Abstract: At the same time as German women gained new legal rights and responsibilities, Catholics looked back seven hundred years to celebrate Elisabeth of Thuringia, a woman who represented Catholic love and charity. To heal the deep divisions in society, Catholics were to strive to love their fellow man as Elisabeth had done and to feel the depth of love that she felt for her fellow Christians. Even as so much had changed from the worlds of medieval and early modern Europe, Catholics claimed Elisabeth as a model for Catholic women's efforts. The importance of the "Social Question" led Catholic leaders to see in medieval Elisabeth an ideal for twentieth-century women. Venerating Elisabeth allowed Catholic women to highlight the power and potential of women while they also honored Catholic tradition that required women's humility and obedience.
Abstract: The counterrevolution that was launched against the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power and related left-wing revolts and civil wars primarily in central-eastern Europe has become a much more clearly defined research subject in the past twenty years but has been framed to almost necessarily exclude women. This article, based on research on radical right groups in northwestern Europe, shows that an expanded framework that pays attention also to the critical noncombatants and even nonmilitary dimensions of counterrevolutionary activity will also include female activists who had important roles to play in this reactionary project. With case studies from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Britain, this article analyzes the character of women's contributions to the reactionary project, their backgrounds and positions, their relationship to contemporary feminist movements, and the nature of counterrevolutionary femininity in contradistinction to the figure of the revolutionary "Red woman."
This article explores the careers and experiences of women physicians who participated in the American Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions' (BFM) medical Mission to Iran between 1888 and 1971. Drawing on medical reports and personal letters, this article considers American women physicians' efforts to use mission medicine to develop medical skills and surgical expertise. I argue that women physicians navigated gender andprofessionalpolitics to establish themselves as medicalprofessionals who were indispensable to the imperialproject. In doingso, they established new avenues of medical practice, and they publicized their medical pursuits within the metropole. This article provides insight into the gendered dynamics of career mobility forAmerican women who engaged with medicine in imperial locales.
This article joins new scholarly directions that reevaluate the professionalization of womens' health during state-building. It concentrates on the modernization of the Ottoman state during and after the Tanzimat 1839-1876. Addressing two central issues: first, itfocuses on unlicensedJewish midwives, and the sources examined-which differ in their producers, aims, audience, and languages-reveal a significantpolitical and cultural change in the portrayal of midwives. Second, it examines Jews'participation in the professionalization of womens' health, which I argue had clear boundaries, as I demonstrate that Ottoman Jews were engaged in debates that called for the supervision of unlicensed midwives and the advancement of scientific medicine methods; however, pregnancy termination and Jewish midwives as leading performers of this practice were not discussed. Focusing on Ottoman Jews, this article underscores cultural divergences in Ottoman perceptions about pregnancy termination.
This article examines the health services provided by Israel to Palestinians during the Israeli Military Government from 1948 to 1966. It underscores the detriments to Palestinian health perpetuated by the Military Governments' travel restrictions in its first years. What follows focuses on the relationships between Arab Jewish migrant nurses and Palestinian women following the establishment of a health center in Baqa al-Gharbiyyeh, in the Triangle region, in 1958. The building blocks of this article include oral interviews with Palestinian women, archival documents, and press reports, all of which illustrate the unique dynamics of health services during that period. These sources offer a rich insight into the Military Government period as they encompass multilayered relations between governing institutions and the Palestinians subordinated to them. The role of nonmilitary mediators-in this case, nurses who offered essential services to these Palestinian women-is examined critically. This article centers the silenced voices of Palestinian women living under the Military Government, illuminating the textures of their lives through the intimate register of personal experience.
The Haifa Infant Welfare Association (HIWA) was a charitable endeavor run by women. Examining the intersection of medicine, charity, and gender within the context of colonialpower dynamics, we argue:first, that the HIWA played an instrumental role in consolidating social networks among Haifas' elites; second, that its durability was facilitated by its relative marginality within intra-Palestinian politics; third, that its Infant Welfare Centers' operation was an outcome of British policy of minimal investment, as it alleviated some of the colonial administrations' responsibilities;fourth, that the HIWA operated within a gendered set of interactions between British and Palestinian elite women, between the centers and aid recipients, and between HIWA members and Haifas' elites; and, fifth, that we trace a shift in the 1940s, as Palestinian participants became more dominant and the HIWA expanded its activities. Our sources include HIWA files in the KhayatFamilyArchives, the Palestinian press, the Israel State Archive, and Save the Children Fund publications.
Belgian people displaced following the German invasion of their country in 1914 were supported, supervised, and medically treated by female health care professionals, humanitarian volunteers, and ladies' refugee committee members during their wartime stay in Scotland. This article focuses on how middle-class female care givers of the Glasgow Corporation Belgian Refugee Committee exercized "soft power" while supporting Belgian refugees. In addition, the actions of the women here considered form part of what Peter Gatrell has described as a constructed "refugee regime" organized by local and nationwide relief providers. Although the women assessed in this article delivered crucial everyday support for displaced Belgians, including children, the contemporary record of First World War humanitarian aid in Scotland and, more widely, Great Britain underreported and marginalized their role.
During the 1920s, the Communist Womens' Movement (CWM) engaged in internationally coordinated campaigns. One of the most successful was the humanitarian aid campaign for Soviet Russia, a country ruined by the years of World War I and the Russian Civil War. This article studies the humanitarian efforts that the CWM engaged in, such as collecting funds and goods to be sent to Russia, setting up sewing and mending centers, and supporting childrens' homes in Russia. It assesses the CWMs' contributions to broader relief efforts coordinated by the Communist International organization as well as by a variety of transnational networks, organizations, and countries. This article compares CWMs' humanitarianism to the efforts of nonproletarian womens' organizations. It analyzes the use of such conceptual frameworks as "motherliness" and womens' special role in humanitarian action that the CWM employed to galvanize more active support for their campaigns among women and to promote radical ideas of motherhood.
Through analyzing the biographies and humanitarian actions ofRosa Genoni and Hilda Clark, this article focuses on the emergence of new professional female figures in the postwar humanitarian system who defined themselves and acted as feminists. I argue that their relief work went hand in hand with the claim to political and social equality for women. Seeing that both Genonis' and Clarks' humanitarian activities, based on democratic and antifascistprinciples, faced obstacles and opposition on the side of authorities and institutions, I show how the scopes of action of the two professionals were significantly restricted and opposed by rising fascism in Europe (Genoni) and the shortcomings of the League of Nations' policies (Clark). The examination is based on unpublished sources from organizational archives andpolice reports as well as ego documents that highlight individual experiences largely absent or silenced in official reports.
This article examines the life and work ofDr. Ruth A. Parmelee, an American missionary obstetrician and gynecologist who was stationed in Ottoman Harpoot during the Great War era. Initially responsible for the child and maternal care of Ottoman women, both Christian and Muslim, Parmelee also treated men due to the unexpected demands of warfare. Once theArmenian Genocide began, she transitioned from reproductive to emergency medicine forsurvivingArmenians. The article analyzes Dr. Parmelees' daily activities, demonstrating how she negotiated herpersonal andprofessionalgendered identity against the expectations of her family, American medical schools, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and Ottoman institutions. By tracing her movements between the various spaces she inhabited, from the mission buildings and hospital to private residences and the refugee camp, this article demonstrates how medical work served as a means of both segregation and inclusion.
Lady Pagets' Mission to Slovakia and the Baltic States developed according to a conservative maternalistic scheme of intervention. Pagets' decision to focus on womens' and childrens' welfare emerged as the result ofstrategic calculations after emergency reliefhad been delivered. While the values by which Paget was stimulated and which she used as the hallmarks ofher discourse about humanitarian work-impartiality andprofessional-ism-reflected widespread conceptions of modernizing humanitarianism and relations to power, her focus on mother and child welfare was constantly inspired by maternalism, which in turn did not remain an element defining the missions' identity but represented a tool Paget used for consolidating her personal power within her own organizations.
