Working from the premise that women’s genealogies take as many forms as the political, historical, and ideological interests of those who wrote, illustrated, or patronized them, this concluding chapter outlines some characteristics of such genealogies and new areas of investigation. Genealogies that construct and convey women’s political and spiritual claims frequently accommodate and even emphasize geographical change, disruptions in succession, and the material nature of textuality. Recognizing the political importance and prevalence of matrilineages in medieval texts in turn offers a broader and more nuanced understanding of medieval concepts of maternity and women’s roles as childbearers.

Genealogy, as depicted in medieval texts and images, is an expansive concept that extends beyond the male-oriented model of patrilineage and includes various approaches to matrilineage and women’s legacies. Because genealogy is always constructed, regardless of how much writers insist on its naturalness, literary sources are key to revealing the imaginative ways medieval writers and their patrons conveyed women-oriented narratives. Through an overview of medieval sources and recent scholarship, this chapter opens up the medieval notion of genealogy to show how it both included female characters and drew upon characteristics typical of elite women’s lives. The Introduction presents three features frequently associated with and useful for understanding women’s genealogies: a close relationship between lineage and material textuality, the importance of manuscript context, and mobile notions of time and geography. Analyses of an aristocratic matrilineal diagram and an excerpt of the Anglo-Norman family romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn illustrate these features.

This chapter draws on conceptions of gender in Mozart’s time and ours to explore the opera’s representation of women. This aspect of The Magic Flute, including the misogynistic statements of the priests, is now widely regarded as problematic. The opera sets the rule of Sarastro and his brotherhood against the Queen and her entourage, and the focus on this conflict between the sexes has to some degree obscured the opera’s focus on the construction of gender in the characterization of Pamina and the Queen. Gender is performed on stage within an established context and frame of reference. Pamina is a sentimental heroine whose idealized image, abduction, and abandonment prove her moral virtue; the Queen is a dark and vengeful mother who refuses to accept her restricted position. This focus allows us to see how both mother and daughter complicate patriarchal assumptions by raising important questions about gender and power.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian fiction dramatizes her reform agenda, which turned on redressing an “unnatural” division back in human history that resulted in the excessively feminine women and humanized men who defined the norm in her own day. Her 1915 novel Herland challenges by flipping traditional gender hierarchies and roles even as it retains while naturalizing other forms of privileged status. Throughout her career, Gilman grounded her politics in the domain of biological existence, initially endorsing the view that natural laws and processes left unimpeded would inevitably work to facilitate the progressively meliorative course of evolution. But the more she became convinced that humans had deviated from this course, the more ardently she advocated for an interventionist, biopolitical approach. By the time she wrote Herland, she was diagnosing a nation’s “health and vitality” based on the extent of degeneracy and impurity she detected in the social body under examination and prescribing drastic cures as needed. Herland thus reveals the author’s conservative tendencies; these increased as she aged and soured on the prospect of sweeping social reform, but they had been there all along, even in her seemingly radical theories of gender.

The history of comics and graphic novels often coincides with a history of marginalization of women and misogynistic stereotypes. Conversely, this chapter examines the representation of women by women in graphic novels, with a particular focus on women’s lives. It recalls the early efforts of women cartoonists within the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Julie Doucet, who produced different representations of femininity and sexuality than their male counterparts. It considers the contributions of seminal graphic memoirs by Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel, which blended stories of personal awakening with a political context and message, offering new templates for future works. It also highlights the recurrence of the theme of childhood trauma in autobiographical works by women authors, such as Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons (2002), as well as the depiction of unequal work, career, household, and parenting demands placed on women. Finally, it reflects on the manner in which graphic novels by women authors may portray women’s experiences such as motherhood, abortion, and menopause, and considers graphic works that expand the notion of women’s discourse beyond binary identities.

This chapter contributes to debates about the relational dynamics of Brazilian slavery, focusing especially on enslaved wet nurses. While the relationships between masters and slaves in the private sphere did involve affection and loyalty, they were also gestated in an environment of abuse, humiliation, and physical and symbolic violence, all of which were essential features of slavery as an institution. Interactions that might be read initially as paradoxical or ambiguous were in fact constitutive of slavery’s ideology of domination, experienced and enacted in various ways by both masters and slaves. The figure of the wet nurse and the practice of relegating breastfeeding to enslaved women – which was generalized among Brazil’s dominant classes during the Empire – helped to forge a slavocratic habitus, a kind of second nature, in which future masters experienced the social relationships of slavery within their intimate circles and everyday lives from a very tender age. This chapter analyzes these domestic and extremely conflictual interactions as an integral part of the slave system, critical to the symbolic and social reproduction of Brazil’s master class.

The American New Woman is an archetype for the generations of women who, in the early twentieth century, were engaged in defining new forms of femininity and forging new public identities, through work, leisure, art, education, and politics. The New Woman also signaled a complex, and sometimes contradictory, modernizing of embodied femininity. Beginning with the New Woman as a sociopolitical individual, mobilized in feminist discourse and suffrage politics, this chapter goes on to explore Greenwich Village women, Black women’s responses to the New Woman, fashions for bobbed hair, and the bodies and performances of different kinds of women dancer (Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Irene Castle). The chapter concludes with Djuna Barnes’ ambivalent encounters with the fashionable New Woman in her work, and Gertrude Stein’s engagement with the legacy of Susan B. Anthony, a crucial pioneer for the women’s suffrage movement and modern feminism, in her final opera The Mother of Us All (1947).

Chapter 3 investigates the French nationality decrees promulgated in 1930 and 1936, which recognized the claims métis people had been making for decades: they were French and entitled to French legal status. These new legal pathways to French citizenship and demarcations of parameters of belonging were tied to concepts of how race and multiracial identity mapped onto French legal status. The decrees codified multiracial people as a specific category in French colonial thought and society, but within the context of how multiracial people themselves claimed multiracial selfhoods. The claims of métis people who petitioned for citizenship deepened the debates about race and racial identity and changed the very idea of Frenchness. The burden of proof on petitioners hinged on questions of paternity and French cultural competency. However, maternal kin and African communities played an essential role in the legal process. Métis obtainment of French citizenship was consequential for hierarchies of status within African societies. At the same time, it both contested and created hierarchies of social and legal status and privilege based on changing racial thought.

This chapter begins by clarifying the distinction between social parenthood and parenting and explain how the longstanding but malleable association between social and biological parenthood depends upon social and legal conventions determining who is eligible to parent. One way in which to place oneself in that situation is to conceive a child biologically – however, biological parenthood often comes apart from social parenthood. I explore the significance of clinical assistance, money, and distance, in navigating this separation in the context of assisted reproduction. The second part of the chapter incorporates gender into the analysis, looking in detail at the social roles of motherhood and fatherhood, and the interplay of biological parenthood and moral parenthood with the expectations associated with these roles – for example, the effect of the visibility of pregnancy on attributional parenthood, the characterisation of fatherhood as more detached and less sentimental than motherhood, the persistence of associations between fatherhood and breadwinning, and so on. In this chapter, I explore the findings of sociological, psychological, and anthropological research into motherhood and fatherhood in order to demonstrate that one can inhabit a social role comprised in part by normative standards, even if one does not conform to those standards.

The perception of Gabriela Mistral and her poetry has transformed over the years: the image of Mistral as the traditionalist and conservative poet, fostered by the Pinochet dictatorship, has been replaced by that of a strong independent voice who, in part, stands for the liberation from society’s gender prescriptions. This chapter focuses on the series of poetry, Locas mujeres (Madwomen), published in Lagar (Winepress, 1954), to demonstrate how this new perception of Mistral holds true in her representation of women in these poems. In line with Mistral’s earlier poetry that underscores women’s voices that have typically not been heard, such as those of the pregnant women of Poemas de las madres (The Mothers’ Poems), the women from this series, designated “insane” by the title, and society, expose their true selves. This chapter first places this whole series in the context of Mistral’s poetry, and finally focuses on two poems, “La bailarina” (“The Dancer”) and “La que camina” (“She Who Walks”), to demonstrate their particular expressions of women’s liberty.

The perception of Gabriela Mistral and her poetry has transformed over the years: the image of Mistral as the traditionalist and conservative poet, fostered by the Pinochet dictatorship, has been replaced by that of a strong independent voice who, in part, stands for the liberation from society’s gender prescriptions. This chapter focuses on the series of poetry, Locas mujeres (Madwomen), published in Lagar (Winepress, 1954), to demonstrate how this new perception of Mistral holds true in her representation of women in these poems. In line with Mistral’s earlier poetry that underscores women’s voices that have typically not been heard, such as those of the pregnant women of Poemas de las madres (The Mothers’ Poems), the women from this series, designated “insane” by the title, and society, expose their true selves. This chapter first places this whole series in the context of Mistral’s poetry, and finally focuses on two poems, “La bailarina” (“The Dancer”) and “La que camina” (“She Who Walks”), to demonstrate their particular expressions of women’s liberty.

This chapter considers the emotional interiorities and intersubjectivities of Romantic surgery. It challenges the well-established stereotype of the pre-anaesthetic surgeon as dispassionate butcher by demonstrating the ways in which surgical identities and subjectivities were shaped by a culture of emotional expression and reflection. The emotional ‘authenticity’ of pre-anaesthetic surgery was rooted in the embodied experience of operative practice, and the huge challenges that came from dealing with death, disease, and disfigurement on a daily basis. But as well as encouraging emotional introspection, the experience of pre-anaesthetic surgery also demanded that the surgeon manage his patients’ emotions. After all, in this period, fear, despondency, and other states of mind were regarded as an immediate cause of death. For this reason, surgeons needed to monitor their patients’ moods and imagine themselves into their position in order to regulate their own conduct and promote optimal operative outcomes. These relations between surgeons and patients were structured by a range of factors, notably gender. For that reason, this chapter concludes with a consideration of Romantic surgical intersubjectivity in practice, utilising Astley Cooper’s casebooks to explore the ‘emotion work’ of womanhood in the elaboration and understanding of breast cancer.