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Suffragist Matilda's Gage's Woman, Church and State, 1893, invites a revisit because it was a pioneering study in world history with woman as its central issue. While labeled an amateur, Gage's work demonstrated an excellent grasp of nineteenth-century historical scholarship and she offered interpretive insights that tied nascent anthropological theory to historical analysis. For these reasons she is best understood in relation to the women scholars of the 1890s and subsequent decades who created a well-researched and scholarly new history of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many art practitioners across cultures and over generations, I work in my room. A room serves the function of essential studio space, a space where I can paint, write, read, chant, meditate or do nothing. The notion of “a room of one’s own” brought forth by the writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in the 1920s is a c­ommon goal among many practitioners in the arts, women in particular. This continues to the present day. In this article, I aim to illustr­ate how my practice is akin to that of women in the West, Paris in particular, at the turn of the twentieth century in the longing for one's private space. The article explores the notion of private space in other, less obvious ways. I also discuss how women in a remote part of China in their own rooms, through the exclusive practice ofnüshu, a set of near-extinct and “secret” writing script, echoed the significance of having their own platform, a creative space in which they could excel. I demonstrate how, through appropriating some characters from the Chinese language with a “female” ideograph andnüshuscript, my drawing acts as a strategy, suggesting that the “edge” of culture could speak. In addition, it attempts to “practice that difference” advocated by the philosopher Luce Irigaray (b. 1930). Working and exhibiting in various spaces, I realize that a room for executing and displaying is a transitional tool. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The pro-suffrage campaign to elevate the Oriental female did not give emphasis to Arab women; however, they were vividly presented in religious literature and romances of a religious nature. The inferior position and the victimisation of Arab women, attributed to Islam, delivered a political and a religious message that helped steer the Victorian reader's opinion towards a desired effect. The paper will focus on the image of the Arab woman in some of these publications to highlight that the use of the biblical element of the Middle East was employed to reinforce Christianity and combat Ottomans. The image of the victimised Arab woman also prepared the public for a future military involvement in the Middle East. The paper suggests that the Victorian depiction of the Arab female may well be the precursor of present-day use of Islam-phobic slogans that trigger sorrow easily transformed into anger at the men, culture and the religion that victimise women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more women enter the museum profession in the MENA countries, they are using their influence as instruments of change to put forward issues of women's equality in museum programs, displays, and publications and thus ultimately help shape the future image and status of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]