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US-born Janet Riesenfeld (1914-1998), known in Mexico as Raquel Rojas (the actress) and Janet Alcoriza (the screenwriter), was an important figure of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema and participant in the Spanish Republicans' cultural production in exile in Mexico. Despite collaborating on at least eighty screenplays between 1946 and 1965, including one entitled Una Gringuita en México (1951), she is mentioned only briefly in the studies of her Spanish exiled associates: second husband Luis Alcoriza (1918-1992) and Surrealist Luis Buñuel (1900-1983). It is during a period of increased national film production in Mexico that Riesenfeld created a niche as an American woman importing Spanish images while disrupting cultural fixities in Mexican popular culture. Building on transnational and mobility studies, this article employs historical biography and transcultural frameworks of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema to illuminate more fully foreign women's productions to Mexican cultural life and the contributions of the European exile community. Integrating reviews, journalism, and analysis of film, it suggests how aspects of Riesenfeld's identity were woven into the screenplays developed by the couple, known as the "Alcorizas," and perhaps contributed to their success. This study adds to the conversation of the transnational peculiarities of cinema by arguing that the screenwriting team parodied notions of cultural authenticity when the film industry applied greater national protections, and that despite sexism, Riesenfeld negotiated creative space as a woman and a foreigner. Riesenfeld's multifaceted entrance into the Mexican film industry provides a biographical case study of the various transnational and gendered dynamics of the war and postwar periods in film production, namely in writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The phenomenon of mass participation of Soviet women in the Great Patriotic War has no analogues in the history of world wars. Despite this, their contribution to the Victory was not immediately reflected in historiography and is still not sufficiently covered both in encyclopedic publications and in school textbooks, which determines the relevance of our study. The purpose of the work is to trace the development of scientific approaches to the study of the participation of Soviet women in the Great Patriotic War. The author uses methods of historiographic analysis, historiographic synthesis, and periodization. The study led to conclusion that in Soviet historiography the main emphasis was made on the leading role of the party in organizing the military service of women, on their heroism and military merits; works on certain categories of female military personnel did not add up to a complex picture. The only generalizing studies on the problem published during the Soviet period were the works by V.S. Murmantseva, based on archival materials. The turning point of the Soviet historiography was the documentary essay by S.A. Alexievich «War’s Unwomanly Face», where, based on oral history materials, a female perspective on the events of the Great Patriotic War was presented for the first time. At the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, when new scientific directions emerged – military-historical anthropology and military-historical psychology, established by E.S. Senyavskaya, – conditions are being created for deeper and more comprehensive study of the phenomenon of women in war. However, no general work devoted to the frontline everyday life of Soviet women soldiers has yet appeared, which makes the study of this problem promising in contemporary historical science.

Recently, scholars have begun to use network analysis to explore women's participation in correspondence networks. One such correspondence with a distinct presence of women letter-writers is that of the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), who corresponded with thirty-five different women, including the philosopher Damaris Masham (1659–1708), and his cousin Mary Clarke (c. 1656–c. 1705). Through the lens of citation and co-citation analysis, this essay explores the reception of the women letter-writers in Locke's correspondence, arguing that shifting focus onto the reception of women facilitates a re-centering of these women's activities even at moments that their own letters are no longer extant, examining the connections between how women letter-writers represent themselves and how they are represented by the wider network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Spanish Civil War, around 15,000 women were deployed as nurses or auxiliaries in the military health service of the Francoist army. Many of them worked behind the firing lines and came close to the combat and destruction. When the war drew to an end, these frontline nurses were demobilized and sent home to hearth and family. For some of them, returning home was a relief; for others, it meant the end to a professional career and meaningful vocation outside family control. Some of them used the tumultuous 'post-war' months to raise their voices, demanding the same treatment as male veterans. They wanted the same privileges these men enjoyed, such as free university access or ex-combatant status. Rallying together in support of such interests, they transcended several social borders, like Francoist ideas of complementary gender roles, concepts of nurses being acquiescent angels at sickbeds, and values of unconditional subordination and obedience. By pushing marriage into the future, they further violated Francoist expectations of a woman's 'proper' biographical trajectory. In all these endeavours to gain a place at the table of Francoist Spain, they found support from their male colleagues and superiors. Drawing from sources of the Francoist military health service, this paper argues that their petitions echoed the elitist and gendered views concerning the making of the victor's society. These perspectives reflected the intricate integration processes within the heterogeneous support base from which the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco drew his legitimacy and backing both during and after the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In 1826 Marian Mason was introduced to British society as a callisthenic instructor. Trained by P.H. Clias, a gymnast who oversaw physical training in the military and navy, Mason is the first high profile female fitness coach in British history. Despite her importance as a landmark figure, Mason's contributions, and indeed life, remain relatively obscured from the historical record. Studying Mason's heyday in public life from 1826 to the early 1830s, this article provides the first substantive examination of Mason's life, her social networks and wealth and, critically, the monograph she published in 1826. While acknowledging Mason's role as an early female fitness coach, the article provides a deep reading of Mason's successes, focusing on her class and relationship advantages, her ability to court medical favour and shrewdness in addressing broader societal concerns. This article is less a biography and more an examination of the broader social and medical trends in early nineteenth century England, which created a space for people like Mason. The article presents a simple argument – Marian Mason was an early female fitness coach who, drawing on broader societal concerns about the body, created a niche for her career by leveraging her expertise and familial connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our special issue approaches knowledge as a product of intermingled sensory experiences in ways that confound neat divisions of body/mind, exterior/interior, subject/object, cognition, emotion, and imagination. Rejecting "cognitive ocularcentrism," as well as approaches that focus on any single sense, we articulate an intersensorial framework premised on the entanglement of touch with other senses, particularly sight. Through this, we highlight hidden epistemic multiplicities, intersubjectivities, and literary strategies for the study of gender in the history of science, especially in reference to the gendering of personae and emotions. The putative rise of the visual in modern science was always already intersensorial, no matter how much cognitive ocularcentrism sought to tame this. By attending to seeming distractions within knowledge production, our issue seeks to reintegrate science back into the immersive flow of intersensorial experience and recover the sensuous webs that connect actors, geographies, fields, and time periods habitually separated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how a gender-historical perspective may still be productive in today’s historiography of education. In doing so, it relies on theoretical approaches developed in feminist and gender-historical debates and in debates about the ontological turn in historiography. Categories are thus understood as “world-giving” and changing entities which cannot just be analysed in their varying historical contexts but must be examined and historicised themselves in order to capture their fuzziness and fluidity. Against this theoretical background and on the basis of professional journals of kindergarten teachers and published speeches of seminar teachers, this article analyses debates about kindergarten in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, focusing on the years 1950–1980. In these debates, it examines what “productive work” (Scott) the categories “child” and “mother” did with regard to social and gender order and how they emerged from various knowledges becoming entangled in specific places and times. The allegedly clear “inside-outside boundaries” and “dichotomies” (Haraway) between the categories are questioned by turning to conflicts, to the unresolved, to the paradoxical. Furthermore, the paper reflects on the tasks assigned to kindergarten and the arguments which were put forward to legitimise it within the category-related “meshwork” (Ingold) of knowledges and power. Finally, it is shown how powerfully the categories “child” and “mother” acted in the debates about kindergarten in German-speaking Switzerland when stabilising and perpetuating a strongly gendered social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary source of this study is 76 video interviews concerning a political campaign by the Chinese Communist Party: the Anti-Hu Feng Counter-revolutionary Clique Movement (1955–1956). This campaign and the long incrimination of its central figures—Hu Feng (1902–1985), his wife Mei Zhi (1914–2004), and other associates—have had an impact on Chinese intellectuals for nearly seven decades and generated hundreds of (auto)biographies, memoirs, critical writings, and scholarly studies since the 1980s. Victimized writers managed to publish again, but the stories of their wives remained obscured and marginalized for years. This article presents three research findings: first, the wives provide different but equally essential testimonies as do the writers; second, methods used by feminist historians can benefit oral history collection from all, but from women and the marginalized in particular; and third, gendered memory helps to bridge the gap between those who have and have not personally experienced specific historical events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is no longer a novelty in Religious Studies that translations play an integral role in questions of (inter-)cultural contact, comparison, and identity. But the question of what translation means, how it relates to interpretation, and the role of text, language, and practice has not been adequately addressed. In recent years, feminist historical research has published some ground-breaking work addressing this very question. This article uses a cross-disciplinary (literature studies, feminist translation studies and religious studies) approach to examine four different Ramayana versions in late colonial Ceylon and India (1900–1930) written by the Theosophists Annie Besant, Marie Musaeus Higgins and Leelawathy Ramanathan for the purpose of girls' education. The differing portrayals of Sita as the "perfect wife" will be used to highlight the importance of theories of translation for the study of global religious history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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