutual aid and active citizenship. Instead, what Attlee called ‘the associative instinct’ has been an overlooked, but nevertheless important, constant in Labour's social thought, from Attlee's experiences as a young man at Toynbee Hall, through the promotion of active and local democracy in the 1940s and the revisionist turn away from macro-economics, and towards quality-of-life issues in the 1950s and 1960s, to the ‘rainbow coalition’ partnerships between local Labour administrations and voluntary groups in the 1980s.


Author(s):  
Oscar de la Torre

In the collective memories of the Lower Amazon maroons, the decades after emancipation are remembered as a period when “the people were oppressed” by Brazil nut merchants, who “enslaved” the blacks of the region. However, a number of individuals also relate memories of merchants who “helped the people,” who “gave goods for the saint patron’s parties,” and who acted, in the words of a Trombetas River maroon descendant, as “fathers of the people.” To reconcile these perspectives I argue in this chapter that these conflicting stories reflect two spheres in the relationships between black peasants and Brazil nut merchants. While the first one was characterized by domination, a few individuals successfully accommodated to, and even collaborated with, the newly arrived commercial houses. In both spheres, Afro-descendant forest specialists and explorers were fundamental to the merchants’ penetration into a world where the mocambeiros had hitherto ruled. In the end, the loss of autonomy and quality of life in the 1910s and 1920s shaped the maroon descendants’ social memory for the rest of the twentieth century, filling it with narratives of poverty, dispossession, and the speech figure of the “new slavery.”


Author(s):  
Quentin Letesson ◽  
Carl Knappett

Urban settlements are often presented as a prominent feature of Bronze Age Crete (McEnroe 2010). And yet, summarizing what is actually known about Minoan towns is much more challenging than one would expect, especially for non-palatial settlements. Many studies are narrowly focused and often take one urban element out of context in all communities (e.g. villas, classification of houses, street system, etc.), hence undermining an understanding of the urban environment as a whole. Furthermore, research on Minoan urban contexts has long been characterized by a strong focus on polite or palatial architecture and very specific urban features related to it (such as the so-called west courts, raised walks, theatral areas, etc.), while most case-studies have often had a rather limited dataset. There are clearly exceptions but, to date, our knowledge of Minoan urban settlements is partly built on a large collection of heterogeneous and disparate information. As already noted some fifteen years ago, the ‘nature and character’ of urban settlements ‘has seen much less discussion, particularly at a generalized level’ (Branigan 2001a: vii; but see chapters 7 and 9). Of course, this situation is also inextricably linked to the nature of our datasets. Research is clearly constrained by the low quality of work in the initial decades of Minoan archaeology when somany of the larger exposures of townscapes on the island were made. And yet, for more than a century now, the archaeology of Bronze Age Crete has thrived:many excavations initiated at the beginning of the twentieth century have either continued or been revived, providing descriptions of numerous settlements of various sizes; new projects have unearthed fascinating buildings and sites; and many regions of the island have now been systematically surveyed. As a consequence, Minoan archaeologists have at their disposal a solid and varied dataset. Of course, sampling issues do exist. Firstly, remains of Neopalatial urban settlements clearly outnumber those of other periods.


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