The Redemption of Saint Paul

2019 ◽  
pp. 132-152
Author(s):  
Marisa Escolar
Keyword(s):  
Saint Paul ◽  
Women's Status ◽  
Rape Victims ◽  
War Brides ◽  
Conversion Narrative ◽  
Women’S Status

This chapter analyzes Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 (1978), the text that most widely perpetuated the gendered redemption paradigm traced in this book. As a British “wedding officer” in Naples, Lewis judges Neapolitan women, distinguishing war brides and rape victims among a sea of prostitutes. This work is not about determining the women’s status but about staging his redemption: starting as a hard-nosed officer, Lewis’s character “dies” and is reborn as the Dantean narrator, making his supposedly anti-fictional diary a conversion narrative, much like John Horne Burns’s The Gallery. As the chapter charts Officer Lewis’s conversion, it puts his diary-novel in dialog with The Gallery and Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (The Skin), whose spectacles Naples ’44 rewrites in more direct prose. Treated as anti-fictional by historians, Naples ’44 has arbitrated the sexuality of Neapolitan women and the men who love, purchase, or violate them. Lewis represents all Neapolitans as whores and all goumiers “as sexual psychopaths” and yet still emerges as the authoritative narrator. The chapter ends with a reflection on the contemporary cinematic adaption, Naples’44, directed by Francesco Patierno.

Country Rankings of Women's Status: An Alternative Index

1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (4III) ◽  
pp. 1025-1039 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmeen Mohiuddln
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Composite Index ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Women's Status ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Implicit Assumption ◽  
Women’S Status ◽  
Country Rankings ◽  
Population Crisis ◽  
Status Of Women

The purpose of the present paper is to formulate a composite index of the status of women and to rank both developed and developing countries on the basis of that index. This index is presented as an alternative or complement to the current status of women index, published by the Population Crisis Committee (PCC) and used by the World Bank and the United Nations, which focuses on indicators measuring health, education, employment, marriage and childbearing, and social equality. The paper argues that these indicators have a poverty-bias and measure women's status in terms of structural change rather than in terms of their welfare vis-ii-vis men. The PCC index is also based on the implicit assumption that women's status in developing countries ought to be defined in a similar way as in developed countries, thus including primarily only those indicators which are more relevant for developed countries. To remedy these defects, the paper presents an alternative composite index, hereafter labelled the Alternative Composite (AC) index, based on many more indicators reflecting women's issues in both developed and developing countries. The results of the statistical analysis show that the ranking of countries based on the AC index is significantly different from the PCC index.

THE EFFECT OF WOMEN'S STATUS AND COMMUNITY ON THE GENDER DIFFERENTIAL IN CHILDREN'S NUTRITION IN INDIA

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 513-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUNITA BOSE
Keyword(s):  
Adult Literacy ◽  
Family Health ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Women's Status ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Supplemental Food ◽  
Beneficial Effects ◽  
Women’S Status ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Gender Differential

SummaryThis study uses the third National Family Health Survey (2005–06) in India to investigate whether differences in women's status, both at the individual and community levels, can explain the persistent gender differential in nutritional allocation among children. The results show that girls are less likely than boys to receive supplemental food and more likely to be malnourished. In general it appears that higher women's status within a community, as well as higher maternal status, have beneficial effects on a daughter's nutritional status. Further, the moderating effects of community appear to be more consistent and stronger than the individual-level characteristics. A positive relationship between the percentage of literate women in a community and the gender differential in malnutrition appears to be an exception to the general findings regarding the beneficial nature of women's status on a daughter's well-being, showing the need for more than just basic adult literacy drives in communities to overcome the problem of daughter neglect.

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