The Stove, the Dough Bowl, and the Samovar: Symbols of a Housewife’s Status in Traditional Karelian Culture

Since the early twentieth century, anthropologists have been including issues related to food into their scholarly scope (B. Malinowski, E. Evans-Pritchard, C. Lévi-Strauss, etc.). Food-culture studies (or culinary culture) examine the production, distribution, consumption, and ingredients of food products and analyse elements of culture related to food. One of the directions of food-culture studies is the gender approach, which considers subordination in female communities and ethno-social factors. The article’s aim is to study the attributes of the bol’shukha’s power (Rus. большуха) in Karelian peasant culture between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was part of everyday practices and played a symbolic role in the in-group stratification of the female community. The author studies attributes connected with the “culinary” topic, i. e. the stove, the dough bowl, and the samovar, referring to testimonies of contemporaries published in the press. She also uses archival documents, the materials of ethnographic expeditions, and linguistic data (dialectal speech and dictionaries). The Russian history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterised by the preservation of certain elements of the rural population’s traditional lifestyle while it was being modernised in the course of reforms. For the purposes of the article, the author adds the samovar to the traditional symbols of a housewife (the stove and the dough bowl) as it had become widespread by the late nineteenth century and was placed on the women’s side of the table in Karelian households. Having certain household objects demonstrated a woman’s status in the in-group hierarchy. The research focus chosen by the author is relevant for cultural anthropology and women’s studies, helping us form an idea of how women organised and realised hierarchy within their communities. The gender approach adds to our knowledge about the social practices and life experience of women’s communities and takes into account factors of ethnicity.

"This Research that We are Doing is Just the Beginning of the Conversation”: Undergraduate Researchers Enacting Literacies of Relationality

We extend theoretical perspectives of critical listening and storying with undergraduate researchers of Color as they conducted a Youth Participatory Action Research inquiry. Undergraduate researchers designed, analyzed, and shared findings of their photovoice project examining their transition experiences to a PwI. We asked: what literacy activities do undergraduate researchers of Color enact during the photovoice project; and how are undergraduate researchers’ literacy activities shaping and, in turn, shaped by contexts of relationality? We conceptually frame our work as extending notions of quilting across African Diaspora women’s communities. We discuss how undergraduate co-researchers enact literacies of relationality while examining transition experiences of first-year students of Color. This stance-taking considers how educational communities including teachers, teacher educators, education researchers, and student affairs educators may meaningfully incorporate knowledge, perspectives, and questions of preservice teachers of Color, which are an integral part of transition experiences of undergraduate researchers and future teachers.

Religious Women

This chapter explores how the identities of religious women in the late Middle Ages were projected and perceived. Beyond the life led by regular nuns, the Middle Ages saw the emergence of many different opportunities for women who wished to lead religious or ‘pious’ lives. The focus is on women who, in terms of Church law, belonged somewhere between the secular and the religious, but who thought of themselves as leading religious lives—in particular, secular canonesses and beguines. The example of Strasbourg is used to demonstrate the varieties of women’s religious communities existing at a given time (here the second half of the fifteenth century) in a single place. It argues that regional circumstances, along with the support of influential religious and secular personalities, shaped the various monastic landscapes and largely defined the religious identity of women’s communities.

The Anglican Tradition

Anglican monasticism began in the 1840s and was associated with the Anglo-Catholic movement. Women’s communities, which were focused on nursing, teaching, and social work, grew quickly, while men’s communities developed later and more slowly. Fears of Roman Catholicism initially caused new communities to avoid traditional forms of monasticism in favour of the more recent models of the Visitation, Daughters of Charity, and Mercy Sisters. Anglican monasticism quickly spread to North America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Melanesia. The years since have seen the emergence of characteristically Anglican notions of community formation, rules, governance, and spirituality. The Second Vatican Council had a profound effect on the Anglo-Catholic movement, leading to significant changes in Anglican monastic communities—among them a greater willingness to experiment with different kinds of community life. Many areas of research are open.

Emma Goldman among the Avant-Garde

This chapter argues that Emma Goldman’s anarchist feminism is a vital, if under-studied, influence on modernist women’s communities. Despite the generation separating them, Goldman and modernist women, such as Margaret Anderson and Emily Holmes Coleman, were united by their improvised personal lives and pursuit of individual liberty in the realm of art and politics. In the fight against censorship, Goldman’s little magazine Mother Earth was a direct role model for Anderson in her fight to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Little Review; a decade later, Coleman provided Goldman with editorial assistance (and occasional resistance) in the writing of Goldman’s Living My Life. Further, both Anderson and Coleman introduced Goldman to modernist writers like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, challenging Goldman to reconsider her ideas of what counted as revolutionary in the fields of art and literature. Through their aesthetic and political differences, we observe an early example of intergenerational American feminism negotiating influence and relevance. Ultimately, Goldman’s work as an anarchist activist and public speaker, especially her focus on women’s autonomy and freedom, provided the groundwork for the experimental personal lives and networks of support that shaped modernist women’s communities.

Wspólnoty kobiet w pisarstwie i życiu Anny Kowalskiej

Women’s Communities in the Writing and Life of Anna Kowalska The article is devoted to the writing and biography of Anna Kowalska. The first part discusses the shared home of Maria Dąbrowska and Anna Kowalska, in which women hired as housekeepers played a vital role. Then the article briefly analyses Kowalska’s novel Safona (Sappho), which depicts the aging Greek female poet surrounded by her young protégées. The main focus is, however, on the novel Gruce (The Gruca family), co-published in 1936 by Anna Kowalska and her husband, Jerzy Kowalski. The novel was heavily revised by Kowalska and reprinted in 1961, and then in 1968. One of the side motifs of this vast work explores a women’s agricultural cooperative in a village near Lviv in the second half of the 1930s. The utopian projects of feminism and cooperativism are criticised here, while the entire novel fits in the “dark” formula of psychological and social (“populist” in the language of the era) realism, characteristic of that decade.

“A New and Apostolic Band of Virgins Arose”

Darerca’s Lives demonstrate the diversity of early medieval religious Irishwomen’s experiences. The religious life was open to women of various social classes and to wives and mothers as well as virgins and widows. Women could be both students and teachers, studying with women and men, travelling throughout Ireland to pursue the religious life as they deemed fit, or living as solitaries in the wild. Her Lives make manifest the harmony of women’s communities and the bonds between women’s monasteries and between women and men, as well as some discord. The threat her community presented to multiple males testifies to the power and wealth women’s communities could attain, yet her actions show how little she cared for worldly gain. Darerca prioritized women’s access to the religious life, regardless of background. Killevy’s continued existence from the fifth century through Viking attacks and other catastrophes up until the sixteenth-century Protestant Dissolution demonstrates her success.

The Care of Nuns

This book recovers the liturgical and pastoral ministries performed by Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. Three ministries are examined in detail—liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others—but they are prefaced by profiles of the monastic officers most often charged with their performances—cantors, sacristans, prioresses, and abbesses. This book challenges past scholarly accounts of these ministries that either locate them exclusively in the so-called Golden Age of double monasteries headed by abbesses in the seventh and eighth centuries, or read the monastic and ecclesiastical reforms of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries as effectively relegating nuns to complete dependency on priests’ sacramental care. This book shows instead that, throughout the central Middle Ages, many nuns in England continued to exercise primary control over the cura animarum of their consorors and others who sought their aid. Most innovative and essential to this study are the close paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses of the surviving liturgical books from women’s communities. When identified and then excavated to unearth the liturgical scripts and scribal productions they preserve, these books hold a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding the lives of nuns in England during the central Middle Ages. These books serve as the foundational documents of practice for this study because they offer witnesses not only to the liturgical and pastoral ministries that nuns performed, but also to the productions of female scribes as copyists, correctors, and even creators of liturgical texts.