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Heroines in History: A Thousand Faces moves beyond stories of individual heroines, taking a thematic, synthesising and global in scope approach to challenge previous understandings of heroines in history. Responding to Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, Katie Pickles explores the idea of a transcultural heroine archetype that recurs through time. Each chapter addresses an archetypal theme important for heroines in history. The volume offers a new consideration of the often-awkward position of women in history and embeds heroines in the context of their times, as well as interpreting and analysing how their stories are told, re-told and represented at different moments. To do so ...
The devastating earthquake that hit Christchurch in 2011 did more than rupture the surface of the city, argues historian Katie Pickles. It created a definitive endpoint to a history shaped by omission, by mythmaking, and by ideological storytelling. In this multi-layered BWB Text, Pickles uncovers what was lost that February day, drawing out the different threads of Christchurch’s colonial history and demonstrating why we should not attempt to knit them back together. This is an incisive analysis of the way a city’s character is interlinked with its geo-spatial appearance: when the latter changes, so too must the former.
On the heels of recent revelations of past and ongoing injustices, reconciliation and solidarity by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is even more urgent. But it is a complex endeavour. In The Solidarity Encounter, Carol Lynne D’Arcangelis links interviews with activists and her own self-reflections to current scholarship to take readers into the fraught terrain of solidarity organizing. Multi-issue coalitions such as Idle No More, #NoDAPL, MMIWG2SQ, Black Lives Matter, and Fridays for Future all depend on the collaboration of diverse communities and on avoiding harmful detours into historically derived helping behaviours. D’Arcangelis grapples with this key tension: colonizing behaviours that result when white women centre their own goals and frameworks as they participate in activism with Indigenous women and groups. The Solidarity Encounter concludes by offering strategies for respecting boundaries between self and other, providing a constructive framework for non-colonizing solidarity that can be applied in any context of unequal power.
Hunters, medicine men, and missionaries continue to dominate images and narratives of the West, even though historians have recognized women’s role as colonizer and colonized since the 1980s. Kristin Burnett helps to correct this imbalance by presenting colonial medicine as a gendered phenomenon. Although the imperial eye focused on medicine men, Aboriginal women in the Treaty 7 region served as healers and caregivers – to their own people and to settler society – until the advent of settler-run hospitals and nursing stations. By revealing Aboriginal and settler women’s contributions to health care, Taking Medicine challenges traditional understandings of colonial medicine in the contact zone.
In this energetic new study, Wendy Mitchinson traces medical perspectives on the treatment of women in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. It is based on in-depth research in a variety of archival sources, including Canadian medical journals, textbooks used in many of Canada’s medical faculties, popular health literature, patient case records, and hospital annual reports, as well as interviews with women who lived during the period. Each chapter examines events throughout a woman’s life cycle – puberty, menstruation, sexuality, marriage and motherhood – and the health problems connected to them – infertility, birth control and abortion, gynaecology, cancer, nervous disorders, and menopause. Mitchinson provides a sensitive understanding of the physician/patient relationship, the unease of many doctors about the bodies of their female patients, as well as overriding concerns about the relationship between female and male bodies. Throughout the book, Mitchinson takes care to examine the roles and agency of both patients and practitioners as diverse individuals.
This edited collection from a distinguished group of contributors explores a range of topics including literature as imperialist propaganda, the representation of the colonies in British literature, the emergence of literary culture in the colonies and the creation of new gender roles such as ‘girl Crusoes’ in works of fiction.
This book examines the myriad identities and portrayals of Edith Cavell, as they have been constructed and handed down by propagandists, biographers and artists. Cavell was first introduced to the British public through a series of Foreign Office statements which claimed to establish the “facts” of her case. Her own voice, along with those of her family, colleagues and friends, were muted, as a monolithic image of a national heroine and martyr emerged. The book identifies two main areas of tension in her commemoration: firstly, the contrast between complexity of her own behaviour and motivations and the simplicity of the “Cavell Legend” that was constructed around her; and, secondly, the mismatch between the attempts of individuals and professional organisations to commemorate her life and work, and the public construction of a “heroine” who could be of value to the nation state.
This volume of essays provides the first major comparative study of the role played by women’s movements and individual female activists in enabling or thwarting the transition from war to peace in Europe in the crucial years 1918 to 1923.