Anglican Women and Social Service in Hong Kong

2018 ◽  
pp. 239-252
Author(s):  
Jane Lee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Women Leaders ◽  
Social Services ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
First Century ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Women And Children

This chapter explores the contribution of Anglican women, Chinese and British, in the promotion of welfare for women and children in Hong Kong from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The narrative covers four areas of progress in chronological order, which include: Elevating Social Status through Education, Advocating Women’s Rights through Social Movements, the establishment of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui Women’s League, and women leaders in social services. It presents an account of change and continuity in the development of women’s work for women: from British women’s work of charity and evangelism to Chinese women’s assumption of leadership roles; from protection of girls and women in the nineteenth century, to pioneering nursery and child care in postwar rehabilitation, and providing holistic care to the elderly and marginalised in twenty-first century.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Banham
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cost Of War ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Cost ◽  
British People

So we decided to emigrate to Australia and I suppose we could now be called ‘Dinkum Aussies’ – after 30 years.1 By 1946 Hong Kong’s pre-war colonial society, which had celebrated its hundredth birthday just five years earlier, had gone forever. Hong Kong, to the British people who lived there between the twentieth century’s two great wars, had been perhaps the prime real estate to be had in the empire. Life there was entertaining and cheap, profits were bountiful. But then came the threat of war. Mindful of their own situation in 1939, the British government instructed the Hong Kong government to mandate evacuation of British women and children should the colony be threatened by attack. In mid-1940, as the Battle of Britain stamped an indelible, greasy smoke stain through British skies thousands of miles away, the majority of Hong Kong’s civilians prescriptively escaped the threat of Asian war. Those families split asunder would often—in the context of the more than 200 husbands killed, and the many divorces—never be reunited; the cost of war being measured in permanently broken homes. That evacuation, in stages from Hong Kong to the Philippines, from the Philippines to Australia, and from Australia to the UK, or back to Hong Kong, and—in many cases—back to Australia again, would define many lives. Looking at Australia’s population today, a surprisingly large number can—at least in part—track their heritage back to Hong Kong’s pre-war society: the garrison, the businessmen, earlier evacuees who had washed up in the colony, and local families. From the perspective of Australia’s twenty-first century population, the effects of Hong Kong’s evacuation still reverberate through tens of thousands of its people. Many of the ancestors of those Australians are buried in Hong Kong or—for those who died as prisoners of war—in Japan, or they lie lost and forgotten, skeletons in Hong Kong’s remotest ravines or at the bottom of the South China Sea....

scholarly journals The Attitudes of Friendly Societies towards the Movement in Great Britain for State Pensions, 1878—1908

1970 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Treble
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Old Age ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The State ◽  
Friendly Societies ◽  
The Individual

The last three decades of the nineteenth century were marked in British social history by a vigorous and far-reaching debate about the causes and incidence of poverty amongst the elderly. By the early 1890s this controversy had produced a sharp cleavage of opinion between those commentators who held that old-age pauperism was largely a product of character defects and those who attributed it to certain social and economic ills which the individual, acting alone, could never hope to remedy. Social thinkers who subscribed to this latter view – the loosely labelled collectivist school of thought – were not content, however, merely with the work of analysis; they were equally anxious to find a panacea for one of the main social problems of the day. In the end the solution they most widely canvassed was the introduction of an old age pensions scheme in which the state would have a vital rle to play. But perhaps of more significance for the development of social services in Great Britain, three of the leading advocates of state intervention endeavoured, in their own distinctive styles, to translate this general declaration of intent into detailed programmes of action.

scholarly journals Sonallah Ibrahim and Miriam Naoum’s Zaat

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-40
Author(s):  
Sara Salem
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Financial Pressure ◽  
And Gender

Abstract This article explores the television adaptation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Zaat, arguing that the series provides us with an interesting representation of the various ways in which national projects in Egypt are gendered. It adds to feminist debates around nationalism, capitalism, and gender. In particular, the focus on the intimate in Zaat reveals how political projects are depicted in the domestic sphere through the lens of women’s work. The article explores two themes: one, the increasing financial pressure and its effects on constructs of masculinity and femininity, and two, the steady decay of infrastructure and social services and how it renders middle-class life an impossibility. The article argues that by focusing on the intimate, Ibrahim’s novel and the TV adaptation both reveal the various forms of work women perform and make use of women’s work to critique or celebrate national projects.

MIDWIFERY AND WOMEN'S WORK IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC: A RECONSIDERATION OF LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH'S A MIDWIFE'S TALE

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
TANFER EMIN TUNC
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Wage Earning

ABSTRACTTwenty years after its initial publication, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize winning monograph A midwife's tale: the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 (1990) still serves as a major benchmark in women's labour/economic history mainly because it provides scholars with a window into the life of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century lay American rural healer not through the comments of an outsider, but through the words of the healer herself. While, on the surface, Ballard's encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary may seem trivial and irrelevant to historians, as Ulrich notes, ‘it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies … For her, living was to be measured in doing’ (p. 9). By piecing together ‘ordinary’ primary source material to form a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich elucidates how American midwives, such as Martha Ballard, functioned within the interstices of the private and public spheres. A midwife's tale is thus not only methodologically significant, but also theoretically important: by illustrating the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and positioning the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, it revises our understanding of prescribed gender roles during the early American Republic (1783–1848). Even though A midwife's tale is clearly limited in terms of time (turn-of-the-nineteenth century) and place (rural Maine), it deserves the renewed attention of historians – especially those interested in gender relations and wage-earning, the economic value of domestic labour, and women's work before industrialization.

scholarly journals Individuality, Freedom, and Community: Ella Flagg Young's Quest for Teacher Empowerment

2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-198
Author(s):  
Jackie M. Blount
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Leadership ◽  
School Board ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Teacher Empowerment ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Leadership Positions ◽  
National Network ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Suffrage Movement

After teaching shifted from men's to women's work in the second half of the nineteenth century, women pushed into newly created realms of educational leadership. They earned appointments to principalships and, buoyed by the growing woman's suffrage movement, they began winning elected superintendencies and school board positions. However, fearing that women might overtake men in running the schools, a multifaceted backlash movement emerged to rein in women's advancements. A tightly organized national network of influential male educators sought to centralize power, standardize and mechanize practices, and otherwise push women out of leadership positions while simultaneously making teaching an increasingly servile profession. Ella Flagg Young, Chicago's superintendent of schools who had long advocated for expanding women's public service, staunchly resisted this disempowerment of teachers. Instead, through her leadership, she vividly illustrated how schools might work if freedom, individuality, and community were truly honored.

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