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The Modern Woman as Global Exemplar, Part II: Florence Nightingale and a Transnational Gendered Modernity: Modern Woman as Global Exemplar, Part II
Abstract
This essay examines the late 19th-century/early 20th-century global process of cooptation and incorporation of foreign moral exemplars into local compendia of “Women Worthies.” Presenting a case study of the early 20th-century adoption of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) as a new Woman Worthy in China, Egypt, and the Anglo-American sphere, I investigate the introduction of previously unknown female figures into local collections of biographies of eminent women. My work suggests new lines of research into global processes of continuity and change, and posits socio-cultural commonplaces of the early “global modern” revealed by these transnational stories and their ubiquity. In investigating the oft-told story of Florence Nightingale, this paper uncovers the intersection between transnational processes of gender definition and the local constitution of a global, gendered modernity and calls for similar studies in other world areas.
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This book reveals the Arabic tradition of life-writing in an entirely new light. Though biography had long been male authored, in the late nineteenth century, short sketches by and about women began to appear in biographical dictionaries and women's journals. By 1940, hundreds of such biographies had been published, featuring Arabs, Turks, Indians, Europeans, North Americans, and ancient Greeks and Persians. The book uses more than 500 “famous women” biographies—which include subjects as diverse as Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, Aisha bt. Abi Bakr, Sarojini Naidu, and Lucy Stone—to demonstrate how these narratives prescribed complex role models for middle-class girls, in a context where nationalist programs and emerging feminisms made defining the ideal female citizen an urgent matter. It begins by asking how cultural traditions shaped women's biography, and to whom the Egyptian biographies were directed. The biographies were published at a time of great cultural awakening in Egypt, when social and political institutions were in upheaval. The stories suggested that Islam could be flexible on social practice and gender, holding out the possibility for women to make their own lives. Yet ultimately they indicated that women would find it extremely difficult to escape the nationalist ideal: the nuclear family with “woman” at its center. This conflict remains central to Egyptian politics today, and in her final chapter the author examines Islamic biographies of women's lives that have been published in more recent years.
Like other commodities, books have both a material and a sociosymbolic life, whose inherent integration has been too often ignored. Comparative literature and translation studies do not grant sufficient importance to the physical life of the book. Analyses of translation often fail to acknowledge that the (historical) journey by which the book traveled forms an important part of the mental worlds and symbolic mutations that it provokes and undergoes once transported. Scholars of book history, paying much attention to the materiality of the book, usually track a book's existence only within its original language environment. While cultural anthropology and geography offer the best models for bringing a fuller and richer history of the book into world-historical focus, scholars of consumption and material culture have yet to add books to their lists of circulating commodities. By looking at books as both cultural products and physical objects, this article proposes new perspectives for a study of translation as part of world history. Two case studies from the transmission of Russian books to China, a German-language collection of stories by the Russian writer Mikhail Artsybashev and a Modern Library anthology of Russian short stories in English, are offered as illustrations of the ways in which transnational translation practices mediate between the book as object, as cultural-symbolic artifact in motion, and as text.
In the years after 1868, when Japan's long period of self-imposed isolation ended, in nursing, as in every other aspect of life, the Japanese looked to the west. This book tells the story of 'Florence Nightingale-ism' in Japan, showing how Japanese nursing developed from 1868 to the present. It discusses how Japanese nursing adopted western models, implementing 'Nightingale-ism' in a conscious, caricature way, and implemented it more fully, at least on the surface, than in Britain. At the same time Japanese nurses had to cope, with great difficulty, with traditional Japanese attitudes, which were strongly opposed to women being involved in professions of any kind, and, as the book shows, western models did not in fact penetrate very deeply.
Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Li La Abu-Lughod. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. ix. 300 pp., contributors, Index.
Like other commodities, books have both a material and a sociosymbolic life, whose inherent integration has been too often ignored. Comparative literature and translation studies do not grant sufficient importance to the physical life of the book. Analyses of translation often fail to acknowledge that the (historical) journey by which the book traveled forms an important part of the mental worlds and symbolic mutations that it provokes and undergoes once transported. Scholars of book history, paying much attention to the materiality of the book, usually track a book's existence only within its original language environment. While cultural anthropology and geography offer the best models for bringing a fuller and richer history of the book into world-historical focus, scholars of consumption and material culture have yet to add books to their lists of circulating commodities. By looking at books as both cultural products and physical objects, this article proposes new perspectives for a study of translation as part of world history. Two case studies from the transmission of Russian books to China, a German-language collection of stories by the Russian writer Mikhail Artsybashev and a Modern Library anthology of Russian short stories in English, are offered as illustrations of the ways in which transnational translation practices mediate between the book as object, as cultural-symbolic artifact in motion, and as text.
This article analyzes the ways in which the process of
modernization in the early twentieth century was gendered by examining
the work and subjectivities of Australian nurses and the writings of two
feminists, Frances Gillam Holden and Rose Scott. Located firmly in
the institutional and cultural field of medicine--a field that
emphasized modern, rational, and scientific values--nurses negotiated
many of the changes modernizing culture brought. Bashford examines
the implications for nurses of the shift from morally defined
interpretations of health and illness to biological understandings, and
the related change from a philanthropic, charitable model of health care
to one more scientific, professional, and state based. Historians
generally have concluded that a scientific, professional paradigm
displaced a moral, charitable one. But the historical picture was far
more complicated. Both modes were problematic for nurses, as women, and
explicit discussions proliferated about the place of science in nursing
knowledge and practice. The cultural institution of "domestic science"
offered one way in which nurses could reconceptualize their work as
modern and scientific, while retaining its basis in the feminine
world of domesticity.
This book by prominent Turkish scholar Nilüfer Göle examines the complex relationships among modernity, religion, and gender relations in the Middle East. Her focus is on the factors that influence young women pursuing university educations in Turkey to adopt seemingly fundamentalist Islamist traditions, such as veiling, and the complex web of meanings attributed to these gender-separating practices. Veiling, a politicized practice that conceptually forces people to choose between the "modern" and the "backward," provides an insightful way of looking at the contemporary Islam-West conflict, shedding light on the recent rise of Islamist fundamentalism in many countries and providing insight into what is a more complex phenomenon than is commonly portrayed in accounts by Western journalists. Göle's sociological approach, employing a number of personal interviews, allows for both a detailed case study of these young Turkish women who are turning to the tenets of fundamental Islamist gender codes, and for a broader critique of Eurocentrism and the academic literature regarding the construction of meaning. Both perspectives serve as a springboard for the launching of theoretical innovations into feminist, religious, cultural, and area studies. "A timely book, whose publication in English will contribute to a variety of scholarly debates. It promises to be provocative and widely read among scholars interested in issues of modernism and identity, women's social movements, the status of women in Islamic societies, and the broader issues of public versus private spheres." --Nilüfer Isvan, State University of New York, Stony Brook The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling was originally published as Modern Mahrem by the Turkish publisher Metis and has been translated into French, German, and Spanish. Nilüfer Göle is Professor of Sociology, Bogaziçi University.
Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In Uneven Developments Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutionsâmedical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement. Drawing on a wide range of sourcesâparliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticityâPoovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.
- Poovey
- Karl
The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914
- C. A. Bayly
Florence Nightingale at First Hand
- L. McDonald
Greathearted Women: Biographies of sixteen women leaders of American and English life
- M. A. Murphy
Heroines of Modern Progress
- E. C. Adams
- D. F. Foster
The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism
- K. Floyd
Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture
- G. Mak
- B. Waaldijk
Telling Lives in Science
- M. Vicinus
Florence Nightingale: Saint, Reformer or Rebel?
- R. G. Hebert
Two Sisters for Social Justice: Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott
- L. Rupp
Interactions: Regional Studies, Global Processes, and Historical Analysis
- C. Reeves