PENGUATAN LITERASI PEREMPUAN PADA KADER MASYARAKAT KOTA MOJOKERTO MELALUI PENERBITAN TABLOID SUHITA

Strengthening women's literacy through the publishing of the Suhita tabloid was carried out for community activist in the Mojokerto city. Literacy strengthening is done to support their duties as community activist. The name Suhita is taken from the name of Dyah Suhita who is the queen of the Majapahit Kingdom. In strengthening this literacy the participants were equipped with various journalistic and writing techniques to support their oral competence. Learning activities carried out with the jigsaw adaptation strategy. Participants were divided into groups according to the type of writing and the writing assignments were changed at each meeting. Such learning makes the atmosphere of life learning because learners are treated as adults who are full of initiative and independence. The results of activities in the form of writings that are ready to be published because editing is also done together in each lesson. Editing was done in a new group. The new group is formed by the way the original group divides itself into new groups. Learning outcomes are published in a 16-page tabloid. Keywords: women's literacy, community cadres, Suhita

Teaching Women to Write: Weaponizing Ḥadīth Against Colonialism

This article traces the use of a ḥadīth prohibiting women’s literacy during the colonial period. Although rejected by most ḥadīth scholars and ignored by jurists, it gained prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century through the works of scholars who weaponized it as a response to colonial education projects. As debates on the religious permissibility of modern education spread, the ḥadīth accompanied them, empowering scholars who attempted to push back against modernizing national education projects. Through an analysis of the debate around this ḥadīth in British India and Egypt, I highlight the importance of the ḥadīth as a pragmatic – and not simply normative – source within Islamic legal discussions as they articulated responses to colonialism.

Achieving Gender Equality Through Electoral Participation Of Women: A Case Study Of 2005, 2010 And 2015 Assembly Elections In Patna (India)

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 advocates for the promotion of gender equality. It ensures women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision making in politics. Females have a right to vote in elections, be elected to government office, serve on boards, and make their voices heard in any process that will ultimately affect them, their families, and their communities. Investing women’s right to political participation is a necessary step to achieve global gender equality and democratic governance.The paper aims to analyze the spatio- temporal participation of women in assembly elections of 2005, 2010 and 2015 in Patna District, to find out association between women’s literacy levels and voting among women in the study area, and to identify motivational and situational constraints of women’s participation in electoral process. For the present study, Patna district has been selected as the study area. The author adopted questionnaire survey and key informant interviews as a means for data collection. The growing participation of women in elections indicates a silent movement of women empowerment. It is found that there is a rising trend in the voting participation of women in the study area. Both literate and illiterate groups are conscious about their voting rights.

How the Virgin Lost her Book

Traditionally pictured with a book in late medieval and Renaissance art, the Virgin Annunciate no longer reads in many nineteenth-century Annunciations. This chapter considers the fleshy materiality of the manuscript codex in the early works before turning to the book’s absence in the later ones. Mary’s lost book indexes the desacralized book in the period of the codex’s mass-culture ubiquity and widespread women’s literacy. Modern paintings of women readers and other self-possessed solitary women often share an Annunciation-like aura, offering other vehicles than the divine for transcendence. By contrast to these self-composed women sitters, Virgins of nineteenth-century Annunciations often seem over-shadowed, as Luke’s Gospel says, or just overwhelmed.

Inter-relationships among key reproductive health indicators in sub-Saharan Africa focusing on the central role of maternal literacy

Background Indicators of reproductive health (RH) are expected to be both inter-related and associated with key social determinants. As the provision of RH services is usually integrated, the effort to improve one RH component should influence the other components. However, there is a lack of evidence-based models demonstrating the inter-relationships. The purpose of this study was to examine the inter-relationships among key RH indicators and their relationship with women’s literacy in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Methods Data were sourced from the most recent demographic and health survey conducted between 2010 and 2016 in 391 provinces of 29 SSA countries. We examined seven RH indicators along with women’s literacy. The unit of analysis was at the provincial level. Structural equation modelling was used to examine the strength of relationships among these indicators and with women’s literacy, using the total standardized effect sizes. Significance tests and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for these effects were calculated using a bias-corrected bootstrap method. Results RH indicators are strongly interrelated and are associated with women’s literacy. The strongest relationship is observed between women’s literacy rate and the contraception prevalence rate, with a total standardized effect size of 0.79 (95% CI 0.74–0.83). The model of inter-relationships developed in this study may guide the design, implementation and evaluation of RH policies and programmes. Conclusions The key challenge in reducing fertility in SSA is to reduce people fertility desire. This could mainly be addressed by enhancing integrated approaches especially between the education and health sectors.

‘… With a Book in Your Hands’: A Reflection on Imaging, Reading, Space, and Female Agency

The Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), created a series of singular paintings that might be identified as feminine soliloquies of solitude, silence, and space. Like seeing, reading is a mediated practice that occurs within the cultural matrix that promotes the appropriate social mores of how to read, what to read, and who is able to read. Over the millennia of Western cultural history, books have been ambiguous symbols of power that have signified authorship, divine inspiration, wisdom, social position, and literacy. This led to the initiation of a singular Christian form of literature—the advice manual—specifically prepared for Christian women by Jerome (347–420), perhaps best known as one of the church fathers, translator of the Vulgate, and penitential saint. Simultaneously, an iconography of women reading evolved from these theological advisories, and paralleled the history of women’s literacy, particularly within Western Christian culture. The dramatic division that has always existed between male readers and female readers was highlighted during the Reformation when Protestant artists recorded the historical reality that readers were predominantly men of all ages but only old women, that is, those women who were relieved form the duties of childbearing and housekeeping, and who, as a form of spiritual preparation for death, meditated upon the scriptures. The magisterial art historian Leo Steinberg documented the tradition of what he termed “engaged” readers in Western art. Engaged male readers dominated numerically over female readers as reading, Steinberg determined, was not a primary, or perhaps better said appropriate, activity for women. Yet Vermeer’s portrayal of a young woman absorbed in textual engagement with a letter was an exquisitely nuanced visual immediacy of intimacy merging with reality that was highlighted by a refined light that illumined the soft, diffuse ambiance of this woman’s world. How Vermeer was able to focus the viewer’s attention on his female subject and her innermost thoughts as she is “lost in space” reading provides a starting point of this discussion of the images, reading, space, and female agency in Christian and in secular art.