Women's emancipation movements in the nineteenth century: a European perspective

This chapter explores gendered dimensions of theological categories in nineteenth-century Christian thought, primarily in Germany. By defining religion as feeling, symbolized in feminine terms, theologians in this period embraced relationality and dependence as ideals for human life. By viewing the family as a model of religious community and a site for the adjudication and cultivation of political values, intellectuals sought alternatives to modern ‘fragmentation’ and processes of alienation and rationalization. Among feminist thinkers, debates over marriage and women’s emancipation raised new questions about the promises and failures of modernization and secularization. Paying attention to these gendered inflections in nineteenth-century Christian thought helps produce a more complicated story about its central features and concerns—one that highlights the value placed not simply on individualism, autonomy, and relativism (as the dominant scholarly paradigm often suggests), but also on relationality, dependence, and the authority and value of religious tradition for modern life.

Download Full-text

“Notre Petite Amie”

Working Girls ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198841173.003.0003 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 92-126

Author(s):

Patricia Tilburg

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Social Network ◽

Working Class ◽

Garment Workers ◽

Female Workers ◽

Garment Worker ◽

Labor Militancy ◽

Women's Emancipation ◽

Male Authority

In 1900, composer and philanthropist Gustave Charpentier founded the Oeuvre de Mimi Pinson, an association providing the workingwomen of Paris with free theater tickets, and free music and dance classes. What began as an effort to provide occasional free entertainment to female workers became a multifaceted conservatory, charity, and social network. The men (and some women) who organized and administered the OMP did so by relying on the trope of the gay, seducible, and tasteful young garment worker. These assumptions defined not only the work of the OMP and its relationship with its working-class members, but also reinforced the comforting notion of workingwomen’s pliability for journalists, politicians, reformers, and countless casual observers. Even as the OMP proffered a vision of emancipated French womanhood as a national renovator, it also deployed a powerful typology of the Parisian garment worker to temper its radical potential. Defined and confined by a nineteenth-century type, the female garment workers of Paris were exemplary targets for a benevolent effort which, at a moment in which feminist action and labor militancy were consolidating, reimagined women’s emancipation and working-class uplift as a matter entirely managed by bourgeois male authority and desire.

Download Full-text

Tropical medicine in nineteenth-century India

The British Journal for the History of Science ◽

10.1017/s0007087400029137 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 25 (3) ◽

pp. 299-318 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Mark Harrison

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Tropical Medicine ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

European Perspective ◽

Germ Theory ◽

Body Of Knowledge ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

The Tropics

It is customary to regard ‘tropical medicine’ as a product of the late nineteenth century, ‘its instrument the microscope, its epistemology the germ theory of disease’. The accepted interpretation is that tropical medicine was a European concept: originating in Britain and France and exported to the colonies by pioneering medical scientists. This interpretation is useful inasmuch as ‘tropical medicine’ as a discipline with its own journals, institutions, qualifications, and an exclusive discourse did not emerge until the last decade of the nineteenth century, and partly in response to metropolitan imperatives. But the European perspective of existing histories of ‘tropical medicine’ has obscured important developments in the understanding of diseases in the tropics which took place prior to 1890; most of which occurred in the colonies themselves – and especially in India. In order to distinguish this body of knowledge from its later, institutional incarnation, it will be referred to here as ‘tropical hygiene’: the term most commonly used by medical men in India until the 1890s.

Download Full-text

The Prayer House of a Galician Maskil: Joseph Perl's Synagogue Regulations

AJS Review ◽

10.1017/s0364009418000478 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 42 (2) ◽

pp. 403-440 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Rachel Manekin

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

English Translation ◽

Reform Movement ◽

European Perspective ◽

Early Nineteenth Century ◽

East European ◽

First Time

AbstractOne of the markers of the emerging Reform movement in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was the publication of synagogue regulations that introduced new norms of decorum and, occasionally, slight changes in the prayer service. Scholarly discussions of the first synagogue regulations have been limited to the available published regulations, namely, the Westphalian (1810) and Amsterdam's Adat Jesurun regulations (1809). The recently discovered regulations composed by Joseph Perl for his synagogue in Tarnopol (1815) enable us for the first time to consider an east European perspective for understanding the different varieties of the new trend of synagogue innovations in the early nineteenth century. In addition to an analysis of Perl's regulations, the following article explains the circumstances in which Perl's synagogue project took shape, and highlights the historiographical significance of his synagogue regulations. I argue that Perl may be credited as the first to suggest a religious path that was both traditionalist and modern, a path that later characterized the synagogue innovations in several Habsburg cities. An English translation of the regulations is provided in an appendix.

Download Full-text