The Family Women And Death

Study of public and private life in classical Athens.

Originally published in 1983 and as a second edition in 1993, this book deals with 3 universal but culturally variable phenomena: the family, women and death. The book poses questions about our own ways of looking at the family and private life, at sex and gender and at death, by analysing ancient Greek ideas and by showing how researchers’ presuppositions have been influenced by their own culture and experience. The views of Fustel de Coulanges on the place of tomb-cult in the evolution of the family in the ancient world are critically examined and related to their 19th Century context; the study of the classical Athenian family is related to current historical and sociological debates on the separation between public and private life.

Examining the compelling and often poignant connection between women and the material culture of death, this collection focuses on the objects women make, the images they keep, the practices they use or are responsible for, and the places they inhabit and construct through ritual and custom. Women?s material practices, ranging from wearing mourning jewelry to dressing the dead, stitching memorial samplers to constructing skull boxes, collecting funeral programs to collecting and studying diseased hearts, making and collecting taxidermies, and making sculptures honoring the death, are explored in this collection as well as women?s affective responses and sentimental labor that mark their expected and unexpected participation in the social practices surrounding death and the dead. The largely invisible work involved in commemorating and constructing narratives and memorials about the dead-from family members and friends to national figures-calls attention to the role women as memory keepers for families, local communities, and the nation. Women have tended to work collaboratively, making, collecting, and sharing objects that conveyed sentiments about the deceased, whether human or animal, as well as the identity of mourners. Death is about loss, and many of the mourning practices that women have traditionally and are currently engaged in are about dealing with private grief and public loss as well as working to mitigate the more general anxiety that death engenders about the impermanence of life.

'...From out of a world of death and destruction, extermination camps, ghettos, starvation and disease, there rises the figure of the woman in the Holocaust... the core of the fascinating studies in this collection. The importance of these research essays is, above all, their historical documentation of situations and events related to women in the Holocaust...'....In the face of imminent death, there was kindness to be seen, self-sacrifice, and the saving of another's life. And from a world that had lost all semblance of humanity came a sense of independence that welled up in the survivors, infusing them with the spirit of life as they emerged from the inferno. 'And what is for me the most moving, the most exciting thing of all, is the ability of those who endured to climb to their feet and shake themselves free of the killing fields, to begin a new life, to start a family....' Ayala Procaccia, Israel Supreme Court Justice'The book contains articles by some of the most prominent scholars in the field... They tell the stories of women who were humiliated, tortured and murdered; their eternally etched-in-the-memory stories of struggle and survival. 'This collection of articles is based on two international conferences on women in the Holocaust, held in recent years at Beit Berl Academic College, Beit Theresienstadt, and the Ghetto Fighters' House in Israel. Hertzog is a daughter of Holocaust survivors, who never spoke about the subject at home. She discovered a feminist perspective on the Holocaust at a conference at Oxford she attended, almost by chance, seven years ago. That experience motivated her to speak with her mother and document their conversations in the article that appears herein.'Ruth Sinai ('"Their heroism was never acknowledged')Haaretz

Dead women litter the visual landscape of the 2000s. In this book, Clarke Dillman explains the contextual environment from which these images have arisen, how the images relate to (and sometimes contradict) the narratives they help to constitute, and the cultural work that dead women perform in visual texts.

This ambitious sourcebook surveys both the traditional basis for and the present state of indigenous women’s reproductive health in Mexico and Central America. Noted practitioners, specialists, and researchers take an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the multiple barriers for access and care to indigenous women that had been complicated by longstanding gender inequities, poverty, stigmatization, lack of education, war, obstetrical violence, and differences in language and customs, all of which contribute to unnecessary maternal morbidity and mortality. Emphasis is placed on indigenous cultures and folkways—from traditional midwives and birth attendants to indigenous botanical medication and traditional healing and spiritual practices—and how they may effectively coexist with modern biomedical care. Throughout these chapters, the main theme is clear: the rights of indigenous women to culturally respective reproductive health care and a successful pregnancy leading to the birth of healthy children. A sampling of the topics: Motherhood and modernization in a Yucatec village Maternal morbidity and mortality in Honduran Miskito communities Solitary birth and maternal mortality among the Rarámuri of Northern Mexico Maternal morbidity and mortality in the rural Trifino region of Guatemala The traditional Ngäbe-Buglé midwives of Panama Characterizations of maternal death among Mayan women in Yucatan, Mexico Unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, and unmet need in Guatemala Maternal Death and Pregnancy-Related Morbidity Among Indigenous Women of Mexico and Central America is designed for anthropologists and other social scientists, physicians, nurses and midwives, public health specialists, epidemiologists, global health workers, international aid organizations and NGOs, governmental agencies, administrators, policy-makers, and others involved in the planning and implementation of maternal and reproductive health care of indigenous women in Mexico and Central America, and possibly other geographical areas.

Identifies and analyzes thematizations of women and death from the past five centuries, illuminating the present and recent past. The theme of women and death is pervasive in the German culture of the past five centuries. With the conviction that only an interdisciplinary approach can explore a typology as far-reaching and significant as this, and in accordance with the feminist tenet that images are accountable for norms, this volume investigates how iconic representations of women and death came about and why they endure. Traditionally, representations of women as agents of death -- when they have been considered at all -- have been considered separately from women as victims, as though there was no shared thematic ground. Here, familiar depictions of female victims are examined alongside the more unsettling spectacle of women as killers, exposing cultural assumptions. Essays explore, among others, the themes of virgin sacrifice and female infanticides, "Death and the Maiden" in art, female vampires in literature, and women killersin the media. Others compare cultural practices such as female mourning across historical contexts, examining change and the reasons for it. The authors' judgments eschew the simplistic and programmatic, contributing not just to current research in German literature, but also to understanding of cultural history in general. Contributors: Stephanie Knöll, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Anna Linton, Bettina Bildhauer, Mary Lindemann, Helen Fronius, Anna Richards, Jürgen Barkhoff, Lawrence Kramer, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Clare Bielby, Gisela Ecker. Anna Linton is Lecturer in German at Kings College London, and Helen Fronius is an AHRC Research Fellow and College Lecturer at Exeter College Oxford.

Explores both constants and changes in representations of warlike and violent women in German culture over the past six centuries.