Encyclopedia of Women's Folklore and Folklife 2 volumes

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WOMEN’S FOLKLORE AND FOLKLIFE

Advisory Board Norma E. Cant u Professor of English and U.S. Latina/o Literatures University of Texas-San Antonio Rosan A. Jordan Independent Scholar New Orleans, LA Cathy Lynn Preston Senior Instructor of English University of Colorado at Boulder Joan Newlon Radner Professor Emerita, American University Independent Scholar Lovell, ME Rachelle H. Saltzman Folklife Coordinator, Iowa Arts Council Des Moines, IA Marilyn M. White Professor of Anthropology Kean University Union, NJ

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WOMEN’S FOLKLORE AND FOLKLIFE Volume 1: A–L Edited by Liz Locke Theresa A. Vaughan Pauline Greenhill

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut  London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of women’s folklore and folklife / edited by Liz Locke, Theresa A. Vaughan, and Pauline Greenhill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-34050-5 ((set) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-34051-2 ((vol. 1) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-34052-9 ((vol. 2) : alk. paper) 1. Women—Folklore—Encyclopedias. I. Locke, Liz. II. Vaughan, Theresa A., 1966– III. Greenhill, Pauline, 1955– GR470.E63 2009 3980 .352—dc22 2008032981 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright  C 2009 by Liz Locke, Theresa A. Vaughan, and Pauline Greenhill All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008032981 ISBN: 978-0-313-34050-5 (set) 978-0-313-34051-2 (vol. 1) 978-0-313-34052-9 (vol. 2) First published in 2009 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

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To All Women Folklorists and their Allies—Past, Present, and Future

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CONTENTS List of Entries

ix

Guide to Related Topics

xiii

Preface

xvii

Acknowledgments

xxi

Overview Essays

xxiii

Women’s Folklore

xxiii

Folklore About Women

xxxv

Folklore of Subversion

xlvii

Women Folklorists The Encyclopedia

lix 1

Selected Bibliography/Web Sites

731

Index

733

About the Editors and Contributors

761

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LIST OF ENTRIES Abortion Activism Adoption Aesthetics Aging Altar, Home American Folklore Society— Women’s Section Androgyny Aphrodisiac Assault, Supernatural Autograph Book Babysitting Ballad Banshee Barbie Doll Barker, Ma Basketmaking Bat Mitzvah Beadwork Beauty Beauty Contest Beauty Queen Belly Dance Best Friend Birth Chair Birthdays Blind Folklore Bloody Mary Body Modification and Adornment Borden, Lizzie Breastfeeding Brideprice

Calamity Jane Camplore Charivari/Shivaree Chastity Cheerleading Childbirth and Childrearing Cinderella Class Clique Coding Consciousness Raising Cosmetics Courtship Couvade Cowgirl Crafting Crime-Victim Stories Croning Cross-Dressing Curandera Cursing Cyberculture Daughter Deaf Folklore Death Diet Culture Divination Practices Divorce Dolls Doula Dowry Elder Care Embroidery Engagement

Erotic Folklore Ethnicity Eve Evil Eye Family Folklore Fans, Language of Farm Women’s Folklore Fashion Female Genital Cutting Feminisms Festival Fieldwork Film First Nations of North America Flowers, Language of Folk Art Folk Belief Folk Costume Folk Custom Folk Dance Folk Drama Folk Group Folk Medicine Folk Music and Folksong Folk Photography Folk Poetry Folklife Folklore Feminists Communication Folklore Studies Association of Canada Folktale Foodways Fortune-Teller

x LIST OF ENTRIES

Gardens Gender Girl Scouts/Girl Guides Girls’ Folklore Girls’ Games Glass Ceiling Goddess Worship Gossip Graffiti Grandmother Graves and Gravemarkers Gullah Women’s Folklore Hair Handclapping Games Helpmate Henna Art/Mehndi Herbs Hip-Hop Culture/Rap Home Birth Homeless Women Housekeeping Humor Immigration Indian Maiden Infertility Initiation Jewish Women’s Folklore Jingle Dress Joke Jump-Rope Rhymes Knitting La Llorona Lacemaking Lament Laundry Legend, Local Legend, Religious Legend, Supernatural Legend, Urban/Contemporary Lesbian and Queer Studies Lesbian Folklore Lilith Lilith Fair Local Characters Lullaby

Magazines, Women’s and Girls’ Magic Maiden, Mother, Crone Marriage Mass Media Material Culture Matriarchy Memorate Menarche Stories Menopause Menstruation Midwifery Military Women’s Folklore Miscarriage Mother Earth Mother Goose Mother-in-law Mother’s Day Mothers’ Folklore Muslim Women’s Folklore Myth Studies Naming Practices Nature/Culture Needlework Nursing Occupational Folklore Old Wives’ Tales Oral History Paperfolding and Papercutting Personal-Experience Narrative Photocopylore Piecework Politics Popular Culture Pottery Pregnancy Princess Processional Performance Prostitution/Sex Work Proverb Public Folklore Purdah Quiltmaking ~ Quinceanera

Race Rape Recipe Books Recitation Red Riding Hood Region: Australia and New Zealand Region: Canada Region: Caribbean Region: Central America Region: Central Asia Region: East Asia Region: Eastern Europe Region: Mexico Region: Middle East Region: Pacific Islands Region: South America Region: Southeast Asia Region: Sub-Saharan Africa Region: United States Region: Western Europe Rhymes Riddle Rites of Passage Ritual Roadside Crosses Rugmaking Rumor Saints Sampler Scandal Scrapbooks Self-Help Sewing Sex Determination Sexism Sexuality Sister Sleeping Beauty Sorority Folklore Spa Culture Spinning Spirituals Stepmother Storytelling Suffrage Movement Sunbonnet Sue Superstition

LIST OF ENTRIES xi

Text Tradition Tradition-Bearer Transgender Folklore Vagina Dentata Vaginal Serpent Valentine’s Day Vampire Veiling Violence

Virgin, Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe Virginity Wage Work Walled-Up Wife Weaving Wedding Wedding, Mock Wicca and Neo-Paganism Wife Sales

Witchcraft, Historical Women Religious Women Warriors Women’s Clubs Women’s Friendship Groups Women’s Movement Women’s Music Festivals Women’s Work Yellow Woman/Irriaku Stories

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GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS Domestic Life

Feminism

Altar, Home Babysitting Childbirth and Childrearing Crafting Embroidery Family Folklore Farm Women’s Folklore Folk Custom Folk Medicine Folklife Foodways Gardens Helpmate Herbs Home Birth Housekeeping Knitting Laundry Lullaby Material Culture Mothers’ Folklore Needlework Old Wives’ Tales Quiltmaking Recipe Books Rugmaking Sampler Scrapbooks Sewing Women’s Folklore Women’s Work

Abortion Activism Class Coding Consciousness Raising Croning Feminisms Folklore About Women Folklore Feminists Communication Glass Ceiling Humor Lesbian and Queer Studies Lesbian Folklore Lilith Fair Matriarchy Nature/Culture Politics Race Rape Sexism Suffrage Movement Sunbonnet Sue Women Folklorists Women’s Folklore Women’s Movement Women’s Music Festivals Folklore as a Profession American Folklore Society— Women’s Section

Fieldwork Folklore About Women Folklore Feminists Communication Folklore Studies Association of Canada Lesbian and Queer Studies Myth Studies Public Folklore Women Folklorists Women’s Folklore Life Cycle Adoption Aging Bat Mitzvah Birth Chair Birthdays Breastfeeding Brideprice Charivari/Shivaree Childbirth and Childrearing Courtship Couvade Croning Daughter Death Divorce Doula Dowry Elder Care Engagement Family Folklore

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GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS

Female Genital Cutting Girls’ Folklore Girls’ Games Grandmother Graves and Gravemarkers Henna Art/Mehndi Home Birth Initiation Maiden, Mother, and Crone Marriage Menarche Stories Menopause Menstruation Midwifery Mother’s Day Mothers’ Folklore Naming Practices Pregnancy ~ Quinceanera Rites of Passage Sexuality Sister Sorority Folklore Stepmother Tradition Veiling Virginity Wedding Wedding, Mock Wife Sales Material Culture Aesthetics Altar, Home Barbie Doll Basketmaking Beadwork Birth Chair Body Modification and Adornment Crafting Dolls Dowry Embroidery Fans, Language of Fashion Flowers, Language of Folk Art Folk Costume Folk Photography Folklife

Gardens Graffiti Graves and Gravemarkers Hair Henna Art/Mehndi Jingle Dress Knitting Lacemaking Material Culture Needlework Paperfolding and Papercutting Piecework Pottery Quiltmaking Recipe Books Roadside Crosses Sampler Scrapbooks Sewing Spinning Sunbonnet Sue Weaving Women’s Work Regions of the World Region: Australia and New Zealand Region: Canada Region: Caribbean Region: Central America Region: Central Asia Region: East Asia Region: Eastern Europe Region: Mexico Region: Middle East Region: Pacific Islands Region: South America Region: Southeast Asia Region: Sub-Saharan Africa Region: United States Region: Western Europe Religion/Ethnicity Altar, Home Bat Mitzvah Belly Dance Curandera Ethnicity Eve Evil Eye Female Genital Cutting

First Nations of North America Folk Belief Goddess Worship Gullah Women’s Folklore Henna Art/Mehndi Hip-Hop Culture/Rap Immigration Indian Maiden Jewish Women’s Folklore Jingle Dress La Llorona Legend, Religious Legend, Supernatural Lilith Muslim Women’s Folklore Naming Practices Purdah ~ Quinceanera Race Saints Spirituals Superstition Veiling Virgin, Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe Wicca and Neopaganism Women Religious Yellow Woman/Irriaku Stories Sexuality Abortion Androgyny Aphrodisiac Assault, Supernatural Beauty Beauty Contest Beauty Queen Body Modification and Adornment Chastity Cosmetics Cross-Dressing Diet Culture Erotic Folklore Fashion Gender Hair Humor Infertility Lesbian and Queer Studies Lesbian Folklore

GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS xv

Menarche Stories Menopause Menstruation Miscarriage Prostitution/Sex Work Purdah Rape Rites of Passage Scandal Sex Determination Sexuality Transgender Folklore Vagina Dentata Vaginal Serpent Veiling Virginity Verbal Lore Ballad Barker, Ma

Bloody Mary Borden, Lizzie Calamity Jane Cinderella Cursing Family Folklore Folk Music and Folksong Folk Poetry Folktale Girls’ Folklore Gossip Joke Jump-Rope Rhymes La Llorona Lament Legend, Local Legend, Religious Legend, Supernatural Legend, Urban/Contemporary Lilith

Local Characters Lullaby Memorate Menarche Stories Mother Goose Mothers’ Folklore Myth Studies Old Wives’ Tales Oral History Proverb Recitation Red Riding Hood Rhymes Riddle Rumor Sleeping Beauty Spirituals Storytelling Yellow Woman/Irriaku Stories

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PREFACE The Encyclopedia of Women’s Folklore and Folklife is, in many ways, a pioneering work of scholarship. Our foremothers helped to set us on the path when they turned their attention to women’s folklore in the 1970s and 1980s. Claire Farrer’s edited work, Women and Folklore: Images and Genres, published in 1975, was an early effort to collect in an accessible volume folklore scholarship about women’s informal cultures. Other important articles and compilations followed, including a special issue in 1987 of the Journal of American Folklore, the American flagship journal of Folklore Studies, devoted to scholarship about women entitled Folklore and Feminism. These and other especially significant works are listed in the ‘‘Selected Bibliography’’ section of this book. Despite more than 150 years of work by academics, ethnographers, public sector folklorists, artists, archivists, and others, on the many genres of folklore included here, and due to the groundbreaking work mentioned above, these volumes represent the discipline of Folklore’s first concerted attempt to bring its attention fully to bear on those collective folkways, engagements, attitudes, and preoccupations specific to the lives of women and girls, and on the contributions by women folklorists to the scholarship thereof. It is our hope that it will make a significant contribution towards achieving the field’s founding and long-avowed goal of providing ways to better understand the deep—if often trivialized, marginalized, or unexplored— ways and means by which we all enact the creative art of being human. We have been exceedingly fortunate to have attracted the participation of some of the originating scholars in the field of Women’s Folklore as contributors to the Encyclopedia of Women’s Folklore and Folklife and as members of its advisory board. The Encyclopedia is organized so that it can be used in a variety of ways. The four leading overview essays—‘‘Women’s Folklore,’’ ‘‘Folklore About Women,’’ ‘‘Folklore of Subversion,’’ and ‘‘Women Folklorists’’—represent a broad survey of folklore scholarship about, and largely by, women. More specifically focused subject entries follow in alphabetical order. Some grapple with large topics: ballads, folktales, material culture, race, and politics, to name just a few. Others cover smaller, more specific topics of interest to

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both professional and general readers: autograph books, the language of fans, Mother’s Day, needlework, and Yellow Woman/Irriaku stories, for example. Each article is written from the perspective of a folklore scholar, and relies upon the highest academic standards of scholarship and analysis. At the end of each topic entry, we have provided a list under the heading ‘‘See Also’’ of related entries in the Encyclopedia that will lead the interested reader to more information on that topic. We also have assembled a suggested reading list for each entry. These references serve as valuable resources for those seeking to expand their acquaintance with scholarship on women’s folklore, and, taken together, provide a nearly comprehensive survey of the literature on women’s folklore to date. A thematic grouping of all of the entries, listed in the front matter under ‘‘Guide to Related Topics,’’ is designed to aid readers who seek to understand the general scope of the Encyclopedia in terms of the umbrella genres of women’s folklore. The Encyclopedia also contains fifteen articles listed under the heading ‘‘Region,’’ ranging from Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands to Southeast and Central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and South America. Each region entry highlights the most salient women’s folklore genres enacted in that part of the world. However, the Encyclopedia cannot and does not make any claims to being comprehensive of all women’s, and girls’ folkways and their expressions in context. Given that women and girls comprise at least half the population of the planet, it was decided early on that the Encyclopedia’s scope and size must be limited in some way so as to make possible its eventual appearance in print. Its primary focus, therefore, is on the contexts and traditions of women residing in North America, the home of most of its contributors. During the years in which the headword list was brainstormed, compiled, and amended, we solicited manuscripts from authors whose expertise could collectively encompass as many of North America’s heterogeneous cultures and traditions as possible. Our efforts were rewarded with a variety of articles on genres and practices specific to its African, Latino, and Asian diasporas, as well as to its First Nations peoples; however, ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, the present work contains lacunae that beg to be filled in subsequent editions. These volumes attempt to respond to an urgent need in folklore scholarship, but they are also a call for more workers in the field to bring their considerable skills and training to bear on the lifeways, concerns, and traditions of the world’s women and girls. The folklore told and used by women is not necessarily the same as folklore about women. In fact, it is seldom if ever the same. Folklore about women is frequently disparaging, as is especially clear in reference to female sexuality itself. Folklorists, especially North American folklorists, have long avoided any discussion of sex as unseemly, or beneath the notice of serious scholars. This attitude arose in part from the deeply felt puritanical traditions that North Americans inherited along with the rest of our history; and in part, from an overly romantic sensibility about just who ‘‘the folk’’ are. Starting in the 1920s, Vance Randolph (1892–1980) collected a huge number of jokes told by Ozark mountain people, and discovered that ‘‘the folk’’ were very fond of what we call ‘‘dirty jokes.’’ He was vilified for

PREFACE xix

decades by other folklorists who thought his work prurient, voyeuristic, destructive, and unhealthy. But dirty jokes are part of the folk’s repertoire, and today, folklorists have him to thank for bringing to light their many rich cultural expressions about human sexuality. Today, we have a different sense of who the folk are. For the most part, they are us. And responsible folklore scholars no longer shy away from the more brutal realities of the world we inhabit—its racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, war, and the other cruelties of everyday life—as they are reflected in the expressions of the folk. The coverage of female sexuality in this volume may occasionally make the reader feel uncomfortable; however, the duty of folkloristics is to observe and report what the folk actually think and do and say, not what we might wish they would think and do and say. Since the beginning of recorded history, female sexuality has been the butt of many a dirty joke; unfortunately, this remains the case today. We regard it as our responsibility to shed as much light as possible on this aspect of North American folklife. The reader will also note that the overall tone of the Encyclopedia is unabashedly feminist in its perspective. Feminist scholarship has enriched the entire field of Folklore, not only in those areas pertaining to women, and it was feminist scholars who first made a concerted effort to turn the field’s attention to women’s concerns. Without the feminist impetus, much of the work included in these volumes would never have been undertaken, and so we make no apologies for this orientation. Feminist scholarship has also helped us understand that we must be attentive to our differences in order to truly understand our common humanity; therefore, the reader will find attention given to ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and politics throughout the Encyclopedia.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors wish to thank the senior folklore scholars who comprised our advisory board—Norma Cant u, Rosan Jordan, Jo Radner, Cathy Preston, Riki Saltzman, and Marilyn White—without whose generosity with their time, talents, encouragement, and endurance this encyclopedia would never have materialized. They are the true mothers of this pioneering publication. Each writer whose work is included here responded to our call, did the research, wrote articles, and hung in there with us as the work progressed. Please accept our heartfelt thanks for your dedication to the project. One of these days, he’ll get those roses we promised, but for now we wish to express our appreciation to Thomas A. Green, who sent us to George Butler at Greenwood Press, whose enthusiasm for the project encouraged us to go forward and whose style made the heavy lifting easier. Thanks also to Nancy Stair for her fine copyediting, Vicki Swope for her meticulous indexing, and our project managers, Colleen Simeral at Cadmus Communications Corp. and Bridget Austiguy-Preschel at Greenwood Press. We wish to extend our thanks for the support of the American Folklore Society’s Women’s Section, whose members first articulated the pressing need for an encyclopedia of women’s folklore and folklife, and to Todd Hallman for recognizing that need. Liz extends her thanks to Theresa—not only for inviting me to participate in the project, but for making my new life in Oklahoma possible; to Pauline, without whose extraordinary assistance during the final stages of the editorial process the project might never have reached completion; to David Long, whose direction and friendship has made my life as an expository writing teacher at Oklahoma University so improbably satisfying; to Bridget Love for the loan of her laptop when my own computer died of exhaustion; to my Indiana University Folklore teachers, especially Greg Schrempp, William Hansen, Henry Glassie, and Dick Bauman, for nurturing my intellect and respecting my ambitions; and, finally, to Joss Whedon, Terry Pratchett, and Lucy Lawless for keeping my heart alive in this new American millennium. Theresa thanks Liz and Pauline for coming on board once she realized just how much work a project of this magnitude actually involves, and for being editorial goddesses. I also would like to acknowledge my professors

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

at the University of Michigan and Indiana University, especially those who made me consider the concerns of women. Students Tamara Robbins-Anderson, Mark Reimer, and Candace Carollo were helpful at various times during the project. Finally, my gratitude goes to my children Cian and Sarah, who frankly were not much help in getting work done—both having been born while the encyclopedia was in progress—but who certainly have made life immeasurably richer; and to my husband Kieran, who is unfailingly supportive, brings me flowers, and never balks at changing dirty diapers. Pauline thanks Juliette Loewen and Kendra Magnusson for helping in the work on last-minute editorial matters. I thank Theresa for being willing to take this project on in the beginning, and for seeing it through to the end with the kind of friendship and patience we could all emulate. And I thank Liz for recognizing the funny side of it all (most of the time!) and for being a constant reminder that it would, truly, get done.

OVERVIEW ESSAYS Women’s Folklore Women’s folklore—discourse that women create about ourselves but also about others—is too often presumed to be identical to women’s culture as it is understood in Euro North America. But women’s folklore does not relate exclusively to domestic life—motherhood, children, and food—the conventional domain of women. Only sexist thinking sees male culture as ‘‘human’’ and women’s culture as specific only to women and girls. The discourses women create, communicate, and negotiate extend over the entire range of human experience; traditional and popular culture reveals the diversity of modes and forms by which we manage our lives and experiences. Women’s folklore also demonstrates women’s power and resistance. In fact, explicit or implicit resistance to the strictures of patriarchy characterizes the majority of women’s folklore and is one of the few generalizations that can be accurately made about it. Despite often negative evaluations of women’s cultures by academics and in the social mainstream, the centrality of women is evident in folklore. Women’s traditional and popular culture is found in, and pertains to, both public and private spheres of society, and is as diverse as the women who create and maintain it. Women’s folklore is characterized by multiplicity of meaning, as evidenced in feminist coding, as well as ambivalence about and resistance to patriarchy. Some distinctive aspects of women’s folklore include collaboration, assemblage from diverse elements, and recycling. Much feminist or women-centered scholarly research also has the latter qualities. The category ‘‘woman’’ commonly designates an inferior place to which some people are assigned and through which they must negotiate. Because of the near-universal subordination of women and girls to at least some men, but more saliently to White capitalist heteropatriarchy—a structural system in which some men and male values, based in race, class, and sexuality as well as gender, dominate almost all women and children politically, socially, and domestically—most women speak from the social, cultural, and economic margins. But our location outside hegemony (power expressed

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not only via direct political and economic control, but more pervasively in terms of social relationships, experience, and consciousness) often gives women a genuinely comprehensive understanding of the structures of power. Like other marginalized groups, many women have come to understand power both with regard to the structures we must negotiate on a daily basis and also in terms how we might imagine alternatives to them. In the process, many have come to agree that ‘‘the personal is political.’’ Women have been the source of much of what has been collected and published about traditional folklore genres. For example, ‘‘Beginning folklore students learn that the brothers Grimm collected primarily from women servants and relatives in the early 1800s’’ (Farrer 1975: xi). Women also have been the unacknowledged source of much of what we know about ballads and other folksongs; female singers figure prominently in North American collections, and fieldwork with the Scottish traditional singer Anna Brown (1747–1810) laid crucial groundwork for later theorizing concerning ballad and song traditions. Because such women’s folklore was not explicitly connected to traditional female roles, and/or because the content was not exclusively female-centered, much traditional and popular culture collected from women was received as part of a common—either non-gendered or presumptively male—heritage. Additionally, there is no way of telling how much of the cultural materials anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and folklorists have purportedly collected from men—almost always the presumed experts—were actually gathered from women. Linguist Jennifer Coates gives an example from a Polish dialect atlas, in which the principal informant was ‘‘seventy-five years old . . . rather deaf and slow. He was interviewed in the presence of his daughterin-law, who is described as an energetic, intelligent woman, a good informant.. . . [and] who replied to most of the questions’’ (Coates 1993: 53). One wonders why she was not acknowledged as the principal informant. Coates concludes wryly, ‘‘How often a female relative gave the responses which are credited to a man, we cannot tell’’ (ibid.). Often women’s influences are difficult, if not impossible, to separate from the texts and performances of male singers. For example, when collecting from a noted community folksinger in rural Newfoundland, Gerald Pocius discovered that the man’s wife was actually the more accomplished singer, but that after her marriage she had assumed a more secondary, supportive role. Many folksong collectors have commented on the importance of female support for male singers in their provision of prompting for both text and tune memory. Most Euro North American societies explicitly admonish women to be silent, and abhor, ridicule, and sometimes even violently quiet those who are not. Proverbs about women’s incessant talk can be found from England— ‘‘Foxes are all tail and women are all tongue’’—to France—‘‘Where there is a woman, there is never silence’’—to Jutland—‘‘The North Sea will sooner be found wanting in water than a woman at a loss for a word’’ (quoted in Coates 1993: 16)—and beyond. But there are also presumptions about the qualities and forms of women’s talk. Women are enjoined against swearing and taboo language—‘‘A whistling sailor, a crowing hen, and a swearing

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woman ought all three to go to hell together’’ (ibid.: 20). Whatever form women’s language takes, it is viewed negatively. Where innovation is culturally valued, women are stereotyped as conservative speakers; where privileged forms of pronunciation and vocabulary are seen as affected and selfconscious, women are perceived as using higher status-associated forms. Even the genre divisions within folkloristics (the academic study of folklore) reflect negative attitudes toward women’s narratives. Men tell stories; women gossip. Conversely, viewing traditions in women-centered terms, rather than comparing them—usually unfavorably—with androcentric (centered on men) interpretations, often illuminates the position of women; for example, it reveals that women and girls are not confined exclusively to the home and domestic sphere. Although men are often associated with the public sphere and women with the private, the actual confinement of women to the field of the domestic is much less common than is a symbolic confinement of women in the home: The private sphere of women’s personal experience . . . does not depend on physical location, sexual exclusivity, type of material, or the number of participants. It is a mode of social interaction, a space where none need fear ridicule or embarrassment, where handwork often accompanies talk, where participants feel that they all share several bonds, where narratives emphasize those bonds, and where each participant is seen as equally capable of and willing to contribute personal information (Yocom in Jordan and Kalcik 1985: 52).

While the private sphere of family and friends may offer women respite from the demands of patriarchy, and even transformative alternatives to hegemony, this is not the case for all. For every woman of Color who finds her home a haven from a racist society, there is a woman whose home is a locus of abuse and terror. With very few exceptions, however, women in all cultures and throughout history have worked, provisioned our families, and socialized beyond the confines of our own homes. Women are participants in the public sphere, just as men are part of the private domain; however, our presence in public is generally perceived as a problem that must be strictly regulated. Traditional cultures have played significant roles in keeping women ‘‘in our place.’’ As the examples about language above attest, some of the most difficult challenges to women’s status are those put forward as humor. For example, Pepito or Jaimito jokes in Mexican and Spanish tradition invariably portray women in unfavorable ways, and blonde jokes (never told about blonde men) serve to demean and silence not only blondes, but all women. Control over women does not require explicit admonitions, rules, walls, or veils. Women firefighters, for example, face constant challenges from their fellows, their clients, their community, and sometimes even their friends and family who fear that their sex renders them inadequate for the physical and psychological tasks involved. Women in responsible positions are the subjects of rumors that undermine their authority and power by asserting that they were promoted over more qualified men, presumably by granting sexual favors or otherwise manipulating their way to the top. Women who are

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seen as outside their proper role-sphere are criticized by men and women alike for their dress, speech styles, and physical appearance; they are subjected to sexual harassment and sometimes even sexual assault. Mass-media reportage (newspapers and periodicals) consistently refers to women politicians, CEOs, and other major figures by their given names, instead of using the (male) standard surname. And traditional forms of narrative, song, poetry, and even yard art (for example, the bending-over fat-bottomed female figure which adorns so many suburban flower beds) are vehicles by which to demean and undermine women in our own homes and communities. Public (men) versus private (women) discursive dichotomies remain insidiously pervasive, in part because of the supports for them in traditional cultures. For example, contemporary legends graphically describe the dangers women face when we enter public spaces, particularly if we venture there alone. In these texts, women are raped and killed, particularly in cars, shopping malls, and parking lots—locations particularly difficult for women to avoid even if our primary work is based in our domestic spaces. Legends of women who discover killers in the backseats of their cars, or who are kidnapped from the mall bathroom overlook the fact that statistically in North America, women are in much greater danger of being attacked in our own homes than anywhere else. Even with the consistent underreporting of domestic and family violence, it, rather than violence from strangers, presents the greater danger to women. The binary opposition of public/private maintains great explanatory power in resolving a multitude of sociocultural paradoxes. It shows how women’s experiences are confined and restricted in patriarchy, but it also demonstrates the need to move beyond such limitations. Women’s folklore reflects the social, cultural, and economic diversity of the women and girls who make and use it, as well as the diversity of people who define ourselves or are defined by others as female or feminine. The categories ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ embrace a wide range of ethnicities, races, religions, sexual orientations, sex/gender identities, classes, ages, nationalities, and locations. Each of these loci affects the types of folklore women rely on to communicate with and express ourselves. Feminist writers have stressed multiplicity of meanings within women’s folkloric texts. For example, one explicitly feminist perspective on women’s culture that highlights multiple understandings is Joan N. Radner and Susan S. Lanser’s ideas about strategic coding. They argue that ‘‘acts of coding— covert expressions of disturbing or subversive ideas—are a common phenomenon in the lives of women, who have so often been dominated, silenced, and marginalized’’ (Radner 1993: vii). Women, like members of other marginalized groups, use multiple, interpretable messages to protect ourselves from the negative consequences of being perceived as subversive. Yet the multiplicity of possible interpretations raises questions about intended meanings. Feminist analyses that crack these codes may be exposing interpretations that are deliberately coded. Indeed, in several cases in which feminist folklorists have engaged in interpretive decoding, the texts’ creators have denied that they intended any such significance. However, the presence of oppressive conditions, marginalization, and risk, as well as multiple

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communities of listeners (some sympathetic, some not) increase the likelihood that women’s messages will be coded, deliberately or otherwise. Feminist coding is pervasive. For example, males-only clubs in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, traditionally invited the city’s mayor to their annual events. When the first female mayor, Elsie Wayne, was elected in 1983, the St. Andrew’s Society told her that she was ‘‘the wrong gender’’ to attend and asked her to ‘‘send a male.’’ Over his protests that he was the wrong religion, she dispatched a Jewish colleague. ‘‘‘I went to Samuel Davis and I said Samuel you have to go representing me at the St. Andrew’s Society and he said Els, what’s a Jewish gentleman going to do there? I said you’re the right gender darlin’’’ (Hersey 1998: 172). Upon receiving the next invitation, this time from the St. Patrick’s Society, she decided to go in disguise. She obtained a waitress outfit and served the head table, to the great amusement of workers and members alike. Mayor Wayne annually contrived to attend so called ‘‘male-only’’ parties: sometimes she went cross-dressed; perhaps most notably, one year she jumped out of a cake. While Wayne’s symbolic statements could be interpreted as merely humorous, or even as buying into traditional female roles, her interventions pointed out that it was not women per se who were excluded from these clubs. Women did, in fact, enter them as workers—to clean, cook, serve, play music, and/or (presumably, perhaps covertly) to perform sexual or sexualized services. Wayne’s coded modes of party-crashing showed that the presence of women performing labor, especially in its domestic forms, would be tolerated, even encouraged. Instead, the exclusion was to women members, women guests, and, above all, a woman mayor. Another example of feminist coding is the bachelorette party, a womenonly pre-marriage ritual found across North America. It appropriates the rites of the male bachelor party but derives its power from juxtaposition with traditional, domestically located and focused bridal showers. A bachelorette party, or ‘‘girls’ night out,’’ celebrates female sexuality in what some participants see as just a bit of fun—drinking, dancing, and watching male strippers. But it can also be experienced as a perpetuation of female stereotyping of women as heterosexuals whose primary connections are with males. The bachelorette party’s meanings, simultaneously conservative and liberating, present a complex, if ambivalent, symbolic reading of the contradictory constructions of North American female sexuality. As these examples demonstrate, women may perform the same actions as men, using the same traditional genres as men, but we often do so differently—sometimes by choice, sometimes not. Religious holiday observances, seen from a female vantage point, offer particularly good examples of such contradictions. Leslie Bella analyses the Christian tradition of Christmas as more than just a period of happy celebration with family and friends and the observation of a holy day. Christmas dinner, for example, while presented by popular culture as a relaxing break from the mundane, creates a huge task for many women. Managing a family Christmas extends far beyond one meal; it involves cooking and baking, shopping and entertaining, cleaning and decorating, sometimes extending weeks or even months before the actual date.

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Women’s beliefs, narratives, songs, and material culture may reflect conventional Euro North American ideas of women as cooperative rather than competitive, passive rather than active, nurturing rather than aggressive, and so on. Carol Mitchell notes that women tell jokes that have content as well as narration styles that are ‘‘less openly hostile and aggressive’’ than men’s, and that women prefer same-sex audiences, whereas men are willing to tell off-color jokes to same-sex, opposite-sex, and mixed-sex audiences (Jordan and Kalcik 1985: 185). Linda A. Hughes and Marjorie Harness Goodwin nuance the ‘‘conventional wisdom concerning girls and their games’’ (Hughes in Hollis et al. 1993: 143), showing how their play can mediate between cooperative and competitive poles, and involve both individual and group aspects. Sometimes, women’s folklore is transmitted via media so different from those conventionally used by men that male folklorists had difficulty recognizing it as traditional. For example, few middle- and upper-class men in Euro North America require telephones for transmitting narratives—because their mobility isn’t limited socially or economically, they can simply go to a venue where storytelling takes place on a face-to-face level. However, for many women, ‘‘the telephone plays the predominant role in transmitting folklore, as well as in keeping . . . in touch with the outside world and passing on news’’ (Degh in Jordan and Kalcik 1985: 9). Linda Degh discusses the case of two women who might otherwise be isolated in their Gary, Indiana, homes by lack of mobility and lack of English, who regularly telephone each other to tell stories. She comments, ‘‘The telephone is almost the exclusive communication link between members of the [Hungarian] immigrant generation’’ (ibid.). Men in the same community are likely to have contacts beyond it because they tend to work with non-immigrants or nonHungarians; most have learned English and have become adept at negotiating public or private transportation. Vera Mark examines the traditional genre of the tall tale—a genre perceived as quintessentially masculine—at the Moncrabeau Liars’ Festival in the terms of the texts and participation of female performers. Mark’s work exemplifies a research strategy often associated with feminist methodology—the active participation and conscious reflection of the fieldworker herself. Mark performed at the festival, and she eloquently describes the difficult tightrope she and other women performers walked in choosing an uncontroversial topic, then creating ‘‘an amusing story without resorting to licentiousness’’ (Hollis et al. 1993: 250). Resistance, both passive and active, is often manifest in women’s folklore. ‘‘The (male) picture of the ideal woman . . . usually omits the role of revolutionary activist’’ and folklore offers ‘‘glimpses of women’s resentment of the repressive role given them’’ (Jordan in Jordan and Kalcik 1985: 42–43). Karen Baldwin’s family storytellers include women who are by no means passive, don’t defer to male storytellers, and often win by ‘‘getting the last word in’’ (1985: 161). Without women’s participation in religion, as adherents, supporters, and infrastructural functionaries, religious institutions could not operate. M. Jane Young looks at household and community, underlining the balanced

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relationship between women and men in Western Puebloan society, and that culture’s focus on the sacredness of both reproduction and life. Margaret K. Brady shows how Mormon women use visionary narratives to mediate the personal, social, and spiritual dimensions of pregnancy and birth. Elaine J. Lawless describes how female Pentecostal preachers must balance their positions as women and as preachers, their domestic and sacred powers. Cynthia Vidaurri demonstrates how women’s participation in the annual Ni~ no Fidencio celebration and as ‘‘materias’’ (vehicles) for this work throughout the year stabilizes and insures the persistence of the tradition. A traditional genre that has often been associated with women is the life story or autobiography. Though some cultures, including some Inuit groups, discourage women from talking about themselves, Robin McGrath shows how Inuit women circumvent this taboo by talking only about their youth and old age (relatively less restricted periods) or by fictionalizing their accounts to make their apparent subject an animal or object. Elaine Jahner, working with a Sioux woman, noted how her life story emphasizes the positive. Julie Cruikshank collaborated with Yukon First Nations women to publish a range of their narrative repertoire—including myths and personalexperience narratives—available in English so these elders’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren will continue to have access to them. At (Asian Indian) Gujarati weddings, the singers are women, but their songs express three distinctly different emotions and intentions. Corresponding to the three stages of rites of passage—separation, transition, and reincorporation—singers present songs of solidarity, of insult, and of conciliation. Solidarity songs draw family members together, including those who have been in conflict, so that the ceremony offers a united front to those in attendance: Place some roses in a vase, Sprinkle kum kum and print the invitations, Send them to all four corners of the world (quoted in Edwards and Katbamna 1988: 165).

Insult songs, fatana, are abusive but not obscene. However, ‘‘the insults contained in fatana are ritual and not real. Any song which includes a blatant element of truth in relation to the other part is likely to cause great offense’’ (ibid.: 167). Finally, conciliation songs, valave, assert the social order, reminding the bride especially of her new family. Their expression is very positive: You have given us your daughter We shall keep as well as you did We shall not break our trust When she asks for water, we shall give her milk . . . The bride is still only young We shall take good care of her (ibid.: 168).

There have also been searches for genres specifically, or even definitionally, female. While opinions differ on how ubiquitous any one such genre

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may be, women’s expressions do tend to highlight particular qualities, including collaboration, reciprocity, assemblage, reuse/recycling, and an ephemeral character. One of the first attempts to identify a female traditional genre came from the research of Susan Kalcik, and related to the collaborative personal-experience narrative storytelling forms developed in women’s consciousness-raising groups. Kalcik explores the strategies women use in these groups: ensuring everyone has an opportunity to contribute, alternating competition and support, and always incorporating humor (for example, ‘‘My doctor thinks my vaginal infection is all in my head; he has a strange picture of my anatomy’’) (1975: 5). Kalcik found that consistent with the purpose of these groups— the concern for recognizing commonality in experience and the political in the personal—‘‘It was not necessary . . . to be explicit when an experience was shared by everyone, for a few words were enough to trace the outline of a story’’ (ibid.: 6). These kernel stories could be developed into more elaborated narratives, often collaboratively; they frequently came to comprise a shared repertoire. Jennifer Coates’ research in Britain on all female groups similarly suggests ‘‘that women . . . build progressively on each others’ contributions, that topics are developed jointly, and that shifts between topics are gradual rather than abrupt’’ (1988: 105). Sandra Dolby Stahl’s work contributed to making the genre better known among academic folklorists who did not necessarily read feminist theory. Altar-making is another candidate for a woman’s genre, especially in Euro North America. Women create, arrange, and produce altars to a multitude of religious and secular figures—from family members, to celebrities, to saints and other religious figures. Kay Turner and Suzanne Seriff examined a St. Joseph’s Day feast in rural central Texas ‘‘not as a symbolic or material expression of women’s subordination to men . . . but rather as a . . . community-wide expression of the power of women’s work’’ (Hollis et al. 1993: 93). This event involves a wide variety of expressions—food and decoration as well as more traditional prayer and praise. A prayer explicitly connects the domestic and the sacred: There is room for Jesus, Joseph, and Mary This is no longer my house, It is that of Jesus, Joseph and Mary (ibid.: 109).

In like manner, it is women who are in charge of the construction of and care for ephemeral public altars set up for religious processions and for matachines celebrations in the southwest, especially in New Mexico and Texas. Needlework arts are also female-dominated. Linda Pershing considers piecework as peacework, including a women’s anti-war project in which women all across the United States made panels for a ribbon that literally encircled the Pentagon on August 4, 1985, to commemorate the tragedy of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The women’s imagery included concerns for ‘‘wholeness and relatedness’’ (Hollis et al. 1993: 340). Pershing uses artist Miriam Shapiro’s term ‘‘femmage’’—the use of traditionally

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women-associated techniques in collages that are personal and intentional, yet make political connection to the world beyond the maker’s individual experience. Pershing calls the Ribbon Around the Pentagon ‘‘an exercise in femmage, a material tribute to the diversity and distinctive nature of women’s values and aesthetics, particularly when juxtaposed with the Pentagon, a quintessentially male symbol of military might’’ (ibid.: 342). Quilting is also considered a quintessentially feminine art. Quilting has a paradoxical quality: it can be hugely creative or a mundane reproduction of patterns; it can involve solo or group work, or both; it has variable literal and figurative layers—sometimes no more than a decorative cover, sometimes a tremendously warming object; it is at once aesthetic and functional; and it recycles materials but may also be wholly new. Joyce Ice’s research indicates concern for both process and product; quilters’ and others’ preferences for handmade over machine-produced is both aesthetically and socially based. And although quilting is usually thought of as a female genre, men are not entirely excluded. Research by Susan Roach in Texas and Susan Shantz in Saskatchewan shows how men (sometimes shamefacedly or secretly) also participate in, and often greatly enjoy, the process of quilting. Piecework, patchwork, and femmage demonstrate the importance of recycling and thrift in women’s culture. These processes have strongly practical associations with women’s position in society. In North America as of 2004, women in paid labor earned about 75 percent of the wages paid to men; many have little or no access to independent sources of income and are fully dependent upon their partners for money. In these circumstances, provisioning the home cheaply is economically necessary—but it can also be a source of creativity and sociability. Garage/yard/tag/car-trunk sales, for instance, offer women opportunities not only to acquire items at low prices, but also to make and maintain social connections in our neighborhoods and communities. Recycling and reusing material is ecologically sound, reducing unnecessary waste and rampant consumerism, and allows women a creative outlet as well as a source of income. Recycling as a principle of women’s culture and communication includes the recycling of words. Feminist theorists such as Mary Daly and Dale Spender have pointed out the importance of returning to the older meanings of words like ‘‘spinster’’ and ‘‘hag’’ to remove their pejorative connotations against aging in women and against women who choose not to marry. They point out that women can take words that are used against us, like ‘‘bitch,’’ and reappropriate them as markers of female power, as did the publishers of Bitch magazine. Many feminists point out that more women (and men) need to use the term ‘‘feminist’’ to describe ourselves in order to correct the narrow and inaccurate stereotypes in the mainstream media about feminism and its ideals/ideas. If there is a uniquely female biological process, it is surely conception and birth. Historically, women have supported each other through birthing and mothering. Until the early years of the twentieth century, and longer in some locations, most North American women relied heavily on informal information shared by female friends and family members to guide them through pregnancy, childbirth, and many aspects of childrearing. Most

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communities had one or more female experts who took on the roles of midwife and doula to assist pregnant and birthing women. In many communities in the American Southwest, parteras or comadronas (midwives) still practice, although now they must be licensed and be registered practitioners. Not all women experience—or want to experience—giving birth, but so far, birth is a procedure confined to biological females. Nevertheless, this restriction has not prevented males throughout time from trying to appropriate birth, literally or figuratively. Marta Weigle discusses how male cultural analysts have understood creation myths in limited, male-defined terms; creation myths may be ‘‘ex nihilo [‘out of nothing’] . . . accomplished through spittle, verbal command, laughter, sneezing, ‘calling down,’ thought, wind, and forming and pronouncing certain written Foundation Letters’’ (1987: 428). Weigle points out that many Aboriginal and First Nations creation myths include female elements of parturition and midwifery, but were excluded in cosmogonic narrative categories by patriarchal definitions. Robbie E. DavisFloyd critiques allopathic medicine’s notion of the birth process and advocates for a consideration of how the ‘‘cultural treatment of birth’’ might lead to an understanding of ‘‘the disappearance of old options and the opening of new ones’’ (Hollis et al. 1993: 321). Popular culture, too, has imagined female men, parturient men, including but not limited to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s portrayal of a pregnant man in Junior (1994). Even the Easter Bunny is usually a male figure who has appropriated female fertility in his annual distribution of chocolate eggs (except in Mexican tradition, where she is La Coneja (‘‘a female rabbit’’). Women and feminist fieldworkers often access women’s traditional and popular cultures differently than do their male and anti-feminist counterparts, uncovering traditions of which other researchers may be unaware. For example, ethnographer Stephanie Kane, researching Embera (Choco) mythography in Panama, discovered that stories about a heroic transgressor named Jeropoto that she collected from women included a crucial aspect missing from the published versions collected by male fieldworkers and missionaries—his request to drink menstrual blood. The strong cultural taboo in Euro North American society against discussing menstruation (sometimes even among women) has led to what ethnologist Suzanne Lussier has called a secret tradition. In Canada, the best known collectors of traditional culture in the twentieth century were female. Edith Fowke (1913–1996) and Helen Creighton (1899–1990) paid at least equal attention to women and their traditions— something their male contemporaries often failed to do. They especially included women performers in their studies. Creighton, an upper-middleclass Nova Scotian, collected farmers’ and fishers’ culture, working most extensively within easy driving distance of her home in Dartmouth. She fit fieldwork into her other responsibilities, including caring for her elderly parents for much of her adult life. She was motivated by an interest in writing and a concern for celebrating Canadian Maritime culture. As an unmarried woman visiting strangers alone, she had to be circumspect about both her methods and the material she gathered. Creighton was notoriously

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negative about bawdy songs and stories, though she was otherwise very catholic in what she collected (if not always in her publications). She wrote: At Little Harbour on the eastern shore I was once recording Ned MacKay in a fishing shack with some half dozen of his friends sitting around listening. A young Lunenburgher came in and contributed a number that not only had no merit as a song, but was definitely vulgar. I let the machine run and when it was over the young man went out laughing while the local fishermen fidgeted in embarrassment. I put the machine in reverse and remarked that I had erased it from the tape. You wouldn’t believe how those few words eased the situation (Creighton 1975: 162).

In contrast, Edith Fowke, a lifelong socialist born in rural Saskatchewan, did most of her fieldwork in Ontario and was well known for her interest in bawdy materials. Fowke, who was married, apparently did not have the same difficulties as a fieldworker in needing to censor her collection in order to retain the respect of male informants. But she also published works focusing on women. One of her last books was a collection and analysis of the repertoire of Ontario singer LaRena Clark. In it, Fowke notes Folksinging is one art in which women have always excelled. Here they have been able to hold their own with men because this is an art that can be learned and practiced in the home. It does not require any special education or training, the lack of which has so consistently handicapped women in other fields.. . . Simply put, men tend to sing outside the home and women sing within it. However, the great women singers transcend that boundary. Originally, most of them learned and sang their songs in the home but many went on to sing them in public as well (Fowke and Rahn 1994: 1).

In the southwestern United States, several women folklorists collected and wrote books, creative or documentary, that chronicled the folkways of women in their communities. The most recognized are Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Cleofas Jaramillo, Aurora Lucero White, and Jovita Gonzalez Mireles. While Zora Neale Hurston remains one of the most well-known African American folklorists, others have followed in her footsteps, collecting and analyzing the music and traditions of African American communities. A fictionalized narrative by Ella Cara Deloria called Waterlily presents a detailed depiction of Sioux life, and Cabeza de Baca’s They Fed Them Cactus chronicles a historical period and cultural reality of the people of New Mexico. Women also participated in collecting traditional culture by helping their husbands with fieldwork. Like much other women’s work, such collaborations often go unrecognized. But those who collected as anthropologists and folklorists are by no means alone as women fieldworkers and presenters of traditional culture. Many who write community columns in local weekly newspapers are writing the ethnography of their town. For example, Canadian Jean Heffernan, who produced the Springhill column for the Amherst Daily News, described local events—weddings, anniversaries, and town council meetings—but also documented politics, sports, tourism,

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professional and commercial life, education, religion, child and adult pastimes, and local customs. Much of her writing demonstrates feminist coding, subtly alluding to women’s knowledge and local understandings. More research on local weekly newspaper columnists would certainly illuminate both historical and current folklore by and about women. Although women collectors have consistently been ignored and underrated in Euro North American folkloristics, our approaches that prioritize the lives and experiences of those with whom we work, study, and publish, and our frequent blurring of subject and self both prefigure and exemplify contemporary fieldwork practice. See also: Altar, Home; Childbirth and Childrearing; Coding; Consciousness Raising; Doula; Folklore of Subversion; Fieldwork; Feminisms; Festival; Folk Music and Folksong; Folktale; Folklore About Women; Girls’ Games; Girls’ Folklore; Joke; Mass Media; Menstruation; Midwifery; Myth Studies; Personal-Experience Narrative; Piecework; Quiltmaking; Rites of Passage; Sexism; Storytelling; Wage Work; Wedding; Women’s Work. References Bella, Leslie. The Christmas Imperative: Leisure, Family and Women’s Work. Halifax: Fernwood, 1992. Buchan, David. The Ballad and the Folk. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola. We Fed Them Cactus (Paso por aqui series on Nuevomejicano Literatuare). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Cant u, Norma E., and Olga Najera-Ramirez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Coates, Jennifer. ‘‘Gossip Revisited: Language in All-Female Groups.’’ In Women in Their Speech Communities, eds. Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron, 94–121. London: Longman, 1988. Coates, Jennifer. Women, Men and Language. Second edition. London: Longman, 1993. Creighton, Helen. A Life in Folklore. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975. Cruikshank, Julie. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990. Deloria, Ella Cara. Waterlily. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Dolby Stahl, Sandra. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Edwards, Viv, and Savita Katbamna. ‘‘The Wedding Songs of British Gujarati Women.’’ In Women in Their Speech Communities, eds. Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron, 158–174. London: Longman, 1988. Farrer, Claire R., ed. Women and Folklore: Images and Genres. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1975. Fowke, Edith, and Jay Rahn. A Family Heritage: The Story and Songs of LaRena Clark. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1994. Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘Radical? Feminist? Nationalist? The Canadian Paradox of Edith Fowke.’’ The Folklore Historian 20 (2003): 22–33. ——— and Diane Tye, eds. Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Hersey, Linda. Elsie!–An Authorized Biography of Elsie Wayne. Saint John, NB: Neptune Publishing, 1998. Hollis, Susan Tower, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, eds. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. hooks, bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994. Hurston, Zora Neale. Folklore and Autobiography. New York: Library of America, 1995. Jackson, Bruce, ed. ‘‘Folklore and Feminism.’’ Special issue of Journal of American Folklore, vol. 100, no. 398 (1987).

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Jordan, Rosan A., and Susan J. Kal cik, eds. Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Lawless, Elaine J. Women Escaping Violence: Empowerment through Narrative. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Mathieu, Jocelyne, ed. ‘‘Femmes et Traditions/Women and Tradition.’’ Special issue of Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 15, no. 2 (1993). Pocius, Gerald. ‘‘‘The First Day That I Thought Of It Since I Was Wed’: Role Expectations and Singer Status in a Newfoundland Outport.’’ Western Folklore 35 (1976): 109–122. Radner, Joan Newlon., ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Seelhorst, Mary. ‘‘‘The Assailant in Disguise’: Old and New Functions of Urban Legends About Women Alone in Danger.’’ North Carolina Folklore Journal, vol. 34, no. 1 (1987): 29– 37. Stoeltje, Beverly J., ed. ‘‘Feminist Revisions in Folklore Studies.’’ Special issue of Journal of Folklore Research 23, no. 3 (1988). Turner, Kay. Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Tye, Diane, and Anne Marie Powers. ‘‘Gender, Resistance and Play: Bachelorette Parties in Atlantic Canada.’’ Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 21, no. 5 (1998): 551–561. Vidaurri, Cynthia. ‘‘Las Que Menos Queria el Nico: Women of the Fidencista Movement.’’ In Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, eds. Norma E. Cant u and Olga NajeraRamirez, 133–142. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pauline Greenhill, Diane Tye, and Norma E. Cantu

Folklore About Women Women are the subject of a great many traditional and popular ideas, beliefs, and practices. Folklore contributes greatly to the process of turning biologically sexed beings into symbolically and culturally gendered ones— both female and male—hence, much folklore about women serves to create, recreate, and reinforce ideas about the differences between women and men. In Euro North American societies, such processes begin at least at the moment of birth, when the inevitable question, ‘‘Is it a boy or a girl?’’ is first posed. There are only two options—and the answer must be unequivocal. One of the strongest folkloric notions about women is that they exist in a biological and cultural unity: that sex always goes along with gender; whoever is sexed female must be gendered female, and vice versa. This binary dividing of women from men problematically excludes all other genders and all other sexes. Yet the fiction that women are a unity (even if they are, as Simone de Beauvoir famously suggested in 1953, one defined primarily as ‘‘the Other’’) persists cross-culturally. In the folklore of Euro North America, girls wear pink and are made of ‘‘sugar and spice and everything nice.’’ Boys wear blue and are made of ‘‘snips (or snakes) and snails and puppy dog tails.’’ As the pink girls age into pink ladies, they increasingly derive their worth—and are judged by their peers and others—in terms of their physical appearance. If sexually adventurous, they are ‘‘sluts’’ or ‘‘whores.’’ If modest, they are virgins until they marry. Upon marriage, they remain faithful to their husbands; indeed, they are sexually active only for the purposes of procreation. These madonnas, once they have outlasted their reproductive capacity, become ‘‘old wives’’ who gossip with others of their kind but are no longer useful to society in any fundamental way. Patriarchy imposes these limitations on women, but

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feminism critiques such notions, not only because they are discriminatory, but also because they unreasonably limit the human potential of women. ‘‘Men have not only excluded, ignored, and otherwise rendered women invisible, they have, for centuries, appropriated women as a semiotic object and made her female form highly visible both to represent their established order and to redress it’’ (Babcock 1987: 398). In fact, however, even in Euro North American cultures, folklore about women also includes material that is much more subtle and multivocal. Women and men alike create folklore about women that accurately and significantly interprets women’s experiences, knowledge, and understanding about the world. Yet women and men also create folklore about women that demeans, misrepresents, and pathologizes women and their lives. Folklore about women, then, remains almost as complex as its subjects. One of the earliest works explicitly linking women and folklore is T. F. Thiselton-Dyer’s 1906 Folk-Lore of Women. Though billed as women’s folklore—the traditional and popular culture created by women and mainly for women—the book instead describes folklore about women, as its chapter heads indicate: Woman’s Characteristics; Woman’s Beauty; Woman’s Dress; Woman’s Eyes; Woman’s Tongue; Woman’s Goodness; Bad Women; Woman’s Love; Woman’s Hate; Love Tests; Woman’s Secrets; Red-haired Girls; Woman’s Fickleness; Local Allusions to Women; Woman’s Will; Women and Marriage; Women as Wives; Young and Old Maids; Widows; Woman’s Curiosity; Sister Legends; Brides and their Maids; Superstitions about Women; Woman’s Tears; Woman’s Blushes; Daughters; and My Lady’s Walk. This list is a remarkable inventory of women’s otherness: women are indivisible— almost all are the singular ‘‘woman,’’ except when they are bad, local, or heterosexually attached; women are metonymous (the part stands for the whole) in dress, eyes, tongue, tears, and blushes; women are characterized by appearance and relationship; and their qualities are simple and often binary: love/hate, fickleness, curiosity, and willfulness. The outlier in this series, ‘‘My Lady’s Walk’’ refers to places named after women. It marks the incongruity of feminine-named or even feminineassociated spaces and the need for explanation thereof, such as: ‘‘a tradition told in connection with the Spindleston Hills, which are commonly said to be haunted by a lady nicknamed ‘The Wandering Shepherdess.’ The story goes that a certain lady, after the death of her lover, abandoned rank and wealth, and spent her remaining days following sheep on the hills, and even now the peasants affirm she may at times be seen doing the same walk, reminding us of the lady with her lantern, who in stormy weather walks up and down the beach at St. Ives on the Cornish coast’’ (Thistelton-Dyer 1906: 246–247). A later work purporting to discuss The Female Hero in Folklore and Legend by Tristram Potter Coffin first considers Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, and Guinevere. It continues with a thematic look at women associated with roses (including ‘‘grotesque’’ ones); traditions concerning murdered women; folklore about witches; a consideration of Mother Goose; descriptions of theatrical and film stars; and finally texts about women who were successful in hitherto male roles.

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The first feminist consideration of folklore about women was Marta Weigle’s Spiders and Spinsters. Although its main focus is on women and mythology, the work was groundbreaking not only in its variety of perspectives on myth, including symbol, cultural avatar, mystery, ritual, model, and charter, but for its generally cross-cultural perspective. The chapter on heroines, for example, considers Joan of Arc, classical figures, and folktale heroines, including a number from North American First Nations peoples. Only seven years separated the publication of Coffin’s book in 1975 and the release of Weigle’s in 1982, yet they are worlds apart in terms of their perspectives on women. The differences cannot only be attributed to the sexes of the authors, but to the fact that feminism began to infiltrate folklore scholarship in the mid-1970s. Scholars trained before that period could get away with writing about women in distancing and othering ways; afterward, it became essential for folklorists to recognize gender as a significant element to be reckoned with in their analyses of traditional and popular culture. Materials describing traditional and popular culture relating to women have become more commonplace with the development of feminist analysis and theory, and with the international proliferation of feminist movements. A bold cross-cultural generalization that women tend to be associated with nature and men with culture has proved remarkably consistent, though the manifestations of the tendency vary considerably. Ideas about women tend to cluster around aspects of their bodies, their biology, and their reproductive capacity—but there is, of course, a great proliferation and variety of cultural discourses related to these facets of women’s lives. Though symbolic division of the sexes seems a cross-cultural concern, the extent to which cultures physically separate women and men varies. Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod characterizes the Islamic Middle East as practicing mutual avoidance between the sexes. In parts of Melanesia, active aggression and antagonism between the sexes leads to fear of one another, but also to symbolic statements which express those fears, as when men incise their penises so they bleed in imitation of menstruation. But such cultures fall short of the economic Northern Hemisphere’s stereotype of grinding, continuous oppression of Southern-Hemisphere women. Unlike so many of their Euro North American sisters, these women experience active female solidarity, encouraged and supported through rituals and stories. Male social scientists of the past too often interpreted the traditional culture expressed, created, and performed by women among women as private, and the culture expressed, created, and performed by women for male or mixed groups as public. Their definitions often became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy—women’s practices were per se private and men’s per se public, regardless of their actual contents or circumstances of presentation and performance. Sometimes these kinds of distinctions characterize relations within particular societies. Folklorist John Szwed noted that information communicated between men at the local store was called ‘‘news.’’ The identical information, passed among women in their homes,

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was called ‘‘gossip.’’ Feminists criticize such dichotomies—whatever their sources—as tending to reinforce sexist binary oppositions. However, it is invariably worth paying attention to traditional cultural contexts, that is, by whom and for whom a text is presented and represented, as well as its contents. Folklore about women is communicated by women and men, in private and in public, and can correspond to or differ from conventional notions of women and their roles. Many stories about actual women tend to reinforce the idea that adult females who act outside the domestic sphere are remarkable and noteworthy. Ella Lauchner Smith, who taught history at Mount Allison University during World War II, became the subject of a cycle of narratives which survive to this day in the small university town of Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, where she lived and worked. Folklorist Diane Tye explains the ambivalence of these kinds of stories. On the one hand, they mark Smith as a local character who violates social codes by treating public space as her own: Dr. George J. [Trueman, then university president] used to have a lot of visitors to Sackville during the summer and this was when they had a chapel in the old Centennial . . . Hall. And it was on the third floor and it was a lovely little chapel. It really was.. . . And he had a visitor this particular day and of course they used to go on a visitation of the campus and Dr. George J. told this man, he said, ‘‘Now,’’ he said, ‘‘This is our Centennial building here, our administration offices, but,’’ he said, ‘‘There’s something on the third floor that we’re really quite proud of. Mount Allison never had it before.’’ And he took him up to show the chapel and he went through the door and into the chapel, here was these ladies’ clothes and undies and everything all hung on a line drying. And Dr. George J. Trueman knew who they belonged to because there was no one else on the campus that would do a thing like this, you know.. . . Just like army banners, you know, they were all drying. And of course he spoke to her about it and he said how embarrassing it was because he had this friend from Toronto or Montreal who was being conducted on this visitation of the Mount A. campus and she said, ‘‘Well,’’ she said, ‘‘I don’t think God would mind me trying to be clean and having my clothes in the chapel drying’’ (Tye in Mathieu 1993: 31).

Tye’s analysis suggests that Smith’s frugal behavior probably resulted from the fact that her social position as a faculty member was not matched, especially in those days before equal pay legislation and policies, with a sufficient income and pension. The university’s and the people of Sackville’s judgments of Smith as an eccentric—both compared with other women and compared with other academics—failed to recognize the reasons behind her actions. On the other hand, both town and gown seem to revel in Smith’s flaunting of convention. Whether in the tellingly sacrilegious yet critical image of her ‘‘undies . . . like army banners’’ displayed in the church, or in stories about her apparently equal unconcern for the time and privacy of everyone from the local children and her neighbors to the university president and the town doctor, the narratives mark her as a rebellious woman.

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Many of those who told Smith stories were her male former students, concerned to mark her location outside women’s traditional space. But the students also seem to have envied her manifest ability to turn her own relative powerlessness into a tactic to control the world around her. In the accounts, Smith is never at a loss for words; nor is she cowed by her apparent superiors. Her students of the day, seeking to maintain or even improve their own social position through post-secondary education, would have been unwilling to disturb the status quo, however much they might wish to do so. In contemporary politics, women who, like Smith, invade traditionally male territory, invariably receive attention from the mainstream media that marks the inappropriateness of their location. Elaine K. Miller suggests that the general themes of cartoons that depicted U.S. vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro were: 1. There are ‘‘special interest’’ groups trying to get into the action or even take over.. . . 2. Women, constituting one of these ‘‘special interest’’ groups, are especially pushy or even threatening.. . . 3. As a group, women are interchangeable.. . . 4. Gender roles and power are reversed.. . . 5. Ferraro appears in domestic or explicitly sexual contexts (Jordan and Kalcik 1985: 362).

Although female politicians are generally seen as acting outside their traditional roles as women, some actual women are near-incomprehensible in sociocultural terms. The idea that women are invariably nurturant precludes certain kinds of female killers. Women who kill their children and female serial killers are particularly unimaginable. Belle Gunness, ‘‘The Lady Bluebeard,’’ an American female serial killer preceding Aileen Wuornos, ‘‘apparently murdered at least one husband, several women and children, and numerous would-be suitors who had answered her matrimonial advertisements placed in Norwegian-language immigrant newspapers’’ (Langlois in Jordan and Kalcik 1985: 109). In the Indiana community where these murders took place, she and her ‘‘murder farm’’ are celebrated in stories. Her roles include monster, trickster, and (beyond the oral tradition) victimized heroine. All these women, from Smith to Gunness, were remarkable, and remarked upon, precisely because they did not fit a preexisting stereotype of women’s behavior or character. However, many women who similarly stand partially outside the conventional expectations for their appearance, role, status, and/or activities label themselves, and/or receive their community’s label, as witches. The character of the witch, like the traditional roles of women generally, manifests a profound ambivalence. Witches are alternately (and sometimes even simultaneously) powerful and weak. Folktale witches often take the villain’s role. As old, ugly women, they contrast with the young, beautiful heroine. However, folklorist Kay Stone’s ‘‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us’’ suggests that this polarization is more marked in the popular culture interpretations of traditional narratives. In her examination of folktale collections from Germany, France, England, and the United States, Stone found that tale collections include stories in which women who are not ‘‘unusually patient, obedient, industrious, and quiet,’’

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as are Disneyfied heroines, but instead ‘‘slovenly, unattractive, and lazy,’’ can nevertheless be quite successful. Stone also interviewed women and girls, many of whom refigured the stories they knew to turn passive heroines into active ones (Farrer 1975: 44). Indeed, many storytellers turn erstwhile evil witches into veritable feminist icons. Feminist revisions point out that fairytales and their characters are not simply taken literally and uncritically by their female (and male) readers and listeners. Reconfigured tales also critically reverse or play with conventional Euro North American expectations for women’s lives: Once upon a time, in a land far away, a beautiful, independent, self-assured princess happened upon a frog as she sat, contemplating ecological issues on the shores of an unpolluted pond in a verdant meadow near her castle. The frog hopped into the princess’ lap and said: Elegant Lady, I was once a handsome prince, until an evil witch cast a spell upon me. One kiss from you, however, and I will turn back into the dapper, young prince that I am and then, my sweet, we can marry and set up housekeeping in your castle with my mother, where you can prepare my meals, clean my clothes, bear my children, and forever feel grateful and happy doing so. That night, as the princess dined sumptuously on lightly sauteed frog legs seasoned in a white wine and onion cream sauce, she chuckled and thought to herself: I don’t fucking think so (e-mail communication).

But witches are not confined to fairy tales. In Atlantic Canada, women who lived alone, belonged to an ethnic or racialized minority, or were otherwise marginalized were often identified as witches. Rumored to have evil powers, these women were further isolated by stories about their actions. Alienating as the experience of being called a witch certainly was, many women nevertheless used their witch identity, capitalizing on community beliefs that witches would punish those who crossed them to ensure that they received enough food and supplies to live. Few community members would dare to refuse a witch’s request, and fear of her retribution encouraged many to ensure that her needs were met.

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Yet witchcraft accusations, which notoriously led to trials and executions in seventeenth-century America, could also lead to community sanctions. Folklorist Natalie Kononenko’s study of witchcraft in Ukraine shows that suspicion against witches sometimes led to verbal and physical attacks, and even to murder, although she argues that most of their activity was ‘‘utterly mundane’’ (in Magliocco 1998: 81). Newfoundland witches could also be subject to violent reprisals, many of which had magical elements: shooting an image or token of the witch, or bottling one’s own urine to block the witch’s power. More recently, the term ‘‘witch’’ has acquired positive connotations for those who seek a women-centered spirituality. Revival Witches or Wiccans, in a form of Neo-Paganism, seek to connect with nature and worship a goddess associated with the moon. Feminist Witches have reclaimed the term ‘‘witch’’ and reversed her negative polarity in Euro North American thinking, celebrating her supernatural power, sexuality, and environmentalism. Scholars bitterly dispute the authenticity of the rituals contemporary Wiccans practice, but many practitioners argue that their activities have historical as well as spiritual validity. Chicana writers redefine and resistantly interpret traditional feminine figures. The Virgin of Guadalupe, venerated since the 1530s, exemplifies ideal womanhood, combining virtue and motherhood. Pat Mora rewrites her as violently avenging the protagonist’s actions: .. . . I stopped the bribes hoarded soft petals didn’t lay them at your feet didn’t speak to you at all. If some day in a dark church I wait for a nod, smile, wink, will you just smash your foot into my mouth? (1986: 77).

Poet Carmen Tafolla (2004: 18–20) reconceptualizes La Malinche, mistress of Hernan Cortez who conquered the Aztecs, not as a second Eve who lost the Mexican paradise, but as the founder of a new people. The Mexican version of La Llorona involves a beautiful mestizo woman who has borne children out of wedlock to a Spaniard, and on hearing of his impending wedding, kills them all, then roams the streets and waterways, weeping. In the Aztec version, she is a pre-Conquest seer who predicts the fall of the empire, and similarly screams in anguish. Writer Sandra Cisneros (1992: 43–56) transforms her into a self-aware, feminist figure, whose cry is instead a laugh. Similar ambivalence characterizes the traditional and popular culture surrounding wholly invented characters such as Barbie. For many feminists, the Mattel doll represents the literal impossibility of Euro North American iconic femininity: no one is simultaneously that tall, blonde, wasp-waisted, longnecked, long-legged, and conical-breasted. Actual women’s and girls’ emulation of Barbie, and of other unachievable or unhealthy images, such as the anorexic, barely post-pubescent ‘‘heroin chic’’ models whose airbrushed photographs filled the women’s magazines of the late twentieth century, do nothing to advance women’s equality in Euro North American culture. However,

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children and adults who play with Barbie dolls are not constrained by the scripts offered to them by her manufacturers and promoters. Despite—or perhaps because of—what sociologist Mary F. Rogers calls Barbie’s ‘‘emphatic femininity,’’ her plastic body now accommodates queer sexualities, anti-bourgeoisie sensibilities, and other alternative possibilities. Art historian and lesbian activist Erica Rand argues that Barbie play—and work—by both adults and children can alternate between straight and queer readings. Like the actual humans who sustain an interest in her, Barbie is never wholly reducible to a simple, unified sexuality. Contemporary artists have conceptualized and developed Lesbian Barbie, who is invisible; Totally Out Barbie, who ‘‘wears a leather jacket, freedom rings, pink triangle, and a woman-symbol earring, highly visible given her short hair’’; and preoperative transsexual Kendra, ‘‘a dyke trapped in the body of a dreamboat’’ (1995: 159). Rand argues that such ‘‘Barbie subversion’’ is begged by the manufacturers’ and marketers’ silences about who/what the doll really is, making her an excellent vehicle for social criticism. Mattel’s strategy of naming of Barbies after their clothes, accessories, and lifestyles has spawned numerous items of sardonic Internet-circulated humor. One widely distributed example promises, ‘‘At long last here are some NEW Barbie dolls to coincide with her and OUR aging gracefully’’ and includes: Bifocals Barbie. Comes with her own set of blended-lens fashion frames in six wild colors (half-frames too!), neck chain, and large-print editions of Vogue and Martha Stewart Living. Hot Flash Barbie. Press Barbie’s bellybutton and watch her face turn beet red while tiny drops of perspiration appear on her forehead. Comes with hand-held fan and tiny tissues. Bunion Barbie. Years of disco dancing in stiletto heels have definitely taken their toll on Barbie’s dainty arched feet. Soothe her sores with the pumice stone and plasters, then slip on soft terry mules. No-More-Wrinkles Barbie. Erase those pesky crow’s feet and lip lines with a tube of Skin Sparkle-Spackle from Barbie’s own line of exclusive age-blasting cosmetics. Mid-Life Crisis Barbie. It’s time to ditch Ken. Barbie needs a change, and Alonzo (her personal trainer) is just what the doctor ordered, along with Prozac. They’re hopping in her new red Miata and heading up to the Napa Valley to open a B and B [bed-and-breakfast inn]. Includes a real tape of ‘‘Breaking Up is Hard To Do.’’ Postmenopausal Barbie. This Barbie wets her pants when she sneezes, forgets where she puts things, and cries a lot. She is sick and tired of Ken sitting on the couch watching the tube, clicking through the channels. Comes with Depends [a brand of adult diapers] and Kleenex. As a bonus this year, the book Getting In Touch With Your Inner Self is included (e-mail communication).

Despite second-wave feminist assertions that women could not see themselves in Barbie, but could only try to be like her, women of the feminist third wave are recreating her in their own images. Their ambivalence about Barbie and, crucially, about their own lives finds expression in this popular culture, as it does in other folklore about women.

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For lesbian, bisexual, and queer women, finding themselves in traditional and popular culture can be difficult and problematic. Films, for example, too often make lesbianism entirely invisible or represent lesbian women as ‘‘killer dykes’’ or hypersexualized predators. Many, then, create their own traditions to develop and claim community. Even before the recent legalization in Massachusetts, California, and Canada of same-sex marriage, commitment ceremonies have been popular in North America. Drawing upon various religious customs, but rewriting them or inventing new traditions, these ceremonies can alternately claim equivalence with heterosexual marriage rites and queer them entirely. Either way, they disrupt the conventional folklore about women. Women find other ways to express their presence and to contest patriarchal views. Many speak directly about their own experiences in oral histories. Sometimes the discussion and presentation of oral history is part of community culture and knowledge. Canadian First Nations elders frequently use stories about their own lives and experiences as part of the teaching of culture and history to younger people. Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned, three Yukon Native elders, collaborated with anthropologist Julie Cruikshank to publish Life Lived Like a Story. They included stories from the past as well as mythical tales, peopled by many women: Good Luck Lady, Game Mother, The Stolen Woman, The Woman Who Was Thrown Away, the women’s female relatives—mothers, grandmothers, ‘‘Mrs. Dickson’s Aunt’’—as well as themselves. Angela Sidney remembered a story from her childhood about ‘‘The Old Woman under the World’’: There are two old ladies down below who look after the world. One is supposed to be sleeping. The other holds up the Earth with a pole. When she shakes it, that’s when there’s supposed to be an earthquake. That old lady there with the pole is supposed to be Death. She always argues—she’s the one who always says, ‘‘Let people sleep for good when they go to sleep, Let them die.’’ That Death Woman wants to kill people before their time. But Sleep Woman says, ‘‘No! Can’t you see how my boss put a good pillow for me to sleep on? And you want me to let her go to sleep for good? No. No—I won’t do that.’’ Those two old ladies. One is Sleep Woman, the other is Death Woman (Cruikshank 1990: 74).

The women in these First Nations stories are not secondary characters, and they are certainly not the limited creatures Thiselton-Dyer implies. They demonstrate and exemplify (as do the other characters in the stories) both proper and improper behavior. Cree women’s reminiscences and personal stories about their daily lives are recorded in Freda Ahenakew and H. C. Wolfart’s Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words. They discuss in great detail everything from encounters with bears to household chores.

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Clearly, not all folklore about women is untrue. Nevertheless, misogynist traditions—true, false, or somewhere in between—abound. For example, Francis Colbert of Job’s Cove, Conception Bay, Newfoundland, often recited ‘‘St. Peter at the Gate’’ at local weddings. This text, about a wife and husband requesting admission to heaven, exemplifies the idea that folklore about women serves to accentuate gender differences: Now, the woman was long, she was lank, she was thin, and she had a scraggly beard growed on her chin. But the man was short and plump and stout and his features were built so he was rounded out (Wareham 1976: 208–211).

The male talkers (the husband and St. Peter) always think before they speak; the sole female speaker, the wife, who takes the majority of the recitation’s lines, has a single, almost uninterrupted monologue. Ultimately, good and bad, first and last, heaven and hell are reversed to the husband’s benefit and the wife’s detriment. He gets into heaven. St. Peter says: ‘‘Thirty years with that woman there, no wonder the man hasn’t got any hair. Smoking is bad, cursing is not good, well, he smoked and he cursed, I should say he would. Thirty years with a tongue so sharp. Say, Angel Gabriel, give him a harp, Give him a harp with golden strings and pass in, good sir, where the angels sing. See that on the finest of foods he feeds, he’s had about all the hell that he needs, Doesn’t seem the right thing to do to roast him on Earth and hereafter, too.’’ (ibid.).

In contrast, the wife goes ‘‘down below’’; St. Peter sends her to hell not only because she usurped the position of control in the marriage but also because she dared to criticize the saint himself. It cannot be entirely coincidental that this is a wedding recitation; it presents some clear indications as to wives’ ideal behaviors: submissive, husband-pleasing cooks who should be uncritical, and, above all, silent. Not all traditional culture that implicates women is as retrogressive as the previous example. Though transgenderism may seem a relatively new phenomenon to Euro North Americans, historians have discovered that for several centuries individuals have crossed sex/gender boundaries. Women often dressed as men in order to have access to male work. Histories and traditions alike have celebrated (and sometimes ridiculed) such women. Perhaps the most famous cross-dressing historic military figure to Euro North Americans was Joan of Arc, who led French troops to victory over the English and was eventually burned at the stake. But she was certainly not the first, nor the last, such woman. Historian Lauren Cook Burgess estimates that 400 women served in the U.S. Civil War, dressing and being treated as men. Women who dressed as men in search of adventure, work, or love also became the subjects of broadside ballads, disseminated originally in print in

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Britain and later transmitted through oral tradition in many parts of Anglo North America. The song ‘‘The Soldier Maid’’ is a good example: Oh what a pretty maid in my time I have been, They forced me from my parents, a soldier I became, They forced me from my parents and certainly I’m undone.. . . . . . My officer he taught me a stately man to be, The soldiers all admired me, my fingers were so small, And they learned me to beat upon the drum the best of all. Oh when I went to my quarters the night time for to spend I was not ashamed for to lie among the men, And hauling off my small clothes to myself I ofttimes smiled, A-lying with the soldiers a maid all the while. Oh many were the battles that I fought upon the field, And many a brave fellow was forced from me to yield, I was guarded by my general for fear I would be slain.. . . Then they sent me over to London to take charge of the tower, I never was discovered until that day and hour, When a lady fell in love with me I told her I was a maid, And straight unto my regiment my secrets were betrayed. Then up steps the officer, he made no more to-do, He asked me the questions, I answered him quite true. He laughed at the joke and he smiled as he said: ‘It’s a pity we should lose such a drummer as a maid.’ .. . . And if our King does want more men those Frenchmen to be slain, I will boldly stand with sword in hand and fight for him again (quoted in Greenhill and Tye 1997: 114–115).

This song, and most others featuring cross-dressed women, shows the protagonist as being particularly skilled at the male labor she performs. The best drummer, admired by all the soldiers, she is so valuable that the general guards her, not the reverse. The text also plays extensively with the sexual possibilities of the woman’s role: ‘‘undone’’—and thus, perhaps, fundamentally transformed—by her new experiences, she’s a maid though she sleeps with men every night, and is discovered only when another woman falls in love with her. These songs about adventurous women are particularly popular with female singers, both now and in the past. The only text from this genre that involves a man dressing as a woman, ‘‘The Shirt and the Apron,’’ has no such positive implications for the protagonist. A sailor is forced to wear a woman’s ‘‘shirt and apron’’ because they are the only ones available after he has been seduced and robbed of all his belongings, including his clothes, by a sex worker. He endures humiliation from his peers—unlike the crossdressed women, he is not disguised by his apparel, but is perfectly recognizable: The sailors saw me come on board those words to me did say, ‘‘Ah you poor old chap, you’ve lost your cap, since you’ve been gone that way.’’ ‘‘Is this the new spring fashion, Jack, the ladies got on shore,

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Where is the shop that’s selling it, or is there any more?’’ ‘‘O Jack, my boy,’’ the captain cry, ‘‘I thought you for Wigginstown! I know you could buy a better suit than that for fifty pounds’’ (Greenleaf and Mansfield 1933: 223)

However, he must also go back to sea because he can’t afford to return home without the money he had saved. Folklorist Margaret Mills has shown that Afghan folktales—even when told in conservative Muslim communities—involve sexual role-switching and even sex changes. ‘‘Men act like women in order to penetrate the private sphere to gain access to women, or involuntarily as victims of male aggression in the form of actual or threatened homosexual rape. By contrast, women most often act like men to gain mobility in the outside world, both to avoid sexual contact and to rescue family members (mostly male) who are confined or incapacitated’’ (in Jordan and Kalcik 1985: 195). Tales in which sex changes occur are much more ambivalent. Men’s stories about women who undergo sex change see it as her reward; women’s stories make the sex change instead a stigma. Presumptions about women form much of the folklore about women. Recent feminist critiques have noted the ways in which even feminist movements have presumed whiteness, ability, heterosexuality, middle class, and a host of other characteristics in the women they describe. Yet increasingly, even within the Euro North American context, considerations of African American and African Canadian women, Chicanas, Aboriginal and First Nations women, women with disabilities, older women, girls, women whose first language is not English, and a host of other marginalized groups are gaining attention. Time and time again, folklore about women returns to the obsession with distinguishing them from men. The qualities associated with women and men, particularly in Euro North American societies, tend to be polarized into binary oppositions. It is sometimes difficult to remember that women and men have much more in common than in differentiation, and that the biological and cultural possibilities of each are by no means exhausted by the two categories. The scientistic mythology of recent trends in sociobiology, for example, built around purportedly cross-species differences between male and female animals, produces a multitude of nonsensical constructions from duck rape and cockroach rape to the cross-cultural presumption of male supremacy even in species where females choose their reproductive partners, rear their young separately, hunt, and show other forms of control. As always, traditional and popular culture—folklore—is not limited to any particular group of people, but crosses cultures, classes, and sexes/genders. See also: Ballad; Barbie Doll; Cross-Dressing; Feminisms; First Nations of North America; Folktale; Gossip; Housekeeping; La Llorona; Lesbian Folklore; Lesbian and Queer Studies; Nature/Culture; Old Wives’ Tales; Oral History; Personal-Experience Narrative; Transgender Folklore; Virgin of Guadalupe; Veiling; Witchcraft, Historical; Wicca and Neo-Paganism; Women’s Folklore; Women’s Movement. References Abu-Lughod, Lila. ‘‘A Community of Secrets: The Separate World of Bedouin Women.’’ Signs 10 (1985): 637–657. Ahenakew, Freda, and H. C. Wolfart. Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words. Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1992.

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Babcock, Barbara. ‘‘Taking Liberties, Writing from the Margins, and Doing It with a Difference.’’ Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 390–411. Burgess, Lauren Cook, ed. An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman alias Pvt. Lyons Wakeman. Pasadena, MD: Minerva Center, 1994. Cisneros, Sandra. ‘‘Woman Hollering Creek.’’ In Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1992. Coffin, Tristram Potter. The Female Hero in Folklore and Legend. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Cruikshank, Julie. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Reissue edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1989 [1953]. Farrer, Claire R., ed. Women and Folklore: Images and Genres. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1975. Greenhill, Pauline, and Diane Tye, eds. Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Greenleaf, Elisabeth Bristol, and Grace Yarrow Mansfield. Ballads and Sea Songs of Newfoundland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. Herrera-Sobek, Maria. ‘‘Social Protest, Folklore, and Feminist Ideology in Chicana Prose and Poetry.’’ In Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory: Collected Essays, ed. Cathy Lynn Preston, 102–166. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. Hollis, Susan Tower, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, eds. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Jordan, Rosan, and Susan J. Kalcik, eds. Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Langlois, Janet L. ‘‘Mothers’ Double Talk.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 80–97. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Magliocco, Sabina, ed. ‘‘Special issue: Wicca.’’ Ethnologies, vol. 20, no. 1 (1998). Mathieu, Jocelyne, ed. ‘‘Special issue: Femmes et Traditions/Women and Tradition.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien 15, no. 2 (1993). Mora, Pat. ‘‘To Big Mary From an Ex-Catholic.’’ Borders. Houston: Arte P ublico, 1986. Rand, Erica. Barbie’s Queer Accessories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Rogers, Mary F. Barbie Culture. London: SAGE Publications, 1999. Szwed, John. ‘‘Gossip, Drinking, and Social Control: Consensus and Communication in a Newfoundland Parish.’’ Ethnology 5 (1966): 34–41. Tafolla, Carmen. ‘‘La Malinche.’’ In Sonnets and Salsa. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2004. Thiselton-Dyer, T. F. Folk-Lore of Women. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1906. Thomas, Jeannie Banks. Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Tye, Diane. ‘‘Narrative, Gender, and Marginality: The Case Study of Ella Lauchner Smith.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 13, no. 2 (1991): 25–36. Wareham, Wilfred. ‘‘The Monologue in Newfoundland.’’ In The Blasty Bough, ed. Clyde Rose. Portugal Cove, St. Philip’s, NL: Breakwater Books, 1976. Weigle, Marta. Spiders and Spinsters: Women and Mythology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Pauline Greenhill

Folklore of Subversion Folklore is an accessible tool of subversion because the vernacular— common knowledge—belongs to the people. Folk art forms do not require special training or certification from outside the community. They do not require special equipment and expense. Profoundly accessible, folk arts and folklore are critical tools for disrupting, challenging, and resisting powerful social systems and social injustice.

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The performance of folktales, proverbs, jokes, songs, and life stories embodies and transmits cultural traditions and values. These traditions represent a body of shared understandings to which people are intellectually and emotionally committed. However, because folk genres are accessible, fluid, and used contextually, individuals and groups can use them to reformulate cultural notions to comment critically and persuasively on social life. This freedom is significant for both social theory and social change because folk-expressive traditions—drawing on societal knowledge and used spontaneously and creatively by individuals—provide sites at the intersection of culture and human agency. For women, folk arts have been especially important because women traditionally have had far fewer avenues than men for expression and participation in the public sphere. In many cultures, women and girls have less access to education than do men and boys and may not be able to read and write, but they still produce material culture, oral cultural, dance, and ritual. Through their cultural expressive traditions, women define alternative social ideas and knowledge, articulate opposition to social injustice, and give voice to their creativity and aesthetic values. Even when done from a relatively disempowered position, this resistance is an exercise of power in the social construction of meaning. Culture is not a fixed, unified, or clearly bounded whole, but rather is part of an ongoing process of revision and negotiation. Through their expressive culture, and despite various constraints, women actively participate in this process to produce culture and social knowledge. Thus, culture often involves subversion, which can be understood in several ways. First, women have used their folk genres to define an alternative cultural space and to critique and subvert patriarchal gender relations. Second, women have used their traditions to subvert oppression against other identity groups to which they belong. Third, women’s subversive use of folk practices is sometimes a coded or individual struggle for recognition or change in the face of oppressive gender relations. Finally, some theoretical issues are especially relevant: How do we know to what degree subversive intent lies within a text or in a particular performance in context? To what degree is subversion unconscious or conscious on the part of the performer? Are these subversions of dominant ideology an effective exercise of power? Here, gender is understood as the social construction of sex. That is, ‘‘woman’’ does not refer to an essential or universal experience, but rather to the cultural ideas and roles that are ascribed to female persons. Therefore, women’s culture refers to the body of ideas and social practices within women’s spheres of social life. Almost always, within a particular culture the position of women is not only different that that of men, but is characterized by a subordinate position within a male-dominated social order. Through their expressive culture, women challenge and subvert these oppressive power relations; they give voice to their experience, knowledge, and personhood. For women, sharing stories and personal-experience narratives may be a means of mutual affirmation and mutual recognition that reflects the

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experience of being gendered—that is, being situated as female within a particular society. For example, in North America in the 1960s, women’s consciousness-raising groups created a space for women to share their stories in order to collectively examine their experiences and identify how they were constrained and defined by the gender system. The personal became political. When women meet and present a worldview that they know is contradictory to men’s, it can be seen as an act of rebellion and subversion. In many cultures, women have their own expressive genres through which they comment on their lives in all-women settings. In Turkmenistan, a vast repertoire of women’s genres—girls’ songs, wedding songs, fortune-telling songs, lullabies, and lamentations—are a means through which women voice their experiences, pain, and dreams. In many societies, including some in Ireland, Greece, New Guinea, and India, women perform distinct genres of oral lament poetry that are often critical of male domination and vent anger at the person who died as well as people in power and the lamenter’s relatives. In Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China, women produced a body of literature in their own written language that is illegible to men although this language is increasingly disused and may die out with the current generation. Women in the Adirondack region of New York State, left out of many of the rituals of hunting culture, organize together, and engage in humorous, subversive discourse that critiques men. These forms of women’s expression may serve to channel anger, sorrow, and trauma in ways that offer a strategy for dealing with life’s hardships. For example, Paxtun women in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan share lament narratives with a distinct aesthetic in all-women gatherings. In these tales, women relate personal experiences of suffering and loss, as well as injustice and angry protest. They evaluate the narratives by their degree of pathos: a good story ‘‘makes you cry until you don’t want to hear more.’’ While they may not like their situation, these women are able to create a realm where they validate and value each other. The folktales of South Indian women—especially rural, non-literate women—often express women’s experiences, and they are often stories of hardship. Several of these South Indian folktales are about stories themselves and affirm the need for stories to be told, suggesting women’s consciousness of this process. In Afghan and Persian folklore, the trope of woman as trickster is ambiguous. The image of women as deceptive and untrustworthy is highly negative and draws from the Qu’ranic story of Hava’s (Eve in the Judeo-Christian Bible) role in offering the Devil’s apple to Adam. However, particular narrators can use women’s trickster tales to portray female characters using their trickery as a form of power for the weak toward worthy outcomes and to support justice. Women’s subculture in the Rajasthan province of India encompasses women’s own oral genres performed in all-women contexts. Women discuss and joke about sex and tell elaborate stories that mock men. Stories, humor, and songs are important not only for their content, but also for the pleasure, comfort, and bonds resulting from communal laughter at shared experiences and perceptions.

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Women may discuss otherwise-taboo topics such as sexuality and being the subjects (not objects) of desire. In Iran, women’s genres of humorous games and stories, baziha, are shared at all-women gatherings on festive occasions and give expression to women’s sexuality and desire. In Morocco, the shikha is a woman artist who performs publicly at weddings and other festivities to audiences of both men and women. At these performances, norms about women, gender, and voice are transgressed as the female shikha focuses on sexual themes, affirms the sexual agency of women, and embraces a style characterized by sexually enticing body movements. While this transgression is valued as entertainment in certain settings, shikhas themselves are culturally constructed and socially marginalized as ‘‘loose women’’ because of this type of performance. Meanwhile, shikhas, typically from the poor economic class, gain financially from their performances. Shikha cultural expression indicates the agency of women and, further, that women do not joyfully and naturally acquiesce to the roles and constraints imposed on them by society. Women, in fact, critically analyze their social situations and engage, even from an often extremely disempowered position, in defining their identities, negotiating power relations, and shaping their societies. Gender relations are always complex. While women may critique men through their expressive traditions, they may simultaneously strive to preserve the honor of their households and the same men they criticize. Further, while men might be culturally defined as superior to women within a particular group, they might hold an oppressed position relative to other men within wider society. Also, it is necessary to recognize that women’s culture is not always subversive. Folkways may communicate messages regarding how women should conform to their social roles and sometimes warn about the repercussions of violating cultural norms. However, clearly, throughout the world, women articulate their resistance to male dominance, present alternative social interpretations, and offer practical knowledge through folkways and cultural expressive traditions that are specific to various collectivities of women. While folklorists have increasingly examined these traditions over the past thirty years, they have remained largely ignored or unrecognized by laypersons and scholars alike. Identity is complex. Women’s gendered identities intersect and overlap with other socially constructed identities of race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, and politics, all of which encode power relations. That is, some racial, ethnic, religious, or other identities are privileged in relation to others, and cultural knowledge includes awareness of these power differences. Through their expressive culture, women—often in alliance with men—may challenge cultural domination and political violence, or interrogate the constraints of class and changes in the dominant mode of production. Women in subordinate groups can be multiply marginalized and may use folklore to resist violence against their cultural group and/or sexual violence perpetrated in the context of racism and political violence. Maintaining cultural identity in the face of slavery, colonization, and assimilation is in itself subversive. Women’s cultural knowledge and practice is often critical to a group’s survival.

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Enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, while stripped of all material possessions, retained their systems of knowledge in their minds. While some of their knowledge—for example, regarding rice cultivation and blacksmithing—was valued and exploited by slave owners, most African knowledge was feared, dismissed, or actively quelled. To maintain an African-based identity and culture under the conditions of slavery and the prohibition of education was an act of subversion. African knowledge, beliefs, practices, and aesthetics that were retained formed a valuable resource for expressing identity, comfort, and coded communication—all of which can be seen as forms of resistance—during more than four centuries of violent dislocations, slavery, and subsequent oppression. Much of this knowledge was expressed or adapted through African American women’s folkways, including oral history and storytelling, religious traditions, quilting, needlepoint, basketweaving, herbalism, healing practices, and cooking. Thus, African American women’s folk arts are a critical part of the struggle for freedom and an affirmation of the existence and persistence of a valuable cultural heritage even in the diaspora of the aftermath of slavery. African American women’s expressive traditions were an intellectual resource that could be put to certain specific uses. For example, enslaved women’s quilts contained African symbolism, continuing the tradition in many African cultures where women encode secret symbols in textile design. Quilts were used by both enslaved and free women as coded communication during the abolition movement to stamp out the practice of slavery. Quilts intentionally draped over a porch railing might signify through their coded designs, legible only to insiders, that a particular home was a safe haven on the Underground Railroad, a social network that facilitated emigration from slave to free states. Based in large part on interviews with a Gullah quilter who was the descendent of slaves, Tobin and Dobard (1994) argue that some of this symbolism gave reference to a set of survival skills for enslaved people escaping to the North. For example, the pattern ‘‘Flying Geese’’ may have referred to geese whose conspicuous northern flight in the spring serves as a directional guide to those escaping. The pattern ‘‘Drunkard’s Path’’ may have indicated that it was important to travel in a non-linear and non-predictable pattern in order to elude capture by trackers. Cooking practices involved strategies for making do with scarce provisions. The less desirable parts of an animal, typically considered waste products, left for slaves—such as the intestines—were made more appealing with herbs from a small garden in the form of chitlins. To find a way in the face of slavery and social injustice is subversion. To make this way appealing is a folk art. In Chile in the 1970s and 1980s, lower middle-class, middle-aged women sewed applique tapestries, arpilleras, which depicted the loss of loved ones due to the political violence that killed tens of thousands under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet. The arpilleras were smuggled out of the country and sold to generate international awareness and raise money as part of these women’s ‘‘strategies to challenge fear, feed their children, engage in a new form of political activism, and of struggle against authoritarianism’’ (Agosin 1994: 12). This women-led movement relied on a women’s folkloric

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tradition to voice protest when men’s political protest was silenced by murder. Ironically, the lack of significance attributed to women and their sewing traditions allowed their political activism to develop with fewer political reprisals. Meanwhile, many found the practice of telling the story of the violation of their human rights, their loss, and their suffering through this artistic form in the community of other women affirming and comforting. In South Africa during the 1960s and 1970s, Xhosa oral historians and storytellers—typically male and telling in the courtyards—articulated resistance that was significant for motivating the anti-apartheid struggle. When the government’s National Party policies removed men by force from communities to migrant barracks, the absence of the courtyard dramatically constrained this form. Women, however, whose storytelling was associated with the kitchen and hearth, took up this role. Many women storytellers and oral historians performed narratives in order to comment critically on and call for resistance against social injustice. Resisting Poverty and Commercialization It is often hard to untangle the issues of class oppression from those of gender or cultural oppression. Often women have less economic power due to gender relations in the family and the occupational spheres that relegate them primarily to the home and out of public contexts. There is an ongoing debate regarding whether class oppression is enforced through racism or racism is simply class oppression in disguise. Clearly, however, women are able to comment critically on economic conditions and contravene economic constraints through their expressive traditions. Also, women’s folkways provide strategies for meeting needs and desires despite economic hardship. Further, the significance of women’s unpaid domestic work and family leadership for the economic well-being of the household may be the subject of folklore. In India, as in many parts of the world, power relations are inscribed in food and eating rituals, for example, where members of a household eat in order of their status. The idealized woman controls her appetite so there is more for others, and this ideal is portrayed throughout Indian folklore. This rationalizes the dismissal of women’s desire. In the low potter caste near Banaras in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, where they are often denied food for days by mothers and mother-in-laws, women tell folktales in which women satisfy their appetites in ways that fly in the face of convention—and are rewarded by the gods. As potter women have more freedom of movement than women in other castes, they also gather secretly to find ways to secure food for themselves. In Rangely, Maine, women developed a tradition of cloth doll-making through which they asserted a value system centered on the nurturance of children (Yocom 1993). This tradition, among other community activities, was passed on to daughters, and was the basis of the town’s annual children’s doll parade over a nearly twenty-year period. In the face of increasing commercialism, the women maintained their preference for cloth dolls and rejected the expense of commercial dolls that

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they also saw as inconsistent with their value of children’s well-being. They characterized Barbie as the kind of self-centered woman who would abuse her children, and the Cabbage Patch doll with its blank stare as similar to an abused child. Lower-middle-class and poor women decorate and embellish their homes through folk arts. During the 1960s and 1970s, one Polish-American woman engaged in a number of crafts, making crocheted bedspreads and braided wool rugs for the many members of her family. When shorts skirts were in style, she obtained wool for making braided rugs from 1940s calf-length wool skirts she bought at thrift shops for pennies. She crocheted inexpensive durable acrylic yarn to create colorful washable bedspreads. She crafted bedspreads by sewing together circles of scrap fabric which were gathered in the center to create a flower-like form, and then attached to a solid backing. Shortly before she died, she explained to her granddaughter that she would look in catalogues and desire products that she could not afford: ‘‘I made these things so that I could have beautiful things, too’’ (Satlowski, J., 1996). Some women’s stories comment on women’s folklore and folkways. These tales may be seen as reinforcing a gendered division of labor or constraints on women’s sexuality, such as the glorification of chastity. But they also speak to the significance of women’s labor, roles, and skills in the face of poverty and political violence against the family. A low-caste Indian woman tells a story about a king who asks the queen about the difference between himself and a peasant man. The queen answers his question by trading places with the peasant’s wife. Through her thrift and the skillful execution of her household tasks, such as meal preparation, the peasant thrives, and eventually becomes the king. Meanwhile, the king begins to lose everything through the slovenliness of the wife, until he becomes a peasant. This suggests that the identity of the king—including his greatness—is inextricably bound with that of his female partner. This story makes the invisible labor of a woman visible and demonstrates how her unpaid labor has material consequences for her family. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, women using their folkways as a means to achieve group and economic empowerment may be an intentional transnational process. For example, in southern Uganda, a not-for-profit program, Beads for Life, facilitates the sale of colorful beads handcrafted from paper by women. They are struggling with illness and loss of family members due to AIDS in the context of a long-standing civil war during which thousands of children have been kidnapped by militia and forced to become child soldiers. Through its Web site, http://www.beadsforlife.com, women in North America hold parties where the issues these women face are discussed and their beads are sold. Connie Regan-Blake, one of the leading storytellers of the storytelling renaissance that emerged in the United States in the 1970s, visited Uganda in 2007 to collaborate on projects and performances. Women’s folk traditions provide a means for them to connect across boundaries of region, race, class, and language, and to talk about their experience as women within their particular social context and a larger international political economy.

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Individuals may also encode feminist messages in their folk arts. The technical skills and aesthetics with which a particular woman executes her craft or performance may resist the drudgery, monotony, and objectification of repetitive utilitarian gendered work and give expression to the intelligence, creativity, and spirit of the individual. Conversely, women may resist domestic labor in a disguised form by professing their incompetence. Or, women may critique women’s work through their folktales. In the field of Cultural Studies, there has been a continuing trend away from seeing meaning as placed in the expressive work through the conscious intentions of its creator, an idea widely critiqued as the ‘‘intentionalist fallacy.’’ It is argued, for example, that authors—or performers—may unconsciously encode cultural meaning of which they are unaware into their texts. This theoretical trend has involved questioning the authority of the author who is seen as shaped by the cultural and ideological context within which she is situated, and the recognition of the power of the reader to take oppositional stances to dominant texts, such as classical literature or Hollywood films, and to use those texts in creative and diverse ways. Meanwhile, in Folklore Studies, there has been an opposite trend toward the recognition of the power of the folk artist to define meaning through the communicative act. Rather than cultural artifacts being classified and dissected in isolation from their context, the folk performer is brought more toward the center of, or even as a partner to, the analysis of discourse. The folk performer’s agency in and interpretation of what they do is emphasized. These different disciplinary trends reflect a common attempt to (1) interrogate the power relations differently encoded in the two disciplines traditionally, and (2) to see aesthetic expression as integrated within its economic, political, and social context. Meaning is seen less as a unitary object to be identified, but rather as a product of social interaction and negotiation among the creative producers, the cultural context, the performance or text, and its recipients. Because folklore encodes culture and because folklore can be used contextually in performance, the analysis of folklore gets at the intersection between culture and human agency. Studies of individual folk artists suggest that these artists bring their own aesthetics to bear in subverting cultural norms that idealize a unitary and essentialized ideal of women in their culture and subverting the monotony of domestic chores—while crafting their own identities and distinctive niches within their cultural group or even within the wider society. Pueblo potter Helen Cordero invented the Storyteller, which is the clay figure of a male storyteller surrounded by children who are sitting on his legs, climbing his body, or otherwise attached to him. This image represents the male role of telling the sacred stories that regenerate the culture. At the same time, however, Cordero spoke through her pottery, widely celebrated for its artistry, and taught Pueblo pottery to non-Pueblo society. That is, she represented her culture and generated culture in a way usually reserved for men. In fact, the permissibility of her work was much discussed and deliberated among the male elders of her community. Meanwhile, Cordero

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impacted Pueblo expressive traditions in lasting ways while gaining economic prosperity. In the early 1990s, an administrator at a major U.S. university participated in an art competition for the staff. At a time that the new chancellor introduced the concept of total quality management, she appropriated the university’s organizational chart, a familiar icon to the staff, and substituted male/female icons from the 1950s for the typical boxes used to represent people in the organizational charts. She identified who was male and female in those positions and the distribution portrayed nearly everyone at the lower end of the chart as female and those at the top as male. She also juxtaposed ‘‘public’’ quotes over ‘‘private’’ anonymous quotes she collected from various sources. The overall effect was to expose the difference between corporate rhetoric and practice, implying hypocrisy and casting doubt upon the university’s proclaimed altruistic intentions. She was permitted to make public statements that would not normally be tolerated from a university employee. She won the competition’s Most Popular and Best in the Show, two honors which the chancellor had to hand to her personally in a public ceremony. One of the few higher ranking female administrators at the university bought the piece for $250 and hung it in her office (Komar 1993). Women may subvert the pressures of and supposed insignificance of domesticity through coded resistance or, conversely, by honoring skillful domestic work and through competition. Women may claim incompetence at women’s chores in order to relieve themselves of them rather than directly refusing to do them. Some folktales describe women rewarded despite their incompetence at a particular chore, such as spinning. Other folktales describe women performing tasks disguised as males for their incompetent husbands and bringing prosperity to their families. These different expressive strategies all disrupt cultural notions of gendered work. Other folktales describe women performing their traditional tasks skillfully or maintaining chastity through their cleverness with the result that their previously peasant husbands trade places with kings. While such stories embrace and promote notions of gendered work, they ironically elevate women by making the making women’s otherwise invisible labor enormously visible and critical to the characters in the story. In North America, at a time when almost all middle-class women were homemakers, women coordinated their domestic chores, and also coordinated leisure time and compared skills. For example, in a Polish American community in Detroit during the 1950s, women did chores such as laundry on the same day of the week. In rural prairie towns in western Canada, women competed to see who would get their chores done first; the first one in the backyard to hang up the laundry was seen as the best housekeeper. These expressive strategies embrace cultural notions of gendered work, but provide ways for women to both work together to support each other and find camaraderie as well as to express and gain recognition for individual skill, adding elements of pleasure to what might otherwise be experienced as drudgery. Research on women’s subversive use of folk expressive traditions raises several theoretical tensions: the question regarding whether subversion can

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be unconscious, how subversive meaning may be relayed through the text or context of a particular performance, and to what degree subversive expression is in fact empowering or leads to social change. These involve larger issues regarding culture, meaning, and power. More research is required for a better understanding of these significant concepts. Feminist folklore scholarship is significant for social theory in that the research methodologies developed and the insights obtained from these issues can provide knowledge regarding gender, the social construction of meaning, and the negotiation of power relations. Intentionality Versus Unconscious Subversion Resistance can be constructed in many ways. Often the subversive content of folklore is coded—that is, not completely overt—allowing its creator plausible deniability because risk is always associated with challenging power. Sometimes this is a life and death risk, and other times the risk is more subtle and complex. For example, while institutionalized slavery was practiced in the United States, slave songs, quilts, and the rhythm of blacksmith hammering encoded information on safety and escaping to the North. During the 1970s, in a rural town in North Carolina, three women friends conducted elaborate pranks to bring general public embarrassment in two different instances where a man had abused one of their friends, in one case physically and in the second psychologically. The fact that they were the perpetrators of these pranks was never revealed to anyone, including their spouses or the friends who were abused, other than the researcher. Some have argued that coded resistance may even be unconscious on the part of the performer. For example, Linda Pershing (1993) describes a small quilting group that created a quilt as a surprise for one of its members who was not included in this particular project. The quilt with several panels depicted the popular Sunbonnet Sue, typically a figure of girl-child sweetness, doing actions that compromised the innocent image—for example, smoking, showering with Overall Bill, burning her bra, and pregnant in her wedding dress. While Pershing saw feminist subversion in this quilt, the quiltmakers protested that the quilt simply reflected an innocent prank directed at the quilter who was the recipient of the gift. Content Versus Context Increasingly, meaning is recognized to lie neither entirely within a story’s text nor within the intentionality of the performer. The tensions regarding where meaning lies and how it is negotiated are central to understanding how women use folklore in subversive ways. Professional feminist storytellers have reflected on how they have appropriated patriarchal stories for feminist purposes. Kay Stone (1993) and Susan Gordon (1993) describe their interpretations of and artistic choices in performing stories from the € Grimm brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmarchen. Gordon describes different settings in which she has told ‘‘The Handless Maiden,’’ how some listeners have responded, and how those responses have shaped her own insights

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about the tale. Both storytellers found and sought to share messages of strength, transformation, and healing in what have often been characterized as patriarchal stories of brutally victimized and punished heroines. Elizabeth Fine (1999) argues that Kentucky storyteller Beverly Carter-Sexton encoded resistance to male dominance and social commentary on Appalachian social relations in her telling of the ‘‘Lazy Jack’’ tale from the body of classic Jack Tales. How Effective is Subversion? Arguably, women’s subversive discourses actually preserve the status quo by providing a safety valve to release tensions that might otherwise get out of control, ultimately forcing a change in social relations. If subversion remains largely unconscious or unacknowledged, it may not exert much moral pressure. It is also often unclear whether the expression of protest or alternative perspectives leads to a change in power relations or social norms. Meaning is fluid, and it is not always clear if the meaning of a particular text or performance is, in fact, subversive. Texts typically have inherent ambiguities, opening them to alternative interpretations and uses by diverse audiences. Texts are multivocal. Even a performer’s own discussion of her work can be disputed as reflecting historical and cultural ideology in ways in which the creator is unaware. Culture is a dynamic negotiation of meaning in which the participants may not have equal power. Women are active in this process, which often requires subverting domination based on gender and heterosexism, and other times subverting domination toward both men and women in their cultural or economic groups. When women share their stories and experience, they are affirmed. While they may not like their situation, there is a realm where women recognize, validate, and value each other. While such a space might be seen only as a safety valve, these moments may help provide comfort in a way that promotes mental and even physical health during various personal or household challenges, hardship, or crises. Critical information that helps others survive may be exchanged in these settings. Even when they do not directly call for change, such performances do provide a place where women’s experience and perspective are privileged. This can be seen as a site of resistance and incipient protest. It speaks to the fact that people can remain free to interpret and define their experiences. Women have often been the preservers of culture and physical survival in the face of severe oppression or genocide. Women are more likely to physically survive political violence and genocide, as for example in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide there. The dismissal of women’s culture works to the advantage of their group when women are less scrutinized by authorities and therefore more able to carry on cultural traditions without punishment or death. In the south Siberian provinces of Khakassia and Tuva, during political and religious persecution, women shamans became increasingly prominent as they were less likely to be perceived as a threat to the authorities, which allowed for the preservation of some culture. Similarly, the home is

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more inscrutable than other arenas of social life. For African Americans, the home functioned as a critical site of resistance—characterized by safety, dignity, and an integrity of being—where women created a sanctuary from the harsh and life-threatening economic and political realities of racist oppression, ‘‘where all that truly matters in life took place’’ (hooks 1990). Individual women draw on this body of women’s culture in different ways, making daily choices regarding how to negotiate power and meaning in their lives. This may have some impact on their lives and be a resource for women to survive or even thrive. Thus, Raheja and Gold (1994) argue that women’s expressive traditions have ‘‘narrative potency’’—that is, they operate in the world and get results. See also: Class; Coding; Consciousness Raising; Dolls; Eve; Folk Art; Folk Music and Folksong; Folktale; Foodways; Gardens; Gender; Gullah Women’s Folklore; Joke; Lament; Lullaby; PersonalExperience Narrative; Politics; Pottery; Proverb; Quiltmaking; Race; Rugmaking; Sexuality; Sunbonnet Sue; Storytelling; Tradition; Violence; Wage Work; Women’s Work. Jessica Senehi References Agosin, Marjorie. Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Babcock, Barbara A. ‘‘‘At Home, No Womens are Storytellers’: Potteries, Stories, and Politics in Cochiti Pueblo.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 221–248. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Blackwell, Carol. Tradition and Society in Turkmenistan: Gender, Oral Culture and Song. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001. Bourke, Angela. ‘‘More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 160–182. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Coughran, Neema. ‘‘Fasts, Feasts, and the Slovenly Women: Strategies among North Indian Potter Women.’’ Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 57, no. 12 (1999): 257–274. Fine, Elizabeth. ‘‘‘Lazy Jack’: Coding and Contextualizing Resistance in Appalachian Women’s Narratives.’’ National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Journal, vol. 11, no. 3 (1999): 112–137. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Fuchs, Denise. Personal communication, 2005. Gordon, Susan. ‘‘The Powers of the Handless Maiden.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 252–288. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Grima, Benedicte. The Performance of Emotion among Paxtun Women: ‘‘The Misfortunes Which Have Befallen Me.’’ Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Hofmeyr, Isabel. ‘‘Not the Magic Talisman: Rethinking Oral Literature in South Africa.’’ World Literature Today, vol. 70, no. 1 (1996): 88–93. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990. Kapchan, Deborah A. ‘‘Moroccan Female Performers Defining the Social Body.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 107, no. 423 (1994): 82–105. Komar, Amy. Personal communication, June 5, 2003. Jassal, Smita Tewari. ‘‘Bhojpuri Songs, Women’s Work and Social Control in Northern India.’’ Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 30, no. 2 (2003): 159–206. Lanser, Susan S. ‘‘Burning Dinners: Subversions of Domesticity.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 36–53. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

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Liu, Fei-Wen. Women Who De-silence Themselves: Male-Illegible Literature (Nushu) and Female-Specific Songs (Nuge) in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China. PhD diss., Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University, 1997. McMahon, Felicia. ‘‘The Worst Piece of ‘Tale’: Flaunted ‘Hidden Transcripts’ in Women’s Play.’’ Play Theory & Research, vol. 1, no. 4 (1992): 251–258. Mills, Margaret A. ‘‘The Gender of the Trick: Female Tricksters and Male Narrators.’’ Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 60, no. 2 (2001): 237–258. Parks, Francis McMillan. Personal communication, November 28, 1994. Pershing, Linda. ‘‘‘She Really Wanted to Be Her Own Woman’: Scandalous Sunbonnet Sue.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 98– 125. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Radner, Joan Newlon, ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, and Ann Grodzins Gold. Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Ramanujan, A. K. ‘‘Toward a Counter-System: Women’s Tales.’’ In Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions, eds. Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, and Margaret A. Mills, 33–55. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Safa-Isfahani, Kaveh. ‘‘Female-Centered World Views in Iranian Culture: Symbolic Respresentations of Sexuality in Dramatic Games.’’ Signs, vol. 6, no. 1 (1980): 33–53. Satlowski, Genevieve. Personal communication, April 16, 1996. Satlowski, Jane. Personal communication, April 18, 1996. Senehi, Jessica. Fieldnotes, May 22, 1997. Stone, Kay F. ‘‘Burning Brightly: New Light from an Old Tale.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 289–306. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Stone, Kay, with Marvyne Jenoff and Susan Gordon. ‘‘Difficult Women in Folktales: Two Women, Two Stories.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye. 250–265. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Tobin, Jacqueline L., and Raymond C. Dobard. Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. New York: Anchor, 1999. Van Deusen, Kira. Singing Story, Healing Drum: Shamans and Storytellers of Turkic Siberia. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Wadley, Susan S. Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Yocom, Margaret R. ‘‘‘Awful Real’: Dolls and Development in Rangely, Maine.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 126–154. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Women Folklorists Women folklorists include all female persons trained in the academic practice of Folklore Studies (folkloristics), and, by some definitions, women who, while not having had formal training, nonetheless collect, analyze, theorize, or valorize traditional and popular culture. Not all women folklorists study women’s folklore, and not all those who study women’s folklore are women. Further, not all women folklorists are feminists and not all feminist folklorists are women. As in other academic areas, what many women—feminist or otherwise— bring to the study of folklore is what gender and science feminist scholar Evelyn Fox Keller calls ‘‘a feeling for the organism,’’ referring to the theory, methods, and analysis advanced by geneticist Barbara McClintock. Enlisting

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their ‘‘feeling for the organism’’ is part of how women folklorists—especially but not exclusively feminists—have redefined the field of Folklore and reconfigured its study in terms of personal identification with its subjects (human) and objects (texts of all kinds—material, social, verbal, musical, ritual, and so on). Women folklorists generally want to understand these subjects and objects as much as possible from the subjects’ and objects’ own perspectives. For example, feminist folklorist and anthropologist Ruth Bunzel, studying Pueblo pottery, did not just talk to potters about their techniques and designs; she apprenticed herself to them and learned how to make the pots herself. This kind of hands-on research technique gives scholars a deep, experiential understanding of creation, construction, and style. Part of their ‘‘feeling for the organism’’ comes from the fact that many women folklorists have been insiders in the cultures they study. Their perspective is already empathic in interpretation. Such researchers don’t want to be, nor do they claim to be, objective—in the sense of being distanced and/or unbiased—in their perspectives. Rather, they acknowledge their personal location and use it as a tool to engage directly with their material. Bias is always present in any work, but acknowledged bias can aid in comprehending why a scholar sees and interprets the world as she does. Understanding researcher subjectivity, then, is generally more important to women folklorists than attempting an objectivity that ultimately cannot be achieved. The value of many women folklorists’ work is in bringing both insider understanding and scholarly rigor to the analysis. As scholars, they exhibit what feminist anthropologist Donna Haraway calls ‘‘the privilege of partial perspective’’ (1988) in two senses. First, as individuals who are involved with and compelled by the people, events, and texts they study, they have special access to insider knowledge about them, and they approach that knowledge in a spirit of critical appreciation. Second, they recognize that their perspective is not and can never be complete; it is only one of many possible understandings of a group or genre. In sum, rather than suspending their own feelings and understandings, women folklorists often enlist them as essential parts of their theory and practice. Historically, women folklorists of all intellectual and scholarly backgrounds, but particularly those not formally trained in academic folkloristics, have been dismissed and belittled by the mainstream/malestream of the discipline. Women folklorists’ experiences in the academy have not always been happy ones; they have been derogated, dismissed, and diminished, often quite openly and directly (see for example Stekert 1987). However, thanks to the rise of feminist folkloristics in the 1970s, their work is now being reevaluated and their contributions recognized. At the American Folklore Society meeting in Austin, Texas, in 1972, women folklorists who recognized the need to turn concerted attention to women’s folklore and women’s folklife began to organize themselves in a caucus within the Society (the caucus eventually became the Women’s Section). Even before the second wave of feminism brought many women into colleges and universities, many studied, researched, and wrote as academic folklorists. Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)—an African American writer

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and fieldworker trained at Barnard College by anthropologists Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead—was a member of the Harlem Renaissance, a scholar, and social activist. Probably her best known folklore study is Mules and Men (1935), but she also worked as a journalist and wrote novels, the most famous being Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Her work, written clearly from the perspective of an insider, seeks to represent the perspectives and language of African Americans. It breaks the boundary between fiction writing, memoir, and folklore theory. Elsie Clews Parsons (1875–1941), a privileged White American folklorist, was also ‘‘an early feminist sociologist and pacifist who used her wealth, position, and intellect to champion social freedom and women’s rights’’ (Babcock 396). She used her personal wealth to support anthropological and folkloristic research, and was herself a prodigious and well-published researcher. However, it is only recently that folklorists have taken Parsons and her work seriously. Criticized by influential folklorist Richard Dorson for attempting unsuccessfully to emulate male scholarship in a ‘‘rigid and colorless’’ way (quoted in Babcock 397), Parsons was also the subject of revisionist work that inappropriately focused on her ‘‘personal life and eccentricities’’ (Joanne Mulcahy, quoted in ibid. 398) rather than on her scholarship. Edith Fowke (1913–1996) researched Canadian folklore. From her earliest involvement with traditional and popular culture, she maintained a dialogue with the intellectual and social currents of her time, but felt she never achieved the recognition and status she deserved. She saw her intellectual practice as meriting the status of a ‘‘professional’’ folklorist; in the United States particularly, being a professional was the ideal of the discipline. She was a prodigious collector and publisher of an extraordinary range of folklore materials from folksongs and ballads to children’s lore, and she authored a variety of scholarly books and articles. Nevertheless, she was rejected by academic folklorists as a popularizer, abhorred some forms of theorizing in the discipline, and despite her call for tolerance and openmindedness, held many apparently unshakeable views about the centrality of Anglo culture in Canada and the need for folklorists to concentrate their efforts on textual materials only. Feminist folklorist Pauline Greenhill has called Fowke a ‘‘paradox’’ for her ambiguous relationship to feminism, nationalism, and radical leftist politics. While Fowke was politically radical—too far left for parts of the socialist New Democratic Party of the 1940s to 1960s—she was academically conservative. Though she published labor songbooks (for example, Fowke and Glazer 1973), her analysis of labor, industrial, and protest song was limited and near-sighted. While she sought to become known as Canada’s premiere folklorist, she tried even harder to obtain recognition from folklorists in the United States, whom she regarded as constituting the discipline’s intellectual center. Finally, though Fowke described herself as a feminist, she rarely employed a women-focused perspective in her work. Greenhill concludes: ‘‘I don’t wish to suggest that Fowke was not radical, feminist, nor nationalist; I’m suggesting instead that the radical, feminist, and nationalist qualities that seemed to pervade her other activities do not seem to have made their way into her studies of traditional culture’’ (2003: 30).

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Women not academically trained in folkloristics whose contributions have recently been reevaluated include two Nova Scotian Canadians whose works have been assessed from feminist perspectives by feminist folklorist Diane Tye. Helen Creighton was a self-taught folklore collector whose studies encompassed, for example, First Nations, Gaelic, Scottish, and Acadian traditions; and songs, beliefs, magic, and folktales. Creighton herself was a believer in predestination; for example, she believed that being born with a caul made her lucky. The fact that she came from a historic Nova Scotian family—though her class status was often, but not always, higher than those from whom she collected—made her very much an insider; she was personally a nationalist and Nova Scotia booster. Though mainstream folklorists dismissed her as a little old lady, too prudish to use alcohol to get people to cooperate in her fieldwork, her eclectic collecting and publication and her appreciation for traditional culture are now considered valuable assets for a fieldworker. Tye comments that the ‘‘principles that underlie her work are as complex as those that motivate academic folklorists’’ (Tye 2005). Jean Heffernan, a local columnist for Springhill, Nova Scotia’s Amherst Daily News in the 1950s, was not the kind of writer usually perceived as a folklorist or ethnographer. Her work, though it describes a wide range of social and cultural activities in Springhill, is often dismissed as mere reportage. Yet Diane Tye convincingly argues not only that Heffernan’s intentions were ethnographic—cultural description—but also that exactly because she was not trained in the folkloristics of her time, she transcended many of its limitations. She recognized her community’s ethnic diversity, where other Canadian folklorists of the period might have limited their vision almost exclusively to Anglo materials. She considered industrial and workers’ traditions, rather than holding to the anti-modernist view then in academic vogue, which saw rural cultures as the true (and sometimes the only) folk societies. She looked at women’s activities well before they were understood as central to understanding cultures. And she understood popular traditions as ongoing parts of community life, not as dying vestiges of outdated notions. Women folklorists in Latino communities in the United States worked in the twentieth century to document the traditional cultures and customs of Latino communities in New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and Puerto Rico. Jovita Gonzalez de Mireles completed her master’s degree in Folklore at the University of Texas under the direction of J. Frank Dobie in 1930, published numerous essays in the journal of the Texas Folklore Society, and became president of the society. She wrote numerous articles on the folklore of south Texas and an historical novel, Caballero (1996). She lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, where she taught bilingual education. Other Tejana students of traditional culture whose work focused on the traditions of south Texas are Femina Guerra (1941a, 1941b), Soledad Perez (1951), and Rogelia Garcia (1970). In New Mexico, Cleofas M. Jaramillo was a founding member of the Santa Fe Folklore Society, while Aurora Lucero White Lea was deeply involved in the collection and classification of Latino regional folklore, as evidenced in her best-known books, The Folklore of New Mexico (1941) and Literary

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Folklore of the Hispanic Southwest (1953). Carmen Gertrudis Espinosa (1970) and Mela Sedillo (1935, 1937) also conducted their research in New Mexico. In Arizona, Luisa Espinel (1946) and Patricia Preciado Martin (1992) collected the traditional Spanish-language songs and lore of the region. Maria Herrera Sobek, author of The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (1993), did her work on the ballad form and on various other folk genres, including pastorelas (Christmas plays) and children’s folklore. The first anthology of Chicana folklorists, Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change (Cant u and Najera Ramirez 2002), was a significant step, but much remains to be done in the area of U.S. Latina Folklore Studies. Some Latina folklorists have worked in the public sector; such is the case of Brazilian Maria Carmen Gambliel in Idaho, and Mexican Olivia Cadaval and Chicana Alicia Gonzalez at the Smithsonian Institution. Noted women who value the traditional arts and foster the development of folklore projects in the Latino community include Carmen Febo-San Miguel, who runs the Taller Puertorique~ no Cultural Center in Philadelphia, and Graciela Sanchez, the director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio. Aside from the work of ethnomusicologists like Laura Larco, who has studied Peru’s folk music, and Brenda Romero, who explores both U.S. and Mexican musical traditions, little has been done to document the role of women in Latino folk music traditions. Since Zamora O’Shea in the 1930s, creative writers have also chronicled Latino folklore. Among their contemporary works are numerous publications on folklore geared for children by women like Chicana Pat Mora (2000, 2004) and Puerto Rice~ nas Marisa Montes (2000) and Carmen Bernier-Grand (2002). These women’s work, enriched because of their cultural insider’s perspective, attests to their commitment to the preservation of traditional cultural practices. Public Folklore in the United States has been extensively affected by women folklorists, who have been part of that field since its inception. Until recently, however, they were not recognized as folklorists. Most were in unofficial, unpaid, and generally unrecognized positions. Around the turn of the twentieth century and into the 1930s, much of their work was a combination of settlement and missionary work designed to uplift isolated rural communities or poverty-stricken urban areas. In the early years of the twentieth century, Massachusetts-born Olive Dame Campbell (1882–1954) worked with her husband, John, to document Appalachian culture in western North Carolina. She not only documented cultural traditions but also, most significantly, played an active role in making sure her own and others’ work was preserved and passed along via the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, still a going concern today. Dame Campbell established the school in memory of her husband and was instrumental in establishing its philosophy, based on the Scandinavian folk school model for adult education. A more academic but still socially motivated group of American women entered the field in the 1920s, including luminaries such as Zora Neale Hurston, whose fieldnotes concerning folksongs, games, tales, and beliefs are part of the archival holdings at the American Folklife Center at the Library

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of Congress. While Hurston was in Florida, Sidney Robertson Cowell (1903–1995) was documenting folksongs around the United States. Born in San Francisco, Cowell worked as a music educator in California, where she studied with composer Ernest Bloch and composer, theorist, performer, teacher, publisher, and impresario Henry Cowell. The director of the Social Music Program of the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side of New York, she also worked for ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger during the 1930s and collected folk music in Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. At the fourth National Folk Festival in 1938, she recorded Swedish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, and Finnish music performed by Chicagoans and Finnish, Gaelic, and Serbian music performed by Minnesotans. She also worked for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), one of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, to assist new immigrants in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. Later, in Washington, DC, Cowell crucially developed and sought funding for folksong collecting projects through arts organizations. In the late 1930s, she began to document folk music in California as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA); she and Eleanora Black published The Gold Rush Song Book in 1940. By the turn of the twenty-first century, women dominated Public Folklore positions in the United States. Significant contributions to public sector discourse and practice have been made by Winnie Lambrecht in Rhode Island, Alexandra Swaney in Montana, Andrea Graham in Nevada and South Dakota, Maida Owens in Louisiana, Tina Bucuvalas in Florida, Riki Saltzman in Iowa, Maria Carmen Gambliel in Idaho, Joyce Ice at the International Museum of Folk Art in Santa Fe, Betsy Peterson at the Fund for Folk Culture in New Mexico, Amy Skillman at the Institute for Cultural Partnerships in Pennsylvania, and Betty Belanus at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Their many accomplishments include publications, films, festivals, folk arts in education programs, radio shows, Web sites, and refugee arts initiatives and advocacy programs. Women folklorists have also long been involved with the establishment of not-for-profit folklife programs. With Bill Ferris, Judy Peiser founded the Center for Southern Folklore in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Jane Beck founded the Vermont Folklife Center; Betsy Peterson, Kay Turner, and Pat Jasper started Texas Folklife Resources; and Debora Kodish established the Philadelphia Folklore Project. In the early part of the twenty-first century, Amy Kitchener founded the Alliance for California Traditional Arts and Gwen Meister launched the Nebraska Folklife Network. Much of this activity could not have occurred without Bess Lomax Hawes, the first director (1977–1991) of the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) Folk Arts Program, now known as the Folk and Traditional Arts Program. Fondly known as ‘‘Bess’’ to her colleagues, she grew up in Texas with her father John Lomax, who with his brother, Alan, was among the first to document American folksongs as distinct from European forms and to regard seriously the folklore of working-class Americans. Hawes collaborated with them on Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads (1941) and on folksong transcriptions with Ruth Crawford Seeger. She later became part of New York City’s folksong revival as a member of the Almanac

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Singers. With Bessie Jones, she coauthored Step It Down (1972), a book about African American children’s games. Hawes began working for the Smithsonian in the mid-1970s. In what is probably her most influential role, Hawes worked during her long tenure at the NEA to firmly establish national and state Folklore Programs. When she retired in 1991, she had nearly achieved her goal of having a folk arts coordinator in place in every U.S. state. Hawes was also central, along with Nancy Hanks, in creating the NEA’s National Heritage fellowships, awarded annually to deserving folk and traditional artists around the United States. Nancy Sweezy, recipient of the NEA’s 2006 Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Advocacy award, began influencing the field by documenting and publicizing a pottery style favored in the South. In the 1950s, Sweezy, a New Englander and a potter herself, worked with Ralph Rinzler to start a craft program as part of the annual Newport Folk Festival. Also with Rinzler, and with weaver and National Heritage Fellow Norman Kennedy, she founded Country Roads, Inc., a not-for-profit organization committed to researching and marketing folk crafts. Sweezy moved to Seagrove, North Carolina, in 1968, where she started an apprenticeship program at Jugtown Pottery, improved its practices, and changed its marketing strategies. She wrote Raised in Clay: The Southern Folk Pottery Tradition (1984). In the 1980s, Sweezy, in concert with the International Institute of Boston, secured NEA funding to help large numbers of Southeast Asian refugees document their own traditions as they adjusted to life in the United States. The result was a series of still-ongoing festivals, workshops, exhibitions, apprenticeships, and school programs focusing on Cambodian, Lao, Hmong, and Vietnamese folk artists. Another woman central to American Public Folklore is Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklore Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress since 1999. Bulger has been a folksinger, Florida’s first State Folk Arts coordinator, administrator at the Bureau of Florida Folklife Programs, and director of folk arts at the Southern Arts Federation. Best known for documenting a variety of folk and traditional Florida artists, she is also coauthor with Tina Bucuvalas and Stetson Kennedy of South Florida Folklife (1994), the editor of Musical Roots of the South (1992), and the producer of Deep South Musical Roots Tour (1992) and Drop On Down in Florida (1981). During her time at the Library of Congress, she spearheaded the development and expansion of the Veterans’ History Project and created partnerships with state folk arts coordinators to bring traditional artists from across the United States to perform at the Library of Congress and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Public sector women folklorists demonstrate the ongoing connections that women have maintained in the field between activism and scholarship. Those links are also sustained by a growing number of American women academic folklorists who are gaining accolades and professional respect for their writing and teaching on a wide variety of methods, theories, traditions, and genres. Some women trained in folkloristics have become known beyond the discipline. Among them are Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author of Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in

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Poland, 1864–1939 (1977), now established in Performance Studies and in Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Rayna Green, editor of The Encyclopedia of the First Peoples of North America (2000), celebrated in anthropological circles for her insider knowledge of First Nations cultures as well as for her wry commentary upon White appropriation of it. A few individuals like Elli Kaija K€ ong€as Maranda, whose work with her husband, Pierre Maranda, resulted in numerous publications on Finnish and Finnish American folklore and structuralist theory, and Linda Degh, especially notable for her work on Hungarian and American legends, beliefs, and folktales, honed their feminist analysis in male-dominated Folklore Departments. At a time when far fewer women had academic positions, they were recognized for their theoretical sophistication and depth of cultural understanding. Many women pioneered particular areas of folklore research. For example, Karen Baldwin, author of Folk Arts and Folklife in and around Pitt County: A Handbook and Resource Guide (1990) and coeditor of Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today (1992), was among the first to understand and appreciate family folklore and to recognize the family as a cultural group that sustains but also develops its own traditions. But feminist folkloristics per se found its first official recognition in a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore (JAF 88, no. 347), published in 1975, edited by Claire R. Farrer, and republished in 1986 as Women and Folklore: Images and Genres. Farrer’s introduction established research on women as having a history as well as a future. Remarkably diverse—including work on new and old genres, and diverse groups, languages, and locales—the publication made Susan Kalcik, Inez Cardozo-Freeman, Beverly J. Stoeltje, and Kay F. Stone particularly, as well as Farrer herself, some of the official foremothers of feminist folkloristics in North America. Twelve years later, in 1987, another special issue of JAF, more boldly entitled Folklore and Feminism, showed how far research by and about women had come and again reflected a wide variety of study areas and genres. Particularly telling were works by Barbara Babcock, Debora Kodish, and Ellen J. Stekert that reflect upon women’s experiences conducting folkloristic research. The issue also included Joan N. Radner and Susan S. Lanser’s first iteration of their now enormously influential concept of feminist coding, as well as work by Marta Weigle, whose Spiders and Spinsters (1982) is arguably the first monograph in American feminist folkloristics. Other distinguished women who participated in the 1987 issue include Kay Turner, mentioned above, who brought feminist folkloristic perspectives to popular studies of women’s altars and later published on lesbian love letters and dream narratives; Margaret K. Brady, who worked with Navajo and Mormon peoples; Elaine J. Lawless, who developed the concept of ‘‘reciprocal ethnography,’’ a method by which she and her consultants’ interpretations meet in the written text they produce, explored the lives of women preachers in Holy Women, Wholly Women (1993), and became an editor of JAF; and Rachelle H. (Riki) Saltzman, mentioned above, who became a wellrespected public folklorist. A special issue of the Journal of Folklore Research, edited by Beverly J. Stoeltje, appeared in 1988 (JFR 25, no. 3) and

OVERVIEW ESSAYS lxvii

included work by Patricia Sawin on women in the Finnish epic Kalevala, as well as Stoeltje’s own studies on gender in the American rodeo. Contributors to the 1987 JAF issue, Susan Tower Hollis and M. Jane Young, with Linda Pershing, edited and contributed to a collection entitled Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore (1993), which also includes significant articles by Rayna Green, Debora Kodish, Amy Shuman, Margaret R. Yocom, Elaine Lawless, Robbie E. Davis-Floyd, and Judith Levin, among others. Pershing is also celebrated for her linking of feminist folkloristics with Peace Studies, as in her The Ribbon Around the Pentagon: Peace by Piecemakers (1996). Two other pivotal collections of essays by American women feminist academic folklorists are noteworthy. In 1985, Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik edited Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, which includes now-classic works by the editors as well as by Margaret R. Yocom, whose article reflects on women folklorists conducting fieldwork with other women; Susan Roach on quilting; Janet Langlois on serial killer Belle Gunness; Carol Mitchell on joke telling; and Margaret Mills—who had also written extensively on the trajectory of women and feminism in American folklorists—on sex, sexuality, and transgender in Afghan oral tradition. Underlining their importance as women folklorists, Stone and Baldwin also contributed to this special issue. Joan N. Radner’s Feminist Messages, published in 1993, includes a study by Polly Stewart on classic ballads, one by Angela Bourke on Irish women’s laments, and another by Cheryl L. Keyes on female rappers. Feminist folklorists Pershing, Yocom, Babcock, and Stone also contributed. Women folklorists were the first to directly apply notions of coding to the understanding of women’s culture. The concept of feminist coding has since been employed by theorists to examine a wide range of texts and practices, but has also been extended to lesbian, gay, and bisexual culture. Since the early 1990s, the numbers of women academics doing feminist folkloristics have increased tremendously; mentioning each one would be an impossibly giant task, worthy of a folktale heroine. Indeed, even trying to note the most significant women folklorist foremothers is daunting—and like older sisters in folktales, we have undoubtedly failed. The successful completion of such a task will require the most resourceful, capable, and quick-witted younger sister—not mere humans like ourselves! See also: Aesthetics; American Folklore Society—Women’s Section; Ballad; Feminisms; Festival; Fieldwork; Film; Folk Art; Folk Drama; Folklife; Folklore Feminists Communication; Folk Music and Folksong; Folktale; Immigration; Pottery; Public Folklore; Region: Canada; Region: Mexico; Region: United States; Tradition-Bearer; Women’s Folklore.  Pauline Greenhill, and Rachelle H. Saltzman Norma E. Cantu, References Abrahamian, Lavon, Nancy Sweezy, and Sam Sweezy, eds. Armenian Folk Arts, Culture, and Identity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. Babcock, Barbara A. ‘‘Taking Liberties, Writing from the Margins, and Doing It with a Difference.’’ Journal of American Folklore 398 (1987): 390–411. Bernier-Grand. Carmen T. Shake It, Morena!: And Other Folklore of Puerto Rico. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 2002.

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Black, Eleanora, and Sidney Robertson Cowell. The Gold Rush Song Book. San Francisco: Colt Press, 1940. Bucuvalas, Tina, Peggy Bulger, and Stetson Kennedy. South Florida Folklife (Folklife in the South Series). Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Bulger, Peggy, ed. Musical Roots of the South. Atlanta, GA: Southern Arts Federation, 1992. Bunzel, Ruth Leah. The Pueblo Potter: A Study of Creative Imagination in Primitive Art. New York: Dover Publications, 1972 [1929]. ———. Juan Bobo: Four Folktales from Puerto Rico. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Cabeza de Baca Gilbert, Fabiola. We Fed Them Cactus. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994 [1954]. Castro, Rafaela G. A Dictionary of Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals and Religious Practices of Mexican Americans. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, Inc., 2000. Cant u, Norma E., and Olga Najera Ramirez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. de Caro, F. A. ‘‘The Women’s Movement in A. F. S.: A Brief Chronology.’’ The Folklore Historian 1: 1–4 (1975). Espinel, Luisa. Canciones de Mi Padre: Spanish Folksongs from Southern Arizona. Tucson: University of Arizona, 1946. Espinosa, Carmen Gertrudis. Shawls, Crinolines, Filigree: The Dress and Adornment of the Women of New Mexico, 1739–1900. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1970. Farrer, Claire R. Women and Folklore: Images and Genres. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1986. Fowke, Edith. ‘‘A Personal Odyssey and Personal Prejudices.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, 39–48. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. ——— and Joe Glazer. Songs of Work and Protest. New York: Dover Publications, 1973. Garcia, Rogelia O. Dolores, Revilla, and Laredo (Three Sister Settlements). Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1970. Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘Radical? Feminist? Nationalist? The Canadian Paradox of Edith Fowke.’’ The Folklore Historian 20 (2003): 22–33. ——— and Diane Tye. Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Gonzalez de Mireles, Jovita. ‘‘Tales and Sons of the Texas–Mexicans.’’ In Man, Bird, and Beast, ed. J. Frank Dobie. 86–116. Austin: Texas Folklore Society, 1930a. ———. ‘‘Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties.’’ Master’s thesis, University of Texas, 1930b. ———. ‘‘Among My People.’’ In Tone the Bell Easy: Slave Songs, Mexican Tales, Treasure Lore, ed. J. Frank Dobie, 99–108. Austin: Texas Folklore Society, 1965 [1932]. ———. Dew on the Thorn, ed. Jose E. Lim on. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1997. Guerra, Fermina. ‘‘Mexican and Spanish Folklore and Incidents in Southeast Texas.’’ Master’s thesis, University of Texas, 1941a. ———. ‘‘Rancho Buena Vista: Its Ways of Life and Traditions.’’ In Texian Stomping Grounds, eds. J. Frank Dobie, Mody C. Boatright, and Harry H. Ransom, 59–77. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1967 [1941b]. Haraway, Donna. ‘‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.’’ Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599. Herrera-Sobek, Marı´a. The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. ———. Chicano Folklore: A Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. Hewitt, Mark, and Nancy Sweezy. The Potter’s Eye: Art and Tradition in North Carolina Pottery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Hollis, Susan Tower, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978 [1937]. ———. Mules and Men. New York: HarperCollins, 1990 [1935].

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Jaramillo, Cleofas M. Cuentos del Hogar/Spanish Fairy Tales. El Campo, TX: Citizen Press, 1939a. ———. The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes: Potajes sabrosos. Santa Fe, NM: Seton Village Press, 1981 [1939b]. ———. Shadows of the Past/Sombras del Pasado. Santa Fe, NM: Seton Village Press, 1941. ———. Romance of a Little Village Girl. San Antonio, TX: Naylor Co., 1945. Jordan, Rosan A., and Susan J. Kal cik, eds. Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985 Jones, Bessie, and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Keller, Evelyn Fox. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983. Lucero-White Lea, Aurora. The Folklore of New Mexico. Santa Fe, NM: Seton Village Press, 1941. ———. Literary Folklore of the Hispanic Southwest. San Antonio, TX: Naylor Co., 1953. Martin, Patricia Preciado. Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of MexicanAmerican Women. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. Montes, Marisa, and Joe Cepeda. Juan Bobo Goes to Work/Juan Bobo Busca Trabajo. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. Mora, Pat. House of Houses. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. ———. Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints. Boston: Beacon Press. 1999. Mora, Pat, and Domi (illustrator). La noche que se cay o la luna: Mito Maya. Berkeley, CA: Groundwood Press, 2000. Mora, Pat, and Domi (illustrator). La carrera del sapo y el venado. Berkeley, CA: Groundwood Press, 2004. Otero-Warren, Nina (Adelina). Old Spain in Our Southwest. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1936. Perez, Soledad. ‘‘Mexican Folklore from Austin, Texas.’’ In The Healer of Los Olmos and Other Mexican Lore, ed. Wilson Mathis Hudson, 71–127. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1951. Pershing, Linda. The Ribbon around the Pentagon: Peace by Piecemakers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. Radner, Joan Newlon, ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Sedillo, Mela. Mexican and New Mexican Folk Dances. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1935. Stekert, Ellen. ‘‘Autobiography of a Woman Folklorist.’’ Journal of American Folklore 398 (1987): 579–585. Stoeltje, Beverly J., ed. ‘‘Special Issue: Feminist Revisions in Folklore Studies.’’ Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 25, no. 3 (1988): 141–242. Sweezy, Nancy. Raised in Clay: The Southern Folk Pottery Tradition. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984. Tye, Diane. ‘‘‘A Very Lone Worker’: Women-Centred Thoughts on Helen Creighton’s Career as a Folklorist.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 15, no. 2 (1993): 107–117. ———. ‘‘Lessons from ‘Undisciplined’ Ethnography: The Case of Jean D. Heffernan.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, 49–64. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Weigle, Marta. Spiders and Spinsters: Women and Mythology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Zamora O’Shea, Elena, Leticia M. Garza Falcon, and Andres Tijerina. El Mesquite: A Story of the Early Spanish Settlements Between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000 [1935].

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A Abortion Abortion is the deliberate termination of a pregnancy. Throughout history and throughout the world, folklore and traditions addressing various means to ‘‘hasten the menses’’ have been informally transmitted from mother to daughter and from midwife or herb woman to community women. Abortion induced by herbs—tansy, pennyroyal, rue, and birthwort are wellknown abortive agents—or by physical manipulation is well documented in North American folklore, and was fairly common in early America. Techniques included herbal infusions, herbal drinks, bloodletting, and, later, drug formulations and mechanical devices. Today, many herbs used as abortifacients (means of inducing abortion) remain popular in the North American alternative health market, and countless urban/contemporary legends addressing the prevention of conception or the termination of pregnancy, from douching with Coca-Cola, Seven-Up, or an aspirin mixture, to jumping up and down, or taking a hot bath immediately after intercourse, remain in informal circulation. Until the nineteenth century, the law did not recognize a pregnancy until the stage of ‘‘quickening’’ (the first fetal movement perceived by a pregnant woman during the fourth or fifth month of gestation). Society and common law regarded a pre-quickening pregnancy only as a stoppage of regular menstruation, or ‘‘blocked’’ menses; terminating unwanted pregnancies (typically resulting from illicit and socially unacceptable relationships) was legal, although practiced on the margins of normative acceptability. Terminating a pregnancy after quickening was a common-law offense. By the mid-nineteenth century, abortion had shifted from a limited last resort to a common practice of U.S. women to regulate their own fertility and limit family size. Abortionists advertised their services in newspapers, and medical manuals commonly contained information about abortifacients. Historians estimate that one of every five pregnancies in mid-nineteenth-century America was aborted. In the 1820s–1840s, state legislatures began to place restrictions on who could perform abortions, but not necessarily on abortion procedures.

2 ABORTION

In practice, these measures were a move by the medical profession to co-opt the medical care of women and drive out of business midwives and other alternative practitioners, such as abortionists, herbalists, and midwives. In the years following the Civil War, the laws regarding abortion changed dramatically. Horatio Robinson Storer and the American Medical Association, in legislatures across the United States, sought to outlaw abortion at any stage of gestation for reasons related to standards of practice rather than to religion, as is commonly assumed. A majority of states prohibited abortions and established criminal penalties for both practitioners and patients. The 1873 Comstock laws (aimed primarily at pornography) prohibited selling or advertising any article or medicine that caused abortions. In 1869, the Roman Catholic Church also prohibited abortion under any circumstances. Despite the anti-abortion laws and legal decisions of the second half of the nineteenth century, abortion remained a common and available practice, although primarily an underground one. Every girl or woman knew what references to ‘‘female regularity’’ and a ‘‘perfect cure’’ meant; advertisers continued to offer preparations that guaranteed ‘‘regular menses’’; and doctors who performed abortions discreetly advertised their services. By the 1930s, anti-abortion laws were being actively enforced, and physicians providing abortion services were prosecuted. As prosecutions increased and contraceptive technologies and access to them improved (due in large part to the efforts of Margaret Sanger), abortion returned to its earlier marginalized social status as a ‘‘back alley’’ (and frequently dangerous) solution to an unwanted, unexpected pregnancy. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, prohibiting most restrictions on abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. Unlike any other Supreme Court decision in U.S. history, however, the legal right of a woman to choose abortion has been continuously challenged in the United States, usually on religious or moral grounds, for more than thirty years. The availability of abortion services has declined markedly in most regions of the country, primarily due to the fact that fewer medical schools are required to provide instruction. In 1996, 86 percent of all counties in the United States provided no abortion services, and 32 percent of all women aged fifteen to forty-four lived in those counties (http://www. plannedparenthood.org). The Supreme Court of Canada decided that antiabortion legislation was unconstitutional in 1988 on the grounds that ‘‘forcing a woman, by threat of criminal sanction, to carry a fetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations, is a profound interference with a woman’s body and thus a violation of her security of the person.’’ Since 1991, abortion in Canada has been treated like any other medical procedure (http://www.duhaime.org). See also: Folk Medicine; Herbs; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Midwifery; Politics; Pregnancy. References: Brodie, Janet Farrell. Contraception and Abortion in NineteenthCentury America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997; Duhaime.org. ‘‘Canadian Abortion Law.’’ http://www.duhaime.org/LegalResources/FamilyLaw/tabid/343/articleType/ ArticleView/articleId/27/Abortion-Law-in-Canada.aspx (accessed August 8, 2008); Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; Mohr, James C. Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of

ACTIVISM 3

National Policy, 1800–1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984; Planned Parenthood. ‘‘Medical Training for Abortion and Contraceptive Services.’’ http://www. plannedparenthood.org/pp2/portal/files/portal/medicalinfo/abortion/fact-abortion-train ing.xml (accessed March 16, 2005); Riddle, John M. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Amanda Carson Banks

Activism Activism generally refers to action or advocacy undertaken to effect social change. While activism has an overtly political motive, it frequently contains cultural and expressive components as well. Particularly when enacted in public, activism utilizes tradition and symbolism to promote its message. Tradition has often been seen as an obstacle to social transformation; however, groups and individuals seeking change—the labor, civil rights, antiwar, feminist, and environmental movements, for example—have effectively incorporated traditional and folkloric elements into their political actions. Participants share rituals, street performances, songs, and personal-experience narratives across movements and generations. The folksong is perhaps the best known of these traditional expressions. Women folk singers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Bernice Johnson Reagon played central roles in both the folk revival and the political movements of the 1960s. Similarly, songs such as ‘‘Which Side Are You On?’’ written by Florence Reese during a coal miners’ strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, became standards during demonstrations by a variety of groups, as did spirituals like ‘‘We Shall Overcome’’ and ‘‘We Shall Not Be Moved.’’ The folksong enabled social criticism while encouraging group participation. However, activism, like politics more broadly, is often seen as a masculine realm; many women have pointed to the sexism in social movements that values some aspects of activism, such as public speaking, while denigrating or ignoring others, such as office work—work typically performed by women. Some women have responded with ‘‘women only’’ groups or with political actions that use distinctly feminine forms of expression. In her essay ‘‘Peace Work out of Piecework: Feminist Needlework Metaphors and the Ribbon around the Pentagon,’’ Linda Pershing documents a group of women whose protests against nuclear armament utilized needlepoint, a traditional craft of women. In 1985, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 20,000 people encircled the Pentagon, the Capitol Building, and the Lincoln and Washington memorials with some fifteen miles of hand-sewn ribbons. Pershing argues that the women involved appraised the event less on its effect on military policy than on the satisfaction they gained from the group sewing process, perhaps suggesting a different way to examine and assess women’s activism. In addition to studying its traditional elements, some folklorists are involved in their own forms of activism, whether through scholarship or its application. Public folklorists in particular may find themselves in the

4 ADOPTION

political role of cultural preservation. However, there has been some controversy in Folklore Studies about the role of advocacy, with some arguing that folklorists should attempt to maintain an objective distance from their subject matter. Many feminist scholars argue, however, that this is neither possible nor desirable, and that the personal, political, and intellectual are inseparable. As Debora Kodish observes in her essay, ‘‘On Coming of Age in the Sixties,’’ the vote at the 1992 American Folklore Society’s annual meeting to oppose anti-gay initiative pending in Oregon exemplified the potential connections between social change and the discipline of Folklore. See also: Folk Music; Politics; Public Folklore; Tradition. References: Garland, Anne Witte. Women Activists: Challenging the Abuse of Power. New York: Feminist Press, 1988; Kodish, Debora. ‘‘On Coming of Age in the Sixties’’ Western Folklore 52 (Spring 1993): 193–207; Pershing, Linda. ‘‘Peace Work out of Piecework: Feminist Needlework Metaphors and the Ribbon around the Pentagon.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 327–57. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Audrey Vanderford Adoption Adoption is an alternative way to become a parent, or, from a baby’s, child’s, or, more rarely, adult’s perspective, to acquire parents other than one’s biological progenitors, and, with them, new family and other kin. Whether adoption is formalized by a particular culture’s laws or enacted as customary practice, it has long involved traditions and incorporation rites. All cultures have customs to socially create parental ties (normally defined by biology). Adoption tales abound in religion, legend, and folk narrative. For example, the biblical book of Exodus recounts Moses’s adoption by the Egyptian pharoah’s daughter after her father decreed that all first-born Hebrew boys be put to death. To save her baby brother’s life, Miriam placed Moses in a basket and set it in the Nile among the bulrushes. Pharoah’s daughter, who found the baby, raised him in her father’s court. Further, text from the book of Ruth is traditionally used in Jewish adoption ceremonies. Ruth, a non-Hebrew who wed Boaz, attached herself to Boaz’s mother Naomi after her first husband’s death and became the first convert to Judaism, saying, ‘‘Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.’’ This adult adoption-conversion story is critical to Jewish adoptions when non-Jewish children need to be incorporated as Jews as well as family members. For both Moses and Ruth, adoption was a choice as well as an obligation for all involved. In China and Japan, adoption has been a way for childless families—or those with daughters only—to acquire sons to pass on the family name. Poor relatives might allow their sons to be adopted by wealthier families, thus ensuring their children’s and extended family’s future. Adoptive parents might also acquire a son who could care for them in old age and maintain rituals for the ancestors. A similar, though less formalized, system in medieval Europe had the same purpose. Apprenticeships of young boys to master craftsmen provided occupational security. The masters would

ADOPTION 5

effectively become fathers to boys as young as seven or eight, whose apprenticeship lasted at least seven years. As least as far back as colonial times, First Nations peoples have had ritual adoption ceremonies to incorporate non-Aboriginals or people from other groups. Similarly, families with several children might often offer one to childless kin. No stigma was attached to the birth parents (as is often the attitude in Euro North American cultures); rather than relinquishing or giving up a child, the biological parents’ act was seen as generosity in sharing abundance. In the United States and Canada, from the mid-nineteenth century on, giving up a child for adoption was the preferred alternative for unwed mothers. Adopting made unpaid labor as well as an heir available to childless couples. Despite this economic necessity, orphans, especially those from unmarried mothers, were stigmatized as ‘‘bastards’’; the women and children, not the illegitimate fathers, were sanctioned for out-of-wedlock relations. Thus, upon adoption, children’s origins were usually concealed, even from themselves; only very recently have legal adoption records been opened to biological parents and children. With the opening of birth records, two motifs have dominated personalexperience narratives about adoption, which often appear in women’s magazines and daytime talk shows. One group of stories recounts searches for biological children and ‘‘real’’ parents that result in reunions of adopted children with their biological parents (rarely are failed searches or unhappy reunions reported). Others involve the reunion of adult twins separated at birth (usually with companion accounts of similar tastes, traits, and life choices). These stories serve to underline popular beliefs in biological determinism over cultural development. In the late twentieth century, the women’s movement and women’s greater economic freedom has destigmatized pregnancy for single women, particularly in Canada and the United States, making fewer babies available for adoption. These social processes have also fostered a trend toward purposeful single parenthood via adoption among the White middle class. Adoption also provides a route to motherhood for women in their thirties and forties who have focused on their careers rather than on finding partners and bearing children, as well as for gays and lesbians wanting to parent either individually or as committed couples. A rise in U.S. demand for babies has made international adoption an attractive alternative for both single and partnered middle-class Americans, and has contributed to contemporary traditions and practices. Americans show a marked preference for adopting girls. Though international adoption in the United States dates at least to the Korean War, the orphan airlift upon the 1975 departure of Americans from Vietnam marked the beginning of the institutionalized adoption of Southeast Asian children—especially girls with American fathers. China’s one-child policy, aimed at controlling its rapidly growing population, has created a pool of abandoned daughters, who are more frequently relinquished than boys in patriarchal cultures. China’s laws required that adoptive parents be over thirty-five; until the early twenty-first century, Chinese law did not prohibit single individuals from

6 AESTHETICS

adopting children. More recently, Americans have adopted children from Romania, Latin America, the Sudan, and Somalia in large numbers. Rumors of baby-buying and baby-selling in Cambodia and Guatemala have resulted in the shutdown of those nations’ adoption programs. International adoption is also replete with cautionary tales about non-certified social workers who claim to be legal adoption agents; obstacles in dealing with immigration and other authorities; in-country customs and cultural faux pas; medical horrors (malnutrition, unsanitary practices, or lack of medical care and resulting long-lasting health problems); and with narratives about the adoption experience (both positive and negative). An explosion of Internet Listservs puts adoptive parents—prospective and experienced—in touch with one another. Through electronic communication, rituals related to adoption have become increasingly traditional and cut across cultures. Traditions include ‘‘forever family’’ customs that honor the culture of biological parents (such as Buddhist altars, spirit houses, New Year’s celebrations, performing arts, visual arts, and literature) and ‘‘gotcha days’’ celebrating the date upon which the child was adopted. Also known as ‘‘airplane day’’ or ‘‘family day,’’ the latter celebration can be marked by longing for absent birth parents. Remembrances can include life books, baby albums that show the child’s life history before and after adoption. Culture camps, dance, and culture classes have proliferated, forming the structural underpinnings for emergent forms of modern adoption lore. See also: Naming Practices; Ritual. References: Andrews, Jan, and Simon Ng. ‘‘The Pincoya’s Child.’’ In Out of the Everywhere: New Tales for Canada, 35–42. Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2000; Bierhorst, John, and Mary K. Okheena, eds. The Dancing Fox: Arctic Folktales. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997; Eldridge, Sherrie. Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew. New York: Dell Publishing, 1999; Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. (Audiotape). Warming the Stone Child: Myths and Stories about Abandonment and the Unmothered Child. Boulder, CO: Sounds True Recordings, 1990; Hazelton, Hugh, ed. ~ ‘‘Nucu the Worm.’’ In Jade and Iron: Latin American Tales from Two Cultures, retold by J€ urgen Riester, trans. Patricia Aldana, 19–20. Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1996; MacLeod, Jean, and Sheena Macrae. Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections. Warren, NJ: EMK Press, 2006; O’Malley, Beth. LifeBooks: Creating a Treasure for the Adopted Child. Winthrop, MA: Adoption-Works Press, 2000; Saltzman, Rachelle H. ‘‘Incorporation Rituals: Naming Ceremonies.’’ C.A.R.T.S. (Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students) Newsletter. New York: City Lore, vol. 4 (2000): 8.

Rachelle H. Saltzman Aesthetics Aesthetics—defined here as a set of formal criteria that separates art from craft, and art from life experience—was strongly influenced by eighteenthcentury European attitudes. Historically, aesthetics has been applied to facilitate the appreciation of the beauty of an art object by understanding the artist’s technical skills and artistic intent. During the period known as the Enlightenment, formal principles governing taste, originality, and aesthetic judgment became determinants of artistic excellence and quality. They were exclusively focused on the art object, thus negating the influence of local

AESTHETICS 7

sociocultural contexts and changing ideologies of beauty. Enlightenment aesthetics spawned a distinctive cultural consciousness that continues to support an elite art world of fine-arts museums, galleries, academic art institutions, dealers, connoisseurs, critics, and scholars. Such consciousness engenders and maintains a number of evaluative concepts that are foreign to the appreciation of the folk arts and perpetuate the marginalization of women’s art work: the concepts of artistic genius, the uniqueness of the art object, the primacy of self-expression and innovation, ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ art’s transcendence, and aesthetic autonomy. By universalizing artistic qualities across space and time, attitudes privileging aesthetic autonomy tend to nullify or ignore cultural and gender differences while supporting exclusionary practices of the art establishment and promoting ‘‘great works of art.’’ The discipline of folkloristics demands that when investigating the arts of folk cultures, all aspects of the art context (including the creative process) are examined in order to understand their symbolic frameworks and integration into other parts of cultural life. The study of individual folk artists also includes their social and biographical circumstances. Thus, the application and understanding of folk aesthetics encompasses an appraisal of individualistic and idiosyncratic elements mediated by standards already recognized within their local communities. Folk aesthetics (ethnoaesthetics) pertain to a ‘‘micro-level’’ of artistry at the local, community, and regional levels—an ‘‘aesthetics of experience’’ based on local ways of being creative. An internal (insider) understanding of ethnoaesthetics is shared by its producers and audience based on identity, knowledge of technical skills, the intricacy and amount of work involved, shared design concepts, and local judgments about what constitutes interesting themes. A local system of aesthetics dispenses with universals in favor of specific groups’ criteria for judging the excellence and value of their own artwork. In Joyce Ice’s (1993) study of aesthetics and women’s quilting groups, she emphasizes the social considerations of reaching consensus about pattern choice, color, stitching, etc., as part of the process of shared artistic decision-making. Thus, the quilt is both the social and aesthetic product of this creative process. The resultant value judgments become the yardstick by which creativity, symbolic action, and the power inherent in making art are measured. Its dimensions are determined by the traditions embedded in the local aesthetic system, which are collectively validated and refined by the artists themselves. Such locally agreed-upon standards shape artistic decisions by either commanding conformity or by setting boundaries to be transgressed. Feminist perspectives on aesthetics are critically attentive to forms of women’s creative expressiveness (particularly domestic arts like quiltmaking and needlework), which are usually considered peripheral or invisible by the dominant culture. Folklorists M. Jane Young and Kay Turner mention a need ‘‘to allow folklore [and feminist aesthetics] to speak for and about the traditions of women’s difference as this is manifested in their material life activities and then given voice through a range of expressive means’’ (20). According to art critic Lucy Lippard, the most effective way to pursue this is through a dialogue which opens up questions about the way social and

8 AESTHETICS

political issues and ideas are addressed through art practice, artworks, events, and how they relate to the position of women in different contexts. Central to women’s folk aesthetics are ideas about creativity, the meaning or significance of art-making (to both insiders and outsiders), inclusiveness, collaboration, relationship, and reflexivity as a form of meditative feedback flowing between art and life. Reflexivity continuously engages individual artistic expression with social interaction. African American quiltmakers, for example, often improvise on basic patterns such as the ‘‘square-in-a-square’’ motif, which allows artists, mindful of tradition, to follow their own instincts and responses to visual space, color, line, proportion, and shape. While they exercise freedom and spontaneity, they are always aware of the rules they flout as they introduce new variants and innovative solutions. Rules inspiring flexibility and improvisation, that is, traditional practices coexisting with different modes of innovation, are sustained and affirmed by communities of insider African American quiltmakers. But outsider ‘‘standard-traditional’’ quilters, although they might recognize the basic patterns, may find the irregularities and idiosyncrasies of such quilts aesthetically unintelligible. Folk aesthetics is itself subject to the evaluative judgment of outsiders (collectors and connoisseurs), a situation which echoes the vertical hierarchical standards in place in the mainstream art world. Within that context, different genres or classes of art objects are considered to have more or less artistic value or merit; for example, women’s domestic arts are often less valued than sculptures created by male folk artists. And for some scholars, determining authenticity (or an authentic cultural expression)—distinguishing the genuine from the ersatz or the fake—is a primary concern. The agreed-upon standards of the mainstream art world insist that a folk artist must be ‘‘untutored’’ or unexposed to formal art training. In addition, the artist must be ‘‘pure,’’ that is, na€ive, unsophisticated, or untainted, and in pursuit of a singular (rather than a communal) vision. When these attitudes are examined, they appear to mirror or replicate the art establishment’s position vis-a-vis ‘‘artistic genius’’ and uniqueness in the fine arts. Popular Culture Studies scholars have succeeded in tempering some of this inverse purism by introducing notions of ‘‘the hybrid’’ (art forms combining all types of influences) and ‘‘the transformative,’’ wherein art changes in response to emergent cultural identities, commercial stimuli, and globalization. Developing concepts involving exchange, borrowing, fluidity, ingenuity, integration, and resilience demonstrate the dynamics of art-making that occurs despite the existence of evaluative categories that privilege purity and promote exclusion. The challenge of women’s aesthetics and the ethnoaesthetic approach is in their demand that we base our appraisals of excellence and beauty on local, collaborative, and inclusive art practices in combination with an understanding of how aesthetic power operates in various sociocultural contexts. See also: Beauty; Folk Art; Folk Group; Quiltmaking; Needlework. References: Armstrong, Robert Plant. The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971; Bartra, Eli, ed. Crafting Gender: Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean. Durham, NC: Duke

AGING 9

University Press, 2003; Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; Deepwell, Katy, ed. New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995; Fine, Gary Alan. Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004; Hollis, Susan Tower et al. eds. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Ice, Joyce. ‘‘Women’s Aesthetics and the Quilting Process.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 166–177. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Korsmeyer, Carolyn. ‘‘Feminist Aesthetics.’’ 2004. http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/feminism-aesthetics/ (accessed July 14, 2005); Whitten, Dorothea S., and Norman E., eds. Imagery and Creativity: Ethnoaesthetics and Art Worlds in the Americas. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993; Young, M. Jane, and Kay Turner. ‘‘Challenging the Canon: Folklore Theory Reconsidered from Feminist Perspectives.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, M. Jane Young, 9–28. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Suzanne P. MacAulay Aging Aging is the natural process by which living organisms develop biologically and grow older. This process includes a decline in biological functions and ultimately death. In human beings, gender is an important variable in the aging process; biological changes affecting women have profound social, psychological, emotional, medical, and economic consequences. Ageism, whether personal or institutional, is the stereotyping of and discrimination against individuals on the basis of age, and specifically old age. Reflecting societal attitudes toward aging, folkloric images of maturing women range from the nurturing, postmenopausal wise woman endowed with supernatural powers (Germany’s Mother Holle and the Oracle in The Matrix) to the ugly, hungry hag (Russia’s Baba Yaga and Gretel’s witch) whose disposition evokes terror. In the United States and Canada and throughout most of the industrialized world, an unprecedented number of individuals are living well into old age. In 1900 in the United States, life expectancy for men was 48.3 years and for women 51.1 years; the number of individuals who survived to old age was relatively small. However, because of medical innovations and advances in public health education, the number of older people in the U.S. population has tripled since the turn of the century. In The Coming of Age (1972), French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir examines the universally grim plight of older people throughout time. She describes how they suffer from lack of respect from younger people, loss in productivity, and other negative experiences; she provides poignant evidence that most cultures deny the intrinsic worth of older people despite their repertoires of fables that exalt the elderly. It is a modern phenomenon that women live longer than men by approximately seven years. As a result, women outnumber men in the general population, especially at the older end of the age spectrum. Judith Worell characterizes the increasingly long lives of women compared with men in the second half of the twentieth century as an ‘‘historic feminization of the world’’ (2001: 96).

10 AGING

Because of social double standards regarding gender and aging, many women grow old with much greater apprehension than do men. The dread of growing older—and so purportedly less sexually attractive—in patriarchal societies is a long-held attitude illustrated by the saying, ‘‘Old age is woman’s hell,’’ attributed to Ninon de Lenclos, a seventeenth-century French writer and courtesan. Whereas a man’s graying hair may mark him as ‘‘distinguished’’ by age, a same-aged woman suffers social denigration for having lost her youthful physical appearance. Consider the social significance of feminine beauty and youth reflected in the folktales collected by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm in the nineteenth century. In many of the original 168 tales, youthful beauty is not only emphasized as the ideal for women, it is associated with goodness, wealth, and social privilege. In contrast, aged women are generally characterized as mean and ugly villains. Although most of these tales are no longer widely recognized by North American audiences, those that have survived in the contemporary imagination—and marketplace—include those in which beautiful young women (such as Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty) in conflict with infamous older women dominate the plot. The youthful feminine ideal has been perpetuated during the past 150 years through adaptations and retellings of folktales produced by the children’s book and film industries, most notably by the Walt Disney Company’s films and related product merchandising. Compare, for example, the benevolent Sea Witch of Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, ‘‘The Little Mermaid,’’ with Ursula, the terrifying virago of the Disney film of the same name. It has long been noted there are few roles for women film actors over forty. When images of women of advanced years do appear in film, popular culture, and narrative folklore, they are often poor and ill or overly ambitious, menacing, or otherwise distasteful: self-absorbed wealthy matrons, witches with gnarled arthritic hands, impoverished peasant ladies laboring in the fields, black-draped widows in mourning, and old hags devouring children for food. The late twentieth-century boom in the cosmetic industry and an increasing demand for cosmetic plastic surgeries attest to the struggle that some women, especially those from the middle and upper classes, face with selfesteem as they age. Their desire for continued social acceptance, fear of losing the opportunity for sexual intimacy, and anxiety about the potential onset of debilitating medical conditions are among the reasons that they view aging as a psychological challenge. While rural Mexicans and Canadians are more likely to exhibit the traditional respect accorded to the aged than are Americans reared on unrelentingly promoted images of ‘‘Generation X,’’ old women are increasingly invisible in these societies as well, and their life experiences dismissed as irrelevant. While women’s medical problems that accompany aging are similar to those of aging men, among whom heart disease and cancer are leading causes of death, older women suffer more frequently than men from gender-linked medical conditions such as osteoporosis, urinary incontinence, insomnia, and depression. And unlike those of previous generations, today’s geriatric illnesses are chronic rather short-term. Chronic illnesses have

AGING 11

economic consequences that affect women disproportionately, including the likelihood that middle-aged women will provide their unpaid eldercare. Coupled with their own weakening and, in some cases, crippling medical conditions, elderly women commonly find their financial security at risk. In the United States, ‘‘women over the age of sixty-five are twice as poor as men in the same age group’’ (Eisler). And older (unmarried) lesbians, particularly if African American, face the distinct possibility of homelessness upon the death of a property-owning partner (Shavers). Ironically, older women were historically the first medical practitioners; as such, they enjoyed social reverence. As healers, their curative knowledge and power aligned them with the wisdom of the ancient goddess Sophia. Today, their wisdom is instead scorned as ‘‘old wives’ tales.’’ Many historians and anthropologists locate the Spanish Inquisition in Europe as the beginning of the demise of the ‘‘wise old women’’ archetype. Threatened by the status of women healers, church authorities declared them agents of the Devil and effectively changed public opinion about them through witch hunts. In addition, traditional myths of Pagan origin were revised to further stigmatize the image of the once-powerful older woman. To counter some of the stereotypes about women and aging, a proliferation of publications began appearing in last decades of the twentieth century, including Women of a Certain Age by Lilia Rubin (1979); In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power and Sexuality (1993) by Lois W. Banner; The Fountain of Age (1993) by Betty Friedan; and The New Ourselves, Growing Older: Women Aging with Knowledge and Power (1987; 1994) by Paula Doress-Worters. In 1989, feminist studies reached a significant milestone with the first issue of the Journal of Women and Aging, a scholarly venue for interdisciplinary research. Public policy in the United States is increasingly reflecting a demographic shift in favor of aging women. While reproductive choice, inequality in the workforce, and childcare were the prominent social issues in the later part of the twentieth century, the concerns of older women are becoming more evident in the new millennium. These include displaced homemakers, widowhood, elder caregiving, social isolation and poverty, and gender-related medical research and health care. Older women’s activism has spawned several influential advocacy organizations. Two, the Gray Panthers and the Red Hat Society, have produced positive new icons to celebrate the aging process; and there has been a renewed interest among scholars about colonial midwives, Mexican curanderas (folk healers), Hopi/Navajo Spider Woman stories, to name a few areas of research. For example, today we know that pre-Columbian Aztec elder women participated in the ritual ingestion of pulque, a liquid fermented from the maguey plant, along with male priests. Recognition of the inestimable value of older women is, however, emerging in literature. Ultima, the curandera of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, the most widely read novel by a Mexican American author, is a prime example. Sharply diverging from typical characterizations of elderly women, Ultima represents goodness and wisdom. She also serves as tradition-bearer and a model for keeping cultural traditions alive. See also:

12 ALTAR, HOME

Beauty; Class; Cosmetics; Croning; Curandera; Elder Care; Grandmother; Old Wives’ Tales; Tradition-Bearer; Women’s Friendship Groups. References: Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. New York: Warner Books, 1999; Baker-Sperry, Lori, and Liz Grauerholz. ‘‘The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children’s Fairy Tales.’’ Gender and Society, vol. 17, no. 5 (October 2003): 711–726; Banner, Lois W. In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power and Sexuality: A History. New York: Vintage, 1993; Beers, Mark H., ed. The Merck Manual of Health and Aging. Whitehouse Station, NJ: Merck & Co., Inc., 2004; De Beauvoir, Simone. The Coming of Age. New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1972; Doress-Worters, Paula. The New Ourselves, Growing Older: Women Aging with Knowledge and Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994; Eisler, Riane. ‘‘The Feminine Face of Poverty.’’ June 22, 2007. http://www.alternet.org/rights/50727 (accessed June 22, 2007); Friedan, Betty. The Fountain of Age. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993; Perrone, Bobette, H. Henrietta Stockel, and Victoria Krueger. Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989; Shavers, Regina, as told to Daisey Hernandez. ‘‘Gay, Gray and Black.’’ Colorlines (Fall 2005): 23–24; Worrell, Judith, ed. Encyclopedia of Women and Gender: Sex Similarities and Differences and the Impact of Society on Gender. San Diego: Academic Press, 2001; Weigle, Marta. Spiders and Spinsters: Women and Mythology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1982.

Gilda Baeza Ortego

Altar, Home Home altars are image-laden material expressions of personal devotion created to serve as sacred places of communication and mediation between an altar-maker and her chosen deity or deities. The creation and use of personal home altars is an ancient women’s religious tradition practiced in cultures worldwide. The tradition engages women from diverse religious backgrounds, including Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, various sects of the African diaspora such as Brazilian Candomble, Cuban Santeria, and others. The word ‘‘altar’’ generally defines a sacred site set apart for communication between deities and humans, but another sense of the term suggests that an altar forms a threshold or gateway, a meeting place of the sacred and the mundane. In contrast to the formal altars found in churches and temples, a woman’s home altar informally expresses her faith and devotion. Consisting of a special grouping of selected religious images and other symbols, a home altar visually represents its maker’s personal relationship with the deities, saints, or ancestors she depends upon for help and comfort in her daily life. Never merely representational, the home altar also serves as an active performance site for the rituals and prayers that are instrumental for engaging relationships with divine resources. In many families, the tradition can be traced back for generations, but it is also evolving in North America as new religious and spiritual options emerge. Within the past forty years, feminist, lesbian, and women’s art movements have brought new practitioners to the altar tradition through the emergence of the women’s spirituality movement. Neo-Pagan revisionist movements such as Wicca also embrace the practice. Even individuals with no affiliation whatsoever simply adapt personal altar-making to their own beliefs and needs.

ALTAR, HOME 13

Still, for most practitioners, the tradition is maternal in lineage; by observation or instruction, women learn to keep an altar from their mothers and grandmothers. They also learn the power of communicating at the altar— saying prayers, making petitions for help, and giving thanks—as a way of maintaining alliances with favored deities or interlocutors. Traditional home altars often feature a central religious image passed down within the family. A Hindu woman’s altar might feature Durga; a Mexican Catholic’s might display the Virgin of Guadalupe. Mothers often donate images to their newly married daughters’ altars, or leave altar objects and images to them as a legacy after death. Through this image, a woman inherits a relationship with a particular deity who, like a revered family member, is known, honored, and relied upon for help. The history of women’s creation and use of domestic altars continues from ancient times to the present. In the West, the earliest home altars known to have been created by women date from the Neolithic period (4000–6000 BCE) in Old Europe and Anatolia (now Turkey). Reserved primarily as sites for presenting offerings or sacrifices to fecund, earth-based goddesses and their consort gods, ancient altars presumably were used to enhance fertility, to invite protection, and to memorialize ancestors. These same functions prevail today; women still pray at their home altars for a good birth, for security of home and family, and to honor the dead. In its long history—evident in the archaeological and historical record for Mycenaean, Greek, Roman, Pagan, and early Christian cultures—the domestic altar in Western tradition has changed little in basic construction. To view a contemporary Catholic Mexican American woman’s home altar sideby-side with a Transylvanian house cult table from the fifth millennium BCE or to see an altar dedicated to the goddess by a feminist in 1985 next to an altar dedicated to the goddess in Mycenae 4,000 years earlier, immediately confirms their visual similarity. On a simple table or other platform surface, votive statues or pictures of local deities are surrounded by instruments for communicating with them: lamps, candles, incense burners, amulets, and offerings such as shells and flowers. Contemporary altars also feature printed materials such as prayer books and secular items such as family photographs and personal mementos, but the visual aesthetic of the altar is consistent, and its communicative purpose has remained virtually unchanged for millennia. Though bound by certain conventions, the tradition still invites variation; no altar looks exactly the same, nor is it used exactly the same way. Certain items (the inherited central image, for example) may remain for a lifetime, but home altars are not fixed sites; they change as the women who make them change. Altar-makers affirm the particularity of the tradition to themselves as individuals and as women; for them, personal devotion trumps institutional dogma. At their altars, women remake and reinvent the usefulness of cultural symbols, both sacred and secular, according to their own histories, purposes, needs, desires, and beliefs. Altar-makers take the received aspects of the tradition and wed them to a creative—and often highly imaginative—impulse. For example, amid typical saints’ statues and votive candles arranged on a shelf or dresser, folk Catholic home altars may

14 ALTAR, HOME

be covered with family photos, display pictures of local political figures, feature unusual personal symbols such as a child’s stuffed animal, or make use of homemade decorative effects such as hand-embroidered altar cloths or glittered paper plates. It is not unusual to find modern altar-makers using their home desks and computers as the base around which their altars are composed. The visual aesthetic of altars is defined by a propensity for layering and accumulation. Objects and symbols are integrated into a coherent visual field that marks their interdependence and connection to each other. Altars exemplify the process that feminist artist Miriam Schapiro aptly named femmage (derived from ‘‘collage’’ and ‘‘assemblage’’) referring to women’s artistic process of collecting and creatively joining seemingly disparate elements into a functional whole (Meyer and Schapiro: 66–69). All the objects on the altar are signs of relationship; each one tells a story of attachment to others, whether they are sacred, social, or nature-based relations. An image of the Virgin Mary testifies to the altar-maker’s ongoing relationship with her; a son’s photo bespeaks his mother’s care; a small heap of stones signifies a love of the Earth. The altar specifies a context for building and sustaining relationships by serving as a site to seek divine help in initiating, repairing, restoring, remembering, and protecting the vitality of human social life. Appeals made there constitute a catalog of situations requiring care and help such as healing the sick, seeking a blessed union in love or marriage, or finding a new home. The intimacy and familiarity of the altar provides an ideal setting for meditation, prayer, and petition. The home altar’s longevity is no doubt related to the singular privacy it affords in giving women a place to speak to the divine without restraint. There, a woman meets her deities and speaks to them with assurance in their mutual ability to create change and to heal. Women ascribe great efficacy to the personal prayers and petitions for help made at their altars. What women ask for most—and receive—at their altars is healing. Healing of body, mind, and spirit is the active result of the good relationships between women and their divine allies promoted at the altar site. Asking and receiving fashion a bond of trust, and this bond fortifies a fundamental labor performed at the altar: the movement from problem to solution in the work of living. As Mexican American altar-maker Margarita Guerrero affirms, ‘‘Here with my saints and the Virgin I have accomplished many things. I have prayed and they answer me. And always I have made things better for myself and others’’ (Turner: 47). See also: Cult of the Virgin; Virgin of Guadalupe; Wicca and Neo-Paganism. References: Gargaetas, Patricia. ‘‘Altared States: Lesbian Altarmaking and the Transformation of Self.’’ Women and Therapy 16/2–3 (1995): 95–105; Gimbutas, Marija. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; Meyer, Melissa, and Miriam Schapiro. ‘‘Waste Not/Want Not: Femmage.’’ Heresies 4 (1978): 66–69; Raven, Arlene. ‘‘The Art of the Altar.’’ Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the Night, Cycle 6: 29–41. Special Issue on Women’s Home Altars, ed. Kay Turner. Austin, TX: Sowing Circle Press, 1983; Turner, Kay. Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 1999.

Kay Turner

AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY—WOMEN’S SECTION 15

American Folklore SocietyÑWomen’s Section The Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society is a subsidiary organization of the American Folklore Society devoted to networking women members of the Society and promoting research on women’s folklore. The American Folklore Society, founded in 1888, is itself the principal nongovernmental organization in the United States for promoting and organizing the scholarly study of folklore. Its individual members are primarily academics, archivists, museum personnel, and persons who work for government and private agencies, such as arts councils, who are engaged in promoting interest in folklore, folklife, and folk art. The Women’s Section was officially established in 1976. The Section had its genesis in the activities of the second-wave U.S. women’s movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s that sought ‘‘women’s liberation,’’ that is, equality for women. The general spirit of this movement ramified within learned societies, such as the Modern Language Association, which were influential in directing developments within academic disciplines. Many women felt that the academic societies to which they belonged were male-dominated and less encouraging of women’s endeavors than of men’s, and they set out to remedy that situation. At the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in Austin, Texas, in 1972, informal meetings led to the establishment of a semiofficial women’s caucus to address concerns about women’s participation in the folklore establishment. At that time, the Society, unlike some similar groups, did not have a structure that established Sections, subgroups devoted to particular interests. When the Society moved toward such a structure, the caucus became an official Section. The first panel on women’s folklore and fieldwork was held at the 1973 American Folklore Society’s annual meeting, where women presented their fieldwork findings on the folklore of women, including Inez CardozoFreeman on Mexican girls’ games; Agnes F. Hostetler on native costumes of Oberwallis, Germany; Susan Kalcik on personal-experience narratives in women’s consciousness-raising groups; and Kay Stone on the construction of female heroes in the tales collected by the Grimm brothers. Along with additional papers, this research was published in the groundbreaking January 1975 issue of the Journal of American Folklore, edited by Claire Farrer. The Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society continues to support this kind of work, offering awards such as the Elli K€ ong€as Maranda prize for scholarship on women’s traditions. The Women’s Section serves primarily to connect women members of the American Folklore Society, though it also promotes women’s folklore and other academic areas of particular interest to women. It does so primarily through meetings at the annual conference of the Society and through the publication of the Folklore Feminists Communication (FFC). Claire Farrer, Rosan A. Jordan, and Susan Kalcik started the journal in Austin, Texas, in 1973; it continues to publish news items, bibliographies, and brief research articles. Its name is a play upon the august folklore monograph series published in Finland, the Folklore Fellows Communications, in which,

16 ANDROGYNY

of course, ‘‘fellows’’ suggests that the publication is by and for men. It was briefly called Folklore Women’s Communication, but the newer name was finally established as appropriate to the feminist orientation of the Women’s Section, which took it over as its own publication. In addition to providing a forum for the discussion of women’s issues, the Section has also sponsored periodic ‘‘cronings’’ of women members of the Society when they reach the age of fifty, holding croning ceremonies every few years at Section meetings. The structure of these ceremonies varies and has involved elaborate costuming, ritual, joking, and singing. Thus, in addition to its other functions, the Section has provided a playful way of celebrating how women age and celebrating senior women in the Society, while also making the point that folklorists recognize the great importance of coming-of-age rituals. See also: Croning; Folklore Feminists Communication; Women Folklorists. References: de Caro, F. A. ‘‘The Women’s Movement in A. F. S.: A Brief Chronology.’’ The Folklore Historian 1: 1–4 (1975); ‘‘Women’s Section of The American Folklore Society.’’ http://www.artlore.net/ffc.html (accessed August 8, 2008).

Rosan A. Jordan and Margaret R. Yocom Androgyny The English word ‘‘androgyny’’ comes from the Greek for ‘‘male’’ (aner) and ‘‘female’’ or ‘‘wife’’ (gyne). It refers to the simultaneous presence of both male/masculine and female/feminine elements in one entity or symbolic system. The image of the androgyne in the Western world comes to us in an etiological tale by Plato (Symposium 189c–193e) that describes our ‘‘original human nature’’ as one in which each person had two halves; but after the gods split apart the androgynes (who combined both male and female natures), human beings have been sexed dichotomously as male and female. ‘‘Hermaphrodism’’ is a related term; ‘‘hermaphrodite’’ is the scientific-medical term for individuals of double, doubtful, or mistaken sex (now more commonly called ‘‘intersexed’’) who usually blend physical female and male features rather than embody both. In Metamorphoses Book IV, the Roman poet Ovid tells of Hermaphroditos, the son of the ideal male type (Hermes) and ideal female type (Aphrodite); a perfectly formed male (blend), s/he later joined (doubled) with the perfectly formed female nymph Salmacis as an hermaphrodite, appearing neither male nor female but noticeably containing aspects of both. The modern idea that the image of the androgyne is an archetypal expression of the union of opposites, an indicator of ‘‘psychic wholeness,’’ comes to us from Marie-Louise Von Franz and C. G. Jung’s work on medieval and Renaissance alchemical texts. In their analytical psychological formulation of the collective unconscious, sex and gender play highly significant roles, so it is unsurprising that the Androgyne archetype acts as a mediating or uniting psychic principle; its appearance in dreams, for example, may indicate a return to health after a long illness or the need for greater recognition by an individual’s conscious mind to consult her unconscious ‘‘inner masculine’’ (Animus) for guidance in achieving psychic balance.

APHRODISIAC 17

Other students of psychology, biology, medicine, religion, and gender/sex may concern themselves with the androgynous regarding the configuration and balance of masculine and feminine elements, how they come together, and their physical, emotional, social, and metaphysical consequences. However, like Jung’s, these approaches usually privilege masculine elements, two-sex/two-gender bipolarities, heterosexuality, and the notion of one sex per body. Psychologist Sandra Bem began research in the 1970s on androgyny to counter the pervasive gender polarization that occurs in both science and society. She developed the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) based on cultural definitions of gender-appropriate behaviors, which yields scores for sextyped, cross-sex-typed, and androgynous individuals. Bem later ascertained that ‘‘androgyny’’ was still too gender-specific a term (favoring the male/ masculine and the one-body-per-sex model), and so, while not entirely repudiating the concept of androgyny, turned her attention toward cultural variables in gender identity. In 1980, History of Religions scholar Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty) published a cross-cultural process typology of androgyny that includes psychological and mythological androgynes in three categories: splitting, a type in which a female-male combination must divide/be divided in order to mature or procreate; fusing, in which submerged (male or female) elements must become integrated for wholeness to be achieved; and the two-in-one, a type in which female and male persons (or gods) unite in perfect love or in a sacred marriage symbolizing the union of opposites. Among the folkloric pseudoandrogynes she identifies are competitive ones, including those who exchange or alternate between sex roles or sexes. In these and all types, ‘‘male androgynes by far outnumber female androgynes and are generally regarded as positive, while female androgynes . . . are generally negative’’ (284). However notorious it has been for its gender dimorphism, North American popular culture has long been fascinated with ‘‘the androgynous look’’—from the flapper of the 1920s, whose ultra-slim body was admired for its boyishness, to pop singers like Madonna and Annie Lennox, whose occasional appropriations of masculine gestures and clothing have gained them large followings among both men and women. See also: Cross-Dressing; Fashion; Gender; Sexuality; Transgender Folklore. References: Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993; Doniger (O’Flaherty), Wendy. Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980; Jung, C. G. Mysterium Coniunctionis. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. The Collected Works of Jung, Vol. 14. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970; Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981.

Liz Locke Aphrodisiac Derived from the name of the Greek goddess of sexual desire, Aphrodite, the term aphrodisiac has traditionally been applied to any substance

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reputed to induce sexual desire, increase sexual performance, or enhance sexual pleasure. The history of aphrodisiac use stretches back some 3,000 years and encompasses an impressive variety, from plants and herbs, animal parts, perfumes, cosmetics, and love charms to recreational drugs, prescription drugs, and hormone preparations. Indeed, its long and colorful history powerfully illustrates the common ground between folk wisdom and medical science. Many would-be wooers obtained from the village wise woman (a practicing herbalist) aphrodisiacs such as mandrake, wormwood, pego palo, ginseng, and kola nuts, whose chemical properties have been linked with currently researched treatments for sexual dysfunction: hallucinogens, plant estrogens, and caffeine. At the same time, belief (the placebo effect) might easily be identified as the key ingredient in all folk aphrodisiacs, and for this reason, charms figured as heavily as herbal concoctions. The principle of sympathetic magic (‘‘like produces like’’) often governed the identification of plants and animal parts as appropriate sexual remedies. Culturally, vigorous sexual performance has been more readily associated with the male than with the female so that phallic shapes have been far more commonly suggestive as aphrodisiacs. Rhinoceros horns, shark’s teeth, carrots, John the Conqueror root, bananas, maize, and cucumbers are a few of the items whose aphrodisiac reputation rests on their phallic appearance. The discouragement of female sexual desire made women’s solicitation of aphrodisiacs a relatively hushed endeavor. However, some female folk traditions allowed room for interpretation; the preparation of cockle bread involved pressing a lump of kneaded dough against the vulva, baking it into this shape, and then presenting the bread to a desired male. So-called ‘‘sex herbs’’ and charms for women tended to focus more directly on fertility than on sexual pleasure. Reputed conception aids included fecund fruits such as tomatoes, the genitals of female animals associated with prolific reproduction such as rabbits and dogs, and human female fluids crucial to childbearing, particularly breast milk and menstrual blood. The Roma (Gypsy) spell of offering a new bridegroom food or drink mixed with a few drops of the bride’s menstrual blood in order to ensure a happy and fruitful marriage derives from this latter tradition. More liberal attitudes concerning female sexuality, along with expectations of continued sexual performance among today’s aging North American population, have more than ensured the continued popularity of aphrodisiacs. Among youths, recreational drugs like MDMA (known as Ecstasy or X) have been considered potent aphrodisiacs, but—like the ‘‘date-rape drug,’’ Rohypnol—their effect consists primarily in the loosening of inhibitions and diminishment of memory rather than in a chemical provocation of libido, an effect they share with possibly the most widespread and socially acceptable aphrodisiac, alcohol. Conversely, proven libido enhancers like Stilbestrol and Viagra, essentially hormone replacement therapies (HRTs), suggest that a decrease in sex drive for both older men and older women is a problem in need of ‘‘fixing.’’ See also: Aging; Cosmetics; Folk Belief; Folk Medicine; Folklore About Women; Foodways; Herbs; Magic; Popular Culture; Rape; Sexuality; Superstition; Witchcraft, Historical; Women’s Folklore.

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References: Mervis, Cynthia, and Angela Hines Watson. Love Potions: A Guide to Aphrodisiacs and Sexual Pleasures. Los Angeles: Jeremy Tarcher, 1993; Taberner, Peter V. Aphrodisiacs: The Science and the Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Wilen, Lydia, Joan Live, and Be Well Wilen. Folk Remedies That Work. New York: Perennial, 1996.

Andrea Austin

Assault, Supernatural The three best known supernatural assault phenomena are known as the old hag, the incubus, and the succubus. While the old hag phenomenon is a nonsexual experience, incubi and succubi attack during sleep to have sex with their victims. A child is sometimes born of this union. There is much confusion and contradiction in the uses of these terms as both victims and researchers use them interchangeably; however, descriptions of the events given by assault victims are always in agreement. The old hag phenomenon, also known as sleep paralysis, is closely examined by David J. Hufford in The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (1982). While researching night terrors, Hufford discovered that men and women of all ages and backgrounds seemed to experience nocturnal assault of the same kind. All reported ‘‘waking’’ to find ‘‘someone’’ sitting on their chest, suffocating and paralyzing them, until the victim was able to ‘‘get rid of the thing.’’ Almost all victims report hearing strange noises—anything from newspapers being torn to high heels on linoleum, and the attacker is frequently female (although most victims don’t actually see a ‘‘hag’’). The phenomenon is experienced by many individuals throughout their lives, sometimes causing them to fear falling asleep. Hufford describes a female traction patient’s disturbing experience of an old hag visit: . . . [Sharon] was, of course, lying on her back as she had since her admission about a week before. Shortly after she closed her eyes she heard the door to her room open . . . She then heard footsteps . . . Sharon said that, as odd as it seems, her first thought was that several nurses were coming in with their shoes off . . . she found that she could not move. Then she suddenly saw a bearded, male face suspended in mid-air . . . it struck her as malevolent (Hufford 88).

Sharon went on to describe feeling as though she were being lifted from the bed and pushed into it at the same time. She was paralyzed and could not scream for help. Her assault ended when a nurse walked into her room, whereupon she woke from sleep. Victims of this phenomenon report being able to suddenly move or scream and this is what makes the attack cease. Some have been known to go so far as to ‘‘prepare’’ their bed before going to sleep in hope of killing the hag when she appears. In his 1850 book, Sleep Psychologically Considered with Reference to Sensation and Memory, Blanchard Fosgate (who uses the term ‘‘incubus’’ to describe events

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that are undeniably old hag occurrences) cites overeating before bedtime as the cause for the feelings of suffocation and paralysis and hypothesizes that a simpler diet will cure the ailment (137). Hufford also records interviews that include ways to ‘‘rat out’’ the malevolent person thought to be behind the ‘‘haggings,’’ who is assumed to be a witch, or a friend who feels mistreated and wants revenge. The old hag is best known as such in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, where a report of having been ‘‘hagged’’ or ‘‘hag-rid’’ the night before may not be considered especially noteworthy, and is experienced by sleepers of all ages (Hufford: 2–5). The experience may also haunt a dreamer in the form of a recurring nightmare. The old hag phenomenon is very much alive today; there are support groups, chat rooms, and Web sites devoted to sharing experiences and knowledge about it. An episode of television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer entitled ‘‘Killed By Death’’ features a demon called Der Kindestod, who sits on the chests of hospitalized children and drains the life from them. An incubus is a male demon who has sex with a woman in her sleep; its female counterpart is a demon known as a succubus who ravages sleeping men in a similar fashion. Incubi are thought to be fallen angels in league with the Devil, attacking victims in order to produce children who are his spawn. (The Arthurian magician Merlin is said by some to have been the product of an incubus union.) At least since the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, highly sexualized vampire figures tend to be placed in the incubi/succubi category because they attack in the night. Folklore’s most infamous succubus is Lilith, Adam’s first partner, sometimes associated with the Christian Devil, who is said to produce demons as her children. The medieval text Malleus Maleficarum (‘‘The Witch’s Hammer’’) deals with incubi/succubi. In it, we are told that demons are able to sire offspring; however, since their bodies aren’t corporeal, they need to obtain sperm from another source. To further their goal, incubi and succubi may work together: the succubus has a sexual encounter with a human male to gather sperm, which she either transforms directly into a male demon or gives to an incubus to impregnate his female victim. The children born of such unions are said to belong to the man who ‘‘donated’’ the sperm, not to the demon; however, these offspring are likely to be inclined toward bad behavior and drawn to Satan. See also: Folk Belief; Legend, Supernatural; Lilith; Memorate. References: Des Hotel, Rob, and Dean Batali. ‘‘Killed By Death.’’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Two, Episode 18. Dir. Deran Serafian; Fosgate, Blanchard. Sleep Psychologically Considered with References to Sensation and Memory. New York: Da Capo Press, 1982; Guazzo, Fancesco Maria. Compenduim Maleficarum: The Montague Summers Edition. New York: Dover Publications, 1988; Hufford, David J. The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982; Summers, Montague, ed. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. New York: Dover Publications, 1971.

Tamara Robbins-Anderson

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Autograph Book Autograph books are small bound albums intended for friends’ signatures and brief verses. Popular among Euro American women and men in the nineteenth century, they became an amusement for children in the late 1800s. While some autograph books of that period contain only signatures, others record verses, reminiscences, and good wishes for the recipient. Schools, summer camps, and, more recently, instructional weekend workshops are among the most popular settings for autograph-book signings. Folklorists and other scholars have found them to be significant sources of information about girls’ and women’s cultural traditions. J. S. Ogilvie published an influential compilation of nineteenth-century autograph rhymes, Seven Hundred Album Verses, in 1884; it offered the reading public, among other items, sample verses for use on Valentine’s Day and other holidays. Most of the rhymes in Ogilvie’s book extol the importance of friendship, asking the recipient to cherish happy memories of time spent together. Genteel British and American women carefully considered which autograph album verses would express the depth of their friendships. In his study of autograph books in New York in the second half of the nineteenth century, folklorist W. K. McNeil found that clever verses signaling remembrance and friendship were the most popular. ‘‘Remember me,’’ has several versions, including ‘‘Remember me early / Remember me late / Remember me ever / Your old schoolmate.’’ Another favored form is the letter code, as in ‘‘YYUR / YYUB / ICUR YY4me’’ (Too wise you are / Too wise you be / I see you are too wise for me’’), a technique that has come back into use among electronic text-message users at the start of the twenty-first century. Simon J. Bronner’s American Children’s Folklore (1988) includes a broad range of children’s autograph rhymes, many of which are funny and critical rather than complimentary. For example, the ‘‘Roses are red’’ pattern, taken from Valentine’s Day verse, has many permutations, including ‘‘Roses are red, violets are black, you’d look better with a knife in your back.’’ Such verses give young writers a chance to develop variations on familiar sentimental themes. Some verses address young women’s maturation, emphasizing love, sexual desire, marriage, and childbearing. A typical inscription in a girl’s album states that ‘‘If all the boys lived across the sea, oh, what a swimmer [girl’s name] would be.’’ Another anticipates her future children’s needs: ‘‘When you get married and have twins, don’t call on me for safety pins.’’ Since these rhymes predate modern feminism, it should not be surprising that they focus on romance and childrearing. Since the early 1990s, children’s use of autograph books has declined, although books like Joanna Cole’s Yours Till Banana Splits: 201 Autograph Rhymes (2004) help to keep verse traditions going. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia offers virtual autograph books for children and adults, with room for a limitless number of e-mail signatures (favorite quotations chosen by e-mail users and appended to e-mail messages), as well as such neutral

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comments such as ‘‘A sig, a sig, I give you a sig’’ (‘‘A signature, a signature, I give you a signature’’). Autograph books retain their social and entertainment functions as they continue to evolve. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Rhymes; Valentine’s Day. References: Bronner, Simon J. American Children’s Folklore. Little Rock, AR: August House, 1988; Cole, Joanna. Yours Till Banana Splits: 201 Autograph Rhymes. Darby, PA: DIANE Publishing Company, 2004; McNeil, W. K. ‘‘From Advice to Laments Once Again: New York Autograph Album Verse, 1850–1900.’’ New York Folklore Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 3 (1970): 168–95; Ogilvie, J. S. Seven Hundred Album Verses. New York: J. S. Ogilvie and Co., 1884.

Elizabeth Tucker

B Babysitting The term ‘‘babysitting’’ refers to the job of supervising children while their parent or parents are away from home. The typical North American babysitter is a young female, eleven to eighteen years of age, who is known to the family and has a good rapport with its youngest member or members. Ideally, she is reliable, trustworthy, and mature enough to know how to behave in an emergency. Babysitting is frequently a girl’s entree to the world of paid work. Grandmothers and other relatives may be enlisted to babysit, but such persons are not usually paid an hourly wage to do so. Increasingly, it is considered acceptable for a babysitter to be a teenage boy trusted by the family. Babysitting rose in popularity in the United States after World War II. Many working families began to move into newly created suburbs, and while they could not afford professional day care for their children (and after-school care did not yet exist), they could employ a teenager from the neighborhood for a nominal fee to watch younger children for brief periods of time. Today, with the availability of day-care centers for middle- and upper-class families, most parents hire a babysitter only occasionally. It is more likely for working-class parents to do so, as day care may be prohibitively expensive, even when it is available. Babysitting wages are fixed by unofficial community standards, generally varying today in the range of $6 to $15 per hour, depending on how many children and for how long they are to be watched. Part-time babysitting has largely superseded the full-time roles of governess or nanny, even among the wealthy. These women generally performed the tasks of a surrogate mother—they were paid to feed, bathe, clothe, soothe, discipline, and educate the children in their care. Some elite families still employ a full-time housekeeper, but her job is likely limited to caring for the domestic sphere regardless of the presence of children; care of a child is considered a separate duty, if not as highly skilled a task. Scarr (1984) notes that the ‘‘sitter’’ plays a temporary role as monitor; she watches, but is not expected to educate, and she is not usually responsible for any housekeeping chores.

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The benefit of hiring a youthful babysitter versus an older caregiver is in the fact that she is typically considered a source of entertainment for the children, rather than an authority figure. However, a parent cannot observe how the sitter spends her time with the children. While most day-care facilities are accredited by the state, and parents can observe their children interacting with other adults and teenagers, the unobserved babysitter is free to place the children in her care in front of a television and not interact with them at all. The babysitter’s young age can also make coping with the demands of difficult children unwieldy. When surveyed, most sitters felt uncomfortable dealing with kids who have behavioral problems. The incidence of child abuse is higher with babysitters than with professional childcare workers. Many urban legends dealing with the dark side of babysitting have emerged over the years. In one of them, a young woman thinks she is alone after the children have gone to sleep. A series of frightening phone calls, however, reveals that there is a crazed killer in the house. In some versions, the girl gets away, but the children are murdered. The role of the babysitter in these stories is that of the helpless female at the mercy of a randomly murderous male. In another urban legend, it is the parents who are warned about unpredictable teenage behavior. Concerned that their babysitter might be smoking marijuana in their home, they call to check on the baby; the babysitter assures them that the baby is fine and the turkey is in the oven. Puzzled over her remark about the turkey, the parents return home to discover that the babysitter has placed their child in the oven (http://snopes. com). It may be said, however, that such stories are designed more to convey negative gender stereotypes about young females than they are about the perils of babysitting. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Gender; Girls’ Folklore; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Occupational Folklore; Wage Work; Women’s Work. References: American Red Cross. ‘‘Babysitter’s Training.’’ http://www.redcross.org/ services/hss/resources/provider_bbs.html (accessed August 8, 2008); Scarr, Sandra. Mother Care, Other Care. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984; Seelhorst, Mary. ‘‘‘The Assailant in Disguise’: Old and New Functions of Urban Legends About Women Alone in Danger.’’ North Carolina Folklore Journal, vol. 34, no. 1 (1987): 29–37.Snopes.com, Urban Legends Reference Pages. ‘‘Wasted and Basted.’’ http://www.snopes.com/horrors/ drugs/babysit.htm (accessed August 8, 2008); Werner, Emmy E. Child Care: Kith, Kin, and Hired Hands. Baltimore: University Park Press, 1984.

Claire Dodd

Ballad The oldest and simplest definition of the ballad is still the best: a song that tells a story. The ballad is usually distinguished from the lyric, a song that, while it may imply or suggest a story, emphasizes emotional response to a person, thing, or situation. English-language ballads are conventionally divided into two main types, the classic or Child ballad and the broadside ballad. Classic ballads are part of a larger European oral repertoire with

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roots in the Middle Ages, in which the narrative mode is typically impersonal and expresses no overt judgment, however extreme the action. The narrative usually progresses via dialogue and incremental repetition, often depending, in part, on traveling stanzas or commonplaces, lines and phrases adapted and refitted for use in many different ballads. Broadside ballads emerged with the development of the popular press. First circulated in print, either on single sheets called broadsides or, later, in newspapers, many broadside ballads quickly entered oral tradition and took their place alongside classic ballads. Typically, such ballads are composed in response to dramatic happenings, and they typically express a clear judgment and affect. Broadside ballads sung in North America include songs of both British and U.S. origin. The Hispanic ballad also flourishes in parts of the United States, having reached a height during the Mexican Revolution. Here too there is a division corresponding roughly to that between classic and broadside ballads. Romances, like impersonal classic ballads, have links to international ballads, while corridos are more emotionally flavored narratives composed in the United States or in Mexico in response to dramatic events. A variant of the form emerged in the late twentieth century; the narcocorrido, a form of the outlaw ballad, it extols the exploits of drug traffickers and drug lords. Believing the classic ballad to be nearly extinct in oral tradition, Francis James Child (1825–1896), a Harvard professor, published a comprehensive collection of them between 1884 and 1898. (His daughter, Helen Child Sargent, in cooperation with George Lyman Kittredge, published a one-volume edition in 1904.) Working mostly from printed sources or manuscript collections, Child gathered all the known English-language ballads from the European repertoire as well as some that may have been created in the British Isles in the mold of international ballads. Scholars still identify versions of classic ballads by the titles and numbers that Child assigned in his collection. Broadside ballads, however, are usually identified by the titles and numbers that G. Malcolm Laws, Jr., assigned them in two surveys first published in the 1950s. (The standard collection of ballad tunes is the fourvolume compendium that Bertrand Harris Bronson published between 1959 and 1972.) A favorite theory of ballad origin in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries held that they were created communally by group improvisation. In 1921, Louise Pound (1872–1958), then at the University of Nebraska, published Poetic Origins and the Ballad, in which she decisively refuted the theory of communal origin, revealing the contradictions inherent in the theory and drawing on her own fieldwork to show how ballads actually function in communities. It took another quarter-century, however, for her view to win general acceptance. The women’s world revealed in the classic or Child ballads is of a piece € with the women’s world represented in Marchen, medieval literature, and classical drama. Characters fall into a limited number of heterosexual female types, including the faithful but hapless beloved, the false beloved, the jealous rival, the seduced maiden, the bereaved mother, the cruel mother, and

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the wife taken advantage of in the absence of her husband. Parents or a brother may interfere fatally, though the maiden may call upon her beloved and be rescued. The lover himself may prove false and wed another, though that will often lead to the death of all three—the betrayed woman, the false lover, and the hapless wife. Or the young wife may run off with another man. Maria Herrera Sobek (1990) finds the same archetypal representations in corridos. There are also negatively represented dangerous women: the murderous second love of ‘‘Young Hunting,’’ the lady who causes the death of Little Musgrave in ‘‘Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard,’’ ‘‘Bonnie Barbara Allen’’ who will not relent from her anger, and the Jewish or Gypsy woman who kills young ‘‘Sir Hugh.’’ But as in M€archen, medieval literature, and classical drama, there are also resourceful women who prevail against the odds. Susy Pye rescues ‘‘Lord Bateman.’’ The murderess of ‘‘Young Hunting’’ answers to no one but a parrot. ‘‘The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington’’ sets off and finds a surprisingly rich young man. ‘‘Lady Isabel’’ tricks her would-be murderer and succeeds in drowning him. The wife of ‘‘Geordie’’ usually succeeds in rescuing her husband in U.S. versions of that ballad. And even ‘‘Mary Hamilton,’’ abandoned to the gallows by her king-lover, achieves an almost enviable dignity. The humorous ballads, too, present both positive and negative images. The clever maids in ‘‘The Baffled Knight’’ and ‘‘The Broomfield Hill’’ easily trick their would-be seducers or rapists, and the clever adulteress in ‘‘Our Goodman’’ has an answer for every challenge. The ballad of ‘‘The Wife Wrapped in Wether’s Skin,’’ however, rationalizes wifebeating, and ‘‘Get Up and Bar the Door’’ suggests that women are not satisfied unless they have the last word. Yet in some American versions of ‘‘The Farmer’s Curst Wife,’’ the misogyny is reversed: the wife’s adventures demonstrate that women are better than men—because when they go to hell, they can come back again. Broadside ballads present a somewhat narrower picture of situations in which women find themselves or figure, and self-sufficient women characters are rare. When soldiers and sailors go off to war, they leave sweethearts behind to moan. Sometimes these women follow and achieve distinction as soldiers or sailors themselves before being found out. Sometimes they remain behind to prove true when their loves return and test them. Some young gentlewomen fall for men of lower station, and either succumb to family pressure and die, overcome the pressure and go off happy, or discover the young man is false and perish. Women with champagne tastes cause their lovers or husbands to turn highwayman to support them in style—seldom successfully. Women are usually less significant characters in outlaw ballads, though the wife of ‘‘Brennan on the Moor’’ rescues her husband from the sheriff, only to have him prove false with a girl who then betrays him. Young men, often soldiers, seduce young women and disappear. Sometimes the girl dies, sometimes she tricks another man into marrying her, and sometimes she names the baby after his father. Frequently, too, the heroine loves a ne’er-do-well who ends up murdering her. (Murder ballads are considered a sub-genre in their own right.) In broadside ballads of

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U.S. origin, a young woman may live on a farm or may cross the prairies. One such heroine, in ‘‘A Fair Lady of the Plains,’’ fights Natives (or cattle rustlers) alongside her husband. Also in U.S. ballads, wives and mothers figure significantly as gauges of the emotional significance of an event: they kiss their husbands, who go off to die in train wrecks or mine disasters; they kiss their sons as they go off to prison; or they survive to mourn their dead. Humorous broadside ballads, like their Child counterparts, have something of the fabliau about them. In ‘‘The Warranty Deed,’’ a new groom finds that his wife is constituted more by artificial parts (glass eye, wooden leg, false teeth, wig, etc.) than ‘‘real woman.’’ In ‘‘The Dumb Wife,’’ a man finds a doctor to cure his wife of muteness, but not one to cure her then of scolding. In ‘‘The Old Maid and the Burglar,’’ the woman in question wants to marry the burglar hiding under her bed. And ‘‘The Old Woman of Slapsadam’’ tries to drown her blind husband, and herself ends up drowned. Occasionally, however, the woman gets the upper hand. In ‘‘Father Grumble,’’ a man and woman change jobs for a day on a bet, and the woman wins. In the relatively rare ‘‘The Dog in the Closet,’’ the wife confounds her husband by substituting the family dog for the lover her husband has locked in the closet. A girl refuses ‘‘The Young Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn.’’ And ‘‘Sweet Betsy from Pike’’ proves irrepressible in every situation that arises on the Oregon Trail. ‘‘La Martina,’’ sung as a dialogue, has the husband inquiring about a horse that is not his, among other belongings that the wife’s lover has forgotten in his quick departure. As is clear, a bourgeois sensibility is characteristic of broadside ballads. In songs of the U.S. South, however, the broadside ballad may incorporate African American elements and a more bicultural sensibility to emerge as a blues ballad. Blues ballads are characterized by an impressionistic, lyrical, less linear narrative, and by personalization, or focus on the individual central character combined with a more ego-centered emotional affect. Typically, too, they feature an expansion of the female presence in the ballad. This ‘‘feminization,’’ as it has been called by Renwick (2001), includes expanding the list of female characters while narrowing the list of males, and emphasizing the reactions of female characters while reducing the level of social comment. It does not require, however, that all female characters be treated sympathetically. Outside the South, the broadside ballad retains its older, bourgeois sensibility. The Southern Appalachian mountains are one of the great repositories of Child (and also broadside) ballads in the United States, as Olive Dame Campbell (1882–1954) of Medford, Massachusetts, discovered in 1908. Her husband, John C. Campbell, had accepted a Russell Sage grant to study social agencies working in the southern mountains. Accompanying him on his survey, she heard Ade B. Smith sing ‘‘Barbara Allen’’ at Hindman Settlement School. Campbell recognized it as one of the ballads that Child had believed to be on the verge of extinction when he published his collection. Campbell asked Smith to sing all the ballads she knew so that she could take them down. As the survey continued elsewhere, Campbell eventually collected more than sixty ballad texts and tunes. With these in hand, she met British folksong scholar Cecil Sharp (1859–1924), who was then

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visiting the United States. She persuaded Sharp to come to the mountains to gather ballads and folksongs in a more systematic way than had been possible for her and her husband. Sharp and his assistant, Maud Karpeles (1885–1976), in 1916, 1917, and 1918, spent a total of forty-six weeks there, he taking down tunes from the mountaineers while Karpeles recorded the texts. While Sharp was collecting at the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Kentucky, he met Evelyn Kendrick Wells (1891–1979). Wells had taken a ballad course under Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929) at Wellesley College, and eventually returned there to revive the ballad course; she published The Ballad Tree in 1950, the first handbook to draw extensively upon the U.S. ballad repertoire. Two children who sang for both Sharp and Wells at Pine Mountain belonged to the Ritchie family of Viper, Kentucky. Their younger sister, Jean Ritchie (1922– ), became a celebrated performer of ballads, made numerous commercial recordings of ballad performances as well as of other types of songs, and ultimately published the family repertoire in versions she had polished during her years of performance and research. Another of the singers who sang for Sharp and Karpeles was Jane Hicks Gentry (1863–1925) of Hot Springs, North Carolina. Gentry was a member of the large Hicks-Harmon family of Watauga County, and was considered one of the finest ballad singers Sharp knew, with a repertoire of twenty-three Child ballads in addition to many other songs. Gentry was also a fine storyteller who communicated the first major collection of Hicks family stories to Isabel Gordon Carter in 1924. In 1938, collector Anne Warner (1905–1991) went to Watauga County with her husband Frank to meet a cousin of Jane Hicks Gentry, the dulcimer maker Nathan Hicks of Beech Mountain. The Warners returned many times to Beech Mountain and nearby towns over the next forty years to gather songs from the extended Hicks family, in which women were more likely than men to sing ballads, while the men more often played instruments or told tales. The Warners also collected from singers on the North Carolina Outer Banks and from the Northeast. Lena Bourne Fish, who sang for them and Helen Flanders (see below) in the 1940s, had a particularly large repertoire, probably more than 100 songs, featuring both Child and broadside ballads as well as lyric folksongs. After her husband’s death, Anne Warner cataloged their collection and edited Traditional American Folksongs from the Anne and Frank Warner Collection (1984). Collectors have continued to gather songs and tales from the Hicks-Harmon clan in the years since Cecil Sharp and the Warners first visited them, resulting in a family repertoire that is probably the best documented in the United States. Early collectors of romances and corridos such as Arthur Campa, Juan Rael, and Aurelio Espinoza found classic romances, like ‘‘La Delgadina,’’ a story of incest, and ‘‘El Hijo Desobediente,’’ being sung in California, New Mexico, and other parts of the Southwest. In Texas, Americo Paredes (1976) found these along with corridos about migrating north to work on the railroad or in cattle drives, as in ‘‘El Corrido de Kiansis’’ that dates from the 1860s. Paredes’ now-classic discussion of border ballads, ‘‘With His Pistol in His Hand’’: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), influenced the founders of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

BALLAD 29

In the years after World War I, it became clear that New England was a second major repository of classic ballads in the United States. Helen Hartness Flanders (1890–1972) began to collect folk songs for the Vermont Commission on Country Life in 1930. Her work attracted the attention of Phillips Barry (1880–1937), who became her mentor and occasional collaborator. Flanders and her colleague Marguerite Olney collected extensively all over New England, eventually establishing the Helen Hartness Flanders Collection at Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vermont. Between 1960 and 1965, Flanders published Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England with a commentary by Tristram P. Coffin and tune transcriptions by Bruno Nettl. Other significant female collectors in New England were Mary W. Smyth, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, Joanna C. Colcord, and Eloise Hubbard Linscott. Women produced significant ballad collections from other parts of North America as well. Emelyn Elizabeth Gardner published a folklore collection, including ballads, from the Schoharie Hills of New York state, soon followed by a publication jointly edited with Geraldine Jencks Chickering, Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan. Louise Pound published Nebraska songs; Mary O. Eddy published an Ohio collection; Sidney Robertson Cowell collected in Appalachia, the Ozarks, the Midwest, and the West Coast; and Margaret Larkin published an important collection of cowboy songs and ballads. Collecting continued in the southern mountains, with resultant publications such as those of Jean Thomas, Ethel Park Richardson, and Dorothy Scarborough, and the recordings of Mary Elizabeth Barnacle. Important early Canadian collections include those of Helen Creighton, from Nova Scotia, and of Elizabeth B. Greenleaf, Grace Y. Mansfield, and Maud Karpeles from Newfoundland (before it became a part of Canada). The most significant Canadian collector of the twentieth century, however, was surely Edith Fowke (1913–1996), especially notable for her work among lumbermen and her studies of particular family repertoires; her many collections include ballads, folksongs, and children’s rhymes. Fowke also oversaw the publication of choral and concert versions of traditional Canadian ballad material. The tradition of female scholarship in ballad studies exemplified by Bates and Wells at Wellesley and Pound at Nebraska has continued in the innovative teaching, research, and contributions to ballad theory of Thelma James at Wayne State University, Mary Ellen Brown at Indiana University, Linda Morley at Harvard, and Kathleen E. B. Manley at the University of Northern Colorado. Ruth Crawford Seeger edited the music for a number of important ballad collections as well as producing two volumes of American folksongs for children, families, and educators. Eleanor Long published a monograph on ‘‘The Maid Freed from the Gallows,’’ as well as numerous articles. Dianne M. Dugaw published overtly feminist ballad scholarship in her studies of cross-dressing in ballads. Anne Cohen has studied the murder of and ballads about Pearl Bryan. Sara Garcia, Maria Herrera-Sebok, and Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez have done considerable work on Hispanic ballads, corridos, and cancion ranchera. Rae Korson headed the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song from 1956 to 1969.

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The list of important North American ballad singers that includes Jane Gentry and her cousins, Jean Ritchie and her sisters, and Lena Bourne Fish, includes others. Emma Dusenbury of Mena, Arkansas, buried in a pauper’s grave in 1939, may have been the greatest of the U.S. ballad singers. Her repertoire was vast, encompassing much of the southern mountain repertoire as well as many rare items. Mrs. Frank Pipkin, a migrant worker in California during the dust bowl days, recorded English ballads for Charles L. Todd. Texas Gladden sang for Sara Gertrude Knott at National Folk Festivals. Almeida Riddle, an Arkansas singer who became a professional performer in her later years (corresponding with the folksong revival of the late twentieth century), also had a large ballad repertoire that she added to all her life. She published a book about her singing in cooperation with folklorist Roger Abrahams. Canadian singer La Rena Clark published a book about her family’s singing in cooperation with Edith Fowke. The internationally famous Carter family recorded ballads, and Mother Maybelle Carter sang ballads in performances and recordings with her daughters after the breakup of the original family group. Arhoolie Records’ catalogue contains works by female singers in the corrido tradition, including those of the legendary Lydia Mendoza. Recordings issued by the Library of Congress, Folkways, June Appal, and other distributors in the second half of the twentieth century, featuring singers such as Aunt Molly Jackson, Sara Ogan Gunning, and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s daughter Peggy, further attest to the richness of the U.S. women’s ballad repertoire. See also: Courtship; Class; Cross-Dressing; Death; Folk Music and Folksong; Fieldwork; Marriage; Storytelling. References: Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959–1972; Broyles-Gonzalez, Yolanda. Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music/La Historia de Lydia Mendoza (with CD). New York: Oxford University Press, 2003; Campa, Arthur. The Spanish Folksongs in the Southwest. University of New Mexico Bulletin. Language Series 5 (1, 2). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1933; Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882–1898; Espinoza, Aurelio. ‘‘Los Romances Tradicionales en California.’’ In Homenaje a Men endez Pidal, series no. 3: 299–313. Madrid, Spain: Imprenta de los sucesores de Hernando, 1925; Flanders, Helen Hartness. Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England (four volumes). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960–1965; Gardner, Emelyn E., and Geraldine J. Chickering. Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939; Herrera-Sobek, Maria. The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Laws, G. Malcolm, Jr. American Balladry from British Broadsides: A Guide for Students and Collectors of Traditional Song. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1957; ———. Native American Balladry: A Descriptive Study and a Bibliographical Syllabus. Revised edition. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1964; Paredes, Americo. ‘‘With His Pistol in His Hand’’: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958; ———. A Texas-Mexican Cancioner: Folksongs of the Lower Border. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976; Pound, Louise. Poetic Origins and the Ballad. New York: Macmillan, 1921; Ramirez, Olga Najera, ed. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Renwick, Roger deV. Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001; Wells, Evelyn K. The Ballad Tree. New York: Ronald Press, 1950; Wilgus, D. K., and Eleanor Long. ‘‘The Blues Ballad and the Genesis of Style in Traditional Narrative Song.’’ In Narrative Folksong: New Directions, eds. Carol L. Edwards and Kathleen E. B. Manley, 435–82. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985.

William Bernard McCarthy

BANSHEE 31

Banshee Referring to an Irish supernatural death messenger, the word ‘‘banshee’’ comes from the Irish bean si, meaning ‘‘woman of the otherworld’’ or ‘‘woman of the fairies.’’ The banshee is also called badhbh, or bean chaointe (crying woman) in different areas of Ireland. According to Irish folklore, the banshee is a solitary female spirit whose mournful keening foretells the impending death of a family member. Belief in the banshee exists throughout rural and urban Ireland, almost certainly originating in the goddess figures of early Irish mythology. Evidence for this may be found in the name badhbh, used mainly in southeast Ireland, which derives from the name of the Irish war goddess Badb, found in early Irish literature. Today, many Irish believe that banshees warn only families of pure Irish ethnicity and of specific lineage, particularly those whose names begin with ‘‘‘Mac,’’ ‘‘Mc,’’ or ‘‘O.’’ Some scholars assert that the belief that banshees protect Irish families of specific lineages emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when many aristocratic family lands were confiscated by the English government. In this context, the banshee figure serves not merely as a defender of Irish nobility, but as a protector of Irish land, reflecting the theme, pervasive in Irish literature and folklore, of the mythic unions between goddesses of the land and its rightful owners. The banshee’s keening wail is usually reported in the vicinity of the home of a person who is about to die, the family dwelling still being the site of most human deaths. However, it is claimed that the banshee’s cry has been heard at the family residence even when the doomed person is temporarily or permanently away from home. It is believed that the banshee will follow a person across the ocean to distant lands; she is also believed to attend funerals, her voice blending in with the mourners’ cries. More commonly heard than seen, the banshee is nevertheless thought to be physically present wherever her cries are heard. She is described by some as an old, small, relatively unattractive woman with silver-gray hair streaming to the ground; others depict her as a young woman with long red hair. Her clothing is a long nightdress in green, white, or gray, often covered by a cobweb-like textured gray cloak, all of which cling to her thin body. She is invariably described as having a pale face and thin body, her eyes red from centuries of crying. The banshee often lives near water, such as a lake, river, or well, where she can be seen washing an article of clothing belonging to one who is about to die; however, she is not limited to any one location or landscape. The banshee figure is also reported in Highland Scotland, where she is called the bean nighe or ‘‘little washer by the ford.’’ The bean nighe is believed to be the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth; she is small in stature, dressed in green, with webbed feet and long, pendulous breasts. She is most often seen washing the bloodstained clothes of one about to die. However, anyone who sees her before she reaches the water is granted three wishes, and those brave enough to suckle at her breast are adopted as her own and granted special favors. See also: Death; Family Folklore; Folk Belief; Legend, Supernatural; Region: Western Europe; Superstition.

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References: Guiley, Rosemary, ed. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. New York: Facts on File, 2000; Lysaght, Patricia. The Banshee: The Irish Death Messenger. Boulder, CO: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1986; ———. ‘‘Aspects of the Earth-Goddess in the Traditions of the Banshee in Ireland.’’ In The Concept of the Goddess, eds. Sandra Billington  ain, Daithi. ‘‘Banshee.’’ In  hOg and Miranda Green, 152–65. London: Routledge, 1996; o Myth, Legend, and Romance: An Encyclopaedia of Irish Folk Tradition. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1991; Wilde, Lady. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland: With Sketches of the Irish Past. London: Chatto & Windus, 1899.

Erin Stapleton-Corcoran

Barbie Doll An adult doll made in the United States and marketed to children beginning in 1959, Barbie was the brainchild of Ruth Handler, a founding member of Mattel Toy Company. Barbie’s plastic body, with its improbable measurements and prominent breasts (modeled after a German sex doll), has generated much controversy and folklore. Inspired by watching her daughter play with paper dolls and by the idea that an adult doll could help girls deal with the changes that their bodies undergo during puberty, Handler pitched her idea to a male colleague at Mattel. According to Handler, Mattel initially dismissed it, horrified by the thought of a doll with breasts. Handler persisted, creating a doll that has been a remarkable, long-term success for Mattel—so much so that if all Barbies sold by the end of the twentieth century were lined up head to toe, they would circle the Earth at least eleven times. Mattel maintains that, by the end of the twentieth century, two Barbies were sold in the world each second. After creating Barbie and surviving breast cancer, Handler went on to establish a firm that designed mastectomy prostheses. She describes her life as going from breasts to breasts. From her inception, the Princess of Plastic has been controversial. She began life fully formed with a job as a fashion model; by 1965, she was an astronaut. Some men, disturbed by the mass distribution of a doll with a career, told the media that playing with Barbie dolls would turn little girls into independent, ‘‘viperous’’ women (Thomas 2003: 123). However, discomfort with such dolls was not new. For example, adult dolls were used to display women’s fashions in Europe and North America in earlier centuries. Female fashion (often more harshly criticized than men’s) was seen as a manifestation of women’s vanity, artifice, and pretense, and dolls were guilty by association. Also, dolls had been ascribed a role in witchcraft rituals, and early courts used ownership of them as evidence against those accused of being witches. Add to these pejorative historical associations some of the contemporary concerns about Barbie dolls, and it’s a wonder that Barbie’s press has not been even more negative. Currently, Barbie’s unlikely proportions generate charges that she perpetuates unhealthy body images for women. Barbie easily taps girls’ curiosity about their sexuality because of her adult physique and her long, sometimes Godiva-like hair. In 1968, Mattel created Christie, Barbie’s Black friend; 1980 saw Black Barbie and Hispanic Barbie. There have been numerous ethnic Barbies since then, but critics charge

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that these dolls still look far too much like blonde Barbie to make them acceptable as toy role models for non-white, non-blonde, and non-thin girls and women. Along with Barbie’s perfect plastic body, her mane of hair defines her very being. While parents express all sorts of concerns about Barbie, children embrace her, in part because they can play with her hair. When Mattel’s research revealed that little girls liked hair play, her tresses were made abnormally long. The children were extending to Barbie the folk customs of hair play—combing, styling, and braiding—that they were doing at home and at slumber parties with their friends. Mattel commodified some of this folkloric behavior; the list of Barbie incarnations that emphasize hair includes Twirly Curls Barbie, Super Hair Barbie, Hollywood Hair Barbie, Troll Hair Barbie, Glitter Hair Barbie, and Hula Hair Barbie, to name but a few. According to Thomas (2000), Barbie is an excellent example of commodified folklore (folklore and folkloric themes translated into marketable objects). Other folkloric currents employed in the marketing of Barbie dolls include legendry, folktales, mythology, rites of passage, holidays, and folk costumes. Legend-inspired Barbies include numerous angel and mermaid Barbies, some of which come with special effects; for example, bubbles come out of the head of one mermaid Barbie when her buttocks are squeezed. Fairy tales inspired the creation of Rapunzel Barbie and Sleeping Beauty Barbie; classical mythology was the impetus for Greek Goddess Barbie. Weddings are one of the most popular rites of passage for Barbie, but there’s also Quincea~ nera Teresa, celebrating her fifteenth birthday, one of the Barbie Family and Friends dolls. Many Barbies are associated with holidays, such as Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day, and Christmas. The Barbie Dolls of the World Collection relies on folk costumes, depicted with varying degrees of accuracy, to indicate nationality. Mattel markets a staggering array of Barbies engaged in various occupations, for example, Paleontologist Barbie, and avocations such as HarleyDavidson Barbie. Barbie also appears as famous media figures, for example, Marilyn Monroe Barbie and Addams Family Barbie and Ken. Ken, Barbie’s boyfriend, appeared on the market in 1961. Barbie also reportedly inspired the 1964 creation of the G. I. Joe doll, who was rechristened as an action figure for boys. Despite the accessories and cultural scripts that Mattel markets along with Barbie (see http://Barbie.com), those who play with her often use the doll to reflect their own interests. Folk play with and folklore about Barbie is thus wildly divergent. Gays and lesbians recode Barbie to reflect their experiences and worldviews, and young children often mirror and extend their own family environments and interests in their Barbie play, so Barbieplay stories range widely in both content and style. For example, representative topics of some oral accounts of children’s play include Barbie as Godzilla, Barbie dating Ken, baking Barbie heads in the oven, utilizing Barbie to explore anatomy and sexuality, and stealing all of a sibling’s Barbie dolls and filling every toilet tank in the household with them. Barbie play does not end with childhood; playful parodies focusing on Barbie abound on the Internet. This electronic folklore (e-lore) criticizes

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Barbie’s body, situates her in real-life situations, and demonstrates her usefulness as a vehicle to address key issues in contemporary women’s lives. E-lore parodies include descriptions of Hacker Barbie, Bag Lady Barbie, Menopausal Barbie, Lipstick Lesbian Barbie, Birkenstock Barbie, Blue-Collar Barbie, Punk Barbie, and Transgender Barbie (formerly known as G. I. Joe). Interestingly, although G. I. Joe has garnered some criticism as a war toy, Barbie has drawn more cultural fire and critique, as e-lore parodies indicate. In the 1960s, a Nazi G. I. Joe was marketed but few noticed; however, every Barbie hairstyle and hemline receives attention. While parodies that focus on the problematic nature of Barbie’s ‘‘body beautiful’’ are abundant, the Internet is largely and disturbingly silent when it comes to similar critiques of G. I. Joe’s ‘‘body violent.’’ See also: Coding; Cyberculture; Dolls; Fashion; Folk Costume; Folk Custom; Folklore of Subversion; Folktale; Girls’ ~ Games; Hair; Quinceanera; Rites of Passage; Sexism; Valentine’s Day; Women’s Work. References: Barbie.com. http://barbie.everythinggirl.com (accessed March 18, 2005); duCille, Ann. ‘‘Barbie in Black and White.’’ In The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty, ed. Yona Zeldis McDonough, 127–142. New York: Touchstone, 1999; Handler, Ruth, with Jacqueline Shannon. Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story. Stamford, CT: Longmeadow Press, 1994; Lord, M. G. Forever Barbie. New York: Avon Books, 1994; Rand, Erica. Barbie’s Queer Accessories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995; Rogers, Mary. Barbie Culture. London: Sage Publications, Ltd., 1999; Stern, Susan. Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour. Distributed on videocassette by New Day Films, 1998; Thomas, Jeannie Banks. ‘‘Ride ’Em Barbie Girl: Commodifying Folklore, Place, and the Exotic.’’ In Worldviews and the American West: The Life of the Place Itself, eds. Polly Stewart, Steve Siporin, C. W. Sullivan III, and Suzi Jones, 65–86. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000; ———. Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Jeannie Banks Thomas Barker, Ma As the mother of four sons, all of whom committed serious crimes in the 1920s and 1930s, Ma Barker is often considered a criminal figure herself. However, there is no direct evidence, other than her long-standing devotion to her sons and their welfare, that this was the case. Born as Arizona Donnie Clark on October 8, 1873, in Ash Grove, Missouri, Barker was known as Arrie, and then as Kate, but was dubbed ‘‘Ma’’ in the newspapers following her death by FBI gunfire on January 16, 1935, in Oklawaha, Florida. She married George Barker, a farmer in southwestern Missouri, in 1892, and raised four sons: Herman, a robber of stores, who shot himself in the head when trapped by the police in 1927; Lloyd, who served twenty-five years in federal prison for robbing a mail truck; Arthur (known as ‘‘Dock’’), a violent gangster who died while attempting to escape from Alcatraz Prison in 1939; and Fred, another violent gangster, who died alongside his mother in 1935. After she and George separated in the mid1920s, Barker lived with various sons in a series of homes and apartments in Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, Illinois, and elsewhere, sometimes under an assumed name to avoid detection.

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Although her four sons had long criminal records, Barker herself was never once arrested, photographed, or fingerprinted by law-enforcement officials. Accordingly, it is difficult to believe FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s claim that she was ‘‘the most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade,’’ who ‘‘became a monument to the evils of parental indulgence’’ (1938: 9). Similar claims were made by Melvin Purvis, one of Hoover’s lead agents at the FBI, who wrote that she ‘‘could handle a machine gun as well as the next man,’’ and that she ruled over the twentyfive members of her criminal gang ‘‘like a queen. Her word was law’’ (1938: 151–52). Barker was probably not as innocent as claimed by Alvin Karpis—she probably was the true leader of their criminal gang. ‘‘The most ridiculous story in the annals of crime is that Ma Barker was the mastermind behind the Karpis-Barker Gang,’’ he wrote. ‘‘It’s no insult to Ma’s memory that she just didn’t have the brains or know-how to direct us on a robbery. . . . You only had to spend a few hours with Ma to see she wasn’t the criminal type. She was just an old-fashioned homebody from the Ozarks’’ (1971: 80–81). The fact that Barker was born and raised in the Ozarks region of southwestern Missouri may help to explain her contradictory images. One stereotypical view is that Ozark mountaineers are primitive, violent, and deceptive, reinforcing the FBI’s view that Barker was one bad mother. The other view stereotypes her as a simple Ozark hillbilly, a woman who loved playing bingo, doing jigsaw puzzles, listening to the radio, and stuffing ‘‘herself with cotton candy all night,’’ as Karpis described her (1971: 91). The true story of Ma Barker probably lies somewhere in between. See also: Mothers’ Folklore. References: Browder, Laura. Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006; Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34. New York: Penguin Press, 2004; Caras, Mark, writer/producer. Ma Barker: Crime Family Values. Biography series. Arts and Entertainment Network, 1997; Hoover, J. Edgar. Persons in Hiding. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1938; Karpis, Alvin, with Bill Trent. The Alvin Karpis Story. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971; Purvis, Melvin. American Agent. New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1938.

James I. Deutsch Basketmaking One of humankind’s oldest forms of material culture is weaving and, in North America, archaeological evidence indicates that basketmaking likely arrived with the first people to arrive from the Old World before the close of the last Ice Age. In some cultures, the story of the creation of the world involves a basket. For example, in Hopi culture, the four animal origins of people floated in a basket boat on everlasting water. The Washoe tell of Washoe, Miwok, Maidu, and Northern Paiute emerging from a water basket filled with cattail down, seeds, and grass. The Passamaquoddy people tell of how Glooskap made the first human by shooting a bow and arrow at the basket (ash) tree; the First Nations came out of the ash tree bark.

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Across time and cultures, basketweaving overwhelmingly has been considered the domain of women. Indigenous stories place the creation of baskets alongside that of humankind and often link it to women’s work. For instance, a Yakima story tells of the creator giving the first woman a little basket which held the skills of art and design that could be imparted to her descendants. Navajo speak of the first Twins who made baskets of reeds and declared that basketmaking should be ‘‘women’s work.’’ Regardless of date of origin, basketweaving has been and continues to be a widespread and important part of Indigenous North American cultures. Sites of spiritual, historical, and cultural importance have Indigenous names connected to baskets or basket materials. Tewa-speaking people in the Southwest, for example, tell of the place the Apache settled as Basket Mountain, noting that this is why Apache are such fine weavers. Stories abound in numerous First Nation communities that provide instruction in the skills and knowledge associated with basketmaking, along with other aspects of living. Knowledge of weaving itself is inextricably tied to knowledge of the natural world: weavers know what materials can be used for weaving, where they grow, and how they should be harvested and prepared. In Native communities, the gathering and preparation of materials often involves prayers, songs, chants, and rituals as the weavers take the resources they require from Mother Earth. Traditional gathering is done with an acute awareness of the need to protect and nurture these natural resources, and weavers are often the first to notice any changes in the environment. On a practical level, First Nation peoples have relied on basketry for nearly every activity in their daily routines. Baskets have been used as containers for food and water, and carriers for everything from babies to firewood, fish traps, clothing, floor coverings, burial shrouds, hunting decoys, and even boats. They have also been critical to the proper performance of ceremonial practices ranging from naming ceremonies to funerary rituals. Immigrants to North America, whose weaving traditions also span many generations and cultures, adapted their weaving styles to embrace available materials and the needs of life in a new land. Although Indigenous weavers and immigrant weavers freely borrowed techniques from each other, distinctive traditions remain firmly rooted in specific communities due to commonly available resources, important traditional cultural meanings and purposes, and/or their economic value. Within the realm of weaving, the term ‘‘basketmaking’’ refers to items covering a wide range of materials, techniques, and functions. Weaving can be done with any material that is pliable enough to be plaited, coiled, twined, braided, linked, and looped. Traditionally, weaving was done with natural materials (black ash, lauhala, sedge, reed, river cane, horsehair, birch bark, grasses, conifer roots, pine needles, etc.), but weavers incorporated manufactured materials as they became available. Natural materials can be dyed with color and woven forms can be embellished with additional materials to create surface effects. Patterns and designs incorporated into the weave are often linked to ethnic and community traditions, and sometimes mark the passing on of knowledge from one artist to another. Most weavers traditionally make objects for use in their own families or communities, but some weavers also make a living by selling their work.

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For instance, in Appalachia, numerous weaving businesses supply their communities with white oak baskets. Native people throughout North America have found a ready market for their work, and continue to sell woven objects to tourists, collectors, and traders. Technology and international trade have had tremendous impacts on the arts of basketmaking. Today, most of the items that were woven out of necessity are now commercially produced, usually out of industrial-age materials. Baskets of natural fibers made in countries where labor is cheap are imported to the United States from all over the world, supplanting more costly local weaving traditions. Even where weaving activity has persisted, weavers have found their sources of natural materials negatively impacted by urban sprawl, the widespread use of pesticides, and growing restrictions on access to land. Despite these challenges, weaving continues. In the late twentieth century, a number of basketmakers’ associations formed in North America for the purpose of perpetuating the knowledge related to gathering and preparing materials as well as to the crafting of woven objects. For instance, the 2,000-member Association of Michigan Basketmakers hosts annual conferences and workshops, maintains a study collection of more than 300 items at the Michigan State University Museum, and is actively involved in documenting the history of their organization. Organizations of Native weavers hold annual gatherings, honor elders, support apprenticeships, and work actively to engage young women and men in learning the skills and the cultural knowledge associated with weaving. Native organizations have also led efforts to work with government agencies and private developers and landowners to protect endangered plant materials and to increase access to restricted gathering sites. The criteria of what makes a good woven basket or other object has always been dependent on the intentions of the maker and the aesthetic standards of the community in which and for which it was made. Basketmakers have been consistently inventive in their use of materials, in the forms they create, and how they decorate or adorn their work. Many baskets have been woven for the sheer pleasure of making an idea into a tangible form. Baskets, old and new, are included in museum and private collections as both art and as important exemplars of historical and cultural knowledge. See also: Aesthetics; Folk Art; Material Culture; Tradition; Tradition-Bearer; Weaving; Women’s Work. References: Turnbaugh, Sarah Peabody, and William W. Turnbaugh. Indian Baskets. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 2004; Wyckoff, Lydia L. Woven Worlds: Basketry from the Clark Field Collection at the Philbrook Museum of Art. Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 2001.

Marsha MacDowell Bat Mitzvah This coming-of-age ritual for Jewish girls, which serves to acknowledge them as adult members of their communities, is relatively recent. In the span of over 5,000 years of Jewish history, the first evidence of a bat mitzvah rite occurred in the nineteenth century in Baghdad. Rabbi Joseph

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Chaim ben Elijah al-Hakam observed that if a twelve-year-old girl received a dress as a gift from her parents and made the appropriate blessing for wearing a new garment, she became a bat mitzvah (‘‘daughter of a commandment’’). This is a far cry from the rite as it is practiced today in North America, where it is typically just like a bar mitzvah, in which a boy chants in Hebrew from the Torah, the parchment scrolls containing the Five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), leads prayers usually during a Shabbat (Saturday) morning service, and delivers a d’var Torah, a discourse on some aspect of Judaism related to the particular Torah portion for that week. A generation ago, however, girls in conservative and orthodox Judaism were not permitted to read from the Torah; their bat mitzvot or b’nai mitvah (two versions of the plural of this term in Hebrew) consisted instead of reading from the Haftarah (the books of the prophets, for example, Micah, Ezekiel, etc.). This is still the case for girls in some orthodox Jewish congregations. Over the last fifty years, however, the bat mitzvah has evolved in two ways. First, it has become a staple of synagogue life for girls in all denominations of Judaism, including orthodoxy, the latest to join in publicly celebrating girls’ coming of age. Second and somewhat less commonly, it is viewed by some women as an opportunity to invite their newly menstruating daughters into the circle of adult Jewish women in the context of a revived ritual for women called Rosh Hodesh (the monthly New Moon festival), which provides a space for Jewish women to explore their roles, needs, and dreams regarding Jewish tradition. In 2000, the Lubavitcher Hasidim, an ultraorthodox sect characterized by significant emphasis on outreach to unaffiliated Jews and ecstatic worship in the form of dancing, singing, and praying, started a Bat Mitzvah Club movement, which is a fusion of the North American consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s and the Girl Scouts/Girl Guides. Another program, also founded in 2000, is run by an independent institute in Philadelphia called ‘‘Rosh Hodesh: It’s a Girl Thing!’’; it is nondenominational and focuses on making the bat mitzvah a meaningful and supportive rite of passage. A major emphasis of both groups, and in fact, of all b’nai mitzvah preparation, regardless of the branch of Judaism, is on each girl’s spiritual preparation during the year preceding the rite of passage into religious adulthood. This time provides an opportunity to learn about puberty, tradition, relationships, God, Israel, self-esteem, and a myriad of other topics important to Jewish girls and women. It is too soon to say, however, what impact, if any, these new movements will have on the evolution of the bat mitzvah rite. A small minority of girls chooses to adapt the ritual mikvah (bath) to their coming-of-age ceremony. While observant Jewish women (and men) have traditionally practiced ritual immersion to create spiritual purity with a physical act before their wedding, observant married women also follow this custom each month after their menstrual periods. Girls who do this immerse themselves in a preliminary mikvah as a way of leaving behind their girlhood and coming out of the water with a new identity. Related to the ritual recognition of a girl’s first period (menarche), which frequently and not coincidentally coincides with the bat mitzvah, some

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mothers have devised a coda to the public ritual by inviting their daughter’s closest friends, female relatives, and teachers (who may bring gifts of blessings, poetry, song, dance, and visual arts and crafts) to recount stories of their own coming-of-age experiences. Because many women who came of age prior to the 1960s never had a bat mitzvah themselves, such events can help to repair past wounds of exclusion from Jewish traditions. Three ritual objects that have become integrated into the bat mitzvah celebration in the reform, reconstructionist, and conservative movements are the tallit (prayer shawls), kippot (ritual head coverings), traditionally worn by men, and Kos Miriam (Cup of Miriam). Both tallit and kiddish cups (traditionally, silver cups to contain the wine that sanctifies every Jewish holiday and rite of passage) are traditional b’nai mitzvah gifts, as are Shabbat candlestick holders (the beginnings of all Jewish holidays are marked by the lighting of candles). Tallit and kippot making has become a significant cottage industry among female artists and crafts people. Kos Miriam, created in the 1990s by a Rosh Hodesh group in Boston, is a goblet used for many ritual occasions. Water is poured into it to symbolize Miriam’s Well, a miraculous and legendary source of water in the desert, named for the prophet Miriam, the sister of Moses. Miriam’s Cup has also claimed its place besides the cup of wine set aside for the Prophet Elijah on Passover. Another innovation in the bat mitzvah ceremony involves references to historical Jewish women. The final benediction and several prayers now invoke ancestral mothers, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, along with the ‘‘fathers,’’ Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—a practice that has also carried into holiday and weekly Shabbat services. The Jewish Women’s Archives (http:// www.jwa.org) encourages girls to draw from the wealth of role models to bring meaning to a bat mitzvah ceremony. As the bat mitzvah evolves, it invites girls into the fold as adults who are inspired and mandated to make Jewish tradition their own in ways their female ancestors could never have imagined. See also: Consciousness Raising; Girl Scouts/Girl Guides; Jewish Women’s Folklore; Legend, Religious; Menarche Stories; Menstruation; Personal-Experience Narrative; Rites of Passage Ritual. References: Adelman, Penina, Ali Feldman, and Shulamit Reinharz. The JGirl’s Guide: The Young Jewish Woman’s Handbook for Coming of Age. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2005; Milgram, Rabbi Goldie. Make Your Own Bar/Bat Mitzvah. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004; Reclaiming Judaism.org. http://www.ReclaimingJudaism.org (accessed August 11, 2008); RitualWell.org. ‘‘Ceremonies for Jewish Living.’’ http:// www.ritualwell.org (accessed August 8, 2008).

Penina Adelman Beadwork Beadwork is a stitching technique as well as an embellishment that uses multiple round, faceted, or tubular beads to create and enhance surface decoration. Beads are commonly applied to fabric, skins, baskets, and even musical instruments, producing patterns that vary in design, application, and meaning. Frequently, beadwork is a field of densely textured and colored patterns, but it can also be the cumulative effect of single strands of

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beads or magically potent beads adorning the body or decorating cult statues. No matter how they are used, beads add visually dynamic accents to cloth and embroidery. The relationship of gender to bead production often divides men’s work, fashioning hard materials (stone and bone carving or glassblowing), from women’s efforts, creating beads from organic substances such as clay or seeds. This division of labor, however, is subject to context. For example, in some Venetian glass workshops, women practice a highly skilled and time-consuming technique that involves making and decorating individual glass beads by using a small, concentrated flame. Bead threading and stitching are predominantly done by women. Working with beads includes the familiar fiber techniques of sewing, weaving, and looping. Beads are either integrated into foundation fabrics or are applied externally, thus amplifying the aesthetic properties of decorative stitchery. They can be embedded in ground fabric through crocheting and knitting by separately inserting single beads between each stitch. Beadweaving involves passing a beading needle and thread at right angles across the vertical warp fibers on a bead loom. This method creates individual or ‘‘free-standing’’ beaded strips of geometric motifs derived from the grid pattern of warp and weft threads. The most free and creative application of beads is bead embroidery, which adds a vibrant layer of ornamentation to fabric. Embroidery techniques offer greater variety and experimentation than beadweaving. They range from the linear arrangement of beads worked in vertical and horizontal rows to flowing asymmetrical compositions of curvilinear elements fabricated from different sizes and types of beads worked in an array of stitches and glowing colors. These stitches are mainly variants of couching stitches, in which one stitch crosses over and anchors strings of beads at regular intervals. Over the centuries, European glass beads or trade beads gradually replaced traditional, more natural materials such as precious and semiprecious stones, shells, quills, animal teeth, and bone. Usually the province of women, beadwork is a translation process which converts and adapts customary practices to suit new materials and techniques. After European contact, Native American needlework evolved new techniques ranging from the use of quills, bone, and shells within rather abstract rectilinear design fields to the employment of glass beads in a European style of representational floral embroidery. Beads reflect prestige and status, but their luminous, brilliant visual effects and rarity also inspire symbolic associations beyond those of identity and aesthetics. In some cultures, they are believed to have magical properties that ensure fertility and ward off evil, as well as religious significance mediated by different belief systems and ritual observances. The revival of opulent Victorian beadwork during the counterculture era of the 1960s and 1970s in North America stimulated a taste for handcrafted and decorative needlework as well as a fascination with the otherworldly or intangible dimensions of adornment. See also: Embroidery; Folk Art; Magic; Material Culture; Needlework; Piecework; Sewing; Weaving. References: Barnes, Galer Britton. ‘‘Finery and Bright Colors.’’ Piecework 1, no. 2 (1993): 72–75; Coe, Ralph T. Sacred Circles: Two Thousand Years of North American Indian Art. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976; Sciama, Lidia D., and Joanne

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B. Eicher, eds. Beads and Bead Makers: Gender, Material Culture and Meaning. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998.

Suzanne P. MacAulay

Beauty Beauty, like its opposite, ugliness, is determined according to cultural context and relations of power. Definitions of the beautiful and corresponding aesthetic standards in art and philosophy shift subtly with each generation and according to social values specific to the time and place. That which is beautiful, attractive, and pleasing to the eye will be admired and enjoyed, idealized, and offered as a model against which the nonbeautiful is measured. Although it is said that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, in fact, dominant discourses on beauty prescribe its qualities, and these are represented, iterated, and transmitted to the populace through mass-media cultural productions in both elite and folk-art forms. For example, in the context of twentieth-century North America, the definition of beauty insofar as it is attached to female and male physical attractiveness is largely aligned with a young, physically fit, able-bodied, and slim physique. This beauty standard is reflected in popular culture, where it is linked with valued characteristics such as affluence, intelligence, good health, success, happiness, vitality, and sexual appeal. Folklorists understand that a cultural study that examines the discourses, artifacts, rituals, and practices of beauty and beautification in a particular place and time will uncover much about the hegemonic ideas and power arrangements characteristic of that location and moment. Historical and cross-cultural analyses of corporeal beauty rituals also indicate their ethnic specificity. Traditional beauty rituals practiced through generations often include a spiritual component. For example, body painting in some ancient and contemporary Australian and North American Aboriginal cultures and heritages is used for ceremonial ritual, adornment, and decoration, and is highly symbolic of community membership, position, and identity. Insofar as beauty rituals are part of a cultural heritage, they symbolize the belief system of that community. For example, in ancient and contemporary Asian, Middle and Far Eastern, African, and South American cultures and heritages, beauty secrets form part of the oral tradition of women’s wisdom, including recipes combining natural organic ingredients to enhance and improve health and to beautify the body. In many cultures worldwide, adornment of the female body with henna art (mehndi) signifies a rite of passage such as marriage; beauty rituals are often part of traditional ceremonies during which older women decorate, encode, and enlighten the next generation about matters of life and love. In the industrialized cultures of North America, dominant discourses of beauty circulating in the mass media reflect the values of a capitalist economy, on a patriarchal, Eurocentric, normatively heterosexual social order, and on a binary sex-gender system. This is reflected in the mass-production of beauty products and processes marketed to women, which encourage

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participation in physical and behavioral transformations to emulate an idealized version of female beauty widely regarded as both unachievable by women and a heterosexist male fantasy; much of what makes it ‘‘ideal’’ is that it is docile, submissive, and highly eroticized. Taken together, the icons of female beauty in Western media—the Barbie doll, technologically-altered photographs of professional celebrities and models via the culture industries (television, magazines, film, and video), and beauty-pageant contestants— represent standards of (virtual or phantasmatic) physical perfection unattainable for most women. As a rule, bodily adornment, decoration, and practices of female beautification are less about spirituality, community, or rites of passage in North American mass culture than they are about power and the commodification of a very limited range of bodily stylizations. The business of beauty culture includes technologies and professions involved in modification and beautification of hair, skin, and fingernails, through fashion, cosmetics, diet, and reconstructive surgeries. In spas, salons, and design houses, largely female cultural domains (with the exception of the plastic surgery field), women practice and purchase the skilled trades of the beauty industries in a quest for physical attractiveness and the sexual and social power that is wielded by those who possess it. Technologies of beauty are folk artifacts which reveal the historical development of Western culture’s pursuit of physical beauty. Examination of the production of cosmetic products, fashion photographs, weight-loss advertisements, and patent drawings for corsets and the like—many of which represent the work of female inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs—reveals its dominant ideologies of the beautiful. Limited definitions of beauty demarcated by and compatible with the hegemony of heteropatriarchy have inspired women’s activism. The historic protest of the Miss America Pageant in 1968 included the spectacle of ‘‘freedom trash cans’’ into which second-wave feminists invited onlookers to toss fashion magazines, girdles, and lipstick. This media-savvy event symbolized a celebration of women’s natural beauty over the artificiality of the beauty queen; a similar political ideology was reflected in the slogan ‘‘Black is Beautiful,’’ popularized by the civil rights movement of the same period. See also: Aesthetics; Barbie Doll; Beauty Contest; Beauty Queen; Cosmetics; Diet Culture; Fashion; Feminisms; Hair; Henna Art/Mehndi; Magazines, Women’s and Girls’; Marriage; Mass Media; Popular Culture; Race; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Sexism; Sexuality; Spa Culture; Women’s Movement; Women’s Work. References: Banks, Ingrid. Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness. New York: New York University Press, 2000; Black, Paula. The Beauty Industry: Gender, Culture, Pleasure. New York and London: Routledge, 2004; Blackwelder, Julia Kirk. Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training During Segregation. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003; Etcoff, Nancy. Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. New York: Anchor, 2000; Gavenas, Mary Lisa. Color Stories: Behind the Scenes of America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002; Gimlin, Debra L. Body Work: Beauty and Self-image in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998; Riordan, Teresa. Inventing Beauty: A History of the Inventions that Have Made Us Beautiful.

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New York: Broadway Books, 2004; Scranton, Philip, ed. Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America. New York: Routledge, 2000; Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used Against Women. New York: Perennial, 2002 [1991].

Sidney Eve Matrix Beauty Contest Like a romantic fairy tale performed on the stage, a beauty contest allegedly creates the opportunity for every young woman to make the fantasy her own. Because beauty contests have proliferated in many locations and have been adapted for a variety of settings, most young women can enter a beauty contest of one kind or another; however, the majority cannot hope to meet the standards set by contemporary beauty pageants. Competing against each other for the fictitious title of ‘‘queen,’’ young women are displayed onstage, where they perform a talent such as singing or dancing for an audience, including a small group of judges chosen by the organization sponsoring the event. The woman judged to embody the ideal qualities of the sponsoring organization is crowned and awarded prizes. She then becomes a local, national, or international celebrity known as Miss America, Miss Ghana, Miss Navajo, or a similar title. Their titles point to a strict body of rules governing the contestants regarding marriage and sexuality; they must not be married, nor should they have ever been married or pregnant. These and other qualifications suggest that beauty contests serve as rituals of initiation and social presentation for young women. Initially proposed in 1854 by P. T. Barnum, an organizer of circuses and variety shows, the first recorded American beauty contest was held at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in 1880. In the twenty-first century, these contests are ubiquitous and can be adapted to any public event, institution, or civic entity, even in war zones. In 2006, the Russian republic of Chechnya held its first beauty contest, and the fifteen-year-old winner was named Beauty of Chechnya. In another innovation, the women’s prison system in Brazil hosted beauty contests in 2005; 603 inmates from ten prisons competed for the title Miss Penetenciaria. The two global contests, Miss Universe and Miss World, have stimulated interest in beauty contests worldwide. Moreover, an unanticipated result of globalization has been a resurgence of nationalism, a phenomenon that has imbued beauty contests with added significance, as they bring recognition to the nation state. Often, these events generate reflections of political issues, as occurred in the Miss America contest in 1968, in Mexico at the 2007 Miss Universe pageant, in India at the 1996 Miss World contest, and in Nigeria at the 2002 Miss World contest. In 2001, in the fourth Face of Africa contest, whose rules require hips no larger than thirty-six inches on girls taller than five feet six inches, all 100 of Uganda’s entrants were judged ‘‘too short and too broad’’ to be called beautiful by Western standards (Duval Smith); the ruling caused an international controversy because African societies often have beauty standards that are dramatically different from the Western model of the tall, thin female body.

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In addition to its intimate relationship to nationalism and local pride, the beauty-contest phenomenon functions as a ritual of gender distinctions, defining the position of women in contemporary societies. The beauty contest, like all initiation rituals, instructs women in the role of womanhood and then presents them to society. However, pageant contestants are also judged and a winner selected. Contestants are instructed with regard to beauty and talent, but they also learn to compete against other women. Equally significant, they learn how to obtain sponsors and how to represent them. Winners of large contests advertise the products of their sponsors as well as speak out about social issues. Though rigid standards govern the contestants, the rewards are empowering: winners receive cash, scholarships, cars, and travel. Especially important, they receive public attention, and with it, a degree of authority. Feminists of the 1960s and 1970s criticized beauty pageants, especially bathing-suit competitions in which contestants display their nearly nude bodies for the judges’ approval. Even the sex-positive feminists of the twenty-first century have used the theme of beauty pageants to mock the patriarchal ideas they enact. For example, CODEPINK Women for Peace has staged parody contests that included prizes for I Miss Liberty, Miss Appropriated Funds, Miss Take, Miss Fire, and Miss Managed. In response to feminist critiques, contest organizers introduced the awarding of academic scholarships as prizes and now require that contestants identify a social cause with which they wish to be identified. In order to revise traditional pageant vocabulary, today’s organizers are urged to remove words like ‘‘poise’’ and ‘‘beauty’’ from beauty-contest discourse. Consequently, many young women have been persuaded to believe that they are participating in scholarship contests, despite the fact that they are displayed onstage and judged on their performance. Also significant is the fact that the bathing-suit competition has returned to many pageants. However configured, beauty contests remain ritual events in which young women learn a female role that conforms to patriarchal expectations. See also: Activism; Beauty; Feminisms; Initiation; Race; Ritual. References: Banet-Weiser, Sarah. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; Cohen, Colleen B., Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje, eds. Beauty Queens on the Global Stage. New York: Routledge, 1996; Craig, Maxine Leeds. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; Duval Smith, Alex. ‘‘Ugandans ‘too big’ to enter beauty contest.’’ The Independent (UK). May 26, 2001. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article246025.ece (accessed December 19, 2007); Osborne, Angela Saulino. Miss America: The Dream Lives On. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1995; Watson, Elwood, and Darcy Martin, eds. There She Is, Miss America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Beverly J. Stoeltje Beauty Queen A beauty queen is a person (typically a woman) chosen to serve as a symbolic representation of a collective identity by a group of people to represent them (or some of them) to a larger, often national, audience. As such, beauty queens are chosen through beauty pageants or contests, which can

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vary in reference to social context, setting, and judging criteria. During her reign, a beauty queen often makes appearances at public functions wearing a tiara (crown) and sash (often emblazoned with the title she holds and/or her sponsors’ names). Recently, analyses of beauty queens have spanned the globe as they are increasingly seen to represent socially defined collective identities such as nations, ethnic/racial groups, or organizations. From the local Miss Snake Charmer Queen of Texas to the internationally broadcast Miss Universe contest, beauty queens remain a popular symbolic vehicle for the assertion and definition of collective identities over time. Criticism of beauty queens has been fairly consistent as feminists have argued that pageants reify patriarchal idealizations and unattainable female beauty standards, which are judged predominantly in heterosexist terms through a patriarchal lens that objectifies women as symbols and not thinking, feeling human beings. Not all beauty queens are the same, however; both queens and pageants vary widely. Large, pyramidal pageants (in which women graduate after winning local, regional, national, and worldwide contests) often have very narrow definitions of beauty, generally premised on White, Western, industrialized ideals, underpinned and promoted by large cosmetic companies intent on expanding their markets, particularly in the developing world. Other, more local pageants—Miss Cherry Blossom in Honolulu, Hawaii, for example—use the beauty queen to draw people to festivals, to celebrate local culture, and to define collectively their identity in symbolic terms. Local beauty queens are often judged not solely on the attractiveness of their faces and bodies, but also on their cultural competence (usually measured through talent performances), educational achievements, service to the local community, and speaking ability. Local differences may be reflected in the eligiblity rules that determine who can and cannot participate in a pageant. Most pageant contestants must comply with rules that require them to be unmarried, childless, of a certain age (typically eighteen to twenty-six), and sometimes of a certain racial/ethnic background or blood quantum. For example, until 1998, the Cherry Blossom Queen pageant in Honolulu, Hawaii, required that contestants be of 100 percent provable Japanese ancestry. With increasing rates of interracial marriage in the Japanese American community, the pageant currently requires contestants to be of 50 percent Japanese ancestry, as do most other Japanese American pageants. These rules send strong messages about the image that the chosen beauty queen must undertake such as sexual purity, youth, beauty, and racial authenticity, but they are also ways that groups who chose queens to represent them define not just the queen but the group itself. As the rules change over time, the criteria by which beauty queens are produced also change to reflect the issues, anxieties, and feelings of the larger community. Beauty queens themselves undergo an often gruelling, and at times, unappreciated role when they make ‘‘visitations’’ to their public; and they must be trained to be royal by consultants and advisors. At the national or international level, beauty queens often use their ‘‘reign’’ and ‘‘visitations’’ to further their careers in public speaking, newscasting, acting, and clothes

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modelling. See also: Aesthetics; Beauty; Beauty Contest; Chastity; Cosmetics; Diet Culture; Ethnicity; Race. References: Banet-Weiser, Sarah. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; Cohen, Colleen Ballerino, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje. Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests and Power. New York: Routledge, 1996; King-O’Riain, Rebecca Chiyoko. Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006; Yano, Christine Reiko. Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity and Culture in Hawai’i’s Cherry Blossom Festival. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006.

Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain

Belly Dance Belly dance, also known as Middle Eastern dance, Raqs Sharqi, Raqs al Bedeli, Oriental dance, or dansi, is a style of dance whose movements tend to emphasize the shoulders, torso, abdomen, hips, and hands. Its movements, usually described as sensuous, can be performed by both men and women, but are more typically performed by women. Its forms are said to mimic childbirth, and the dance is believed to have originated as a means of distracting and encouraging a woman in labor. It is also a dance of celebration that women perform for other women. In the Middle Eastern countries of its origin, belly dancing is recognized as a traditional women’s dance form, most properly performed in a harem or other women-only space. Women began performing the dance for men as a product of colonialism and the voyeuristic tastes of nineteenth-century Orientalists who wished to study the folk arts of the region, even those considered off limits to male spectators aside from the performer’s husband or sheik (in the case of concubines performing). There are many names for belly dance in its North African, East Asian, and West Asian countries of origin, and their repertoire of movements differ to some extent; however, names recognizable to North Americans typically have more to do with costuming styles than with movement forms per se. Some of the common styles in North America are designated ‘‘cabaret/nightclub,’’ ‘‘folkloric,’’ ‘‘beledi,’’ ‘‘gypsy,’’ ‘‘fusion,’’ and ‘‘American Tribal Styles (ATS).’’ Costuming varies from the beaded bra and hip-belt of cabaret to the long, full skirts and full-torso coverage of the ‘‘folkloric’’ styles. American folklore has it that belly dance was introduced at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 in the person of ‘‘Little Egypt,’’ ‘‘a mysterious woman’’ sponsored by San Francisco businessman Sol Bloom along with other dancers he’d seen perform in London. It is also held (incorrectly) that Mark Twain had a heart attack when he saw her dance. However, it is more likely that the form made its North American debut twelve years earlier in the person of a woman dubbed ‘‘Fatima’’ at the Birdcage Theatre, a bordello in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881. The crossing of the traditional gender barrier and its exportation led to consideration of belly dance as a disreputable art; it was accorded little prestige in its originating countries. In the United States, Victorian mores

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ruling women’s bodies combined with racist attitudes regarding Western Asian and North African cultures in general essentially condemned belly dancing’s forms and costumes to the vaudeville and burlesque traditions. Given this history, along with Hollywood associations of male-pleasing ‘‘harem girls’’ and professional ecdysiasts (striptease artists), many incorrect perceptions of belly dancing have become entrenched in the U.S. mindset. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in belly dance, thanks in part to such popular music stars as Shakira (a Colombian-Lebanese singer-dancer) and Beyonce (an African American from Houston). It is now common to find classes offered in most major North American cities in schools, gyms, spas, and health clubs. According to a widely distributed feature story in 2004, ‘‘The allure of belly dancing in the new millennium lies in its low-impact mix of meditation and workout’’ (AP 2004). Many women now see belly dance as a way to ‘‘spice up’’ their weight-loss exercise regimens or as a way to gain confidence in their sexuality and appearance, claiming that it ‘‘brings out the woman inside.’’ Jamileh Jeanne Handy, an instructor in Brunswick, Maine, counters her students’ resistance to the form by explaining that ‘‘Belly dancing celebrates the excitement of youth, the pride of motherhood, and the wisdom of age’’ (AP 2004). A typical belly dance class consists of White, middle-class women of all ages and sizes who often have no knowledge of the feminine cultures from which the form arose or that it ever had a practical function in those cultures. In response to this phenomenon, the Bellydancers of Color Association (BOCA), founded in 2004 by the Washington, DC-based troupe Moor Hips, now holds an annual conference ‘‘that educates participants about the history of the dance, as well as teaching some fancy moves’’ (Johnson: 49). Having become an element of U.S. popular culture, belly dance is the focus of many new Web sites; they typically provide some history of the form and costuming tips, along with schedules for classes and special events. The Rakkasah Middle Eastern Dance Festival celebrated its twentyfifth anniversary in 2005 in Richmond, California. This annual festival, with new venues in Salt Lake City, Utah, and New York City (Rakkasah East), features live bands, dance demonstrations, and henna decorating, along with vendors selling swords, costumes, instructional videos, and recordings of Middle Eastern music. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Diet Culture; Festival; Folk Costume; Folk Dance; Henna Art/Mehndi; Popular Culture; Region: Middle East; Spa Culture; Women’s Folklore. References: Al-Rawi, Rosina-Fawzia B. Grandmother’s Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing. Trans. Monique Arav. Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing Group, 2000; Associated Press. ‘‘Belly Dancing Seen As a Path to Fitness.’’ November 29, 2004. http://my.earthlink.net/article/hea?guid¼20041129/41aaacd0_3ca6_ 15526200411292124240385 (accessed November 29, 2004); Carlton, Donna. Looking for Little Egypt. Bloomington, IN: International Dance Discovery Books, 1995; Djoumahna, Kajira. The Tribal Bible: Exploring the Phenomena that is American Tribal Style Bellydance. Vancouver: Black Sheep Press, 2003; Johnson, Tammy. ‘‘Shake It ’Til You Make It.’’ Colorlines (September/October 2006): 49–51; ‘‘Rakkasah Middle Eastern Dance Festival.’’ http://www.rakkasah.com (accessed April 23, 2005); Richards, Tazz, and Kajira Djoumahna, eds. The Bellydance Book: Rediscovering the Oldest Dance. San Jose, CA: Backbeat Press, 2000; Salimpour, Jamila. ‘‘The Mystery of Little Egypt.’’ n.d.

48 BEST FRIEND

http://www.suhaila.com/Pages/Articles/LittleEgypt.htm (accessed February 21, 2005); Shira. ‘‘The Art of Middle Eastern Dance.’’ n.d. http://www.shira.net (accessed December 26, 2007); Van Nieuwkerk, Karin. ‘‘A Trade Like Any Other’’: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995; Yasmina. ‘‘Yasmina’s Joy of Bellydancing.’’ n.d. http://www.joyofbellydancing.com (accessed February 21, 2005).

Andrea Kitta Best Friend A best friend is a girl’s or a woman’s closest, primary friend. In early childhood, girls may go through many ‘‘best friends,’’ making and breaking friendships easily, but in adolescence and adulthood, there are usually just one or two people who receive this special designation. In childhood, girls often have a best friend who is a girl of similar age. There are exceptions, of course, especially after adolescence, when a woman’s best friend may be a man, whether heterosexual or homosexual. All friendships have unique characteristics, but in the popular imagination, best friends understand each other, share feelings and secrets, and care for one another. A best friend ideally provides unconditional emotional support and advice; she is reliable in times of crisis and celebration. Often a best friend is described as the first person a woman calls if she needs a ride to an emergency room or a temporary shelter; she can be counted on to host her best friend’s bridal shower, for example, or her fiftieth birthday party. A woman’s best friend is usually the maid or matron of honor at her wedding, and, if she’s Latina, one of the damas (maids of honor) at her quincea~ nera. A Christian woman may honor her best friend by asking her to be a newborn child’s godmother, thus entrusting her physical and spiritual welfare. During childhood, best friends may become ‘‘blood sisters’’ by piercing a finger until it bleeds and touching them together so that the blood merges, representing the merging of their lives. Best friends may create and share a secret language, create their own rituals, and share ‘‘inside jokes.’’ In North American cultures, they often attend sleepovers together (wherein girls spend the night at another girl’s home), ‘‘an important way of establishing emotional and social autonomy from one’s parents and transferring feelings of tenderness and affection from parents to age mates’’ (Oxrieder in Georges and Jones: 249). Best friends will often share clothing—another gesture of trust. They may also exchange jewelry such as rings or ‘‘friendship bracelets’’ (handmade bracelets of woven thread) that indicate a valued and enduring friendship between the wearer and the giver. In middle school and high school, best friends may exchange handwritten notes in the classroom, perhaps signed or decorated with the phrase ‘‘BFF’’— ‘‘Best Friends Forever.’’ Girls frequently make lists ranking their friends, bestowing the most time and attention on those they place at the top. In adolescence, best friends often hold hands or link arms. Traditionally, the little finger is the finger of friendship; girls may link the little fingers of their right hands together and shake them up and down while saying, ‘‘Make friends, make friends, Never, never, break friends.’’

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Rituals like this one endear children to one another by symbolically linking a part of one friend with the same part of the other. Numerous portrayals of the best-friend relationship appear in literature, television, and film. Books intended for young and adolescent girls, such as Lisa Yee’s Millicent Min: Girl Genius (2004), explore the joys and sorrows of making and losing best friends. Popular U.S. television programs intended for adults, such as Friends and Will and Grace, also extol the virtues of friendship; and many films—perhaps most famously Thelma and Louise (1991)—explore the transformative power of the best-friend bond at critical junctures in women’s lives. One of American history’s greatest of best friends were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the former, author of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and a married mother of seven children, the latter, a restless and unmarried Quaker. Over the course of an intensely intellectual and emotional friendship that lasted for nearly five decades, they not only pushed and prodded America—and finally the U.S. Congress—to accept the political enfranchisement of women through the vote but created the most enduring civil rights movement in world history: women’s movement. Per her instructions, when Stanton died, a photograph of Anthony, surrounded by flowers, was placed near her coffin. As significant as having a best friend is losing one through physical separation or simply due to the shifting nature of childhood relationships. Feelings of profound loss and/or betrayal are frequently expressed by girls who have lost a best friend. And in adulthood, a change in status from best friend to former best friend—whether because of an argument or simply due to differing life trajectories—can be as emotionally painful as it was in childhood. But a best-friend relationship can also mature from its playful childhood beginnings into a lifelong bond that embodies the power and ~ cohesion of female care and intimacy. See also: Quinceanera; Rhymes; Ritual; Women’s Friendship Groups; Women’s Movement. References: Apter, Terri, and Ruthellen Josselson. Best Friend: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls’ and Women’s Friendships. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1998; Bronner, Simon J. American Children’s Folklore. Little Rock, AR: August House, Inc., 1988; Corsaro, William. We’re Friends, Right? Inside Kids’ Culture. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2003; Georges, Robert A., and Michael Owen Jones. Folkloristics: An Introduction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Dir. Ken Burns. Florentine Films, 1999; Oliker, Stacy J. Best Friends and Marriage: Exchange Among Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; Opie, Peter, and Iona Peter. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959; Oxrieder, Julia Woodbridge. ‘‘The Slumber Party: Transition into Adolescence.’’ Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 43 (1977): 128–134; Schappell, Elissa, and Jenny Offill. The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women Tell the True Stories Behind Their Blowups, Burnouts, and Slow Fades. New York: Doubleday, 2005.

Alina Autumn Christian and Theresa A. Vaughan Birth Chair A birth chair can take the form of a stool or modified chair, used historically as an aid in childbirth. A woman would sit on the stool or chair,

50 BIRTHDAYS

usually supported by one or more attendants, during the final stage of birth. Evidence for the use of a stool or chair for giving birth goes back to ancient Egypt; there are references to the practice in the Hebrew Bible. Chair designs have changed over time, possibly reflecting developing attitudes toward birth as well as shifts in cultural conventions. Physically, the birth stool or chair helps support a woman in an upright position with her pelvis open. This allows the laboring women to work with gravity as well as position herself in a way which facilitates giving birth. Early designs of birth chairs were low to the ground to allow the woman to brace her feet against the floor while bearing down during a contraction. By the 1700s, however, the height began to rise and the chairs became more complex, seemingly coinciding with the medicalization of the birth process and the transition from midwife-attended births to doctorattended births. Advocates of the alternative birth movement (begun in the latter half of the twentieth century) see this change as taking power from midwives and other women in its positioning of women’s bodies for the convenience of a doctor rather than the comfort of the laboring woman. Some medical doctors, however, feel that using a birth chair makes birth too rapid and maintaining a sterile field too difficult. By the 1900s, birth chairs were largely replaced by beds or operating tables. Again, the shift coincides with a decline in midwife-attended births. There has been a minor resurgence in the use of birth chairs, although this seems to be limited to midwives and freestanding birth centers participating in the alternative birth movement. In Europe, where midwives are much more commonly accepted by the medical community, birth chairs are also now employed on a regular basis. This may reflect a general cultural shift in expectations about positions and locations appropriate for childbirth, regardless of the gender of the attending health professional. Historically, very few birth chairs have been manufactured industrially, but were instead individually built or modified from existing chairs; thus, little standardization exists in examples. Most birth chairs (as opposed to stools) have a seat with an area removed to allow access to the emerging infant. Most birth stools are relatively narrow, presumably for the same reason. Writing from the perspective of a folklorist interested in material culture, Amanda Carson Banks has done a comprehensive survey of surviving examples of birth chairs in Europe and North America. There are extant examples in museums and hospitals, although she reports that very few are currently in service. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Home Birth; Midwifery. References: Ashford, Janet Isaacs. The Whole Birth Catalog: A Sourcebook for Choices in Childbirth. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983; Banks, Amanda Carson. Birth Chairs, Midwives, and Medicine. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999; Jordan, Brigitte. Birth in Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1993.

Theresa A. Vaughan Birthdays Birthdays mark the anniversary of a person’s birth. Many of today’s North American birthday rituals have their origins in Europe, related as they are to

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the ancient Greeks’ celebrations of the birthdays of the gods. ‘‘The Greeks believed that everyone had a protective spirit or daemon who attended his [or her] birthday and watched over him in life’’ (Linton 8). The belief was that malevolent spirits are likely to be especially dangerous on such occasions as one’s birthday; the giving of gifts and best wishes was intended to ward off these evil spirits. However, in ancient patriarchal societies, the birthdays of women and children were not considered important enough to be worthy of note. Many of the birthday traditions of today have their origins in nineteenthcentury Germany with children’s birthdays known as kinderfeste. Candles were placed around the edge of a child’s dinner plate in the belief that if a child blows out all the candles in one breath, her accompanying wish would be granted. The ‘‘Happy Birthday’’ song often associated with this ritual today was composed in 1893 by the American sisters Patty Smith and Mildred Hill. The giving of birthday cards began in England in the early twentieth century and has since spread internationally. A birthday ritual that can be found in many parts of the world relates to softening up the body as a new year of life begins; done by intimates of the person whose birthday it is, it can take the form of bumps, punches, smacks, spanks, or ear pulling. Iona and Peter Opie describe a ritual in Britain in which ‘‘they take hold of the arms and legs, lift him [or her] as high as they can and bump him on the ground, repeating it according to the number of years old he is’’ (324–325). The traditional belief is that it is bad luck if the birthday celebrant is not spanked because it was believed to soften up the body for the tomb. Similar rituals are carried out in Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and Argentina. From Canada comes the tradition of greasing the nose with butter, making the birthday child too slippery for bad luck to catch her. In Latin Ameri~ can cultures a girl’s fifteenth birthday, known as a quinceanera, marks a girl’s passage into adulthood. Many of these celebrations are as elaborate as the Sweet Sixteen parties discussed below, and some are the equivalent of a debutante ball. Chicano and Mexican birthdays feature a papier mache ~ pinata suspended from the ceiling; the birthday celebrant hits it with a stick until goodies such as small toys and candy are dispersed. Russian children are presented with pies inscribed with birthday wishes, and Chinese children may expect to be served special noodles at a birthday lunch. In North America’s Japanese families, children who turn seven, five, and three are considered special and may take part in the Shichi-go-san Festival (whose name literally translates into the numbers ‘‘seven-five-three’’). First Nation peoples tend to place more significance on milestones such as a child’s first steps and first words than on birthdays. American girls may participate in lavish Sweet Sixteen birthday celebrations, which can include restaurant visits, sleepovers, theme, and pool parties involving hours of complex planning and preparation and much expense. Elaborate parties for relatives and friends are becoming more common for women when they celebrate milestone birthdays, especially at forty ~ and fifty. See also: Quinceanera; Rites of Passage; Ritual. References: BirthdayCelebrations.net. ‘‘Traditions from Around the World.’’ n.d. http://www.birthdaycelebrations.net/usabirthdays.htm (accessed January 5, 2007);

52 BLIND FOLKLORE

Linton, Ralph, and Adelin Linton. The Lore of Birthdays. New York: Henry Schuman, 1952; Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. The Lore and Language of the Playground. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Janice Ackerley

Blind Folklore Commonly held American beliefs about blindness and the blind have changed over time, but they frequently center around two ideas familiar to historians of disability: morality and illness. Beliefs circulated about blind girls and women are particularly laden with social anxieties about vulnerability and virtue. In the nineteenth century, Victorian-era beliefs about the blind (like those of the poor) were two-pronged. On the one hand, charitable associations presented the blind as tragic figures who nonetheless embodied the American ideals of willingness to work and desire to achieve independence. At the same time, stereotypes persisted of the blind as lazy, incapable, and jealous of sighted people. The Victorian taste for sentimentality embraced the image of the blind girl in ballads and folksongs, many simply titled ‘‘The Blind Girl,’’ or such variations as ‘‘The Lament of the Blind Orphan Girl.’’ The heroine of these songs was virtuous, pathetic, often orphaned, and usually doomed. In the German folk song ‘‘The Blind Child’s Prayer,’’ a widowed father listens to his daughter’s bedtime prayers on the night before he remarries: And as he turned to leave the room One joyful cry was given. He turned and caught the last sweet smile. The blind child was in heaven. They buried her by her mother’s side And raised a marble fair. And on it graved the simple words, ’’There’ll be no blind ones there.’’

Following the internationally celebrated accomplishments of Helen Keller (1880–1968), social assumptions about blindness began to change. Keller became famous for her educational and social attainments, despite the fact that she was blind and deaf from birth. Keller’s extraordinary achievements were actually anteceded by those of Helen de Kroyft (1818–1915), and Laura Bridgman (1829–1889). Due largely to these women’s advances, the popular image of the blind person, and particularly the blind woman, began to include ideas of independence, sophistication, and even erudition. In the twentieth century, blind and visually impaired people gained greater control of their own public image by means of national organizations such as the American Foundation for the Blind, the National Federation of the Blind, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. At most levels of society, it is no longer acceptable to stereotype the blind negatively, although blind people report that some negative beliefs persist. In academe, for instance, visually impaired people report superstitious fears of blindness in colleagues among people for whom loss of vision would be

BLOODY MARY 53

professionally devastating. Despite greater understanding, fears persist that blindness may be somehow contagious. At the same time, blind and visually impaired people also encounter the attitude that they are privileged by legislation such as the ADA and underqualified for the work they do. A widely held folk belief is that blind people enjoy heightened sensitivity in their remaining senses. This notion informs many representations of the blind in popular culture. Movies such as Wait Until Dark (1967), Scent of a Woman (1992), and Daredevil (2003) represent blind characters as able to navigate in some, or even all, situations better than sighted people. These beliefs show a tendency to treat blindness as a mere inconvenience, or even as an advantage within the context of a sighted society. A conflation of physical blindness with lack of insight or understanding is a longstanding conceptual association in Western culture. Ironically, this belief exists simultaneously with one that attributes extraordinary perceptions to the blind. Thanks to the increasing popularity of the genres of personal-experience narratives and memoirs, blind authors are now more able to tell their own stories. One recurring theme in works by the visually impaired is the desire for sighted people to ‘‘get it right’’—that is, to dispel the many erroneous beliefs and stereotypes the sighted have about blindness. See also: Activism; Ballad; Deaf Folklore; Folk Belief; Folk Music and Folksong; Folklore About Women; Occupational Folklore; Personal-Experience Narrative; Superstition. References: Deutsche Volkslieder. ‘‘The Blind Child’s Prayer.’’ n.d. http://ingeb.org/ songs/theytell.html (accessed June 1, 2005); Freeberg, Ernest. ‘‘The Meanings of Blindness in Nineteenth-Century America.’’ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 110, no. 1 (2000): 119–152; Kent, Deborah. ‘‘Views From Hollywood: Recent Portrayals of Blind People in Film and on Television.’’ Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, vol. 93 (June 1999): 392–394.

Karen Munro Bloody Mary Bloody Mary (or Mary Whales) is an adolescent’s game in which girls stand in front of a bathroom mirror and invoke a violent ghost by chanting a predetermined phrase a specific number of times. There are variants of the game, as is the case with most folklore. In most versions, one or more girls stand in the dark in front of a bathroom mirror. Each girl pricks a finger with a pin, then all press their bloodied fingers together. The girls then repeat a specified chant, often ‘‘I do believe in you,’’ or ‘‘Bloody Mary show your fright / show your fright this starry night,’’ or they simply repeat the name ‘‘Bloody Mary’’ a specified number of times (three, ten, 100). Sometimes the chant is done with eyes closed, and sometimes the chanter must turn around in a circle each time the phrase is spoken. Upon opening her eyes, the chanter is supposed to see Bloody Mary in the mirror or, in some versions, Bloody Mary will reach out and scratch the chanter’s face with long fingernails or shards of mirror. At this point the girl(s) will usually run screaming from the bathroom, but in some variants one of the girls must remember to first flush the toilet to get rid of Mary.

54 BODY MODIFICATION AND ADORNMENT

In some cases, the Bloody Mary game is fused with the Vanishing Hitchhiker legend, in which an innocent passerby picks up a girl who stands on the side of the road in the rain. The driver takes her to the address she specifies, but upon arriving there, s/he finds that the girl has disappeared, sometimes leaving a wet spot or a scarf on the backseat. The driver then learns from the girl’s distraught parents that it is the anniversary of their daughter’s death. Mary is also sometimes conflated with La Llorona. Janet Langlois notes that the girls shift from passivity to action as they play the game. When combined with the Vanishing Hitchhiker legend, Bloody Mary is a passive victim, killed by violence; she then disappears only to reappear in a mirror from which she herself acts as a killer of girls when she reaches out to scratch (kill) her summoner(s). Alan Dundes interprets the game as a ritual associated with menarche, the onset of menses. His analysis begins by noting that the players are girls who are at or near the age of menarche (first menstruation), that the game takes place in the bathroom and involves a sudden appearance of blood, and that flushing the toilet makes Bloody Mary go away. He also reports that girls sometimes refer to themselves as ‘‘Bloody Mary’’ when they are menstruating. See also: Folk Belief; Girls’ Folklore; Girls’ Games; La Llorona; Legend, Supernatural; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Menarche Stories; Menstruation; Rites of Passage; Superstition. References: Dundes, Alan. Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002; Langlois, Janet. ‘‘Mary Whales, I Believe in You.’’ In Indiana Folklore: A Reader, ed. Linda Degh, 196–224. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980; Summers, Wynne L. ‘‘Bloody Mary: When Ostension Becomes a Deadly and Destructive Teen Ritual.’’ Midwestern Folklore 26, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 19–26.

Sarah Catlin-Dupuy Body Modification and Adornment Women’s body modification and adornment refers to practices of permanent or semipermanent alterations of the body, usually non-medically prescribed, for reasons ranging from the aesthetic to the transformative. The practices most commonly seen in contemporary North America are tattooing, piercing, and scarification, including cutting/cicatrization and branding. In much of the world, these methods are historically folkloric, and remain so today. Many of the skills involved in safely and aesthetically adorning the body are learned largely through firsthand interactions, informal training, apprenticeships, workshops, seminars, and body-arts festivals. Women whose bodies are thus adorned often develop a strong sense of belonging to a folk group, either because their adornment practices allow them to feel that they are part of an ongoing tradition, or because they perceive that the dominant culture views their practices as deviant. In present-day North America, however, the sight of a young woman with a tattooed ankle or pierced nose has become commonplace. Body piercing is the practice of inserting an object through the skin to create a hole in which jewelry may be worn for aesthetic reasons or to intensify

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sensation. It is a semipermanent form of body modification: the jewelry may be removed, but a scar will mark the site of the piercing. Protruding and ‘‘public’’ body parts, such as the nostrils and nasal septum, ears, and lips, are most commonly pierced; however, the navel, tongue, nipples, and genitalia may be pierced as well. Less common are surface piercings, which use a bar with a ball on either end, creating a barbell shape. The bar runs under the surface of the skin, anywhere from the forehead to the hand. Each end of the rod projects from the skin and has the balls screwed on to it. Women’s piercings range from the socially acceptable (earlobes) to the rebellious (safety pin in a nostril) to the sexually stimulating (labial or clitoral piercings). Scarification is the practice of intentionally creating or exacerbating a scar, usually by burning or cutting the skin, to achieve aesthetic and/or sensory results. Scarification is a permanent body modification; without plastic surgery, which also leaves scars, most scarifications cannot be removed. Intentional scars may be made on every body region from the limbs and torso (common in North America) to the genitals and face. Scarification is viewed as a more dangerous body-modification practice than tattooing or piercing because the practitioner has less control over the results. Some people scar lightly; others develop keloids, raised, fibrous scar tissue. Together with tattooing, these practices form the bases of contemporary body modification. The current North American body-modification movement, known as body play, body art, or bodywork, arose in the 1970s in the gay leather S&M (sadism and masochism) scene in San Francisco. Jim Ward, Fakir Musafar, and Doug Malloy’s (Richard Simonton’s) experiments with piercings and jewelry were primary influences on the way body piercing is practiced today, including the development of an apprenticeship system. Today, a typical piercing is performed with a hypodermic needle (never with a piercing gun). Jewelry, usually made of surgical steel, niobium, or titanium, is secured with a captive bead if it is ring-shaped, or with a screw-on bead if it is shaped like a barbell or a semicircle. Body piercing has been practiced in human cultures since antiquity; the contemporary upsurge in its popularity draws on historical styles. A female figurine from Iran (ca. 3500–2900 BCE) has multiple ear piercings. Labrets (piercings through the lower lip) are part of traditional women’s cultures in the subarctic region, Africa, and South America. Labrets, like earlobe piercings, can be gradually stretched to permit the insertion of larger and larger plugs or plaques. Piercing of the nostrils was common in ancient India, and some claim nipple piercings began as early as fourteenth-century Europe. A prohibition in Leviticus 19:28 admonishes, ‘‘You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you: I am the LORD,’’ but may be contradicted in Genesis 24:22 in which Abraham’s servant gives a nose ring (also translated as ‘‘earring’’) to Rebekah, the future wife of his son Isaac. Examples of cuttings practiced by African women can be found in ethnographic sources and in issues of the popular National Geographic magazine. Many contemporary North American women refer to such ancient or ‘‘exotic’’ examples of ‘‘tribal’’ or ‘‘primitive’’ body modification when discussing their reasons for being pierced, cut, branded, or scarred. Such references enable them to feel centered in a tradition.

56 BODY MODIFICATION AND ADORNMENT

Branding and cutting are the most common methods of scarification. Branding burns the skin to leave a scar. Common methods include strike branding, in which small, thin pieces of metal are shaped, heated with a propane torch, and briefly pressed against the skin one at a time to form a pattern, and cautery or laser branding, in which a medical cautery tool is used to draw the brand onto the skin. Because the resulting scar expands to several times the width of the original burn, brands tend to be constituted by broad lines and simple shapes. With the notable exception of those brands common to some contemporary African American fraternities, whose members are sometimes marked with a symbol of their brotherhood, brands have been used historically primarily as a form of punishment, or as a mark of ownership, or both. Women’s participation in aesthetic branding is a recent phenomenon. Cutters in the body-modification movement differentiate their practice of cutting designs into the skin from an increasingly common medical condition that compels young women to repeatedly cut themselves (self-mutilation). In aesthetic cutting, cuts do not penetrate the skin to the muscle tissue. A variant practice is skin removal, in which small to large patches of skin are cut away to leave larger scars. Ink rubbing is a practice that arose in the S&M lesbian community: tattoo ink or another colorant is rubbed into the cut to give the scar color. As the wound heals, much of the color falls out along with the scab, though the scar remains. Keloiding is often desirable, and many wearers of cuttings and/or brands rub irritants into the wound or irritate it with a toothbrush or steel wool to create a large, raised scar. This practice was appropriated from African traditions in which clay is rubbed into a wound to raise ornamental keloids. In North America, tattooing has been practiced more often by White people, and scarification through cutting by persons of African descent; scar tissue is more visible than are tattoos on dark skin. Among the permanent practices of body modification and adornment, tattooing has perhaps the longest history among North American women. Tattooing involves adding designs and color to the body with ink or another pigment through a process of repeatedly puncturing the skin with a needle or needles or, less commonly, with another sharp tool. The word ‘‘tattoo’’ derives from the Tahitian word tattau or ta-tu and came into use in Europe following the eighteenth-century voyages of James Cook. The practice gained popularity among European sailors. Later, upper-class Europeans adopted the practice, originally restricting it to men, but soon spreading to women. Tattooed royalty have included Queen Olga of Sweden, Princess Waldemar of Denmark, and the mother of Winston Churchill, Lady Randolf Churchill, who had a snake tattooed on her wrist. While tattooing certainly existed in Native North and South America as well as among the Japanese (where it is known as irezumi), it was European tattoo fashion that spread to the United States in the later 1800s with the advent of the first electric tattoo machine. By the turn of century, and well into the 1920s, society women were getting small decorative tattoos and even cosmetic tattoos now known as ‘‘permanent makeup.’’ The art’s mainstream popularity didn’t last, however;

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views of the practice were again associated with the subcultures of sailors, and later with bikers and punks. For decades, women who sported tattoos were displayed as curiosities in carnival ‘‘freak shows.’’ For them, tattoos served as means to make an independent living, while for others, tattooed by their husbands, they were a sign of male ownership. Tattooed women rarely had ink on their faces and hands, and thus were often able to present themselves as ‘‘normal’’ in public; many invented stories in which they were kidnapped by ‘‘savages’’ or criminals and forcibly tattooed in order to avoid the stigma of immorality associated with visible tattoos. Although tattooing came into the mainstream in the 1980s and 1990s, contemporary women’s tattooing still retains some of its historical stigma. Until recently, women’s tattoos tended to involve mild subjects such as flowers, and were done on private areas such as a breast, hip, or buttock. Just as piercing has become more mainstream, so has tattooing; women and girls with tattooed arms or ankles are no longer unusual. For many women, the choice of design and placement of a tattoo may appear at first be aesthetically based, but continuing pleasure in (or sometimes aversion to) body modification is often linked to the emotional and physical sensations that occurred during the tattooing process. Women bring designs of their own choosing to tattoo shops, pick from the work a proprietor-artist has done in the past, or choose from the shop’s ‘‘flash,’’ brightly colored stencils posted on its walls. Traditional women’s flash includes roses, hearts, small animals, and Celtic knotwork. A woman may choose a flash tattoo because it fits her notion of how a tattoo should look (adding to her feeling of inclusion in a folk group), because getting a tattoo was a last-minute decision, or because she did not realize she could ask to be tattooed with a design of her own making. A tattoo design is transferred onto the body with a washable ink stencil, which both gives the artist an outline and shows the client what it will look like on her body. Contemporary artists use a grouping of three needles to create a fine outline and groupings of five to seven needles for wider lines or to fill color in a large space. A single needle might be used for extremely delicate designs. Tattooing needles are mounted on a ‘‘gun’’ and go in and out of the skin about 3,000 times per minute. In contemporary North America, many women both wear permanent and semipermanent adornments on their body and participate in these traditions as body artists themselves. Due to the sensitive nature of many of the sites at which women choose to permanently adorn themselves, women tattoo customers often specifically seek a female artist. Their reasons for being tattooed, pierced, cut, branded, or scarred include aesthetics, rites of passage/ personal meaning, sexual or tactile stimulation, shock value, sense of affiliation, and reclaiming the body from trauma. See also: Aesthetics; Beauty; Coding; Cosmetics; Fashion; Folk Group; Hair; Henna Art/Mehndi; Initiation; Rites of Passage. References: Demello, Marge. Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000; Duerr, Hans Peter. Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization. Trans. Felicitas Goodman. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985; Featherstone, Mike, ed. Body

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Modification. London: Sage Publications, 2000; Myers, James. ‘‘Non-mainstream Body Modification: Genital Piercing, Branding, Burning, and Cutting.’’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 32, no. 3 (October 1992): 267–306; Rubin, Arnold, ed. Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformations of the Human Body. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988; Sanders, Clinton R. ‘‘Memorial Decoration: Women, Tattooing and the Meanings of Body Alteration.’’ Michigan Quarterly Review 30 (1991): 146–57; Serra, Richard, ed. Pierced Hearts and True Love: A Century of Drawings for Tattoos. New York: The Drawing Center, 1995; University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology. ‘‘Body Modifications Ancient and Modern.’’ Near East Collection. n.d. http://www.museum.upenn.edu/new/exhibits/ online_exhibits/body_modification/bodmodpierce.shtml (accessed December 26, 2007); Vale, V., and Andrea Juno, eds. Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment and Ritual. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1989; Wojcik, Daniel. Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Camilla H. Mortensen Borden, Lizzie Legendary for the two brutal murders she was alleged to have committed, Lizzie Borden takes her place as one of relatively few women counted among America’s most notorious criminals. The fact that she was tried and acquitted of these homicides has done little to counter the memory of Borden as an infamous hatchet murderer. The controversy surrounding both killings and their alleged perpetrator persists, along with a singsong children’s rhyme still heard on playgrounds in the United States today: Lizzie Borden took and axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.

Some matters are not in dispute. As grisly crime scene photographs attest, there is no question that Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother, Andrew and Abby Borden, met horribly violent deaths. Discovered on August 4, 1892, in the private residence they shared with thirty-two-year-old Lizzie in Fall River, Massachusetts, both bodies bore the marks of repeated blows from an axe or similarly sharp object. But other aspects of the events have become the subject of extended debate. Was Borden in fact guilty of the murders? (She claimed to have been in the barn at the time.) Who else, such as Bridget Sullivan, the Borden family’s housemaid, might have had sufficient access and motive to commit the crimes? What was the household’s untold story? What torments might compel someone, particularly a family member, to such intense physical violence? The deep controversy surrounding Borden likely owes to the crime’s affront to Victorian-era sensibilities about womanhood and propriety. A hatchet murder would draw attention in and of itself, then or now, but the notion that a woman, and otherwise unremarkable ‘‘spinster’’ (Borden was single) could be implicated in double-parricide and, in its commission, in acts of brazen mutilation, was almost impossible for the public to fathom. The trial itself is the subject of lore, particularly because, despite incriminating circumstantial evidence, Lizzie Borden was acquitted in both the

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deaths of her father and his second wife. Although legally exonerated of the crimes, Borden would find herself identified with the murders for the rest of her life, and was stigmatized by accusations that she was responsible for brutally ending two innocent lives. She finished up her own life as a pariah at the age of sixty-seven, still living in the Hill District of Fall River, neither vindicated in public perception nor forgiven by her community. Borden remains a recognizable figure within popular culture, and the deeds she is said to have committed still capture the nation’s imagination. Contemporary retellings of the Borden tale abound, from spooky stories passed among children, to novels, films, plays, operas, and ballets dramatizing Borden’s life and dismal end. Angela Carter’s (1986) short-story rendition of the tale told from Borden’s perspective is especially remarkable. As with other macabre tales, the Borden incident also finds its way into tourism, with eerie sites opened in Fall River, such as the ‘‘Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast’’ and its accompanying museum. Guests may stay overnight in the house where the murders occurred; more squeamish visitors, however, may opt to take the daytime tour. Lizzie Borden is, likewise, the subject, predictably enough, of many Web sites. At least one ‘‘virtual Borden house’’ invites online guests to graphically experience the bloody scene of the crimes. Other Web sites, somewhat less sensational and morbid in purpose, offer digital archives of trial evidence, and serve as curricular units for students posing as historical detectives sleuthing for the truth. That search continues. See also: Local Characters; Rhymes; Rumor; Violence. References: Bellesiles, Michael A., ed. Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History. New York: NYU Press, 1999; Carter, Angela. ‘‘The Fall River Axe Murders.’’ In Saints and Strangers, 7–31. New York: Viking Penguin, Inc. [King Penguin], 1986; Kent, David, and Robert A. Flynn. The Lizzie Borden Sourcebook. Boston: Branden, 1992; Williams, Joyce. Lizzie Borden: A Case Book of Family and Crime in the 1890s. Bloomington, IN: TIS Publications, 1980.

Linda S. Watts Breastfeeding Breastfeeding is the act of nourishing an infant at the breast of its mother or another lactating woman. Until the early twentieth century, breastfeeding was nearly always essential to the survival of an infant, and is still considered by both biomedicine and most vernacular traditions to be the healthiest way to feed a baby. While breastfeeding is a natural, physiological process, it is also a social and cultural one. Customs dictating the duration and practice of breastfeeding have varied widely in different places and eras. Who breastfeeds whose baby, what constitutes wholesome or unwholesome milk, how and when babies are weaned, and how breastfeeding is valued all vary. Although a natural process, breastfeeding is also a skill that must be learned by both the mother and her newborn, and thus it is highly sensitive to cultural norms. Since breastfeeding is a cultural as well as a natural act, it follows that there is a complex relationship between traditional wisdom regarding its

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practice and what is now understood about the physiological process of lactation. For instance, in many cultures around the world, women have been advised to delay the start of breastfeeding until the milk comes in several days after birth, since colostrum (an important source of antibodies and nutrients) is perceived as unhealthy. It is widely held that the quality of breast milk can be harmed by the mother’s emotional state, to the degree that an anxious woman may be encouraged to wean her baby. Among Haitian women, it is commonly believed that strong emotions can generate bad blood, which can contaminate breast milk. The mother’s diet is often restricted; women may be advised to avoid spicy foods, broccoli, onions, or chocolate. Many African American women avoid any food they were unable to tolerate during pregnancy. Alternatively, to improve breast milk, women may be encouraged to eat spicy foods, garlic, or, in the case of Ozark women observed by Vance Randolph, raw onion (209). There is also traditional wisdom regarding the best time to wean, such as by zodiac signs or phases of the moon, and the best age to wean, which can vary greatly. A widely held folk belief with some physiological justification holds that breastfeeding provides protection against pregnancy. Breast milk is commonly considered to have benefits other than infant feeding, and is used as a treatment for eye infections and other ailments. Various herbal and other remedies have been used to increase or decrease milk supply and to soothe engorged breasts and sore nipples. For example, fenugreek, first known to have been used in Ayurvedic medicine, is still used in many parts of the world, including North America, to increase the milk supply. Applying cabbage leaves to the breasts to relieve engorgement is likewise a widely distributed practice that is present in North America. Breastfeeding rates declined precipitously throughout the twentieth century in the United States and in much of the world as the birthing and rearing of children came to be seen as a scientific enterprise to be managed by experts. For the first time in human history, many of the women becoming mothers, particularly in North America, had not themselves been nursed, may have never seen a woman nurse a baby, and had no breastfeeding peers to turn to for advice and support. Much of the traditional wisdom regarding breastfeeding had been lost. Those who did choose to breastfeed their babies often received such poor medical advice that their milk supply dwindled. In the mid-twentieth century, it was commonly believed that most women could not produce enough milk to feed their babies. The numbers of breastfed babies in the United States declined to 18 percent in 1966 (WHO statistics cited in Carter: 4). In 1956, Catholic mothers in Illinois started La Leche League, an organization dedicated to providing mother-to-mother support, and it quickly became an influential organization. In the 1970s, paralleling the rise in natural childbirth, breastfeeding rates began to rise again. Currently, the majority of babies are breastfed in their first month of life, and numbers have increased in the first decade of the twenty-first century, although attitudes toward breastfeeding in North America remain highly ambivalent. The first years of the new century have seen the rise of ‘‘lactivists,’’ nursing mothers who fight for the right to breastfeed their babies in public by organizing

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‘‘nurse-ins’’ in locations where this right has been denied. See also: Activism; Childbirth and Childrearing; Herbs; Mothers’ Folklore; Nature/Culture; Old Wives’ Tales. References: Baumslag, Naomi, and Dia L. Michels. Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995; Carter, Pam. Feminism, Breasts and Breast-feeding. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995; Farmer, Paul. ‘‘Bad Blood. Spoiled Milk: Bodily Fluids as Moral Barometers in Rural Haiti.’’ American Ethnologist, vol. 15 no. 1 (1988): 62–83; Friedman, Albert B. ‘‘Grounding a Superstition: Lactation as Contraceptive.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 95, no. 376 (1982): 200–208; Hand, Wayland D., ed. Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from North Carolina. Volume VI of the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, Newman Ivey White, general ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1961; Harmon, Amy. ‘‘‘Lactivists’ Taking Their Cause, and Their Babies, to the Streets.’’ New York Times, June 7, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/07/nyregion/07nurse.html?ex¼1275796800& en¼0c55cf357d95bd30&ei¼5088&partner¼rssnyt&emc¼rss; Huggins, Kathleen. The Nursing Mother’s Companion. Third revised edition. Boston: Harvard Common Press, 1995; Humphrey, Sheila. The Nursing Mother’s Herbal. Minneapolis: Fairview Press, 2003; Maher, Vanessa, ed. The Anthropology of Breast-Feeding: Natural Law or Social Construct. Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1992; Randolph, Vance. Ozark Superstitions. New York: Columbia University Press, 1947; Snow, Loudell F. Walkin’ Over Medicine. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998; Ward, Jule DeJager. La Leche League: At the Crossroads of Medicine, Feminism, and Religion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Jennifer E. Livesay Brideprice Brideprice is the amount given to the bride by the bridegroom prior to marriage. In cultures where this marriage custom exists, the giving of brideprice is a requirement for a valid marriage. In cultures where there is no formal marriage ceremony, the marriage is recognized when the brideprice has been paid. Originally, the groom’s family paid the brideprice to the parents of the bride to make up for the loss of their daughter and of the work she performed for them. Today, many cultures recognize the brideprice as the bride’s property. In some cultures, the groom or his parents provide goods, services, or work to the bride’s family in lieu of the brideprice. In many instances, brideprice is not regarded as the purchase price of the bride, paid by a suitor to the girl’s father for the right to marry his daughter and control her. Rather, it is seen as a gift, a token of respect and kindness toward the bride. It also symbolizes the bridegroom’s promise to support his wife. Another of its purposes, if paid in money, is to provide financial protection for a woman should she be divorced or widowed. In some cultures, a woman feels pride and increased status in her community by the payment of a satisfying brideprice by her husband. It gives her the public assurance that she is a person of worth. Many peoples of African, Australian Aboriginal, Native American, and Semitic descent observe traditions of giving and receiving brideprice, generally given to the bride by the bridegroom and paid in money, goods, and/or services. In ancient Jewish marriage custom, the payment of brideprice is

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an established law, provided for in the marriage contract called the Ketubah, and given to the bride to protect her in the event of divorce or widowhood. This provision of the Ketubah are said to have helped to raise the status of women. In Muslim cultures, the sadaq (brideprice) is given to the bride’s parents, but it is established by Koranic law to be the property of the bride. Payment of brideprice is required for a valid Islamic marriage. The value of the brideprice depends upon many factors, such as a woman’s beauty, talents, education, the wealth of her parents, and her family’s desire to keep her at home. The brideprice for a Muslim virgin is more than that for a widow or divorcee. Among well-to-do families, the brideprice is usually spent on the bride’s marriage trousseau of jewelry, furniture, and clothes. These items remain the bride’s property during and after marriage by the term of the marriage contract; they give a married woman some insurance against poverty if her husband were to die or divorce her. See also: Engagement; Jewish Women’s Folklore; Muslim Women’s Folklore; Rites of Passage; Wedding. References: Fielding, William J. Strange Customs of Courtship and Marriage. New York City: Hart Publishing Company Inc., 1942; Goodsell, Willystine. A History of Marriage and the Family. New York: AMS Press, 1974; Jones, E. O. Marriage Customs through the Ages. New York: Collier Books, 1965; Mordecai, Carolyn. Weddings: Dating & Love Customs of Cultures Worldwide including Royalty. Phoenix: Nittany, 1999; Murphy, Brian. The World of Weddings. New York & London: Paddington Press Ltd., 1978.

Zainab Jerret

C Calamity Jane Born Martha Jane Cannary in Princeton, Missouri, on May 1, 1852, there is some speculation that Calamity Jane may have been born as late as 1856. At the age of thirteen, Martha, with her parents and three siblings, began a five-month trek along the Overland Pass. During the journey, Martha spent much of her time riding horses and hunting with the men. She preferred their company and adopted masculine dress, though she was rarely mistaken for a man, as some western lore states. Not long after the family’s arrival in Virginia City, Montana, Martha’s mother and father died and she began her adventures in the American West. At sixteen, Martha started a series of masculine jobs: scouting for the army, bull-whacking, and riding for the Pony Express. Though difficult jobs even for most men, Martha excelled at each of them; she is said to have scouted for General George Custer, although there is little likelihood of this. In her autobiography, she claims to have obtained the nickname ‘‘Calamity Jane’’ while on a scouting mission. It seems she stumbled upon soldiers trying to stop a Native uprising when a captain named Egan was shot. He began to fall from his horse and Martha rushed to his aid. ‘‘I lifted him onto my horse in front of me and succeeded in getting him safely to the fort. Captain Egan on recovering laughingly said, ‘I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains.’’’ Captain Egan denied this event ever occurred. Martha Cannary may also have received her nickname while nursing victims of smallpox in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1878. The town had been ravaged by the disease, and Martha wanted to help nurse the ill. It is said that due to her selflessness, the townsfolk were able to forget her alreadybrazen past during this ‘‘calamity,’’ and named her Calamity Jane. Between the 1870s and 1890s, new stories began to emerge about Calamity Jane and her wild adventures in dime novels. Published by Beadle and Adams, Calamity had a costarring role with Deadwood Dick, though in most stories she emerged as the heroine. Calamity fought Natives, villains, and in many episodes, saved Dick from death. She was ‘‘. . . a dare-devil . . . the most reckless buckaroo in these Hills’’ (Faber: 38). With her popularity

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and reputation growing, tourists traveled to Deadwood, South Dakota, to meet the ‘‘famous’’ Calamity Jane—a woman whom locals regarded as an alcoholic and a burden to their society was quite popular back East. According to legend, Calamity married Wild Bill Hickok and may have had a child by him, named Janey, who was given up for adoption. Calamity began to keep a journal that, upon her death, would be given to her daughter. Many doubt the authenticity of the letters, but if they are real, they show a Calamity Jane who is lonely, depressed, and tired of her nomadic life. She longs to meet her daughter and wants to be another person, a better person. In her later years, Calamity opened a saloon and hurdy-gurdy house. She attempted touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, but her hard drinking kept her in trouble. After being kicked out of the show, Calamity went home to Deadwood and wrote the previously mentioned autobiography, Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane by Herself. Calamity went to a fair in Buffalo, New York, to sell the booklet herself, but it was a disappointing experience; her health failing, Calamity returned again to Deadwood. She passed away two years later on August 1, 1903, due to ‘‘inflammation of the bowel.’’ Her funeral is said to be one of the largest Deadwood had ever seen, with mourners including members of its high society. Calamity Jane is buried next to Bill Hickok in Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, South Dakota. See also: Cowgirl; Cross-Dressing, Legend, Local; Local Characters; Popular Culture: Region: United States. References: Botkin, Benjamin Albert, ed. A Treasury of Western Folklore. New York: Crown Publishers, 1951; Faber, Doris. Calamity Jane: Her Life and Her Legend. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992; Hickok, Martha Cannary. Calamity Jane’s Letters to her Daughter. San Lorenzo, CA: Shameless Hussy Press, 1976; McLaird, James D. Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005; Sollid, Roberta Seed. Calamity Jane. Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society Press, 1995.

Tamara Robbins-Anderson Camplore Camplore is the folklore of recreational camping and summer camps. It draws on traditions based on the temporary culture of camping trips and summer camps for children, which have become fixtures of U.S. and Canadian culture over the past 150 years. Songs, stories, local legends, and rituals may form part of campers’ orientation to a new environment and community, but camplore also emerges among campers and camp staff as they experience living in temporary communities and develop personal histories with distinctive places. The origins of camps can be linked to educational and recreational philosophies that valued folklore for the creation of national identities, recapitulating elements of the frontier experience together with Native American elements that in the late nineteenth century were enlisted to emblematize a distinctive new-world identity. U.S. and Canadian women were central to the nineteenth-century creation of the camping movement, which emerged both to socialize immigrant

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and urban children and to benefit the health and social development of children generally. According to the American Camp Association, a majority of camp directors today are women, and about 30 percent of established camps today are for girls only. These camps may foster strong associations, mentor relationships, and peer networks that last a lifetime. Many cross boundaries of education, occupation race, ethnicity, and residence to focus attention on common formative experiences in group living, leadership, risk management, culture creation, and personal and environmental values. Camplore is at the heart of this experience. There are more than 12,000 established camps in the United States alone. Most are operated by non-profit youth, religious, and educational organizations, but more than 20 percent are run by families who may have owned and operated a summer camp for generations. In Canada, a similar pattern is found. Many children attend ‘‘day camp’’ or ‘‘sleep-away’’ camps (some for up to eight weeks annually). Study of their experiences can illuminate the changing social networks of girls and women in North American societies. Although there are collections on camp folklore and general camp ethnographies in several archives (for example, at University of California at Los Angeles; Bowling Green University, Ohio; New York Folklore Society; and Utah State University), most published discussions focus on sponsoring organizations and on the social institution of the summer camp in general terms. Some call attention to the conscious appropriation of adapted Native North American themes and motifs, including nomenclature, tipis, woodcraft and nature activities, and dance skills. Others include material on rites of passage, pranks, and other small traditions of subversion, campfire rituals, skits, gift exchanges, music, and storytelling. Abigail Van Slyke’s work deals with the architecture of camps as the embodiment of ideas about gender, nature, and childhood; Richard Louv writes about the importance of regular exposure to, confidence about, and competence in the natural environment in ways that may be relevant to further explorations of camplore. See also: First Nations of North America; Folk Custom; Folk Drama; Folk Group; Folk Music and Folksong; Foodways; Girl Scouts/Girl Guides; Legend, Local; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Storytelling. References: Brewer, Teri F. ‘‘Why They Went to the Woods: Immigrants and Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century United States.’’ Unpublished conference paper. Cardiff: Anthropology Wales, 2001; Brewer, Teri F., and Patricia A. Wells Creating and Maintaining Traditions: Ramifications of Expressive Behavior for Policy. Unpublished conference paper. Santa Monica, CA: Organizational Folklore, 1983; Chandler, Joan. ‘‘Camping for Life: Transmission of Values at a Girl’s Summer Camp.’’ In Children and Their Organizations: Investigations in American Culture, eds. R. T. Sieber and A. J. Gordon, 67–70. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1981; Deloria, Phillip J. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998; Eels, Eleanor. The History of Organized Camping: The First 100 Years. Martinsville, IN: American Camping Association, 1986; Kahn, Laurie. Sleepaway: The Girls of Summer and the Camps They Love. New York: Workman Publishing, 2003; Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. New York: Algonquin Books, 2005; Van Slyck, Abigail. Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2006; Wells, Patricia Atkinson. ‘‘The Paradox of Functional Dysfunction in a Girl Scout Camp: Implications of Cultural Diversity for Achieving Organizational

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Goals.’’ In Inside Organizations: Understanding the Human Dimension, eds. M. O. Jones, M. D. Moore, and R. C. Snyder, 109–17. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988.

Teri Brewer

Charivari/Shivaree Charivari/Shivaree is a ritual usually linked with marriage in which friends, relatives, and community members gather outside the newlyweds’ house or even in their bedroom and make raucous noise by running chainsaws, honking car horns, shooting rifles, banging pots, singing, shouting, and/or playing instruments off-key. Once a social critique of unacceptable marriages, sexual or sex-role deviations, or political actions, charivari (or shivaree) is now practiced in parts of rural Canada and the United States as an affectionate prank. It is usually accompanied by trickery inside and outside the house, such as placing alarm clocks set at untimely hours beneath the couple’s bed, removing labels from canned goods, toilet papering the yard, and assembling farm machinery on the barn roof. In the United States, charivari can be called belling, bull band(ing), calathump, calthump(ian) band, horning, serenade, skimerton, skimilton, tinpanning, or rattle band(ing). In Canada, banjo or saluting are also used, but sometimes the practice is unnamed. Charivaris were recorded in medieval times. The Italian Renaissance crowd demanded a ‘‘ransom’’ and then punished the couple with cacophony or rewarded their generosity with melodious song. Charivaris drew attention to marriages that fell outside of social conventions, such as between old and old, old and young, or interracial persons, or to ‘‘[lampoon] shrewish wives and impotent husbands in the interests of effecting procreation and ensuring the community’s future’’ (Tylus 2000). The focus on procreation symbolically ties charivari’s older and newer forms: older charivaris denounced couples unlikely to be fertile or whose children could not be incorporated into a racially segregated society. But in parts of Canada, couples can endure the newer affectionate charivari any number of times until there is evidence that their first child is on the way. Disapproval charivaris were conducted almost exclusively by men. In an 1804 shivaree in New Orleans, even ‘‘very genteel men’’ took part; ‘‘all this comes from an indisposition to allow ladies two chances for husbands, in a society where so few single ladies find even one husband!’’ (Davis 1984). In the 1840s, ‘‘young unmarried males . . . engaged in the practice of charivari, as, in masked disguise, they named and marked with raucous antics those in the community who had violated—through adultery, for instance, or wife-beating, or condescension toward the community—the neighborhood’s norms’’ (Gura 1999). Some time in the late nineteenth century, most charivaris became a positive comment on the marriage (though the two forms coincided well into the twentieth century). Welcoming charivaris involved women as well as men, and were often cross generational. Women’s participation often included bringing lunch (a cold meal of sandwiches and sweets) in

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expectation of being invited into the house. These charivaris usually close with a community celebration in the newlyweds’ home. See also: Folk Custom; Marriage; Ritual; Wedding. References: Davis, Natalie Zemon. ‘‘Charivari, Honor, and Community in SeventeenthCentury Lyon and Geneva.’’ In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon, 42–57. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984; Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘Welcome and Unwelcome Visitors: Shivarees and the Political Economy of Rural-Urban Interactions in Southern Ontario.’’ Journal of Ritual Studies 3 (1989): 45–67; Gura, Philip F. ‘‘America’s Minstrel Daze.’’ New England Quarterly: A Historical View of New England Life and Letters, vol. 72, no. 4 (1999): 602–616; Morrison, Monica. ‘‘Wedding Night Pranks in Western New Brunswick.’’ Southern Folklore Quarterly 38 (1974): 285–297; Tylus, Jane. ‘‘Theater and Its Social Uses: Machiavelli’s Mandragola and the Spectacle of Infamy.’’ Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 3 (2000): 656–686.

Sarah Catlin-Dupuy Chastity The concept of chastity (from the Latin castus, ‘‘pure’’) has deep roots in the sexual politics of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially since the rise of Christianity. Today, its historically accumulated cognate meanings include sexual and emotional modesty, restraint, virtue, abstinence, renunciation, celibacy, divinely or officially sanctioned sexual behavior, without sin, and holy. The notion that a human body-mind has the capacity for ‘‘purity’’ in thought, word, and deed implies that it also has the capacity for its opposite: a temporary or permanent state of being sullied or stained. Originating in Platonic and Manichaean philosophies, the concept of chastity reveals a fundamental split in Western thought between matter (from the Latin mater, ‘‘mother’’), deemed inherently evil because it inevitably changes, dies, and decays, and disembodied mind, spirit, or soul, deemed inherently good because it is unchanging and immortal. Given this formulation, chastity is an expression of the belief that ‘‘abstinence from sex [is] the most effective technique with which to achieve clarity of soul’’ (Brown: 78); it is also a conceptual construct that generates what has become known as the madonna/whore dichotomy as a characterization of ‘‘the nature of women.’’ Chastity—historically and in the present—presents a paradox for women for three reasons. First, associated with the realm of matter in the Western imagination, women have come to represent (hetero) sexuality itself (men have sexuality; women are sexuality). Therefore, ‘‘good women’’ (madonnas) abstain from illicit sexual expressions for the sake of men, whose souls are endangered by their mere presence, and also for the sake of their own souls’ redemption from the ‘‘sin of Eve,’’ that is, original sin. Second, procreation, particularly socially sanctioned procreation, as every Roman matron knew, is necessary for the orderly continuity of society. If a woman chooses to abstain altogether from expressing her sexuality, she leaves herself open to the charge that she has transgressed not only against the stability and order of society, but against her own nature. Finally, long-accepted metaphorical associations between a woman’s mouth and her vagina (both have ‘‘lips’’ and are potentially dangerous when open) mean that chastity in word implies women’s silence (closed lips).

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She may, therefore, correctly choose chastity only within the bounds of (quiet) married sex, once she is widowed, or as a renunciate nun. If her sexuality finds expression in other contexts, she falls into the whore category, where her sexuality becomes the sole mark of her personhood. Patriarchy maintains its control of female sexuality primarily because its regulation ensures continuity of male inheritance patterns and because it reflects upon the reputations of its male guardians. Hence, during the European medieval period, a departing crusader insisted that his wife wear a chastity belt while he was away, or so the stories go. Chastity belts are more fictive than factual, but it is in the idea that he must somehow restrain and secure her naturally vagrant sexuality for himself that their importance lies. But while chastity may seem like an old-fashioned ideal in these post-Sex-and-the-City days, its foundational ideology remains essentially unchanged. Women, particularly upper- and middle-class women, whose unchaste sexual behavior results in the births of ‘‘illegitimate’’ children, may still be sent to homes for unwed mothers, a very hush-hush and shame-filled operation. Historically, abortions were life-threatening, back-alley procedures; as of this writing, it remains to be seen if they will remain legal, safe, and available in the United States. The idea that raped women are ‘‘asking for it’’ by wearing immodest dress persists in some sectors. And ‘‘blushing’’ brides dressed in white are still ‘‘given away.’’ The classic pattern of heterosexual gender relations in which good men are expected to be aggressively initiating and sexually experienced while good women giggle, blush demurely, and passively comply with male desires, are colored by historical notions of the pure, virtuous, modest, chaste female. Current evangelical Protestant abstinence campaigns in England and North America encourage young women and men to abstain from sexual intercourse until marriage and to mark their commitment to chastity by wearing a ‘‘chastity ring’’ or ‘‘purity ring’’ on the fourth finger of the left hand (‘‘Silver Ring Thing’’). Due to poor sex education, however, especially in the United States, studies show that abstinence pledgers are up to six times more likely to have oral and anal sex, resulting in sexually transmitted disease rates that coincide with those of their non-pledging peers. In other traditions, chastity is marked variously by the wearing of habits, head- and/ or bodyscarves, special underwear (in the case of Mormons), chastity belts (in the case of sadism and masochism adherents), and in its most extreme form, by surgically removing the clitoris and/or closing the vaginal lips through female genital cutting. See also: Eve; Female Genital Cutting; Helpmate; Sexuality; Veiling; Virginity; Wedding. References: Associated Press. ‘‘Study: Abstinence Pledgers May Risk STDs.’’ Arizona Daily Sun, March 19, 2005, http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story. cfm storyID¼105330 (accessed March 19, 2005); Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; Classen, Albrecht. The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Silver Ring Thing. http://www.silverringthing.com (accessed June 29, 2007); Theiss, Janet M. Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Jessica Grant Jørgensen and Liz Locke

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Cheerleading Cheerleading is an adolescent-driven cultural production combining folk dance—patterned and rhythmic movement—with folk poetry—memorized shouts and chants in rhyming or blank verse. The practice has developed its own trappings, vocabulary, theatrics, and organizational structures. Though originally American, cheerleading has been exported around the world. Its elements are traditional, patterned, and symbolic. While boys and men are incorporated into many teams, especially in the extensively developed U.S. technical cheerleading competitions, the custom is primarily associated with and dominated by girls and women. Since the early 1970s, through national media and organizational structures, the vernacular practice of cheerleading has been extracted from its local ceremonial contexts and developed for staged presentations. Cheerleading was once viewed only as vigorous sideline encouragement to keep both players and spectators enthused about winning at community sporting events like high school basketball and university football games. It now occurs in a variety of contexts and for various purposes—from its original function as sideline entertainment at sports events to elaborately staged championships in which teams of cheerleaders compete. This self-conscious alteration has transformed the auxiliary nature of the form into an activity recognized as a sport in its own right, not simply as an accessory to maledominated sports events. While some high-powered teams have professional choreographers who groom them for national championships, commonly team captains are responsible for teaching cheers and dances to new cheerleaders. Knowledge of the practice and of the cheerleader role and social image are passed down through generations of girls, primarily through oral transmission. In the United States, it is transmitted from experts to novices within individual squads over school years marked by cheerleading’s calendrical rituals. Among these, tryouts (experienced as a chance for initiation into an elite clique) and competitions are especially vital. Cheerleading’s processes of firsthand transmission take place in two major arenas: first, during the learning and teaching of cheers within one team, and second, at gatherings of cheerleaders at camps and competitions. The latter events gather passionate participants who demonstrate and share routines that remain remarkably consistent across time and space. Specific cheers are rarely transmitted between squads at these brief occasions, yet the rules of performance are influenced, shaped, and reinforced by the intense communal experience. Cheerleaders explicitly refer to ‘‘spirit’’ as a core value; they strive to embody it through elements that combine the unofficial and spontaneous with the formalized and ceremonial. This traditional body of knowledge finds a forum for exchange and validation in the context of the competition. Cheerleading competitions, in the United States and elsewhere, are grand conventions of scantily uniformed, coiffed, and glittered girls presenting their routines in screaming, synchronized teams. Costumes, cosmetics, hairstyles, facial expressions, preparations, and customs on- and offstage are stylized and imitative.

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At standard competitions, each team has two and a half minutes to perform on a brightly lit stage. Routines can include human pyramids and other stunts, dancing to recorded music, and required verbal cheer elements. These singsong chants, accompanied by choreographed movements, handclapping and foot-stomping, feature complex rhythms and syncopations. They typically incorporate suggestive pelvic movements and symbolic gestures that illustrate (often with militaristic imagery) the accompanying lyrics. Common elements include clenched fists, punching and chopping motions, kicks and jumps that reveal the crotch area, and defiant stances with legs spread. The hip-thrusting and gyrating mimic more consciously seductive styles of dance. Such choreography is a requisite element of contemporary cheerleading performance, but the increasing sexualization of the genre troubles some critics. As troubling is the marked increase in injuries sustained by competitive cheerleaders, especially in recent years. The amalgamation of other styles of movement—for example, hip-hop and martial arts—into American cheerleading has not significantly altered the genre’s basic vocabulary, including its repertoire of gestures, jumps, and formations, its body of textual material, and its accompanying accessories, such as pom-poms and poodle socks. Cheerleading squads from around the United States, convening at competitions, share a common repertoire of cheers that have been passed down often virtually unchanged for fifty years. See also: Clique; Cosmetics; Folk Dance; Folk Poetry; Girls’ Games; Hair; Initiation; Sorority Folklore; Tradition. References: Adams, Natalie Guice, and Pamela J. Bettis. Cheerleader!: An American Icon. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003; Hanson, Mary Ellen. Go! Fight! Win!: Cheerleading in American Culture. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995; Kurman, George. ‘‘What Does Girls’ Cheerleading Communicate?’’ Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 57–64; Lesko, Nancy. ‘‘We’re Leading America: The Changing Organization and Form of High School Cheerleading.’’ Theory and Research in Social Education 16 (1988): 263–278; Miller, Montana. ‘‘Radiant Smiles: The International Spread of American Cheerleading.’’ Paper presented at American Folklore Society annual meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2004; Pennington, Bill. ‘‘As Cheerleaders Soar, So Does the Danger.’’ New York Times, March 31, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/ 31/sports/31cheerleader.html?_r¼1&adxnnl¼1&oref¼slogin&adxnnlx¼1198430036-kLr8 e4Spe6KlV7EiCGCupw (accessed December 23, 2007).

Montana Miller Childbirth and Childrearing Childbirth is the act or process of giving birth (parturition), and childrearing the acts or processes of protecting, caring for, feeding, and otherwise facilitating the development of offspring from infancy to relative self-sufficiency. For the majority of human history in both Western and non-Western societies, the practices of childbirth, midwifery, and early infant care have been shaped by societal issues and beliefs and have undergone great changes, new understandings, and different practices. Influences on childbirth and childrearing practices have included advances in medical knowledge, industrialization and urbanization, the rise of the middle class, changes in belief

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patterns and structures in both organized religions and in community-based household or folk religions, and new scientific and cultural understandings about women’s bodies, health, and roles. In the nineteenth century, early folklorists and antiquarians began to collect what they regarded as survivals (relics of the past, particularly traditions and beliefs common to rural areas). Examples associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy included notions about dietary intake and prenatal marking, including pica (the desire to eat non-food items, such as ice, chalk, ashes, or starch, and particularly geophagy—dirt-eating during pregnancy); divination practices regarding the sex of the fetus; practices and styles of delivery; methods of pain relief and postures; customs and rituals of birth chambers and attendants; and societal attitudes and beliefs regarding general birthlore and early infant care. These were recorded in large collections of folkways and rural practices. Fanny Bergen’s Current Superstitions: Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking States (1996) and Charles Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (2003) are examples. In contrast, histories of birth presented by members of the medical profession were based on cultural evolutionary ideas involving projections of progress toward social ideals; in the main, they advocated and described cultural advances and technological developments. Conventional histories, however, did not capture or discuss the experiences of the vast majority of women giving birth, the role and beliefs of the community in the birth process, or the practices, traditions, and beliefs of midwives. More recent efforts to create a history of birth from a folklife or social historical perspective placed traditions and practices within chronological periods. Typically, early histories describe a period in the deep past when women were highly involved in delivery as midwives and assistants practicing a non-interventionist approach that was centered on serving mothers. A second period in Western Europe and in North America is seen as beginning in the mid-1700s with the growing professionalization of medicine, an increase in the study and practice of midwifery by males, and the definition of birth as a disease state. A third period, from the mid-nineteenth century until the present day, is characterized as a period of consolidation of medical control over birth, with a counter-movement to reclaim birth as a female-centered, natural event, and a glorification of the early period of what is now called ‘‘social birth.’’ In the first period of social birth, from the early years of America until the mid-1700s, the process of labor and delivery was a community event. Childbirth was viewed as a normal process, and community members were content to allow nature to follow its course. The predominant practices, material objects, and language associated with birth were predicated upon this understanding and approach. Intervention was rare, and doctors were called only in the case of an impossible delivery, the death of the mother, or the death of the child in utero (as yet unborn). Near the time of delivery, the neighborhood midwife was alerted that her services would be required in the days to come. When the moment arrived, the father, a child, or a neighbor was sent to fetch her to the pregnant

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woman’s home to assist in the delivery. The midwife would bring along the tools of her trade—twine, scissors, cloth, and perhaps a birth stool or chair. The latter would be assembled and the expectant mother would spend her labor talking with her friends and neighbors who had gathered. When she reached the point of delivery, she would sit upon a birth chair, makeshift stool, or the lap of attendants, and deliver her child. Fathers participated if needed; doctors were seldom present. A diary account from 1677 by Samuel Sewall of Massachusetts portrays such a visit by a midwife: April 2, 1677. Father and I sitting in the great Hall, heard the [summoning] child cry.. . . Went home with the Midwife about 2 o’clock, carrying her Stool, whose parts were included in a Bagg. Met with the watch at Mr. Rocks Brew house, who baid us stand, enquired what we were. I told the Woman’s occupation, so they baid God bless our labours, and let us pass (Banks 1999: 6).

American midwives were high-ranking members of their communities, consulted for their advice on birth, but also on conception, pregnancy, abortion, childrearing, and all elements of community health care. In addition to their practical expertise in delivery, midwives had knowledge— passed on through oral communication and informal apprenticeships—of herbal treatments, including the use of ergot, a wheat fungus that stimulates labor (later marketed and used as a medical drug), herbs to cause the contraction of the uterus (for delivery or abortion), and aids for relaxation. In the seventeen century, only the poorest of the poor delivered their children in hospitals, lying-in societies, or the medical area of the poorhouse. These were the only cases a doctor might have occasion to observe, although the vast majority of these deliveries were also attended by midwives. By the late nineteenth century, Dr. Charles Zeigler was complaining in the Journal of the American Medical Association, ‘‘It is at present impossible to secure cases sufficient for the proper training in obstetrics, since 75 percent of the material otherwise available for clinical purposes is utilized providing a livelihood for midwives’’ (Ehrenreich 1989: 95). In early American settlements, church authorities were involved in approving or certifying midwives, because they were required by law to baptize children, often in utero, in the event of a difficult or fatal delivery so the infant could be absolved of original sin prior to death. In addition, part of a midwife’s duties, as dictated by church authorities, included determining the identity of the father of an unmarried woman’s child, and informing authorities if an abortion had been performed after a report of quickening (first movement of a fetus in utero perceived by the mother). Despite their high status within the community, midwives also bore the burden of suspicion. Various Christian doctrines loosely supported the interpretation of illness or death as the will of God or the result of sin or association with the Devil. Midwives were therefore vulnerable to charges of witchcraft upon failure to deliver a perfect child. Suspicion was also attached to their free access to body parts long considered magical: the placenta, the umbilical cord, and the caul (the embryonic sac when it covers the head at birth). In 1555, W€ urzburg regulations for midwives forbid them

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to take away the placenta and required that they throw it in running water. As late as 1711, Brandenburg regulations forbade midwives to give away or sell remains of birth, such as the membranes, caul, or umbilical cord (Forbes 1966: 118). The first person executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1648 was Margaret Jones, a midwife accused of witchcraft (Williams 1992: 152). The decline of the influence of the institutional Protestantism and Catholicism after the American War of Independence served to lessen charges of witchcraft; midwives continued to practice throughout the American colonies and states. Colonial women bore children on an average of every two and a half years—about twelve pregnancies in a lifetime. Approximately one birth in every twenty-four resulted in stillbirth or death within the first days of life, and about seven children in each family survived infancy and early childhood. Colonial Americans generally regarded the rearing of offspring as an exercise in taming children’s innate sinfulness and training them to be productive citizens. Many New England Puritans beat their children, seeking to break their willfulness, and took them to see corpses or hangings as a warning against the consequences of sin. The vast majority of colonial and early republican American families lived on farms and depended on the labor of every family member. By the age of six or seven, farm children had specific responsibilities. Considered miniature adults, their rearing was built on received gender roles: girls were schooled in household chores, boys on the farm, in the family business, or apprenticed out to a neighboring industry. By ten or twelve, sons were working at men’s tasks and daughters were helping their mothers with cooking, washing, spinning, and milking, or taking over certain areas of home and garden care completely. Boys and girls were often fostered out between the ages of seven and fourteen as servants or apprentices. Titles of conduct books by Louisa Caroline Huggins, one of the first women in the United States to write for and about children, are representative of the belief in separate gender spheres: I Will Be a Lady: A Book for Girls (1845) and I Will be a Gentleman: A Book for Boys (1846). It should be noted, however, that there was no single American way of childrearing; Native Americans, African Americans, and White colonists had different traditions. After the Revolutionary War, the growing influence of physicians’ guilds and colleges, the increase in the numbers of doctors being trained and practicing, and the discovery of possibilities for profit in midwifery threatened the practice of traditional midwifery and the livelihood of female midwives in the United States. By increasingly defining birth as a dangerous, pathological crisis, the medical profession undermined society’s belief in the skills of midwives, thereby increasing doctors’ incomes. In 1820, Walter Channing, professor of obstetrics at Harvard, wrote, ‘‘Women seldom forget a practitioner who has conducted them tenderly and safely through parturition. . . . It is principally on this account that the practice of midwifery becomes desirable to physicians. It is this which insures to the permancy [sic] and security of all their other business’’ (Banks 1999: 40). Physicians developed and substantiated a definition of pregnancy and birth as disease states. Displacing traditional folk medicine in order to

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supply a specific etiology (cause) and catalogue of symptoms, they offered elaborate birth-chair designs and began to innovate invasive practices and the liberal use of technologically advanced tools. Forceps, crochets, and hooks, previously only utilized as a last resort to save the life of the mother, the child, or both, became commonplace. Changes in the folk practices of delivery and in the beliefs and attitudes that had supported them are most evident in changes in styles and postures for delivery—from upright in a birth chair to recumbent in a bed (necessary for tool use); in the sex of the birth attendant—from female to male; in attitudes toward laboring women; and in language regarding pregnancy and birth. Terms such as ‘‘teeming’’ and ‘‘breeding’’ were replaced in nineteenth-century diaries, literature, and other texts with terms like ‘‘sick,’’ ‘‘confined,’’ and, tellingly, ‘‘ill.’’ Midwifery manuals gave way to obstetrical texts, and in the titles of these works, pregnancy and birth were increasingly referred to as the ‘‘diseases of women.’’ Advice booklets appeared which instructed women as to proper behavior during pregnancy exams and birth, and provided general guidance for the selection and use of doctors. This portrayal of birth as a disease state fed the growing conception within society of the fragility of women. As Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi stated in 1895, ‘‘I think, finally, it is in the increased attention paid to women, and especially in their new function as lucrative patients, scarcely imagined a hundred years ago, that we find explanation for much of the ill health among women, freshly discovered today’’ (Banks 1999: 41). The actual practice of childbirth was also affected by other significant societal changes, including shifts in the general attitude of the populace about femininity and womanhood, industrialization, changing economic structures, and the emergence of the middle class. Women were eventually understood to be as weak and fragile as doctors and scientists thought they were. Exertion and activity were regarded as dangerous to their health and general well-being. If a woman did not experience illness as a result of such activities, she must not be ‘‘truly female.’’ Thus, fragility and ill health became acceptable and common indications of a refined sensibility and high social status. The cultivation of upper-class women’s ill health as a sign of status and civilized behavior further contributed to the growing conception that the whole process of childbearing was well beyond a refined woman’s capability. If a woman was ‘‘civilized,’’ it was believed, she needed medical help in delivery. As members of the growing middle class sought to emulate the wealthy classes in all ways, it became critical for them to show that the active economic participation of their wives and daughters to provide for the family’s welfare was unnecessary. Female idleness, once considered sinful, was now a status symbol. Yet in the nineteenth century, birth in some ways became more difficult. Life in the industrialized city and standards of fashionable dress made the image of unhealthy women into reality. Years of use of supports such as corsets and strait lacing seriously altered a woman’s anatomy. Malformed torsos and pelvic areas made delivery difficult or impossible, and fetuses were damaged when women continued to wear fashionable undergarments throughout pregnancy.

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By the late nineteenth century, the practice of delivery was strikingly different from what it had been 100 years earlier. The strong bonds of female community, particularly noticeable through women’s earlier participation in the delivery of a community member, were weakened by popular migration to cities where friends, family members, and neighbors were no longer available. Knowledge about pregnancy and childbirth declined as these topics became increasingly unacceptable in polite conversation; when people did speak of them, they used euphemisms and told fictional stories about where babies come from (for example, brought by the stork or found in a cabbage patch). Even practitioners used such euphemisms when advertising their services. Drugs were used to hasten delivery, bloodletting was practiced, and obstetrical tools were extensively employed to remove the infant mechanically from the mother. Birth-chair design was first radically altered, and then the chairs themselves gradually were dismissed as archaic items; horizontal delivery in bed was preferred. Such changes may have made doctors physically more comfortable and enhanced their feeling and appearance of control, but they increased the actual burden on the mother and removed control of the event from her. The elements and practices associated with the earlier, more natural approach came to be regarded with apprehension and dread, representing a period before treatment was available. The nineteenth century also saw the development of the cult of motherhood in the United States, with the glorification of ‘‘true womanhood’’ and the invention of childhood as a distinct stage of life. In her separate domestic sphere, a wife as full-time homemaker and mother was valued as a nurturer, not as a worker. More children were kept at home into their late teens because they were no longer considered economic assets who could be employed in household industries or bound out as child apprentices. Children were treated as beings in emotional and social formation instead of as miniature adults to be trained in the skills and necessary tasks of society (Kertzer and Barbagli 2002). By the middle of the nineteenth century, these changes in the view of children had spread from the elite to the urban (and largely Protestant) middle class. Books, magazines, poetry, and fiction were being written especially for children who now enjoyed prolonged childhoods. Parents eagerly read advice books on how best to rear children. Merchants began offering dolls, trains, and other children’s playthings, and stores specializing in games, toys, and children’s goods opened in larger cities. Attitudes about children’s early learning also changed. As late as the 1830s and 1840s, infant schools in the northern states enrolled children as young as three years; reading at an early age was encouraged. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody established the first formally organized kindergarten in Boston in 1860. Influenced by German educational experiments, Peabody sought to offer children learning activities such as clay modeling and papercutting, rather than specific instruction in reading or writing, or training in the chores and tasks of their elders as in the past. The former activities, she argued, stimulated children’s educational development; the latter merely exploited and broke them (Mann and Peabody 1869).

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Unfortunately, not all children lived such a privileged existence. Although urban middle-class families could prosper without having to put their children to work, for most families a child was still a necessary economic asset. Children of the poor, the indentured, and the enslaved were still sent out to work in fields, mines, and mills until the enactment of child-labor laws, beginning in 1916. Children were expected to contribute to the well-being and support of the family and work the same hours as adults; they could be prosecuted and punished under the same laws. While maternity hospitals or lying-in centers were first used only by poor women who were delivered free of charge in exchange for their use as test cases for medical students, birth in hospitals among women of the upper classes and paying customers rose sharply following the introduction of obstetrical anesthesia, known as ‘‘twilight sleep,’’ at the turn of the twentieth century. Delivery in hospitals took place in operating rooms or theaters, with women highly anesthetized on flat tables or hospital gurneys with arm straps, shoulder straps, and stirrups with leg restraints, attended by licensed medical personnel. Birth was a medical procedure conducted by doctors on the unconscious woman. Texts on childbirth available to and intended for women were treatises on home economics: advice on mothering, scientific housekeeping, diapering, and tips for the care and nurturing of children. Little information about becoming pregnant and the processes of gestation and delivery was made available; women were instructed to speak about their condition to no one but their doctors. S. Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia stated in 1888, ‘‘Wise women choose their doctors and trust them. The wisest ask the fewest questions’’ (Banks 1999: 49). In the early years of the twentieth century, midwives, already radically compromised, increasingly lost access even to indigent women as clients. Hired by governments and municipalities, midwives performed home visits following delivery to check on the mother and to monitor the infant’s progress, but were infrequently, if ever, participants in the actual birth process. Only in very rural areas or among the very poor were midwives still the primary birth practitioners. While in the past, midwives had been cast as witches, in the early twentieth century, practicing midwives were assumed to be abortionists. The widespread commonality of experience due to the surge in childbirth in North America from the mid-1940s until the early 1960s (‘‘the baby boom’’), combined with massive family movement to the suburbs, provided new forums for contact and community among women. These new circumstances created contexts in which the topic of birth was once again considered acceptable for discourse. As women discussed birth in general and the actual details of the delivery process, they questioned the standard medical approach to childbirth, debated whether medicalized birth in hospitals was really the best approach to delivery, and expressed concern over the absence of the laboring woman in the event. Bolstered by information about the growing popularity in Europe of methods of birth like accouchement sans douleur (birth without pain, the Lamaze method), women in North America sought not only to reduce

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unnecessary intervention in their deliveries but also to defeat the patronizing attitudes of professional medicine toward women. From this renewed dialogue on the topic of delivery, the movement for alternative birth began. Encompassing a wide variety of natural, alternative, and non-interventionist practices, the movement placed value on the mother’s role and strove for practices that worked in concert with birth, rather than attempting to dictate and manipulate it. This movement looked to traditional practices, to the era of social birth, and to the growing trend toward self-care for models of practice. Newer approaches such as underwater birth were introduced, and older practices were revived—birth chairs, use of midwives and community women (doulas), and the birth act as a communal event. With the growth of the alternative birth movement, midwives began to take on greater roles in delivery, practicing in hospitals as certified nurse-midwives and certified professional midwives, legally licensed and recognized in some states. Midwives and advocates of natural birth established freestanding birth centers. In an effort to meet the demands of their lucrative clientele, hospitals responded by creating specialized birthing suites that offered a more ‘‘homey’’ atmosphere yet maintained the pathological definition of birth. Building on the nineteenth-century cult of motherhood and the glorification of childhood, progressive-era reformers from the 1890s to the 1920s stressed new scientific understanding of child development (as well as scientific housekeeping, cooking, and motherhood). These reformers urged that children be removed from the labor force, age-segregated, protected from adult concerns, and shepherded through systematic stages of growth by nurturing mothers and/or trained experts dedicated solely to the needs of their children. By the 1920s, this new style of childrearing had been adopted by most families with sufficient resources, although many others still lacked the means to create and maintain such child-centered households. While parents or guardians were expected to provide their children with moral guidance and oversee their education and training for an occupation, meeting the needs of children, even inventing new needs, became important elements of the consumer economy. The symbolic leader in this era was pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, following the publication in 1946 of his manual Baby and ChildCare. Throughout the twentieth century, social, cultural, political, and economic emphases on children, childhood, and childrearing grew by leaps and bounds. Scholarly attention has been brought to bear on the folklore of children, children as a lucrative market, the special vulnerabilities of children, and specialized entertainment, diversions, and activities for children, including camps, educational programs, sports, clubs, clothing, and the burgeoning toy industry. In the early twenty-first century, the children of the poor are included and their futures implicated in consumer-oriented childrearing. See also: Abortion; Birth Chair; Doula; Folk Custom; Folk Medicine; Herbs; Home Birth; Lullaby; Midwifery; Mothers’ Folklore; Pregnancy; Witchcraft, Historical. References: Arnup, Katherine, Andre Levesque, and Ruth Roach Pierson, eds. Delivering Motherhood: Maternal Ideologies and Practices in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

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New York: Routledge, 1990; Banks, Amanda Carson. Birth Chairs, Midwives, and Medicine. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999; Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Ehrenreich, Barbara. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1989; Forbes, Thomas Rogers. The Midwife and the Witch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966; Haines, Michael. ‘‘Fertility and Mortality in the United States.’’ EH.Net Encyclopedia of Economic and Business History, ed. Robert Whaples, 2005. http://www.eh.net/encyclopedia (accessed July 22, 2005); Hoffert, Sylvia. Private Matters: American Attitudes Toward Childbearing and Infant Nurture in the Urban North, 1800–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981; Kertzer, David, and Marzio Barbagli, eds. Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1789–1913: The Rise of the European Family, Volume 2. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002; Leavitt, Judith Walzer. Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750–1950. London: Oxford University Press, 1988; Mann, Mary Tyler Peabody, and Elizabeth P. Peabody. Moral Culture of Infancy, and Kindergarten Guide: With Music for the Plays. New York: J. W. Schemerhorn, 1869; Stearns, Peter N. Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America. New York: New York University Press, 2003; Welter, Barbara. ‘‘The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860.’’ American Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 1 (1966): 151–174; Williams, Selma R., and Pamela Williams Adelman. Riding the Nightmare: Women & Witchcraft from the Old World to Colonial Salem. New York: Harper Perennial Editions, 1992.

Amanda Carson Banks Cinderella ‘‘Cinderella,’’ meaning ‘‘ash-girl’’ (Italian Cenerentola, French Cendrillon, German Aschenputtel), is perhaps the best-known folktale in the world. Its earliest known variant dates to ninth-century CE China. The most influential European versions are in magic tale collections from oral sources by Neapolitan Giambattista Basile (1634–1636), Parisian Charles Perrault (1697), and the German philologists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1812); the first English printing was a 1729 translation of Perrault. Interpretations focus on variations and meanings in the heroine’s initial persecution, her magic helpers, her encounter with the prince, proving her identity, and their marriage. The Walt Disney animated film, which debuted in 1949, is one in a long line of reworkings/retellings of this ever-popular story. British folklorist Marian Roalfe Cox’s 1893 study of 345 variants of ‘‘Cinderella’’ and Swedish folklorist Anna Birgitta Rooth’s 1951 Cinderella Cycle, based on almost 700 versions, attest to the tale’s historic and geographic range. Virtually unknown in the West until 1932, the Chinese Cinderella Yehhsien appears in a book by Tuan Ch’eng-shih (ca. 850), who identifies the teller as a former servant, ‘‘originally a cave man of Yung Chow [who] remembered very much about the strange stories of the south’’ (Jameson in Dundes 1982: 77). Chinese folklorist Nai-tung Ting’s 1974 study of Cinderella in China and Indochina includes twenty-one versions. The Chinese practice of foot-binding girls to create a form of ideal beauty may be origin for the shoe-test to prove Cinderella’s identity, as in some versions of the tale. The earliest European reference is in a sermon delivered at Strasbourg, France, in 1501; a tale text appears in an early 1570s edition of Bonaventure des Periers’s Novel Pastimes and Merry Tales. ‘‘The Cat Cinderella’’ is

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the sixth ‘‘diversion’’ on the first of five days during which ten women each tell one story in Basile’s Il Pentamerone, originally called The Story of Stories or the Entertainment of the Little Ones when it was published in the Neapolitan dialect; it was translated into Italian in 1747. Perrault’s ‘‘Cendrillon’’ in his 1697 collection Tales of Past Times, with Lessons, better known by its alternate title Tales of My Mother Goose, was first translated from French into English in 1729. Ash Girl (‘‘Aschenputtel’’) is in the first volume (1812) of the Grimm brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales. Perrault’s version, which introduces the glass slipper, has proved the most popular. Marian Cox identifies two major versions of ‘‘Cinderella’’ (Tatar 1999: 103–104): one involves an ‘‘ill-treated heroine (with mothers, stepmothers, and their progeny as victimizers)’’; the other involves an ‘‘unnatural father,’’ Victorian wording for an importunate ‘‘father’s perverse erotic attachment . . . or . . . insistence on a verbal declaration of love.’’ The former are called Cinderella tales, the latter, Catskin tales. Some Catskin plots combine both: the heroine, persecuted by her father, becomes a Cinderella ‘‘obliged to spend her days in domestic servitude under the supervision of a despotic cook or a queen.’’ The Chinese Cinderella Yeh-hsien is assisted by a long-haired man in coarse clothing who comes down from the sky to tell her how to pray to the bones of the magically growing fish beheaded by her stepmother. Basile’s Cat Cinderella is helped by magical gifts from the dove of the fairies on the Island of Sardinia; Perrault’s Cendrillon is assisted by her fairy godmother; and the Grimms’ Aschenputtel has the aid of a white bird who three times a day alights on the tree that grows on her mother’s grave. British historian and writer Marina Warner suggests that the absent mother in Cinderella and other magic tales is replaced by the good fairy who may also herself be the narrator of the story and thus, ‘‘if she is offering herself as the benevolent wonder-worker in the lives of the story’s protagonists, . . . may be reproducing within the tale another historical circumstance in the lives of women besides the high rate of death in childbirth or the enforced abandonment of children on widowhood: she may be recording, in concealed form, the antagonism between mothers and the women their sons marry, between daughters-in-law and their husbands’ mothers’’ (1994: 217). In Kissing the Witch, Irish novelist, playwright, and historian Emma Donoghue ends ‘‘The Tale of the Shoe’’ with Cinderella fleeing the prince’s marriage proposal, tossing away the shoe, and going home with the helpful woman stranger old enough to be her mother. Greek folklorist Photeine P. Bourboulis (Dundes 1982) seeks origins for Cinderella’s encounter with the prince in the ‘‘bride-show custom.’’ She documents how in Byzantium, Russia, and China an imperial bachelor selected a bride from among eligible girls assembled before him. Cinderella’s true identity is not revealed at this first meeting and must be divined by the fit of a finger-ring, a shoe of whatever material, or by some other means. In Nazi Germany, magic tales like Cinderella were retold and reinterpreted in anti-Semitic terms. According to one Aryan interpreter, ‘‘The prince finds the genuine, worthy bride because his unspoiled instinct leads

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him, because the voice of his blood tells him that she is the right one’’ (Zipes 1983: 140). Cinderella’s marriage to the prince and her stepsisters’ failure to marry him has been interpreted in terms of social class. For example, American folklorist and German Studies scholar Jack Zipes (1983) sees fairy tales as important elements in the nineteenth-century rise of the urban-industrial bourgeoisie from the agrarian feudalism evident in many of the tales’ accounts of nobility and peasantry. Tale collections served to socialize children to meet changing domestic and public normative expectations. In the Grimms’‘‘Aschenputtel,’’ American folklorist Elisabeth Panttaja finds the conflict between Cinderella and her stepmother and the stepsisters and their mother evidence of ‘‘the discord between feudal and bourgeois values, attitudes, and aesthetics.’’ In the end, the stepsisters are severely punished and the old ‘‘aristocratic order’’ prevails because ‘‘unlike many other tales which reward the cunning upstart, ‘Cinderella’ prizes innate nobility over striving, and reserves the happy ending for the daughter of the ‘pure’ past instead of the daughters of the aspiring middle class’’ (1993: 94). Greek-born lesbian poet and translator Olga Broumas’s Cinderella laments her token status in a household of pretentious men and longs to return to her sisters’ hut and her ‘‘wet canvas shoes’’ (Mieder 1985: 85–86). The hugely popular American film, Pretty Woman (1990), uses the conventions of the folktale to romanticize contemporary sex work as an unfortunate detour on the inevitable path that all ‘‘pretty women’’ take toward happy marriages with wealthy men. The Cinderella of American children’s literature is influenced by the Horatio Alger ‘‘rags-to-riches formula,’’ according to Jane Yolen (Dundes 1982: 296), herself an American author of children’s books. This ‘‘American creed . . . that even a poor boy can grow up to become president’’ and its ‘‘unliberated corollary that even a poor girl can grow up and become the president’s wife’’ is ‘‘ironic:’’ ‘‘‘Cinderella’ is not a story of rags to riches, but rather riches recovered; not poor girl into princess but rather rich girl (or princess) rescued from improper or wicked enslavement.’’ It is ‘‘that [American] story’’ of strike-it-rich, working-class people who win sweepstakes, chance to marry wealth, or collect large insurance settlements which poet Anne Sexton (1971) ‘‘transforms’’ in her retelling of the Grimms’‘‘Cinderella.’’ Walt Disney produced several silent animated films adapting magic tales with his collaborator Ub Iwerks, one of which was ‘‘Cinderella’’ (1922). His Hollywood studio’s 1949 animation, an enormous box-office and merchandising success, is from Perrault. Jack Zipes encapsulates Disney’s ‘‘spell’’ or successful ‘‘formula for feature-length fairy tales, [which] he never abandoned’’ from 1934 on: ‘‘Instead of using technology to enhance the communal aspects of narrative and bring about major changes in viewing stories to stir and animate viewers, he employed animators and technology to stop thinking about change, to return to his films, and to long nostalgically for neatly ordered patriarchal realms’’ (Tatar 1999: 352). Feminists have vigorously debated the kind of socialization into gender roles fostered by the tales’ passive and active heroes and heroines. For example, in ‘‘‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation

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through the Fairy Tale,’’ American Marcia K. Lieberman finds magic-tale heroines like Cinderella ‘‘not merely passive . . . but frequently victims and even martyrs as well’’; a ‘‘child who dreams of being a Cinderella dreams perforce not only of being chosen and elevated by a prince but also of being a glamorous sufferer or victim’’ (Zipes 1986: 194). Such arguments were field-tested by Canadian folklorist Kay Stone, who interviewed women, men, girls, and boys about their perceptions of and memories about the tales (1975, 1985). She found that both females and males at some point in their lives ‘‘clearly view fairy tale heroines and heroes as providing different kinds of idealized behavior,’’ with women continuing to be involved even after childhood: ‘‘For women, the problem-creating aspect of the tales is the attempted identification with the ideal woman, or the guilt if one fails to identify with her, and the expectation that one’s life will be transformed dramatically and all one’s problems solved with the arrival of a man . . . [and they may] continue to reinterpret their responses at various ages, but often without solving the problem’’ (1985: 143). This supports views of these ‘‘classic tales’’ as ‘‘both ‘parables of female socialization’ and stories that ultimately call ‘women forth to an awakening’’’ (Haase 2000: 37). The concept of voice, whether studied editorially or ethnographically, is important to a more complex understanding of Cinderella tales. American scholar Ruth B. Bottigheimer has analyzed ‘‘Aschenputtel’’ in the Grimms’ editions of 1812, 1819, and 1857 to see how instances of direct speech and thought by the various characters were reduced, altered to indirection, or silenced by the editors (1987: 57–70). In the final edition, Cinderella has lost virtually all direct voice and thus appears more passive and isolated. Karen E. Rowe (in Bottigheimer 1986) and Marina Warner (1994) both argue for the importance of viewing magic and other tales as originating primarily among women storytellers such as the ten women narrators in Basile’s Pentamerone. Their concerns as women inhabiting particular sociohistorical positions influence their narrations’ portrayal of mothers, fathers, stepmothers, daughters, and suitors. Ethnographic studies of ‘‘Cinderella’’ as told on specific occasions by named tellers show the range of interpretations. Told by grandparents and grandchildren during a traditional hearthside evening in Tuscany, ‘‘Cinderella’’ illuminates the competition between women and men, old and young (Falassi in Dundes 1982). In eastern Iran, Ismaili Muslim women recount ‘‘Cinderella’’ as part of an all-women food offering and ritual meal to honor Mohammed’s daughter Fatima, who is petitioned to fulfill wishes (Mills in Dundes 1982). In rural Spanish villages, where folktales like ‘‘Cinderella’’ are integral to the courtship and marriage process, women and men tell different versions reflecting their divergent views of romantic love as illusory, ambivalent, and sometimes very dangerous (Taggart 1990). Conversational versions of and allusions to ‘‘Cinderella,’’ whether humorous or serious, also need study to complement the cross-cultural, literary, and popular texts in order to fathom the longstanding, widespread, collective, and individual appeal of this heroine. See also: Beauty; Courtship; Daughter; Folktale; Housework; Marriage; Old Wives’ Tales; Princess; Red Riding Hood; Sleeping Beauty; Stepmother.

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References: Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978; Bottigheimer, Ruth B., ed. Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986; ———. Grimms’ Bad Girls & Bold Boys: The Moral & Social Vision of the Tales. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987; Donoghue, Emma. Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins. New York: Joanna Cotler Books, HarperCollins, 1997; Dowling, Colette. The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence. New York: Summit Books, 1981; Dundes, Alan. Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1982; Haase, Donald. ‘‘Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship: A Critical Survey and Bibliography.’’ Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, vol. 14, no. 1 (2000): 15–63; Mieder, Wolfgang, ed. Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry. Hanover and London: University Press of New England for University of Vermont, 1985; Panttaja, Elisabeth. ‘‘Going Up in the World: Class in ‘Cinderella’.’’ Western Folklore 52, no. 1 (1993): 85–104; Sexton, Anne. Transformations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971; Stone, Kay. ‘‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us.’’ In Women and Folklore: Images and Genres, ed. Claire R. Farrer, 42–50. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1986 [1975]; ———. ‘‘The Misuses of Enchantment: Controversies on the Significance of Fairy Tales.’’ In Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, eds. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kal cik, 125–45. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Taggart, James M. Enchanted Maidens: Gender Relations in Spanish Folktales of Courtship and Marriage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990; Tatar, Maria. Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992; ———. ed. The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999; Ulanov, Ann, and Barry Ulanov. Cinderella and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying. Reworked and expanded edition. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon, 1998; von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Feminine in Fairytales. New York: Spring Publications, 1972; Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994; Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New York: Wildman Press, 1983; ———. ed. Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. New York: Methuen, 1986.

Marta Weigle Class The word ‘‘class’’ refers to a person’s position in the social hierarchy. Broadly speaking, people occupy three main classes in North America: the upper, middle, and lower classes. One’s class identity is based on the three interdependent factors of wealth, educational attainment, and occupational status. Ethnicity and length of residence in the United States, Canada, or Mexico also impinges upon perceptions of class status. A lower-class woman, for instance, is limited in her choices of what to study and in the kind of career she has because she has few economic resources at her disposal, a situation made worse if she belongs to a non-dominant ethnicity or does not have full citizenship status. This, in turn affects the relative influence she has not only in her own social sphere, but also in the larger society. Each class tends to develop a ‘‘class culture.’’ The conditions of lowerclass work and living are understood to be less desirable than those of the middle class, which are understood to be less desirable than those of the upper class. Lower- and middle-class occupations, for instance, imply

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working for someone, whereas upper-class occupations imply working for oneself, with colleagues, or managing or employing other workers. Lowerand middle-class neighborhoods tend to demonstrate greater uniformity and have fewer amenities than do upper-class neighborhoods. Persons with less access to social resources and fewer opportunities for upward mobility depend more on others, while greater socioeconomic class privilege allows a higher degree of independence from and/or subjugation of others. Worldwide, women are far more likely to be poor than men, and in the United States, women over the age of sixty-five are twice as poor as men in the same age group. A majority of Americans regard themselves as members of the middle class and operate as if the middle class were the most influential sector in society. Those at the bottom and the top of the American middle class, however, exhibit great disparities in both material conditions and social power. For this reason, Dennis Gilbert (2003) recalibrated and renamed the tripartite class system in the United States. Using census data from 1950–2000, Gilbert identifies those at the very top of the socioeconomic hierarchy as belonging to the privileged classes. This group can be further divided into a capitalist class, whose income is derived from returns on assets, and an upper-middle class, whose income is derived from work. Members of capitalist households might be heirs to large fortunes, investors, and top-level executives. They comprised 1 percent of the total U.S. population in 2000. In that year, a capitalist earned upward of $2 million a year. Members of the upper-middle class are usually highly educated professionals, medium-sized business owners, and upper managers. They comprised 14 percent of the total U.S. population in 2000 and earned upward of $120,000 a year. In the past, the middle class was contrasted with the working class in order to distinguish between those who performed mental as opposed to physical labor. The labels ‘‘blue collar’’ and ‘‘white collar’’ are sometimes used in the same way to distinguish dirty or outdoor work from clean or indoor work. If one considers economic earnings, however, an electrician who engages in skilled physical labor may earn a great deal more than a teacher, who performs mental/managerial labor. Nevertheless, the teacher possesses more occupational prestige than the electrician because her job requires a college degree. The label ‘‘pink collar’’ is a gendered addition to this way of distinguishing jobs based on their prestige or desirability. Pinkcollar service-industry workers constitute a largely female sector of the workforce. They do not necessarily get dirty or work outside, yet they enjoy little to no occupational prestige and receive very low wages. This group constitutes a kind of servant class in a technological age. Gilbert identifies the middle and working classes as two segments of what he calls the majority classes. Thus, these two classes are grouped together, even though they exhibit some distinctions in educational attainment and earning power. The 30 percent of U.S. households that are middle class in this schema often have completed some college, earned about $55,000 a year in 2000, and work in semiprofessional, lower-management and non-retail sales jobs. The 30 percent of U.S. households that are working class have a high school education, earned about $35,000 a year in 2000, and

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work in manufacturing, clerical, and retail-sales jobs. One can easily perceive that as one descends the economic order, the difference in earnings between class subgroups diminishes. Gilbert identifies the remaining 25 percent of U.S. households in 2000 as belonging to the lower classes. This group can be further divided into the working poor and the underclass. The working poor have completed some high school, earn about $22,000 a year, and work as laborers, factory, clerical, and service workers. The underclass is made up of individuals who participate only sporadically in the official workforce. They may be unemployed, working part-time, and/or dependent on government assistance. Typically, they have completed some high school and earn about $12,000 a year. Thus, Gilbert renames the traditional categories of upper, middle, and lower classes the privileged, majority, and lower classes. He divides these categories into six distinct groups: capitalist, upper-middle, middle, working, working poor, and underclass. What is obscured when we speak of a middle-class majority is the important role played by the very few at the top of the social hierarchy in directing social life in the United States. Stephen Rose (2000) demonstrates that the 7 percent of people earning more than $300,000 annually have exponentially greater wealth than the 72 percent whose earnings place them in the middle class (in this case, a combination of Gilbert’s upper-middle, middle, and working classes). The concentration of wealth at the top of the hierarchy, which is further concentrated in the hands of fewer individuals since Rose conducted his study (DeNavs-Walt, et al), correlates with the greater influence this tiny upper class has over society at large. The leaders of business and government come from this class; they provide a vision of the social good that is likely to serve their own interests; however, while this class is powerful, its influence does not go unchallenged. Class conflict is the result of disparities in wealth, access to opportunity, and worldview. For women, the notion of class as a function of wealth, educational attainment, and professional status remains problematic because women’s earnings continue to lag behind White men’s regardless of educational attainment. On average, American women earn 80 percent of what men earn one year after college graduation; after ten years, that figure falls to 69 percent (CNN/Reuters). Black and Latino men also fare worse than do White men, but disparities are compounded for Black and Latina women. To complicate matters further, many women participate in the paid workforce only part-time or intermittently over their lifetimes as a consequence of childrearing and other household obligations. At a glance, this work pattern appears similar to that of Gilbert’s underclass. A housewife may be highly educated and have no independent income. Alternately, she may have a high school education, yet have access to considerable wealth through her ties to a professional husband. Since men continue to contribute more earnings than do women in the majority of American families, a married woman’s class identity is usually dependent upon her husband’s earnings, occupation, and educational attainment. American historian John Bodnar (1987) has traced the relation between social class and success among early twentieth-century immigrants to the

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United States. He finds immigrants who were middle class in their countries of origin were able to accomplish the American Dream of upward mobility over time, even if they suffered a period of downward mobility as a consequence of their emigration. On the other hand, immigrants who were working-class or impoverished in their countries of origin were more likely to join the permanent underclass in the United States. These findings indicate aspirations, values, and adaptive capacities tied to one’s class can play a powerful role in perpetuating one’s class identity in changed circumstances. When one examines the class positions of women, however, the picture becomes more complicated. Christine Grella (1990) discovered that middleclass women who divorce generally experience downward mobility. This situation creates dissonance between a woman’s subjective sense of middleclass identity (acquired and/or maintained through her association with her former husband) and her actual experience of material impoverishment. Those who remain single heads of households redefine themselves as poor or lower-middle class over time. Grella’s study indicates social class for women is not a rigid identity category but may change with changing economic circumstances. While the assignment of class identity is based on wealth and social influence, it is marked by other factors as well. Where you live, how you move your body, how you speak, what you value, what you eat, wear, drive, and even what kind of sports you enjoy can signal your class identity. Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker explore the American class system in their documentary video, People Like Us: Social Class in America (2001). They demonstrate how each social class exhibits a set of preferences that become deeply ingrained in individual members through a process of informal learning or enculturation. Members who violate these preferences are sanctioned by others of their class. For example, a woman who marries above her class is as likely to be sanctioned as one who marries below her class. In this sense, members of all classes are in some ways limited by their class identity in what they can and cannot do. This is what is meant by ‘‘class culture.’’ Alvarez and Kolker’s earlier documentary, American Tongues (1987), demonstrates the influence of class-based dialects on women’s opportunities outside their communities of origin. A working-class woman from Appalachia who migrated to Ohio states that she has to work twice as hard to demonstrate her competence because her coworkers disparage the way she speaks as ignorant. Another from Brooklyn, New York, attempts to ‘‘unlearn’’ her dialect in order to get people from outside her own neighborhood to take her seriously in the business environment. While a workingclass identity may involve having one’s opportunities limited, talents overlooked, and personal integrity distrusted, it may also engender and/or project qualities that are valued by members of all classes: sincerity, unpretentiousness, and loyalty to friends and family. Class cultures are often intertwined with regional and ethnic cultural complexes. Patricia Hill Collins (2000) introduced the word ‘‘intersectionality’’ to describe how multiple dimensions of oppression shape a person’s lived experience. Folklorist Richard Bauman’s earlier phrase, ‘‘differential identity,’’ refers to multiple dimensions of identity without special reference

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to oppression. For instance, the experience of being Black is not uniform across the African American population. Instead, racial identity intersects with other aspects of one’s social identity and lived experience: being female, being reared in a rural setting, being homosexual, being deaf or disabled, and/or being lower class. These sources of oppression cannot simply be tallied to determine a sum total. Rather, the various aspects of lived experience interact to produce unique and multifaceted effects. As a case in point, Maxine Baca Zinn (1989) interrogates the various explanations scholars and policymakers have created to explain the continuing existence of a largely Black, central-city underclass. She finds the link between family dissolution and middle-class women’s impoverishment does not hold for lower-class Black women. Black women who become single heads of household appear to experience no significant downward mobility because they were usually already impoverished as married women. Such data contests the notion that a high rate of broken families in lower-class Black communities is a cause of poverty. Rather, household dissolution is more likely to be an adaptive response to limited opportunities. Baca Zinn points to structural conditions such as the decline of well-paying, low-skill manufacturing jobs and their shift in location from city to suburbs as a cause of Black male joblessness and impoverishment. However, she rejects the recommendation to develop secure, well-paying, low-skill jobs for men in order to allow them to reassert themselves as patriarchal providers for Black families. Such a solution would not reduce independent Black women’s impoverishment, whereas universal childcare and equal pay for equal work might. Feminist theorist bell hooks (2000) uses her personal life story to explore the important and often overlooked dimension of class in African American culture. Throughout her published work, hooks expresses a continuing nostalgia for the rural folk culture she experienced as a child while visiting her maternal grandmother. This integrated, self-sufficient way of life existed in some ways outside the class system and allowed its members to avoid challenges to their integrity in the American South prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In her own journey to class consciousness, hooks reveals the white face of class privilege in America. She contrasts contemporary attitudes in African American and progressive communities—living simply, in solidarity with the poor—with powerful and pervasive social messages that encourage greed and ruthlessness. By continually circling back to her own autobiography to mine the lessons of a lower-class upbringing, hooks demonstrates that much is to be gained by retrieving and celebrating the perspectives of lower-class, Black folk culture even as Americans aspire to ascend the social hierarchy. The class structure in Canada, while not equivalent to that of the United States, follows the general model for postindustrial, developed nations. In contrast, the class structure of Mexico is marked by even greater disparities in wealth and opportunity than its northern neighbors. These disparities are related historically to the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a few. Despite recent democratizing trends, a ruling class combined with a small middle class maintains control of both political and economic power,

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whereas the vast majority of both urban and rural Mexicans live in poverty. Moreover, a legacy of internal colonization besets those regions in Mexico that are home to large Indigenous populations. Indigenous groups find themselves at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, alternately despised and exoticized by majority mestizos (people of mixed European and Native ancestry) and ruling criollos (Mexican descendants of the Spanish colonizers). Rosario Castellanos’ (1925–1974) brilliant novel, The Book of Lamentations (1998), about an Indigenous uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, provides a sobering view of this society in the early part of the twentieth century. In it, she describes how local elites, descended from Spanish conquistadors, mistreated Indigenous workers with impunity, and how gender oppression permeated the society at all levels. In the 1990s, Chiapas once again erupted in violence as Zapatista revolutionaries defended Indigenous peasants against increasing incursions by business interests and the state. After World War II, a period of strong economic growth in Mexico allowed for the expansion of its middle class, which now includes about 20 percent of all households. This group changed the course of Mexican government by overthrowing the ruling one-party system and installing opposition candidate Vicente Fox in 2000 (Gilbert 2007). During the 1940s, thousands of landless peasants from rural Mexico participated in the U.S. guest-worker program, initiating the migrant stream that continues to spark debate on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Folklorist Marı´a HerreraSobek (1979) explores the image of these braceros (‘‘laborers’’) in elite and folk literature in Mexico. She discovers that elite writers, inspired by virulent nationalism, ignore the entrenched exploitation of peasants in their own country to highlight the indignities and injustices of migrant life in the United States. When Herrera-Sobek collected stories from the migrants, she found that they painted a less ideologically charged picture of their situation, recognizing and comparing opportunities and challenges on both sides of the border. More recently, cultural theorist Nestor Garcı´a Canclini (1993) explored how Indigenous producers fit into Mexico’s contemporary capitalist market. He argues that those at the bottom provide symbolic capital for Mexican national identity, but they continue to miss out on economic rewards. For Garcı´a Canclini, the folklorist’s role is not only to promote the products of folk culture but also to assist the folk in maintaining control over the fruits of their labor. As in Mexico, folklore studies in the U.S. have focused more commonly on the cultural traditions of the lower classes than on those of the middle and upper classes. This preference is partly motivated by the recognition that folk cultures in some ways resist purely economic forms of evaluation. Folklorists have extensively studied groups such as Appalachians, centralcity dwellers, non-English speakers, and male prisoners because their social isolation from the mainstream has enabled them to preserve alternative lifestyles, knowledge, and social and aesthetic forms. At the same time, folklorists have found it easier to discuss ethnic and regional identities than class identities; to speak openly of class would be to recognize the folklorist’s own privileged position, as a professional and an academic, with respect to the people she studies.

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In an internal critique of folklore’s class dynamics, Rosan Jordan and Frank de Caro (1996) trace the origins of folklore study in Louisiana to a group of privileged White Creoles whose regional identity was being threatened by assimilationist pressures. Previous American folklorists had been especially interested in collecting the lore of Black, French-speaking, former slaves. Whereas such a focus may seem benign compared with the brutal violence directed at Louisiana Blacks from other quarters, Jordan and de Caro demonstrate that the act of collecting became a way for early folklorists to assert their enlightened superiority over their interlocutors. They constructed a highly romanticized vision of a former plantation society in which Blacks and Whites lived harmoniously. In this case, members of a privileged social class used folklore collecting to reassert their benevolent authority over an underclass simultaneously distinguished by race. In the process, the folklore of formerly enslaved Blacks became the folklore of White Creoles. David Whisnant’s study of the politics of culture in Appalachia (1983) similarly explores the dynamics of cultural preservation in that region in the early twentieth century. By examining three such efforts—the Hindman Settlement School in Eastern Kentucky, Olive Dame Campbell’s work in western North Carolina, and the Whitetop Festival in southwest Virginia— Whisnant uncovers a class dynamic in which mostly female, privileged outsiders worked simultaneously to reform the manners and customs of poor Appalachian families and to preserve what they viewed as this groups’s vanishing folkways. While Whisnant shows that cultural preservationists were well intentioned, they were also highly selective in their activities; the resulting images of Appalachian culture were more representative of the romantic ideas of the cultural interventionists than of the region’s residents. To add to this irony, funding for these efforts came from the same capitalist industrialists who were wreaking havoc on local economies by exploiting the region’s timber and mineral reserves. Not only does Whisnant provide a cautionary tale for contemporary cultural preservationists, he also reveals the intersecting dimensions of class and gender in cultural interventions. Feminist folklorists insist that the exchange between an informant and a researcher is always embedded in relations of power. In reflecting on her work with impoverished Brazilian women, Daphne Patai (1991) points out that systematic inequalities between first-world researchers and third-world narrators make collecting such women’s oral narratives fit the typical pattern of first/third-world exchange. That is, raw materials (in this case, oral histories and personal-experience narratives) are extracted from the thirdworld community for subsequent refashioning, packaging, and sale to a distant consumer in the first world. Patai concludes that under such circumstances, ethical research is impossible. She admonishes feminist fieldworkers to cultivate humility and to recognize that our research does not improve the lives of those we study, no matter how fervently we wish it to be so. Since work is one of the defining elements of class identity, occupational folklore ought to provide some insight into questions of women and class; unfortunately, this subfield has been overwhelmingly oriented toward

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male-identified professions and masculine artistry. Studies of office lore tend to focus on how the informal verbal and material products of the modern office environment (water-cooler stories and photocopy lore, for example) express workers’ frustration with corporate culture. Their gender-neutral focus ignores class and gender hierarchies within the corporate setting in order to emphasize the struggle of the individual against the organization. Among the few folkloristic essays that do take gender into account is Michael J. Bell’s (1989) examination of the occupational performances of women bartenders in a Black middle-class neighborhood in West Philadelphia. In pointing out that much occupational folklore deals with the artistic and verbal byproducts of particular professions, he emphasizes that tending bar, which involves the self-conscious adoption and manipulation of dramatic roles, is itself an expressive performance. Owners and patrons alike expect a barmaid to create or facilitate a social scene at her bar while simultaneously maintaining a certain distance—to engage with patrons, but not to become a patron in the process. Labor lore and labor history provide a wealth of interesting possibilities for the student of women and class. Yet, here again, folklore scholarship has focused, with a few notable exceptions, on masculine trades and traditions. Susan Davis (1982), for example, provides a fascinating picture of nineteenth-century Christmas revelry on the part of largely unemployed, White, working-class young men, but laments the absence in the record of information about working-class women’s customs. In the course of their merrymaking, masked young men invaded Philadelphia’s city center, threatening businesses and theatergoers with noisemaking, shooting, drinking, and fighting. They also assaulted Black residents and members of rival gangs. Davis points out that, on the one hand, lower-class youth challenged city authorities with their violent disorder. On the other, their derogatory masking—particularly as women and in blackface (a particularly onerous form of racist minstrelsy)—united them with the city’s middle- and upperclass leaders in an assertion of White male privilege. In stark contrast, Davis also identifies an emerging middle-class complex of customs centered on the home, family, and children. Interestingly, these customs were propagated largely by the middle-class women. She concludes that, whereas nineteenth-century working-class celebrations were gendered male, middle-class celebrations were gendered female. This kind of historical coupling of divergent class and gender identities still permeates American folkloristics. Oral histories of factory workers provide useful insights into the class culture of the working poor. Victoria Byerly’s collection of oral histories from female cotton mill workers (1986) includes the voices of Black and White union and non-union workers from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1980s. Each woman’s story is distinctive, but they share common experiences: going to work at an early age, earning low wages, marrying young, bearing children, and being subjugated by fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. Yet, despite their memories of hardship and their awareness of unfavorable views about mill workers prevalent in the larger society, these women remember their old mill communities fondly. They eloquently recall

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positive aspects of working-class culture, reflecting the ambivalence many lower-class people feel about their distinctive folkways and lifestyles. Herbert Biberman’s classic labor film Salt of the Earth (1954) dramatizes the complexity of women’s participation in a miner’s strike against the New Jersey Zinc Company in Bayard, New Mexico, in the early 1950s. Unusual then in documentary filmmaking, most of the actors were Chicanos playing themselves in their struggle for wage parity with Anglo coworkers. More surprisingly, Biberman chose to dramatize the decisive role the wives of strikers played in the strike, even when faced with their husbands’ resistance to their activism. Thus, it contains an early and powerful feminist message about equality, respect, and solidarity across gender lines. More recently, Connie Field’s documentary film The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1989) focuses on women industrial workers during and after World War II. Her film follows the stories of several White and Black women who answered the call to join the U.S. labor force while most able-bodied men were fighting overseas. The women speak passionately about their work lives, the pleasure they took in learning new skills, building ships and airplanes, and receiving hefty paychecks. After the war, however, their narrow window of opportunity for high-paying industrial jobs closed as the men—along with virulent gender discrimination—returned to the industrial workplace. Housekeeping, an occupation consistently linked to women, has been severely understudied from a folkloristic perspective. In her pathbreaking article, Judith Levin (1993) points out that, on the surface, housework lacks many of the characteristics traditionally associated with creative expressivity. Commonly portrayed as ‘‘trivial, repetitive, and invisible,’’ it is performed in isolation from others, remains unpaid and rarely results in a product (287). Levin borrows a process orientation from Michael Owen Jones— ‘‘a feeling for form’’—to discover how women derive aesthetic pleasure from doing housework. Another excellent source for exploring the intersection of women and class is Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s (2001) sociological examination of domestic workers in the Los Angeles area. Hondagneu-Sotelo explores how the overwhelmingly female, immigrant, women of Color in the American ‘‘pink-collar’’ workforce experience their roles as paid housekeepers (dom esticas). She notes that the domestica makes visible the profound inequality in the conditions and rewards of labor for women of different social classes, sparking a painful ambivalence toward them in their largely female, professional employers. Hondagneu-Sotelo reveals just how much an affluent lifestyle depends upon the subjugation of others. Finally, investigative journalist Barbara Ehrenreich reports on her experiment in adopting the lifestyle of the working poor (2001). Ehrenreich gave up her comfortable professional lifestyle for a year to learn firsthand what life is like for those who live at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy in the United States. She traveled from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, working as a waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart sales clerk. Along the way, she discovered smart, hardworking coworkers who nevertheless were barely able to make ends meet. For the majority of Americans, one job doesn’t pay enough to get by, and, just

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because they are poor, workers endure indignities ranging from mandatory drug testing to being treated as if they were children. In a forceful challenge to the rhetoric of contemporary welfare system reformers, Ehrenreich eloquently reveals just how much class continues to matter in America. See also: Beauty; Deaf Folklore; Folk Speech; Glass Ceiling; Housekeeping; Immigration; Photocopylore; Wage Work; Women’s Work. References: Alvarez, Louis, and Andrew Kolker, director and producer. American Tongues. Center for New American Media, 1987; ———. People Like Us: Social Class in America. Center for New American Media, 2001; Bauman, Richard. ‘‘Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 84, no. 331 (January–March 1971): 31–41; Bell, Michael J. ‘‘Tending Bar at Brown’s: Occupational Role as Artistic Performance.’’ In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, ed. Elliott Oring, 146–157. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989; Biberman, Herbert. Salt of the Earth. Independent Productions: International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, 1954. http://www.archive.org/details/salt_of_the_earth (accessed June 22, 2007); Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987; Byerly, Victoria, and Cletus E. Daniel. Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press (Cornell University School of International Labor Relations imprint), 1986; Castellanos, Rosario. The Book of Lamentations. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998 (1962); Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000; CNN Money.com (Reuters). ‘‘On payday, it’s still a man’s world.’’ April 23, 2007. http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/23/news/ economy/gender_gap/index.htm (accessed June 22, 2007); Davis, Susan G. ‘‘‘Making Night Hideous’: Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia.’’ American Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 2 (1982): 185–199; DeNavas-Walt, Carmen, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica Smith. ‘‘Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006.’’ Issued August 2007. http://www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/p60233.pdf (accessed August 10, 2008) Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001; Eisler, Riane. ‘‘The Feminine Face of Poverty.’’ AlterNet, April 19, 2007. http://www.alternet.org/rights/ 50727 (accessed August 10, 2008); Field, Connie, director. The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter. Clarity Films, 1989; Garcı´a-Canclini, Nestor, and Lidia Lozano. Transforming Modernity: Popular Culture in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993; Gilbert, Dennis. The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality. Sixth edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003; ———. Mexico’s Middle Class in the Neoliberal Era. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007; Grella, Christine E. ‘‘Irreconcilable Differences: Women Defining Class after Divorce and Downward Mobility.’’ Gender and Society, vol. 4, no. 1 (1990): 41–55; Herrera-Sobek, Marı´a. The Bracero Experience: Elitelore versus Folklore. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Studies Publications, University of California, Los Angeles, 1979; Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. Dom estica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; hooks, bell. Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York: Routledge, 2000; Jordan, Rosan, and Frank de Caro. ‘‘In This Folk-Lore Land Race, Class Identity, and Folklore Studies in Louisiana.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 109, no. 431 (1996): 31– 59; Levin, Judith. ‘‘Why Folklorists Should Study Housework.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 285– 296. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Patai, Daphne. ‘‘U.S. Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible?’’ In Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, eds. Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai, 137–154. New York: Routledge, 1991; Rose, Stephen J. Social Stratification in the United States. New York: The New Press, 2000; Whisnant, David E. All that is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983; Zinn,

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Maxine Baca. ‘‘Family, Race, and Poverty in the Eighties.’’ Signs: Common Grounds and Crossroads: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in Women’s Lives, vol. 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 856–874.

Katherine Borland Clique A clique is a relatively small, exclusive folk group, an elitist clustering formed within a larger, encompassing social network. Cliques can be formed and found in all folk groups, large and small—in families, workplaces, governments, social clubs, sports teams, and councils, for example. But the term ‘‘clique’’ is most often used to reference elitist groups in schools, particularly in North American middle school and high school settings. Social exclusivity demands delineations regarding the inclusion and exclusion of members—its two most powerful functions; its rules of acceptance/ rejection are marked by symbolically powerful coding that signals clique members’ interests, preferred locales for gathering, bodily adornments, speech patterns, behaviors, decision-making, associations, consumption habits, and musical preferences, among others—all of which may be summed up as their ‘‘style.’’ In essence, a clique is something like a preferred marketing brand, a mark that signifies more than a tangible product but a way of living and being. It is tempting to classify all folk groups—with their initiatory rites and jargon, their esoteric ways of doing and being—as cliques, but cliques, especially in the school setting, possess an enigmatic quality known as ‘‘popularity,’’ and popularity equals power. While the youth culture of any North American high school is comprised of many differing folk groups, each with an identifying label and style—including but not limited to jocks and cheerleaders (male and female athletes), headbangers (heavy-metal music enthusiasts), greasers (members of Latino or White street gangs), plastics (haughty, well dressed girls), nerds (intellectuals), geeks (computer whizzes), punks (ostentatious rebels), skate rats (skateboard enthusiasts), and stoners (marijuana smokers)—cliques occupy different niches in the social hierarchy, forming alliances as necessary, setting and enforcing behavioral and attitudinal expectations for members, and generally reifying the social pecking order. Each group excludes those who occupy positions lower in the hierarchy as well as those higher up. Teenage girls, particularly those identified in a spate of recent books as ‘‘mean girls,’’ play a critical role in upper-echelon clique formation and maintenance, utilizing such boundary-enforcing skills as rumormongering, backbiting (speaking ill of a person not present), ostracism, pointed group giggling, verbal and physical bullying, studied indifference, and a certain capriciousness in making someone or something ‘‘in’’ (attractive, cool, popular) one day and ‘‘out’’ (unattractive, passe, unpopular) the next. While cliques are often passionately disparaged by non-members, they do provide a kind of social safety net by making a large school environment seem smaller and its assortment of denizens more manageable. Emotional insecurity is a condition of adolescent youth in most cultures; an all-consuming

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desire to ‘‘fit in’’ emboldens and empowers clique members. Wearing the ‘‘right’’ clothes, being seen at the ‘‘right’’ places, saying the ‘‘right’’ things, and hanging out with the ‘‘right’’ crowd means modifying oneself in order to ‘‘fit’’ its prescribed norms. The insular and whimsical nature of cliques does mean, though, that fitting in can be forever elusive: one’s skin color and socioeconomic class, for example, are not susceptible to modification. Cliques are featured prominently in hundreds of books, films, and television programs catering to teenagers. A few examples are Susan Eloise Hinton’s widely read The Outsiders, Canadian television’s Degrassi High, most of John Hughes’ films (The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, etc.), the disturbing Carrie and Heathers, the comic Clueless, and recently, Mean Girls. Each offers a representation of adolescent culture focused on the influence of prevailing social hierarchies. The serious consequences of belonging to teenage cliques in North American schools have been much-discussed in recent years, especially in light of several tragic school shootings, acts committed by marginalized and deeply troubled White males. Increased reports of teens bullied to suicide have also laid bare the potential violence of cliquishness, illuminating the deep psychological scarring it can induce. See also: Class; Fashion; Folk Group; Girls’ Folklore; Popular Culture. References: Aufferman, Kyra. ‘‘Mean Girls?: A Culture of Cliques.’’ BCHeights.com: The Independent Student Newspaper of Boston College, March 21, 2005. http:// media.www.bcheights.com/media/storage/paper144/news/2005/02/21/Features/Mean-Girls. A.Culture.Of.Cliques-871128.shtml (accessed June 30, 2007); Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion (Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006; Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979; Jansen, William Hugh. ‘‘The Esoteric-Exoteric Factor in Folklore.’’ In The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes, 43–51. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1965; Wiseman, Rosalind. Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

Jessica Grant Jørgensen Coding In the sense in which folklorists use it, ‘‘coding’’ means communicating through a set of signals—words, forms, behaviors, and signifiers of some kind—in situations where some members of the audience may be competent and willing to decode the message, but others are not. In the context of complex audiences, strategic coding can protect its creator from the consequences of openly expressing particular messages. When we speak of coding as a strategic folk process, we distinguish the term from more general use in which it designates the system of language rules through which communication is possible. Not all forms of coding are surreptitious, nor are all forms of coding undertaken in situations of high risk; it is also not always clear that coding is in fact (or intentionally) taking place. Coding may be undertaken for a variety of purposes, from pleasure and play to the deliberate attempt to prevent outsider understanding, from protection against mild anxiety to

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protection against threat to one’s life. At one pole, children may delight in devising expressions or languages (such as pig Latin) that adults cannot understand, or lovers may devise private terms of address; in such instances, a ‘‘cracking’’ of the code may cause embarrassment or discomfort but has no serious consequence. In these situations, having outsiders aware that coding is taking place might even enhance the satisfaction derived from the act. At the other pole, codes may take the form of highly secret signals for, say, rescue operations that put many lives at risk. In this case, not only the message but the very fact that coding is occurring must be concealed. It is important, therefore, to distinguish a range of contexts, forms, and practices in which coding may occur. The bicultural (in this case, dual-gendered) context created by the association of men and women in North America creates many opportunities for women’s coding. Although women’s experiences and material circumstances vary from culture to culture, from community to community, and from individual to individual, in most societies, women have developed a set of common signifying practices (beliefs, understandings, behaviors, and rituals) whose meanings are not necessarily accessible to men of the same group. These practices derive from separation between men’s and women’s traditional areas of activity—separate domains usually marked not only by difference but by subordination. Because women are often socially, economically, and emotionally dependent upon the good will of men, their attitudes and understandings cannot always be openly acknowledged, and women are therefore especially likely to express themselves, and to communicate with other women, through coded means. We can distinguish three forms of coding: explicit, complicit, and implicit. Because the boundaries between these kinds of coding strategies are not hard and fast, it is best to think of them as stages along a continuum. In cases of explicit coding, the presence of a code is obvious even to those who cannot decipher it. Explicit coding tends to challenge an audience to decode its message, and thus it may have various effects. Pig Latin, for example, may be used playfully to tease, but the vivid displays of the Clothesline Project, using colors to encode T-shirts representing different types of gender-related violence, are intended to educate and to inspire change. In situations of risk, however, explicit coding can be dangerous precisely because it constitutes an announcement that coding is taking place; it broadcasts the idea that the outsider is not meant to understand, and thereby opens the possibility that the ‘‘wrong’’ receiver will crack the code and decode the message. Complicit coding, arguably the most common form, is consciously employed among members of a folk group who are united both by shared culture and a shared sense of threat. Situations of complicit coding are not obvious to outsiders, but as in explicit coding, they require definite, comprehensible signals. Such signals may be agreed upon collectively beforehand (for example, symbols, code names, or a sheet hanging on a clothesline to indicate a safe house on the Underground Railway) or drawn from inside knowledge and adopted on the spot (for example, mentioning a significant name to signal membership in Alcoholics Anonymous, or

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wearing particular clothing to indicate group membership). Young Islamist women in Turkey encode in the pastel shades of their raincoats their membership in a particular tarikat (a banned religious order). This kind of coding is also common among lesbians in the United States. Informants mention ‘‘the L. L. Bean look’’ as a clue to lesbian identity, for example, and one woman explained how her lesbian friends at a particular Navy base managed to discuss their evening plans in front of other members of the company: ‘‘Are you going out star gazing tonight?’’—alluding to a local discotheque called Star’s. In complicit coding, what has been communicated may seem odd to the outsider, its significance uncertain, but the fact that the outsider is not meant to understand is not made obvious. Moreover, complicit coding—a folk art with many functions—often has playful as well as protective purposes. In lesbian culture, for instance, the signals and double entendres adopted for complicit coding in the presence of straight people—or other signals, that would not be deemed appropriate for use among heterosexuals—are used in exclusively gay settings as a means of consolidating and celebrating group identity. Although both explicit and complicit acts of coding are undertaken knowingly and purposefully, not all coding is deliberate. In the third type, implicit coding, even the existence of a coded message is arguable and may be denied by the creator, and the signals are not collectively determined. Implicit coding is covert, and its purposes may not be consciously recognized even by the encoder herself. This raises complex questions about intentions and interpretations that may be constructed both by original signal-receiver(s) and by outside observer-analysts such as folklorists. A quilter who sews a patch in which the traditionally sweet Sunbonnet Sue figure is swallowed by a snake may dismiss her creation as ‘‘just a joke,’’ but persons viewing the quilt may ignore her assertion and interpret it as an encoded message of feminist resistance to traditional stereotypes. Obviously, the interpretation of implicit coding presents a dilemma, but with careful and respectful scholarship grounded in the specific cultural context of the performance, it is feasible to posit at least the possibility that an act of coding has occurred. A context for concealed coding (complicit or implicit) exists when, for a particular individual or folk group, there exists a situation of oppression, dominance, or risk; when there is some kind of opposition to this situation that cannot safely be made explicit; and when there is a community of potential ‘‘listeners’’ from which one would want to protect oneself. However, the identification and interpretation of implicit coding must ultimately remain an act of inference—inference that has potentially serious consequences for individuals and communities and hence should be undertaken with great care. In the absence of clear information from the encoder, interpreting implicit coding remains an ambiguous project, not only uncertain but often highly charged. Coding in individual texts and performances is frequently ambiguous, and different audiences may disagree as to their interpretation. But it is possible to identify certain common strategies, often occurring in combination. The first of these is appropriation, the act of adapting forms or materials normally associated with the dominant culture to the purposes of an

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oppressed culture. Strategic appropriations may simply borrow and refashion dominant cultural forms. For example, Irish storyteller Peig Sayers, who learned her stories from her father and other male relatives, retold those tales with major changes of pace, tone, and emphasis to focus attention on the hard lot of women. More extreme appropriations may constitute parodies or subversions: lesbian commitment ceremonies, for instance, may playfully adapt features of heterosexual weddings (for example, one spouse wears a tuxedo; two bride dolls crown the wedding cake). As women move into roles that have previously belonged to men, appropriation can be an effective tactic, as with African American women rappers who gained airtime in the predominantly male rap music industry of the 1980s by adopting the ‘‘hard’’ performance mode of male rappers, but injected into their work significant rebuttal of negative male attitudes toward women. Juxtaposition is the ironic arrangement of texts, artifacts, or performances so that they develop additional levels of meaning. For example, a quilt created by a group of women as a bridal gift for one of their members may represent an ironic coded message when it covers her marriage bed; symbolic of the group’s intimacy, it becomes a reminder that the bride has been removed from that intimacy by her new primary duties to her husband. Distraction is a coding strategy that drowns out or draws attention away from the subversive power of a message. A mother may voice and simultaneously disguise her deepest fears in the lyrics of a soothing lullaby (‘‘Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, / You know your mama’s bound to die . . .’’). Pentecostal women preachers may draw attention away from the fact that they are moving into a normally male position of power by describing their pastoral duties in maternal terms, and emphasizing their obedience to God’s call. Indirection refers to the many ways in which, as Emily Dickinson put it, one can ‘‘tell all the truth but tell it slant.’’ Perhaps the most common strategy of coding, indirection includes metaphor, impersonation, metonymy (substitution of a part for the whole), and hedging. For example, Mexican American women tell legends of vaginal serpents as metaphoric expressions of sexual fears; Kentucky mountain women sing traditional Euro American ballads as impersonal lessons about how to outsmart men; lesbians may use metonymy to inquire about a stranger’s sexual orientation by asking if she has been to the Michigan Women’s Music Festival. Hedging—almost saying something, but not quite saying it—encompasses a range of verbal strategies that have been identified by some linguists as characteristic of ‘‘women’s language’’ or the ‘‘language of the powerless,’’ including passive constructions, euphemisms, and qualifiers. Minimization or trivialization strategies understate, minimize, or ‘‘normalize’’ the subversive power of a message, usually by employing forms that the dominant culture considers to be unimportant, innocuous, or irrelevant. The claim that ‘‘it’s only a joke’’ disguises criticism, prejudice, anger, and other risky feelings. The seriousness of women’s communication and knowledge is likewise trivialized by traditionally disparaging labels— ‘‘gossip,’’ ‘‘woman talk,’’ ‘‘old wives’ tales.’’

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The last common coding strategy is incompetence. Here, the encoder of a message expresses resistance to the dominant culture’s expectations by claiming or demonstrating incompetence at activities conventionally associated with her oppressed culture. Strategic incompetence is often a tactic of underclasses whose labor power is being exploited, as, for instance, in some of the African American folktales of the slave John and Old Massa in which John manages to be excused from onerous duties by feigning inability. Women who profess or display incompetence at conventionally feminine activities— such as cooking, sewing, or cleaning—may be expressing their resistance to patriarchal expectations; were they to refuse these duties outright, they might run considerable risks, but incompetence, though frowned upon, is not usually regarded as blameworthy. See also: Feminisms; Folk Group; Gossip; Hip-Hop Culture/Rap; Housekeeping; Humor; Lesbian Folklore; Old Wives’ Tales; Sunbonnet Sue; Vaginal Serpent. References: Babcock, Barbara, ed. The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978; Buhler, Sarah. ‘‘‘I Chose Some Cups and Saucers’: Gender, Tradition, and Subversive Elements in my Grandmother’s Life Stories.’’ Ethnologies, vol. 21, no.1 (1999): 47–63, 303–04; Hollis, Susan Tower, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, eds. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Jordan, Rosan A. ‘‘The Vaginal Serpent and Other Themes from Mexican-American Women’s Lore.’’ In Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, eds. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik, 26–44. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Lawless, Elaine J. ‘‘Access to the Pulpit: Reproductive Images and Maternal Strategies of the Pentecostal Female Preacher.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 258–76. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; McDowell, Margaret B. ‘‘Folk Lullabies: Songs of Anger, Love and Fear.’’ Feminist Studies, vol. 3, no.1 (1977): 205–218; Radner, Joan Newlon, ed. ‘‘The Woman Who Went to Hell: Coded Values in Irish Folk Narrative.’’ Midwestern Folklore, vol. 15, no. 2 (1989): 49–51; ———. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Shuman, Amy. ‘‘Gender and Genre.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 71–88. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Taggart, James M. Enchanted Maidens: Gender Relations in Spanish Folktales of Courtship and Marriage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992; Williams, Brett. ‘‘Why Migrant Women Feed Their Husbands Tamales: Foodways as a Basis for a Revisionist View of Tejano Family Life.’’ In Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, eds. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, 113–26. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984; ‘‘Women and Storytelling.’’ Special issue of Women and Language, vol. XIX, no. 1 (Spring 1996).

Joan Newlon Radner

Consciousness Raising Consciousness raising is one of the primary methods of encouraging selfawareness enacted by those in the women’s liberation movement, whereby women share personal-experience narratives that link their experiences to those of other women, recognizing these experiences not as personal idiosyncrasies but as evidence of systematic oppression. Consciousness raising demonstrates the feminist adage that ‘‘the personal is political.’’

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There is some debate about the origins of consciousness raising as a feminist strategy, some link it to the civil rights movement’s slogan ‘‘tell it like it is’’; others, like Alice Echols, associate it with Chinese peasants’ practice of ‘‘speaking bitterness.’’ Regardless of its genesis, consciousness raising played a central role in the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Proponents of consciousness raising argue that by sharing their personal-experience narratives, women gain an awareness of their oppression and realize that problems they believed were personal are actually socially constituted. Solutions to these problems therefore require a political movement, not just individual transformation. Consciousness raising occurs in small group sessions (CR groups) of varying size and frequency in which women’s personal-experience narratives are shared and analyzed. These narratives typically deal with topics such as sexuality, health, marriage, motherhood, and employment. Many groups discourage outright leadership, although some appoint facilitators to suggest topics or monitor discussion. As frequently occurs in storytelling performances, one personal-experience narrative elicits another, and everyone present is encouraged to speak. In her article ‘‘‘. . . like Ann’s gynecologist or the time I was almost raped’: Personal Narratives in Women’s Rap Groups,’’ Susan Kalcik (1975) argues that the narratives told in CR groups are structurally fluid. A recurring type of narrative is what she calls the kernel story, ‘‘a brief reference to the subject, the central action, or an important piece of dialogue from a longer story.’’ She reports that because the women who participate in CR sessions often have similar experiences to describe, stories known to the group become touchstones for common experience, needing to be evoked only by ‘‘kernel’’ allusions upon which others may elaborate. While women are frequently stereotyped as being unable to tell stories ‘‘correctly,’’ CR groups foster creativity and competence, providing women a space in which to share their stories in a supportive environment without fear of derision. For many second-wave feminists, consciousness-raising sessions were meant to provide a starting point from which participants could move on to other political projects. However, these sessions were criticized by some for encouraging only talk while actually discouraging action. Consciousness raising also came under fire for being monopolized by middle-class women with bourgeois values. Although it was premised on the notion of identifying the common oppression shared by women, consciousness raising often minimized women’s differences, such as race, class, and sexual orientation. According to Lisa Maria Hogeland, consciousness-raising groups faded from use among feminists by the mid-1970s, replaced largely by the solitary act of reading feminist literature. However, consciousness raising arguably continues in Women’s Studies classrooms, in Internet chat rooms, and in women’s homes to the present day. See also: Activism; Feminisms; Oral History; Personal-Experience Narrative; Politics; Storytelling. References: Echols, Alice. Daring to be BAD: Radical Feminism in America, 1967– 1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989; Hogeland, Lisa Maria. Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women’s Liberation Movement. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998; Kalcik, Susan. ‘‘‘. . . like Ann’s

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gynecologist or the time I was almost raped’: Personal Narratives in Women’s Rap Groups.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 88, no. 347 (1975): 3–11; Stahl, Sandra Dolby. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Audrey Vanderford Cosmetics Cosmetics serve an aesthetic purpose, usually in the form of applied toiletry, makeup, clothing, wigs, or surgical intervention designed to beautify the body or complexion. The application of cosmetics to the male or female face, hair, and body should also be understood by anthropologists and folklorists as a ritual communicative act deeply imbued with meanings determined by historical moment, tradition, and cultural context. Historical cross-cultural studies of cosmetics trace their use by women and men from ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures (kohl eyeliner, malachite eye shadow, lip and cheek rouge/stain, and face powder date to about 10,000 BCE) to ancient China (nail polish dates to about 3000 BCE). Perhaps the oldest cosmetic is henna, used in Asian, African, Middle, and Far Eastern cultures in mehndi skin art and as hair dye and nail stain. Cosmetics have been used for ceremonial and everyday purposes and by various classes and castes of people to communicate attractiveness, sex appeal, and fertility, but they also signify ancient tradition and cultural values, identity, and community. Cosmetics are a powerful communicative medium. Industrialized Western cultures have developed cosmetics as part of their technologies of beautification. Outpacing most other industries, the cosmetics and personal care industry expects global sales of its products to exceed $270 billion in 2008. Historically, many female inventors and businesswomen found their fame and established their fortunes in the manufacturing and distribution of cosmetics. It is disputed as to which African American inventor and cosmetics entrepreneur was the first Black millionaire in the United States: Madame C. J. Walker (Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Walker), who sold her grooming products door to door in the 1910s, or her colleague Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone, who made her fortune selling products and apparatus for relaxing and growing hair in the 1920s. The cosmetics industries have always provided women with opportunities for professionalization, and have been used as vehicles for class ascension. Today, the Mary Kay Cosmetics empire and the globally reaching Avon Cosmetics company are two corporations that employ large numbers of women and encourage entrepreneurial spirit and personal empowerment through selling and using their beauty products. These conglomerates are so successful as to have become cultural icons—the ‘‘Avon Lady’’ and the pink Cadillacs driven by Mary Kay agents have widespread recognizability. Other key figures in the Western history of cosmetics production include Estee Lauder, Helena Rubenstein, Max Faktor (Factor), Elizabeth Arden, Charles Revson (Revlon), Eugene Schueller (L’Oreal), and Frank Toskan (MAC). Each of these inventors is associated with an innovative product,

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signature style, look, or ‘‘face,’’ such as Factor’s ‘‘bee-stung lips’’; a cosmetically enhanced ‘‘look’’ is often made famous through its use by a celebrity figure in advertising. Prior to the establishment of federal standards regulating the manufacturing of cosmetics in the United States and Canada, many unsafe products caused their wearers irreparable damage, and in some cases proved fatal. The history of innovations in cosmetic use and manufacturing includes cases such as the dangerous and corrosive effects of lead in white face paint and power, corrosive skin lightening and bleaching products marketed by and for Black women and men, and Lash-Lure mascara, which caused blindness in the 1930s. However, some useful innovations and breakthroughs include the quest by manufacturers to produce a durable ‘‘kissproof’’ lipstick; a widely influential and unpatented formula for indelible lip stains was finally realized by American chemist Hazel Bishop. Professional makeup artists practice cosmetic application for print and television advertising, and in theater, film, and the fashion industry. Some of these professionals gain notoriety and launch their own product lines, as did Bobbie Brown and Sonia Kashuk. Hollywood and its spectacularly madeup stars have greatly influenced trends in makeup. For example, actors Clara Bow, Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, and Marlene Dietrich each had a ‘‘trademark face’’ achieved through intricate makeup artistry. Aestheticians and makeup artists also participate in the culture of beauty shops and retail cosmetic counters. During the early twentieth century, employment in beauty salons provided essential income for Black women, whose options for paid work were otherwise largely restricted to domestic service. Ethnographic studies of Western hairdressing and beauty salons document these sites as key arenas for the creation and maintenance of women’s communities; at some historical moments, they served as rare public spaces in which women could connect to discuss life and politics. As integral components of the beauty industry and the cult of femininity, cosmetics are used by women for reasons of vanity, but also as a form of pleasurable and playful experimentation, an opportunity for creativity and artistry. Socially and health-conscious female consumers today demand strict cosmetic production regulations, often preferring the use of environmentally friendly and organic or natural ingredients. Responding to public outcries about animal testing in cosmetics research has proved the key to success for many cosmetic companies, including Aveda, Prescriptives, and The Body Shop, which proudly proclaim that their products are ‘‘cruelty free.’’ See also: Aesthetics; Beauty; Fashion; Film; Hair; Henna Art/Mehndi; Magazines, Women’s and Girls’; Mass Media; Popular Culture; Ritual; Sexuality; Spa Culture; Women’s Work. References: Ash, Mary Kay. Miracles Happen: The Life and Timeless Principles of the Founder of Mary Kay Inc. New York: Perennial Currents, 2003; Basten, Fred E., Robert Salvatore, and Paul A. Kaufman. Max Factor’s Hollywood: Glamour, Movies, Make-Up. Los Angeles: Stoddart, 1995; Blackwelder, Julia Kirk. 2003. Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training During Segregation. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 2003; Corson, Richard. Fashions in Makeup: From Ancient to Modern Times. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2004 [1981]; Global Cosmetics Industry (GCI)

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Homepage. http://www.globalcosmetic.com/mediakit (accessed August 8, 2008); Pallingston, Jessica. Lipstick: A Celebration of the World’s Favorite Cosmetic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998; Riordan, Teresa. Inventing Beauty: A History of the Inventions That Have Made Us Beautiful. New York: Broadway, 2004; Roddick, Anita. Body and Soul: Profits with Principles—The Amazing Success Story of Anita Roddick & The Body Shop. New York: Crown, Three Rivers Press, 1994 [1991]; Woodhead, Lindy. War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden, Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004.

Sidney Eve Matrix Courtship Courtship is the premarital relationship between a couple involving a wide variety of traditional practices from rhymes to rituals. From childhood, women are prepared for their role in courtship, with the expectation that it will ultimately lead to marriage. Even preschool children may have opposite-sex boyfriends and girlfriends before they are aware that, in adulthood, the terms will invariably signify sexual relationships. Once in grade school, the preparation begins in earnest. The playground becomes the location where early role-modeling takes place. Little girls—and sometimes boys— jump rope to rhymes such as: Policeman, policeman Do your duty For here comes Delinda (or other child’s name) The bathing beauty. She can wiggle She can waddle She can do the kick And I bet you all the money She can do the split (Bronner: 72).

The rhyme describes provocative behavior by girls or women, suggesting its aim is to attract men’s attention. Another, implicating pregnancy, is Mother, mother I am ill Send for the doctor Over the hill First comes the doctor Then comes the nurse Then comes the lady with the alligator purse (Bronner: 73).

Kissing tag encourages boys to assume their traditional role of pursuer, and Valentine’s Day is a time for little boys and girls to declare that they love each other, at times resulting in mock weddings on playgrounds during recess. Both boys and girls model the behavior that they know from home or from various media. In North America, little girls may become caught up in perceiving themselves as princesses waiting for their prince to come. They are encouraged to take this role into adulthood; for example, Disney counts on the lure of childhood fantasies to sell its line of ‘‘Princess’’ wedding dresses. Cinderella gowns are ‘‘classic glamour;’’ Snow White is ‘‘sweet

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elegance;’’ Ariel and Jasmine, on the other hand, are ‘‘considerably racier’’ (Marr). Adolescence is a time of transition from the games of childhood to eventual commitment as adults. Activities like ‘‘hanging out’’ (large groups of both sexes, no pairing) or ‘‘hooking up’’ (pairing up and engaging in a physical relationship) are practiced both by high school age and older adolescents. Among heterosexual couples, the man is expected to initiate dating, though it is now permissible and not unusual for women to take that role. The culminating courtship event of adolescence is the prom (a formal dance event), and ‘‘for some young women, the prom is seen as a dress rehearsal for weddings’’ (Best: 61). Prom memories are often highlights of adolescence for those who choose to participate. Adolescence is a period of liminality—a state of being between childhood and adulthood—which is reflected in the prom. ‘‘While the prom is resolutely a space of constraint, it is also a space of infinite possibility and self-(re)invention, a rich tapestry of spectacle and pageantry. Proms are spaces of performance and often emerge as meaningful sites in which to express a range of confrontational youth stances’’ (Best: 11). Older adolescents, including college students, fine-tune the art of hanging out and hooking up, although for most, the latter requires no exclusivity or commitment. While different terminology applies for relationship statuses, ‘‘dating’’ usually implies an exclusive relationship. Those with multiple partners and/or no exclusivity are considered ‘‘single.’’ At some point, usually during the late twenties or early thirties, most individuals look for a spouse or partner. This is where the years of preparation and courtship-like events begin to pay off. When considering their path from courtship to marriage, most ‘‘Americans think in reverse, revising the past on the basis of what happened later, replacing coincidence with destiny’’ (Zeitlin et al.: 91–92) in stories identifiable as the ‘‘family romance’’ (94). When a couple gets engaged, generally marriage has already been discussed. The asker, usually the man in heterosexual partnerings, is secure in the knowledge that he will be accepted. In fact, it is not uncommon for some wedding planning to take place before the official engagement. While flowers and champagne or sparkling cider are still familiar parts of the engagement process, the settings have broadened. A formal atmosphere is no longer expected. Engagements may take place in the mountains, in parks, or on a beach, as well as in a variety of other informal places. For some, engagements can be very public. ‘‘Will you marry me?’’ may flash across a scoreboard at a football game, an entertainer may do the asking for someone in the audience, or the asker may hire a plane to fly overhead with a banner saying ‘‘Will you marry me?’’ and the name of the (usually) woman. Similarly, weddings, the culmination of courtship, are in mainstream North America becoming more elaborate. Weddings are big business. With paraphernalia from planners to favors, weddings and receptions average around $25,000. Churches, hotels, reception centers, and homes are only a few of the choices for wedding venues. Some couples create ‘‘destination’’ weddings. They and their guests fly to designated ‘‘romantic’’ locations and

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enjoy a week of celebration. These might celebrate the couple’s love of the outdoors and the activities they enjoy there, or may simply display their wealth and opportunities for conspicuous consumption. However, not all Euro North Americans see courtship and marriage as the ultimate aim of their lives. Feminists have been particularly critical of heterosexual courtship’s enforcement of patriarchal patterns and male dominance. Self-proclaimed spinster-for-life Jaclyn Geller states that her purpose in writing Here Comes the Bride is to ‘‘dissuade many would-be wives from draping themselves in white and walking down the aisle’’ (71). For example, criticizing Gloria Steinem’s decision to marry for the first time at the age of sixty-six, Geller argues ‘‘that choosing to uphold an institution rooted in the barter of women as property, an institution that devalues friendship and envisions female existence in terms of a romantic narrative of male redemption, is not valid, not right at any age’’ (71). Though most heterosexuals in the United States expect their courtship will lead to marriage, many individuals now seek new courtship practices that may not culminate in a wedding. See also: Engagement; Jump-Rope Rhymes; Rhymes; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Valentine’s Day; Wedding; Wedding, Mock. References: Best, Amy L. Prom Night. New York: Routledge, 2000; Bronner, Simon J. American Children’s Folklore. Little Rock: August House, 1988; Geller, Jaclyn. Here Comes the Bride. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001; Marr, Merisa. ‘‘Fairy-tale wedding? Disney can supply the gown.’’ Deseret Morning News, Salt Lake City, March 4, 2007; Zeitlin, Steven J., Amy J. Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker. A Celebration of American Family Folklore. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.

Kristi A. Young Couvade From the French couver, to brood or hatch eggs, couvade refers to gestation and birth customs involving the father, particularly his lying-in at the time of delivery, and more generally to beliefs about male pregnancy and parturition. The custom is first mentioned in Apollonius of Rhodes’s epic The Argonautica (ca. 260 BC), citing Tibareni on the Euxine (Black) Sea: ‘‘When a woman is in childbirth, it is the husband who takes to his bed [and] lies there groaning with his head wrapped up and his wife feeds him with loving care’’ (Dundes 1987). The term first appears in print in Charles de Rochefort’s 1665 ‘‘natural and moral history’’of West Indies Carib Natives (Antilles Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l’Am erique). Anthropological use ‘‘to refer to a widespread custom whereby fathers or men about to become fathers ritually went through the motions of confinement and childbirth’’ began with British anthropologist Edward B. Tylor’s 1865 Researches into the Early History of Mankind. Western medical literature identifies couvade syndrome among some fathers-to-be with various gastrointestinal disorders and/or psychological symptoms. British amateur Egyptologist Warren R. Dawson’s 1929 compendium The Custom of Couvade geographically surveys worldwide evidence for ‘‘related customs’’ which ‘‘require that the father of a child, at or before its birth and for some time after the event, should take to his bed, submit himself to

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diet, and behave generally as though he, and not his wife, were undergoing the rigors of the confinement,’’ but offers little analysis. Many anthropologists have related couvade to the ritual establishment or recognition of paternity (for example, Douglas 1975), others to male protection for the mother and/or child by symbolically diverting attention to themselves during a vulnerable period. Couvade syndrome manifests clinically with physical symptoms similar to pregnancy discomforts like morning sickness and/or psychological ambivalence toward the mother or child. Freudian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim saw this as ‘‘womb envy:’’ ‘‘Women, emotionally satisfied by having given birth and secure in this ability to produce life, can agree to the couvade; men need it to fill the emotional vacuum created by their inability to bear children’’ (1962). Jungian analytical psychologist Nor Hall (1989) considers male ‘‘brooding’’ part of the preparation for fatherhood and bonding with the child. Greek mythology depicts the Olympian god Zeus as a father who swallows his pregnant first wife, the goddess Metis, and ‘‘gives birth’’ to a fully formed daughter, Athena, through his head. It is also Zeus who carries the fetus of his son Dionysus sewn into his thigh until proper delivery time because the latter’s mortal mother, Semele, was immolated by beholding her lover in immortal form. From the latter eleventh century, European cathedral iconography showed a pregnant Adam with a mature Eve halfway out of his side while God oversees the ‘‘birth’’; there is a complex of European Catholic folklore associated with Eve, Adam, and other pregnant, parturient males (Zapperi 1991, Dundes 1987). Alchemy and some contemporary reproductive technologies also may be viewed as types of male or male-managed pregnancy. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Eve; Pregnancy. References: Bettelheim, Bruno. Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male. New York: Collier Books, 1962; Dawson, Warren R. ‘‘Introducing the Custom of Couvade [1929].’’ In Broodmales: A Psychological Essay on Men in Childbirth, ed. Nor Hall, 3–44. Reprint edition. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1989; Douglas, Mary. Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975; Dundes, Alan. Parsing through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987; Zapperi, Roberto. The Pregnant Man. Trans. Brian Williams. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991.

Marta Weigle Cowgirl Women with athletic mastery of horses and a penchant for working with livestock are known in the United States as cowgirls. Evoking images of courage, self-reliance, and hard work, cowgirls had their primary origin on the frontier family ranches of the American West. Sometimes identified as the ‘‘cowboy’s female counterpart’’ or the ‘‘cowboy girl,’’ cowgirls ride and frequently rope animals because it is a necessary part of their working lives, just as it is for men. During the settlement of the western states, women performed jobs typically held by men and were expected to

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participate in all aspects of life, from housekeeping to castrating cattle. Cowgirls often worked for their families, but unlike cowboys, they usually were not paid. The image of the cowgirl began to develop in the late nineteenth century with casually organized rural festivals or ranch-versus-ranch rodeos in which women and girls demonstrated their expert handling of horses and livestock alongside the men. Despite the fact that women had long had experience with ranching and rodeos, it wasn’t until the Wild West shows of the 1880s that the word ‘‘cowgirl’’ was used—its coining credited to Theodore Roosevelt—both nationally and internationally. The public persona of the cowgirl grew from her appearances in Wild West shows and dime novels, and more recently in films and on television. Cowgirls typically performed and competed alongside cowboys in shooting events, trick riding, and bull-dogging (steer wrestling), and, like cowboys, women also rode buffaloes and played equestrian football. Between 1830 and 1930, traveling Wild West show cowgirls like Annie Oakley, Laura Mulhall, and Ruth Roach drew large audiences to their exuberant performances in Europe as well as in the United States. Performance and competition in rodeos contributed to the cowgirl’s identity as a confident, competent participant in the building of the American West. Many women took part in rodeo competitions just as they do today. Rodeo stars such as Tad Lucas, Fanny Sperry Steele, and Mabel Strickland were not only expert horsewomen, but were famous for their talent with the lariat, bull riding, relay racing, trick riding, Roman racing, and steer tying. However, by the 1930s, equestrian skill, a well-groomed horse, and the cowgirl’s own beauty had become the overriding factors in the judging of rodeo cowgirls in competitions. This double standard in judging criteria led in part to the exclusion of women from a number of rodeo events. However, by 1941, cowgirls had organized the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association, and thereby reinstituted many rodeo competitions previously barred to them. Barrel racing, a timed race around a cloverleaf course of three barrels, was established specifically for cowgirls. Early dime novels popularized the image of the cowgirl as eminently capable. But referred to as a ‘‘sport’’ or ‘‘the pard’’ (partner) in early twentiethcentury fiction, the cowgirl eventually came to be seen as less competent than the cowboy, and even subservient to ranching men. With the rise of the Western film genre, real cowgirls were allowed to participate as actors and stuntwomen, displaying strength and agility on horseback, but with minor exceptions, movie cowgirls played secondary roles to the films’ male heroes. Dale Evans, one of television’s most famous cowgirls, performed on the The Roy Rogers Show, which ran from 1950 to 1957. In her cowgirl persona, Evans demonstrated courage and independence when chasing villains, but was more often shown serving coffee and food to Roy Rogers and his friends back at the cafe. Today, throughout the American West, many cowgirls work on ranches and compete in rodeos. As a tribute to cowgirls of the past and present, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame opened in 2002 in Fort Worth, Texas. See also: Occupational Folklore; Women’s Work.

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References: Armitage, Shelley. ‘‘Rawhide Heroines: The Evolution of the Cowgirl and the Myth of America.’’ In The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture, ed. Sam Girgus, 166–81. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981; Flood, Elizabeth Clair, and William Manns. Cowgirls: Women of the Wild West. Santa Fe, NM: ZON International Publishing Company, 2000; Fragnito, Skawennati Tricia, and Marilyn Burgess. ‘‘Indian Cowgirls.’’ n. d. http://www.moa.ubc.ca/Exhibitions/Online/Other/Indian Cowgirls/cowgirl.html (accessed May 27, 2005); Jordon, Teresa. Cowgirls: Women of the American West. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992; LeCompte, Mary Lou. Cowgirls of the Rodeo: Pioneer Professional Athletes. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Redden, Paul. Wild West Shows. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999; Riske, Milt. Those Magnificent Cowgirls: A History of the Rodeo Cowgirl. Cheyenne, WY: Frontier Printing, 1983; Roach, Joyce Gibson. The Cowgirls. Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1990; Russell, Don. The Wild West. Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1970; Savage, Candace. Cowgirls. Vancouver and Toronto: Greystone, 1996; Stoeltje, Beverly J. ‘‘Gender Representations in Performance: The Cowgirl and the Hostess.’’ Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 25, no. 3 (1988): 219–241; Wallis, Sue. ‘‘Spirit of the Cowgirl.’’ In Cowgirls: Commemorating the Women of the West, ed. David R. Stoecklein, 17–29. Ketchum, ID: David R. Stoecklein Photography and Publishing, 1999.

Kristin M. McAndrews Crafting Crafting is a term used in English-speaking North America to refer to the creation of decorative items, often from household scraps or commercially produced kits. Crafting is distinguished from other types of creative production traditionally associated with women (such as quilting, needlework, knitting, and so forth) in that crafting projects are normally quickly and easily accomplished; they are, in fact, usually advertised as fast or easy, requiring no special skill or training on the part of the creator to complete. Crafted items include decorative innovations on practical items, or items which are intended to be only decorative. Projects are usually accomplished using a mix of techniques combining some traditional folklife activities and materials (mentioned above) with some characteristics of fine art. Product descriptions frequently employed in advertisements for commercially produced kits refer to the creation of ‘‘museum quality’’ art with inexpensive materials. Faux finishes, or surface decoration meant to mimic more expensive materials, are popular. Projects are often described in women’s magazines, in crafting magazines, and on television how-to or domestic-living programs directed at female audiences. The last twenty years have seen the rise of profitable crafting stores, often very large and stocked with silk flowers, fabric paint, glue guns, frames and furniture to decorate, colored paper and ribbons, and other supplies used to produce simple decorative items. Often crafting is a social activity. Women gather in groups to do projects, compare notes, and trade materials. Scrapbooking is especially popular in this regard. Many crafting activities are also geared toward sharing with or teaching crafting to children. This is in keeping with historic women’s traditions such as quilting bees, in which the participants gathered socially to talk, watch and teach children, and accomplish a creative task together.

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Crafting is not well respected among most women who consider themselves adept in the fine arts or at traditional crafts that require a great deal of practice to master. Nevertheless, crafting is a very popular creative outlet for women who have not the time, inclination, training, or confidence to explore more demanding, elite, or traditional art forms. Crafting may have gained in popularity as women moved out of the multigenerational family settings in which more complex activities and techniques are usually learned. The increased number of women in the workforce who consequently cannot accomplish time-consuming creative tasks is undoubtedly also a factor in the value and popularity of crafting. See also: Folk Art; Material Culture; Sampler; Scrapbooks; Women’s Friendship Groups. References: Vaughan, Theresa A. Art and Community: A Community Art Center in Norman, Oklahoma. Diss., Indiana University, Bloomington, 1999.

Theresa A. Vaughan

Crime-Victim Stories Personal-experience prose narratives that deal with crime victimization are told to inform, entertain, frighten, and to impart street smarts about city life to the listener or audience of other urbanites. In this type of modern storytelling, the narratives are formulaic and have an identifiable form. They often embed themes such as bystander apathy and fear of the city and function in a didactic way, such as reinforcing one mental map of a city or neighborhood and identifying ‘‘safe’’ and ‘‘unsafe’’ territory based not only on empirical evidence but often by subjective observations that are presented within these stories. The stories reveal that women often believe that they are targets of crime because they ‘‘were in the wrong place at the wrong time.’’ Women often say, for example, that they should have followed their intuition and crossed the street when they realized they were being followed. Women share their stories about muggings and rapes, whether with a counselor at a rapecounseling center or at women’s social gatherings. While crime-victim stories can be told in any city and by any group, they are particularly common among people who live in New York City and reveal a particular type of New York humor. Today, it is common and acceptable for women to talk about their experiences as crime victims, especially at rape-crisis centers, where personnel often encourage women to get medical attention and social and psychological support after experiencing rape. However, in the early days of the feminist movement of the 1960s, women first started ‘‘revealing’’ their experiences about crime-victim events, especially rape, in women’s consciousness groups. In the past, the sharing of women-centered narratives was not encouraged; women were expected to remain silent about rape, or to reveal their experiences only to family members because victims were often perceived as the instigators of rape via their choices of venue or dress. The recounting of crime-victim stories among women provides a way for them to feel empowered about situations in which they feel otherwise powerless.

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Incarcerated women narrate their experiences from a different perspective and may reveal their firsthand accounts of murder and other violent crimes as well as their ‘‘vision’’ narratives of belief. Through these stories, women restore their self images, reshape their lives, and learn to cope with their status as crime victims or perpetrators. See also: Consciousness Raising; Humor; Personal-Experience Narrative; Rape. References: Brunvand, Jan. H. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: Norton, 1986; Burke, Carol. Vision Narratives of Women in Prison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993; Cody, Cornelia. ‘‘Only in New York: The New York City Personal-Experience Narrative.’’ Journal of Folklore Research: An International Journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, vol. 42 no. 2 (2006): 217–244; Wachs, Eleanor. Crime-Victim Stories: New York City’s Urban Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Eleanor Wachs Croning Croning, an invented tradition that has arisen in North American women’s groups since the early 1980s, refers to a rite of passage, a ceremony marking either menopause or a woman’s transition into midlife. A woman is considered eligible for croning at or around the age of fifty, but there is no absolute agreement as to the proper age. Based on the idea that women’s lives consist of childhood, child-bearing, and postmenopausal stages (corresponding to the three aspects of the archetypal Triple Goddess—maiden, mother, and crone), croning marks women’s passage into the third stage of life, wherein they become elders, or ‘‘crones.’’ As North American women active in the second wave of the feminist movement have entered midlife, they have created age-related support groups, online communities, Web sites, publications, and conferences. Claiming that older women were revered in pre-Christian, matriarchal societies, and that the crone aspect of the Triple Goddess was once worshipped, the croning movement draws upon ideas from liberal feminism, feminist spirituality, and Jungian psychology. It seeks to overturn Christian and patriarchal demonization of the crone and to win back for older women the respect they formerly enjoyed by reclaiming negative stereotypes, such as that of the crone. Jungian psychologists assert that the psychological work of navigating life changes requires a ritual (for example, Pretat 1994: 17–18). Traditional rituals to mark menopause or the transition to later life are very rare; hence, women have created their own. Some individuals design their own ceremonies, usually involving women friends and family. However, most ceremonies are created and enacted by women’s groups such as support groups and feminist witchcraft circles, and professional groups such as the Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society. Croning ceremonies may initiate a single woman or a group of women. Men are sometimes included, and in a few groups, men may also be eligible to become crones. A Chicana ceremony, ~ the cincuentanera, has recently evolved to celebrate a fifty-year-old woman’s life and accomplishments, often including elements reminiscent of those ~ employed in the quinceanera (‘‘fifteenth year’’) coming-of-age ritual.

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The form of croning ceremonies varies widely. Some new crones receive homemade crowns or other headdresses (from the spurious but oftenrepeated etymology of the word ‘‘crone’’ from ‘‘crown’’) to mark their new status. Elder crones in a group often initiate newly eligible women into crone status. A ceremony for an individual woman usually includes some commemoration of her life, either by herself or by her friends, for example in a ‘‘memory book.’’ Croning ceremonies also celebrate older women in general: one group prays to ‘‘the grandmothers,’’ while another includes representations of women pioneers in their field. Groups borrow and freely recombine ideas from each other; elements from modern witchcraft rituals are common (such as casting a circle or calling upon the four elements of Earth, air, fire, and water), as are rituals from other religious traditions, such as Native American practices like smudging. On the personal level, croning ceremonies are instruments of conscious aging, and may help individuals come to terms with the changes that accompany later life. Politically, the croning movement seeks to reverse Western society’s fear and denial of aging, especially in women. Crossculturally, the status and quality of life for women usually improve when they reach midlife. Although status improvements do occur in less-marked forms in industrialized societies, the croning movement emphasizes that society despises women who are no longer young, sexually attractive, and capable of childbearing. Croning ceremonies attempt to reverse this trend by arguing that older women should be respected as sources of wisdom and moral authority. See also: Aging; American Folklore Society—Women’s Section; Goddess Worship; Maiden, Mother, and Crone; Menopause; Quin~ ceanera; Rites of Passage; Wicca and Neo-Paganism; Women’s Groups. References: Brown, Judith K. ‘‘Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Middle-Aged Women.’’ Current Anthropology, vol. 23, no. 2 (1982): 143–56; ———. ‘‘Lives of Middle-Aged Women.’’ In In Her Prime: New Views of Middle-Aged Women, ed. Virginia Kerns and Judith K. Brown, 17–32. Second edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992; Cant u, Norma E., and Olga Najera-Ramirez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Dresser, Norine. Multicultural Celebrations: Today’s Rules of Etiquette for Life’s Special Occasions. New York: Three Rivers Press-Random House, 1999; McCabe, Janice. Morphing the Crone: A Critical Ethnography of Crone Consciousness, Culture and Communities, a Feminist Participatory Action Research Project. PhD diss., York University, 2005; Mantecon, Valerie H. ‘‘Where Are the Archetypes? Searching for Symbols of Women’s Midlife Passage.’’ Women and Therapy, vol. 14, no. 1 (1993): 77–88; Pretat, Jane R. Coming to Age: The Croning Years and Late-Life Transformation. (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts), 62. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1994; Radner, Joan N. ‘‘Coming of Age: The Creative Rituals of Older Women.’’ Southern Folklore, vol. 50, no. 2 (1993): 113–25; Rountree, Kathryn. ‘‘The New Witch of the West: Feminists Reclaim the Crone.’’ Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 30, no. 4 (1997): 211–29; Walker, Barbara G. The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985.

Moira Smith

Cross-Dressing Women cross-dress as men and take on male social roles in virtually every culture and time period, with varying purposes and degrees of social

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acceptance. Cross-dressed warrior women are perhaps the most common and widely approved. Those who sail away or ride out to join and/or rescue husbands and/or lovers who have gone to war appear frequently in European ballads and their North American descendants. A cross-dresser in balladry may end up pregnant and/or dead, but as often as not, she marries the man who discovers her true identity. Distaste for cross-dressers in Christianity is exemplified by legends about the ninth-century pontiff, Pope Joan (John VIII), who in some variants died giving birth to the Antichrist in the streets of Rome. Goddess figures around the world assume men’s roles and clothing, frequently remaining perpetually virginal, which serves to limit and contain their masculinized femininity. Two-spirited persons (berdaches) in many North American First Nations perform the social roles and adopt the traditional dress associated with the opposite sex. In some traditions, women may live some or even most of their lives gendered as men. Some even marry women and adopt children. Cultures have varying requirements for legitimizing the practice, including a woman’s age, marital and social status, motivation, type of dress, and willingness to return to gender-appropriate clothing once her goal has been met. In folklore, disguising oneself for the sake of another is far more likely to meet with success than is doing so solely for personal gain. In contemporary North America, cross-dressed women have moved into popular culture, where they may achieve both success and heterosexual romance without the unfortunate side effects of unwanted pregnancy or death. Examples include Marlene Dietrich’s tuxedo-clad torch singer in Morocco in 1930, Julie Andrews’ female impersonator (‘‘a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman’’) in Victor/Victoria in 1982, and Whoopi Goldberg’s role in the American remake of The Associate in 1996, in which, rather than working for White men, she ‘‘becomes’’ one to succeed on Wall Street. Like most folkloric heroines, cabaret performers Dietrich and Andrews give up their careers after finding the love of good men; however, Goldberg’s character ultimately unmasks herself to affirm her identity as an unattached, successful Black woman. But dressing in men’s clothes for the sake of one’s religious beliefs is presented in a less positive light than are other motives. For example, in Yentl (1983), Barbra Streisand’s character dresses as a male rabbinical student to avoid the trap of marriage after her father’s death. She finds both scholarly and romantic success in the short term, but abandons both when she realizes that, if discovered, her deception will result in ostracism both for herself and her friends. Clinical psychologists use the term ‘‘transvestism’’ to describe the practice of cross-dressing as a sexual fetish. Statistically, males are more prone to transvestism than are females, but more likely to be socially chastised for it. Within the sexualized contexts of patriarchy, men who genuinely aspire to femininity are more likely to be seen as deviant for taking on what is perceived as a submissive role (for example, a serial killer in Silence of the Lambs, 1991) than are women who aspire to higher, masculine status. Folklore and popular cultural genres generally represent cross-dressing men less positively than their female counterparts. They are portrayed as less capable at women’s work, as in the 1983 film Mr. Mom and the folktale ‘‘The Old

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Man and Woman Who Switched Jobs,’’ both of which portray wives as far more competent in performing ‘‘men’s work’’ than are their husbands in completing traditionally female tasks. The film portrays an inventively disastrous day of housekeeping; the folktale’s role-switching results in, among other things, burned bread and a hanged cow. Two film characters are notable exceptions: in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Robin Williams transforms himself into his own children’s beloved nanny, and in Tootsie (1982), Dustin Hoffman wins fans as a female soap-opera character. Men often cross-dress to flee from capture—in Some Like It Hot (1959), Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis join a women’s musical group to escape the mob after witnessing an execution; in Willow (1988), Val Kilmer’s warrior character comically takes on women’s clothing to escape the wrath of a cuckholded husband. Or men may cross-dress to commit murder—in the urban legend, ‘‘The Hairy-Handed Hitchhiker,’’ a killer disguises himself as a female hitchhiker, only to be given away by his hairy hands. However, even when portrayed in a positive light, cross-dressed women are generally deemed dangerously subversive, while cross-dressed men are simply not taken seriously. See also: Ballad; Film; Folklore About Women; Folk Music and Folksong; Folktale; Gender; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Popular Culture; Transgender Folklore; Women Warriors; Women’s Work. References: Baring-Gould, Sabine. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978; Boureau, Alain. The Myth of Pope Joan. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; Courlander, Harold, ed. Hopi Voices: Recollections, Traditions, and Narratives of the Hopi Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982; Dugaw, Dianne. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘Neither a Man Nor a Maid: Sexualities and Gendered Meanings in Cross-Dressing Ballads.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 108, no. 428 (Spring 1995): 156–177; Hymes, Dell. In Vain I Tried to Tell You: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004 [1991]; Jordan, Rosan A., and Susan J. Kalcik, eds. Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971; Lewis, C. S. A Horse and His Boy. New York: Harper Collins, 1954; Pratchett, Terry. Monstrous Regiment. New York: Harper Collins, 2003; Radner, Joan Newlon, ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois, 1993; Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998; ———. ‘‘What are Two-Spirits/Berdaches?’’ n.d. http://www. geocities.com/westhollywood/stonewall/3044/berdache.html (accessed August 10, 2008).

Julia Kelso

Curandera Curandera (‘‘folk healer’’) is an umbrella term that encompasses various folk-healing modalities, such as partera, hierbera, sobadora, and huesera— midwife, herbalist, folk massage therapist, and chiropractor—and seers and card readers as well as those who practice the black arts (sorcery) in Mexican American, Mexican, and U.S. Latino communities. As a folk-healing practitioner in the United States, she fulfills a vital function for the well-being of individuals and communities. The curandera is an experienced seer or spiritual counselor and often specializes in a particular healing practice;

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parteras, for example, are specialized health practitioners who may or may not engage in the traditional activities of the curandera. The origin of the curandera of folk-healing traditional lore can be traced to the Indigenous roots of mestizo culture, and to the folk-healing practices of Spain and Africa. The traditional women healers of Puerto Rican and other Caribbean cultures, known as hierberas or babalaos, may practice within the religious context of Santerı´a or espiritismo; they also heal with herbs and with rituals. Susto (fright or soul loss) and limpias (general soul cleansing) are but two conditions curanderas and hierberas attend to. In both traditions, herbal baths, teas, and particular rituals may be prescribed.  The botanica, the yerberia, or hierberia (herb store) provides a muchneeded service by making the various necessary utensils, herbs, images, and other accoutrements available for the patient and the healer. The store is a community focal point, serving as a meeting place for healers, who may advertise their services to the neighborhood by leaving a business card or handwritten note on a bulletin board at the establishment. The curandera belief system holds that there must be balance between hot and cold, and that four conditions determine health: the physical, the mental, the spiritual, and the emotional. Curanderas believe that the balance among these four aspects determines illness or good health in a body. Thus, they treat holistically, looking for imbalance when diagnosing an ailment that may or may not be recognized by Western medicine, such as cancer, heart disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, migraine, a broken heart, susto, or bilis (rage). The figure of the curandera appears often as a stock character in Chicano/a and Latino/a literature; portrayed as a wise and revered member of the community, she is also satirized to provide comic relief. See also: Divination Practices; Folk Medicine; Fortune-Teller; Herbs; Tradition-Bearer. References: Avila, Elena, and Joy Parker. Woman Who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health. New York: Penguin/Putnam, 1999; Fernandez Olmos, Margarita, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Healing Cultures: Art and Religion as Curative Practices in the Caribbean and its Diaspora. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001; Kay, Margarita A. Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996; Paredes, Americo, and Richard Bauman. Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993; Trotter, Robert T., and Juan Antonio Chavira. Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing. Second edition. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

Norma E. Cantu Cursing Cursing maintains separate but linked meanings in folklore. It can involve the utterance of words or phrases generally considered objectionable in mainstream society, also called ‘‘swearing’’ or ‘‘profanity.’’ In Euro North America, this type of curse takes three main forms: obscenity—sexual references, as in ‘‘Fuck you!’’; blasphemy—religious references, such as ‘‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’’; and abjection—materials or processes that break through bodily boundaries and are thus found disgusting, like ‘‘Shit!’’ Swearing and profanity connect with a second, often implicitly magical, form of

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cursing, that of using language to manipulate negative supernatural forces against another person or persons. Though sometimes supported by powerful objects, such curses most commonly form simple verbal charms or spells. Thus, a swearing curse like ‘‘Fuck you!’’ can be understood as a verbal invocation by the curser of what is implicitly a negative act against the recipient. Conversely, ‘‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’’ invokes that venerated figure’s protection of the speaker herself or another person, making it also similar to a charm or spell. The latter two forms—cursing as profanity and cursing as magical speech—can be enacted by both women and men. However, both often have marked associations with women or take specific forms when women use them. A third form of curse, unquestionably women-centered, is what is called ‘‘the curse’’ in the vernacular— menstruation, which is also associated with the abject, menstrual blood. In Euro North American society, swearing and profanity as linguistic forms are thought to be employed primarily by men, particularly by those of the working class. Foundational feminist linguistic research connected women’s need to elevate their social position with their language use. Since cursing is impolite, it is unfeminine. Women and girls are encouraged to be ladylike, and their language as well as their postures and actions should reflect their femininity. However, though women are normally expected to avoid curse words, in extreme circumstances, they are informally licensed not to censor their speech. Thus, mild expressions like ‘‘Oh fudge, my hair is on fire,’’ or ‘‘Dear me, did he kidnap the baby?’’ (Lakoff: 246) are considered inapt in the extreme circumstances. Further, Euro North American women in aggravated and painful circumstances like childbirth (another process associated with abjection) often find themselves extricated from everyday social constraints. They often express that freedom in an informal license to curse. Parturient women were ‘‘surprised when they found themselves yelling loudly, cursing, complaining, giving orders, or ‘losing control’’’—all symptoms of a social liberty usually denied them (Martin: 66). Under some circumstances, however, women are culturally enjoined to otherwise problematic language. Brides in some Chinese cultures are supposed to lament their loss of youth, freedom, and natal family by cursing their parents, the matchmakers, and their future husband’s family. Similarly, women undergoing ‘‘the curse,’’ or who are premenstrual or postmenopausal, may find they can access the verbal freedom of cursing because they are thought to be less in control of themselves at that time. Feminist theorists suggest that women take full advantage of such license to express the anger and frustrations with politics, work, family, and society that they may feel on a daily basis but should not show for fear of condemnation, or even legal and/or medical intervention. This temporary freedom of expression is often a source of immense pleasure for women. Magical cursing comprises a significant element of many traditional narratives. For example, older folktale witches regularly curse younger women, whether the stepmother in ‘‘Snow White,’’ jealous of her stepdaughter’s beauty, or the bitter uninvited guest at the christening of the baby who will become Sleeping Beauty. This form of cursing, like its swearing counterpart, is a weapon of the weak, used by those who cannot directly attack those

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who may threaten them. But cursing can be a most effective weapon, if only temporarily, as folktale cursers and others demonstrate. Indeed, cursing can be an effective weapon in actual communication. In Turkish culture, women use curses precisely because they lack power and because of their inability to use physical force, particularly against men. ‘‘Under such circumstances, cursing remains the only way to demonstrate emotional reactions such as anger, or hatred of unfair treatment’’ (VanciOsam: 75). Women’s curses, called beddua, differ from men’s curses, called € ur, € which are ‘‘ruder, more derogatory, and often an initial step toward kuf violence or the use of physical force’’ (ibid.). Beddua include: ‘‘May their tongues be covered by boils. May the boils be eaten by worms’’ (ibid.: 79), ‘‘May you suffer at the hands of judges and doctors,’’ or ‘‘May dead crows gouge out your eyes’’ (ibid.: 81). These texts clearly demonstrate the links between magical cursing and swearing. It is doubtful that the women who invoke beddua actually believe that they will bring boils, judges, doctors, or dead crows to punish individuals who have done them wrong. Instead, beddua offer their users a remarkably poetic, creative, and allusive outlet for anger. In traditional Jewish culture, women may curse one another, despite the possibility that it will bring shame to their families. Predictably, curses are ‘‘weak’’ or ‘‘strong,’’ that is, associated respectively with women and men. ‘‘Weak’’ curses include ‘‘‘May you break your neck,’ ‘May you become blind,’ [and] ‘May you die young’’’ (Shai: 43). When used by men, they are considered negatively effeminate. Though sometimes seen as ignominious, a woman may curse ‘‘to bring her problems to the attention of the wider community, since if the act should bring shame on herself it may also bring shame to the extended family’’ (ibid.: 44). Women’s cursing, which may look like an uncontrolled outburst, may actually be a strategy to air in public, and thus to resolve, grievances with others. ‘‘The expression of dissatisfaction quickly mobilizes local people to bring about reconciliation. For this reason, cursing in a direct form may lead to a state of repaired relationships between individuals’’ (ibid.: 45). Women in all-female contexts may feel more comfortable cursing, particularly in heterosexist cultures where a negative judgement from men is more serious than one from other women. Thus, in women’s self-defense classes, consciousness-raising groups, or other homosocial organizations, women may curse more freely. However, women may also be the recipients of cursing from men as a form of sexual harassment, for example, when they enter non-traditional fields of employment. See also: Consciousness Raising; Folktale; Gender; Menstruation. References: Black, C. Fred. ‘‘Death and Abuse in Marriage Laments: The Curse of Chinese Brides.’’ Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 37, no. 1 (1978): 13–33; Lakoff, Robin. ‘‘Extract from Language and Women’s Place.’’ In The Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron, 242–252. Second edition. London: Routledge, 1998 [1975]; Martin, Karin A. ‘‘Giving Birth Like a Girl.’’ Gender and Society, vol. 17, no. 1 (2003): 54–72; Shai, Donna. ‘‘Public Cursing and Social Control in a Traditional Jewish Community.’’ Western Folklore, € lker. ‘‘May You Be Shot with Greasy Bullets: vol. 37, no. 1 (1978): 39–46; Vanci-Osam, U Curse Utterances in Turkish.’’ Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 57, no. 1 (1998): 71–86.

Pauline Greenhill

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Cyberculture Cyberculture studies focus on the cultural origins and evolving legacies of computing technologies, and include the study of their related scientific, technological, and philosophical contexts. Cyberculture encompasses early automata and calculating machines, computing machines (those capable of manipulating data according to instruction), robotics (the science of complex machines), cybernetics (the science of complex systems), virtual environments (artificially generated, non-material environments), the Internet, artificial intelligence (AI), and, at its broadest, the philosophical concept of ‘‘simulation.’’ As an expression of the basic human drives for building and for navigation, cyberculture is closely tied to folklore, myth, and fiction. In The Cybercultures Reader (2000), Timothy Leary uses the term ‘‘cybernaut’’ to describe all engineers, architects, explorers, and cartographers in virtual and/or physical geographies, comparing the voyages of both Renaissance explorer, Marco Polo, and fictional hero of Greek epic poetry, Odysseus, with the midnight activities of teenage hackers engrossed in online gaming. Such terminology captures a primary conflict that has characterized the development of cyberculture, one of particular importance to the student of folklore: a violent striation between the concerns of authoritative rule on the one hand and populist practice on the other. At the same time, stereotypical and hierarchized categories of ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female,’’ ‘‘controller’’ and ‘‘machine,’’ and ‘‘creator’’ and ‘‘created,’’ have tended to be reduplicated in all areas to do with computing technologies, both in official discourse and in computing subcultures. Perhaps unsurprisingly, published histories of early computing have largely championed the accomplishments of men. When female pioneers in the field are included, gender stereotypes detract from public perception of their contributions. The portrayal of computing progenitors Charles Babbage and Lady Ada (Byron) Lovelace speaks directly both to the perpetuation of gender stereotype in established histories and to cyberculture’s competing claims of authority and populism. Babbage’s Analytical Engine (1840) is widely cited as the first modern analog computer. Lady Lovelace constructed what has been described as the first computer program, a set of instructions for the Analytical Engine intended to be utilized in a manner similar to the cards of Jacquard’s loom. She also published A Sketch of the Analytical Engine (1845), a treatise describing in prophetic terms the potential use to which such a machine might be put. Officially, Babbage envisioned the Analytical Engine performing sophisticated astronomical calculations for the British Navy. However, Lady Lovelace envisioned the machine generating musical combinations, pieces of text, and other representational output. The more colorful biographies also record the pair’s fondness for horse racing and speculate that the Analytical Engine’s calculating potential fuelled their dream of a reliable, predictive system of betting based on mathematical probabilities. Yet Lovelace’s significant contribution has been forgotten or seriously downplayed. While Babbage has been presented by

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computing historians as the authoritative inventor of the machine, the scientist interested in astronomy and naval procedure, and a risk-taker intent on cracking the mathematics of random variables, Lovelace has been characterized as ‘‘Babbage’s muse,’’ as a ‘‘dreamer’’ predicting computer-driven art and music, and as an opium addict who lost a fortune ‘‘on the ponies.’’ Yet the Analytical Engine’s presumed transposition from naval research to entertainment (art, music, and horse racing) did foreshadow the evolution of the computer in the twentieth century, as government-directed supercomputing gave way to the personal computer (PC) and brought the technology into the feminized realm of popular culture and mass consumption. Advances in computing architectures and programming in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1990s retraced the mythic ambitions of the field’s earlier pioneers: the creation of ‘‘life’’ and cheating fate. The military context of microcomputer development paradoxically bequeathed a legacy of secrecy and restriction while enabling the structures and devices that would grant access to this technology by the general populace. E-mail developed in the 1960s and 1970s from the need for U.S. Department of Defense personnel to communicate electronically. It soon filtered down through the military to academic institutions, although it would be decades still before it was available to Jane and John Doe on the street. Similarly, the Internet originated from ARPANET, the corporate communication network of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) computer scientists. Downsized after military cutbacks at the end of the Cold War, PARC group scientists moved from military to corporate funding while vehemently retaining a 1960s counterculture ethic; they were responsible for key innovations that would bring about the widespread distribution of computer communication networks (today referred to as the ‘‘democratization of the ‘Net’’’). The established histories often describe the transition of computing from a military context to the realm of democratic practice through a rhetoric of iconoclastic male heroes who rescued a passive, general population from governmental control or the perceived threat of AI. Science fiction firsts such as Forbidden Planet (1956) and the hugely successful television series Buck Rogers (1950) form unofficial parallels in popular culture to the official vision of these histories, both offering decidedly male-centered narratives. At the same time, the science of cybernetics, theorized by Norbert Wiener in 1948, fundamentally reconceived of complex systems in ways that eschew ideas like ‘‘authoritative’’ and ‘‘centeredness’’ in favor of concepts such as ‘‘distributed’’ and ‘‘part function.’’ Wiener generalized and expanded the concept of cybernetics to describe all complex systems of interacting parts, whether the human body, a building, or a computer network, and suggested that they be defined not by physical arrangement and boundaries, but through the processes of information flows. Similarly, in the late 1960s, a group of four architects using the name Archigram developed an ‘‘architecture of lightness,’’ a mode of conceptualizing buildings as open to networks of communications technologies, and as portable—even disposable. The Microsoft Windows catchphrase, ‘‘Where do you want to go today?’’ nicely encapsulates what Archigram envisioned for cities of the future: people, machines, and buildings capable of roaming and linking up

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in various arrangements, at various times, in fluid relationships, and with fluid purposes. Such decenteredness and flexibility promised much for an egalitarian vision of computing technologies, in terms of both public usage and gender identity. However, the dream of nomadically empowered populations has proven difficult to achieve, as current conflicts between proprietary software and corporate licensing on the one hand and public demand for free access and unlimited information upgrade on the other have inevitably resulted from the dual impulses that structured the late 1960s and early 1990s explosions in computing technologies. Such conflict reaches a popular apotheosis in the blockbuster film The Matrix (1999). Played out in terms that emphatically restate the symmetries between naval, architectural, physical, and virtual territories, the film stages an epic confrontation between authoritative control with Agent Smith, a sentient program or AI, and the iconoclastic hacker-hero Neo. Despite the liberatory potential envisioned in the very malleability of simulated worlds and digital relations, a masculinist rhetoric amenable to military and corporate warfare has reasserted itself in cybercultures with amazing resilience; the impulses of technological egalitarianism have not included women as a specific group. Primary categories of cyberlore reveal aggressive gender polarizations: hacker culture and its mythologies center around the lone, teenage male; video games feature both militarized combat sequences and hypersexualized female avatars (on-screen player icons), playing, like hacker culture, to the teenage male audience; online shopping sites, although statistics attest to the generality of their demographic, are perceived as feminized ‘‘space’’ marked by excesses of consumption, frenzied bargain hunting, and purchase for leisure rather than necessity; chain e-mails, invariably of the ‘‘joy-luck’’ variety (‘‘send to five friends; break the chain and misfortune will follow’’), are overwhelmingly targeted at and distributed by women; and chat rooms have spawned activities with decidedly sexual content that are potentially dangerous spaces for women and children. As Nina Wakeford remarked, much of the Internet still functions as a ‘‘lawless wild west world,’’ controlled by ‘‘console cowboys’’ (Wakeford 91). Frontier justice, largely underpinned by conspiracy theory, has been described as the motivational calling card of self-styled techno-subversives— ‘‘hackers.’’ A hacker’s perception that authorities not only have complete, regulated control of network technologies but are withholding vital information from the populace, presents him or her with the irresistible challenge to infiltrate restricted databases and cause anarchic havoc. As Andrew Ross details, the media constructs teenage hacking as a threat to both corporate hegemony and national security, thereby perpetuating its romantic counterculture mythology; ‘‘the dominant representation of the hacker is that of ‘rebel with a modem’’’ (Ross: 256). Note that although it is aimed against institutional authority, hacking is still clearly regarded as a form of skilled combat. Moreover, cultural productions from news headlines to online humor confirm that hacker culture is clearly coded male. Frequently linked in the popular imagination with hacking, videogaming, too, is perceived as a pastime for teenage males. Numerous games adopt

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militarized scenarios, whether single-player or MMPORG (massive multiplayer online role-playing games) in design. The exaggeratedly masculine avatars of games like Duke Nukem and Doom are easily intelligible in this context, while the use of female avatars has generated considerable debate. Role-playing games, originating from early Dungeons and Dragons groups and online MUDs (multi-user dungeons, domains, or dimensions), appeared initially to offer considerable flexibility in character construction and ample opportunity to reenvision gender roles. However, as these games evolved into popular console versions and MMPORGs, commercial interests and user demand combined to produce fairly rigid generic protocols for gendered playable characters. The video game character Lara Croft, adapted for the Tomb Raider films (2001, 2003), serves as a good example of the gender debate. While Lara takes on the role of action hero within the game and even combines masculine and feminine attributes in her hypergendered signature look of big breasts and guns, the sexualization of her character and its alignment with soft-core pornography is demonstrated by the fan lore that surrounds her. Lara fans have created entire backstories and supporting paraphernalia, including the infamous ‘‘nude Lara’’ patch, a modification that strips the avatar of her clothing. Combat-hardened video vixens like Lara may have come a long way from the passive prostitutes in Duke Nukem who beg, ‘‘Kill me, kill me,’’ but feminist critics argue that the difference is one of degree, not kind. The ease with which video games translate between militarized and pornographic scenarios is obvious in a game such as Leisure Suit Larry, in which the object of game play is to maneuver Larry into positions of sexual intercourse with several female characters—much like shooting down as many space invaders as possible—within a given time limit. Online, women have grouped toward activities involving consumption and private or domestic communication, spaces already culturally coded as female, particularly online shopping malls, e-mail, and blogs (Web-published diaries). Online malls have consistently tailored site graphics and navigation designs to evoke physical shopping malls, with female-targeted items such as clothing, shoes, and purses in the most visibly noticeable locations, heavy usage of female models with the products, and female-oriented catchphrases such as ‘‘Discover the softer side of Sears.’’ Likewise, chain e-mails—one of the first Internet genres to capture the attention of folklorists—are mass-produced, but stealthily invade the space of private e-mail addresses. These e-mails promise love or good luck as a result of sending a copy of the letter to five or more friends within a designated time limit. While the address to ‘‘friends’’ encourages erasure of the border between the virtual, generic address and the recipients’ actual friends through the nature of their intended distribution, chain e-mail also functions, like the shopping mall, as public inscription of private space. Graphics included with such e-mails are often female-oriented and content-themed, with prominent displays of roses, babies, and butterflies. The association of femininity with friendship, love, and the private sphere versus the warrior’s code of videogaming and the publicity of lone-male hacking suggests just how stereotyped computing lore and practice remains.

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Further, many commentators believe that the potential for virtual gender play that feminist critics had envisioned so positively in the heady first days of Internet expansion has been curtailed through both authoritative and populist mechanisms. The economic realities of niche marketing, from video games to the online auction mall eBay, have resulted in products and associated advertising that exaggerate gender stereotypes. Unofficial online practice has also reinforced rigid gender identity in many subcategories, from chat-room humor that makes gender masquerade a staple comic subject to the use of e-mail and chat-room space for pornography distribution. Certainly, cyberspace has offered women new access to public expression, with many sites dedicated to the publication of women’s writing about women’s concerns, along with online versions of feminist magazines like Bitch, which have a wider virtual than print readership. However, cybercultures have failed to bring gender-egalitarian principles to the mainstream, and have more easily translated standard gender roles from the physical world to the digital. See also: Film; Gender; Magazines, Girls’ and Women’s; Popular Culture. References: Bell, David, ed. An Introduction to Cybercultures. London: Routledge, 2001; Bell, David, and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge, 2000; Bitch Magazine. n.d. http://www.bitchmagazine.org (accessed July 13, 2007); Colomina, Beatriz. Sexuality and Space. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992; Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991; ———. ‘‘A Manifesto For Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.’’ In The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, 50–57. New York: Routledge, 2000; Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999; Kirkup, Gill, Linda Janes, Kath Woodward, and Giona Hovenden, eds. The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000; Leary, Timothy. ‘‘The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot.’’ In The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara Kennedy, 529–539. London: Routledge, 2000; Lupton, Ellen. Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993; Palumbo, Maria Louisa. New Wombs: Electronic Bodies and Architectural Disorders. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser, 2000; Ross, Andrew. ‘‘Hacking Away at the Counter-Culture.’’ In The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara Kennedy, 254–267. London: Routledge, 2000; Toole, Betty Alexandra. Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age. Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press, 1998; Wakeford, Nina. ‘‘Networking Women and Grrrls with Information/Communication Technology: Surfing Tales of the World Wide Web.’’ In Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, eds. J. Terry and M. Calvert, 52–66. London: Routledge, 1997.

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D Daughter The female child of parents of any gender—biological, adopted, foster, or stepoffspring—is their daughter. The relationship combines emotional, sociocultural, and legal aspects. Parents are expected to provide for their daughters and sons until a legally mandated age that differs from one nation and/ or state to another. Required provisions often include the basics of life and formal education to some level. However, it is usually the emotional and social aspects of the relationship between parents and daughters that are explored in traditional and popular culture. Parents, especially fathers, are often represented in ballads as excessively controlling of their daughters’ relationships with men. Fathers’ scrutiny of daughters’ sexuality and, ultimately, of their choice of marriage partners, goes beyond mere solicitousness and care for the women’s future happiness. Anthropologist Gayle Rubin argues that the exchange of women, that is, fathers offering their daughters to the sons of their male allies to cement a connection between the men, is fundamental to the development of the system of patriarchy in human cultures. Thus, a folksong like the Newfoundland lyric ‘‘The Star of Logy Bay’’ is not simply a lament by a lover that his girlfriend’s father has sent her far away to prevent the two marrying; it is an expression of the power of the patriarchal rule that fathers have over their daughters. Indeed, relationships between fathers and daughters are frequently the motivating force behind Anglo American ballad stories. A standard pattern is that the father refuses to let his daughter marry the man of her choice. She rebelliously follows her lover anyway, with varied results. Sometimes, particularly when the woman has shown great boldness by dressing as a man to pursue her lover, the outcome is happy. If the daughter doesn’t marry the man she originally went after, she gets another, even better choice. Instead of one of her peers, she may marry the wealthy ship’s captain or the rich landowner. Sometimes, however, the results are tragic, and the lovers die together. The ballad’s metaphorical result is often a plant, which grows on their contiguous graves and twines together ‘‘in a true love’s knot’’ over their resting places. The implication is that though they could not be together in life, they are

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joined in death. Sometimes this evidence of the couple’s love makes parents remorseful of their actions toward their daughter. The relationship between mothers and daughters isn’t usually central to the plots of traditional ballads; however, these bonds are a primary motivating force in folktales. Also in contrast to ballads, father-daughter folktale links are positive. In ‘‘Beauty and the Beast,’’ Beauty saves her father, and indeed her family, by taming the Beast, who threatens to kill him. Youngest daughters are especially obedient and reliable, and often seem to be the main support of their family. But stepdaughters in particular have a hard time in the Grimms’ folktales (even though it is doubtful whether the lack of blood relation is traditional or part of the Grimm brothers’ inability to conceive of biological mothers acting cruelly toward their children). In one famous tale, the mother overvalues her biological children (Cinderella’s two ugly stepsisters) and makes her own stepdaughter act as their servant or slave. In many variants, even after the daughter’s relationship with the prince who courts her is established, the daughter remains kind and caring toward her stepmother and stepsisters. Oral histories of pioneer life in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America show that mothers and daughters invariably relied upon each other for emotional support, and also in conducting domestic labor and maintaining social relations. Daughters remembering their mothers invariably cite their deep admiration for the older women’s resiliency and caring, but also their sense of mutual responsibility. Feminist scholar Eliane Silverman calls this situation ‘‘a mother-daughter web of obedience and obligation’’ (39). She points out that the web extends through the generations to granddaughters and also to daughters-in-law. In contemporary Euro North American societies, the lack of affordable health care often turns daughters into live-in caregivers for their elderly parents. Eldercare is an extension of women’s expected unpaid domestic labor. In this situation, the cultural presumption that daughters should rely on their parents is reversed. Daughters may find themselves providing all the necessities of life to those who once provided the same to them when they were young. The resulting bond is a complicated one. Given the difficulties of relationships between daughters and their parents, it’s not surprising that this arrangement can be extremely trying for all involved while it can be mutually rewarding and nurturing. See also: Ballad; Elder Care; Family Folklore; Folktale; Oral History; Women’s Work. References: Abel, Emily K. ‘‘Adult Daughters and Care for the Elderly.’’ Feminist Studies, vol. 12, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 479–498; Rubin, Gayle. ‘‘The Traffic in Women.’’ In Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975; Silverman, Eliane. ‘‘In Their Own Words: Mothers and Daughters on the Alberta Frontier.’’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 2, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 37–44; Stewart, Polly. ‘‘Wishful Willful Wily Women: Verbal Strategies for Female Success in the Child Ballads.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 54–73. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Tatar, Maria, ed. The Annotated Brothers Grimm. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004; Westkott, Marcia. ‘‘Mothers and Daughters in the World of the Father.’’ Frontiers, vol. 3, no. 2 (1978): 16–21.

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Deaf Folklore As a North American folk group, the Deaf community includes deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals of all classes, genders, and ethnicities who identify themselves as sharing a common language (American Sign Language or ASL) and culture; the term ‘‘Deaf’’ is a mark of that cultural identity while ‘‘deaf’’ marks only a physiological condition. Rather than a single-characteristic description of people who are physically incapable of perceiving the sounds of speech, Deaf culture includes those who identify themselves and are accepted by other members of the community as part of that group. Thus, individuals who are deaf but do not use ASL are not considered members of Deaf culture. Deaf culture can also be recognized in the formal institutions and structures shared by its members (for example, Deaf Women United, Gallaudet University, the National Association of the Deaf, and community groups), in its material culture (for example, telecommunication devices known as TDDs, and flashing alarm clocks and doorbells), and in its normative tendency to endogamous marriage (Deaf people almost exclusively marry other Deaf people). Written English is a second language for many individuals in the Deaf community, and, not surprisingly, visual representations of English, rather than auditory/oral forms, are the preferred means of its transmission (for example, television closed-captioning). Through contact with other Deaf individuals, deaf children born into hearing families have the potential to become members of a cultural group different from that of their own parents. A modern ASL/English bilingual Deaf identity is the product of generations of a collective experience of being deaf in a predominantly hearing society (Humphries 2004). Deaf folklore, unique in numerous respects, includes riddles, jokes, games, legends, folktales (see Padden and Humphries 1988), and a variety of other genres transmitted through ASL. It functions, like all folklore, to help define and maintain social identity, to facilitate developmental adaptation, to navigate the frustrations and injustices that are part of the experience of living in the hearing world, and to provide humor and entertainment. Distinctly Deaf folklore includes sign puns, number stories, and ABC stories. An ABC story is a story or poem that begins with the finger-spelled letter A and proceeds through the alphabet, finally ending with the letter Z. As each letter is used, the storyteller must use the handshape of the manual alphabet in the signs or motions conveying the story. For example, the handshape for the letter A, if moved in a circular fashion in front of the chest, represents the phrase ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ but the same gesture held in a stationary position indicates knocking on a door. Given the high degree of linguistic play the genre involves, good ABC storytellers must display great creativity in signing. Deaf folklore is not translatable into the linear structures of written language. ASL makes it possible, for example, to convey more than one idea simultaneously by signing them with different hands, or by signing one with one hand and spelling the other with the other hand. Because it frequently involves physicality for the full expression of an idea or emotion, ASL storytellers use facial expressions and movements to communicate nuanced

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emotions or to embody a character. The audience knows who is ‘‘speaking’’ by a stance, a cocked eyebrow, or a change of gait. Consequently, it was only with the relatively recent advent of videotape technology that Deaf folklore came to be recognized as an art form; today, it can be communicated within Deaf culture and preserved for study by outsiders in this and other visual media. Deaf Women United (DWU) held its seventh national convention in the United States in 1999. Its activist mission statement sets goals of ‘‘empowerment, enrichment, and networking’’: Deaf women are key members in this era of social change by being involved in the shaping of this world and our respective communities. . . . [yet] successful Deaf women have not made front page headlines or been recognized for their contributions. We currently have a small number of Deaf women leaders at the helm of some very important organizations and institutions; yet we do not have complete access to services and opportunities that are available to hearing women. It is this equal access that ensures an individual the right and ability to lead full and productive lives. (DWU 2000)

The subversive potential of Deaf culture forcefully entered the perception of the hearing world in 2004, when Natalya Dmitruk, an anchorwomaninterpreter for Ukraine’s state-owned television station, and the hearing daughter of Deaf parents, signed to her audience that the night’s election results were fraudulent. The community of Laurent, South Dakota, is designed around ASL users and planned for full occupation by 2018. Everyone who lives there—from restaurant workers to the members of the town council—will be expected to communicate in sign language. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Coding; Consciousness Raising; Feminisms; Fieldwork; Film; Folk Belief; Folk Group; Folk Poetry; Humor; Joke; Material Culture; Politics; Storytelling. References: Davey, Monica. ‘‘As Town for Deaf Takes Shape, Debate on Isolation Reemerges.’’ The New York Times, March 20, 2005; Davis, Lennard J. ‘‘Deafness and the Riddle of Identity.’’ The Chronicle of Higher Education, B6–8. January 12, 2007; Deaf Women United (DWU). n.d. http://www.dwu.org (accessed June 22, 2005); Humphries, Tom. ‘‘The Modern Deaf Self: Indigenous Practices and Educational Imperatives.’’ Literacy and Deaf People: Cultural and Contextual Perspectives, ed. B. J. Brueggemann, 29–46. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2004; Padden, Carol, and Tom Humphries. Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988; Peters, Cynthia L. Deaf American Literature: From Carnival to the Canon. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2000; Rutherford, Susan. A Study of American Deaf Folklore. Burtonsville, MD: Linstock Press, 1993; Schreck, Carl. ‘‘Ukraine Journalist Stages Silent Revolt.’’ The Moscow Times, November 29, 2004. http://www.themoscowtimes. com/stories/2004/11/29/002.html (accessed August 10, 2008).

Melanie Zimmer Death The end of a human life is a social and spiritual transition in which women play a multitude of roles. Women are extensively implicated spiritually, ritually, practically, and in narrative traditions, with others’ deaths. In the mythic traditions of many cultures, humanity was created immortal—or

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at least born to be reborn after death, like the seasons—but at some point, people made a choice (or a mistake) which led to permanent mortality. As often as not in mythology, women are assigned the role of making that choice. In Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, Eve chose to eat an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, an act which led to humankind’s loss of access to the Tree of Life as well as to its exile from the Garden of Eden. Eve’s action is not described as a conscious choice for mortality; however, in other cultures, women have been deliberately responsible for the coming of death. Female characters often serve as gods of death. In most cultures, they are morally neutral characters; they take the dead, judge them, tend to them, and sometimes punish them, but have no personal stake in their deaths or in their souls, and, with few exceptions, never kill. In Norse mythology, warrior-women called the Valkyries choose the men who will die on the battlefield so that these dead warriors can fight in Ragnarok, the war which will bring the end of the world. Goddesses of the dead are also often responsible for the introduction of mortality into human life, but it is crossdressed Loki, a Trickster god, who brings permanent death into the Norse world. He kills the god Balder, and then, in contrast to the significant roles women play in lament traditions, refuses to cry, even when the death-god, Hel, Loki’s daughter, makes Balder’s return to life conditional on all things in the world weeping for him. Ereshkigal was the death goddess of Sumer; ancient Egypt’s was Isis. Isis became associated with the world of the dead when she rescued her brother-husband Osiris by gathering his scattered body parts and putting them back together so that he could take his place as judge of the dead. Greek myths tell that when Persephone (Kore) was kidnapped by Hades and taken to the underworld to be his wife, her mother, Demeter, caused the Earth to become barren in her mourning. When her daughter was returned, she rejoiced, returning generative life to the human world. But, in a common folkloric trope, Persephone had eaten the food of the dead, and therefore had to return to Hades’ realm. In a compromise negotiated by the male gods, Persephone spent three months underground with her husband, and the rest of the year with her mother on Earth. Kali, an Asian god of destruction and rebirth, is commonly associated with battlefields and war. She wears a necklace of human skulls and dances on the bodies of the dead. She was sometimes propitiated through human sacrifices, and had a cult of assassins as followers. Another divine figure revered in Asian Indian tradition is Sati or Suttee. In the ultimate expression of love and loyalty, she threw herself on the pyre of her husband Rama when he died. This led to a long-standing tradition of women voluntarily (or not) throwing themselves on their husband’s pyres in funeral ceremonies, despite the practice having been officially outlawed in the present day. Women’s mourning, the notion of an eternal connection between spouses, and the burial of royal wives and concubines with their husbands (so that they may serve and honor their male partners in the afterlife) are long-standing expressions of connections attributed to women with deaths not their own. Do~ na Sebastiana appears frequently in New Mexican art and folktales, sometimes conferring healing powers on those who treat her well. Her

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life-sized image was drawn through the streets by Catholic Penitentes during Holy Week processions. Death also held a significant place in the Mexico’s ancient civilizations. Among the Aztecs, for example, it was considered a blessing for a woman to die in childbirth; such a death, like dying in battle or as a human sacrifice, assured a desirable afterlife. In the folklore of Dia de los Muertos (the Mexican ‘‘Day of the Dead’’), death is always personified as a woman—La Catrina (‘‘Fancy Lady’’), La Pelona (‘‘The Bald One’’), La Flaca (‘‘The Skinny One’’), La Huesuda (‘‘The Boney One’’), La Calaca (‘‘The Skeleton’’)—just as she is in the calaveras, satirical songs and poems written for the living on the Day of the Dead (Palfrey 1995; Hernandez 2002). Jean Cocteau’s 1949 film Orph ee anthropomorphizes death as a woman, as do Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels. In the latter, modeled after musician Tori Amos, she is one of the seven Deathless (the others being Destiny, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delight, and Dream), and one of the most popular characters in the series. In the Marvel Comics universe, Hela, based on the Norse death-god Hel, functions not only as the ruler of the underworld, but as an enemy of the hero-god Thor. She has been reinterpreted here to give us an evil creature who actually causes death rather than one who merely collects and jealously guards the dead. Female figures may also function as harbingers of death. The Morrigan of Celtic mythology stands across streams combing her hair on the eve of battle as a forewarning of the deaths to come. Her bird, the raven, feasts on the dead. In Ireland, Brittany and elsewhere, the banshee, said by some to be an aspect of the Morrigan, cries at the houses of those about to die. One theory about the close connection between women and death is that menstruation ties them to mortality. The misogynist saying, ‘‘I don’t trust anything that bleeds for seven days but doesn’t die,’’ holds a powerful and sometimes frightening image. With its blood, physical risk, and connection to the cycles of nature, the act of childbirth also brings women closer to death. Birth, like death, has long been considered unclean, not only for reasons of hygiene, but because the process of being born places the (otherwise pure) human spirit into a body that will inevitably decay, necessitating the separation from society of persons who have had contact with either one. In medieval Europe, for example, the blood of the afterbirth was believed to attract demons, combining fertility with death. In some European traditions, women who died while pregnant were believed to continue to gestate the child. As a result, they were buried with swaddling and other items they would need to properly care for their child after death. Women who died pregnant or in childbirth were buried with special precautions or at particular locations; like other unquiet European dead, they were buried at crossroads or in unhallowed ground to keep them and/or the dead child from walking the land. Purportedly physical connections between women and the world of the dead may explain the dual nature of so many folkloric entities. Demeter and Persephone, like Isis and Osiris, trade their time between the dead and the living. In a similar motif, fairy queens are generally soulless and apparently unable to conceive; they steal children and convey a limited and treacherous immortality on men they choose to bring into their worlds. For

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example, a prince is taken by the Fairy Queen and after three days desires to return home. He is allowed to leave only the condition that he swears he will return and is admonished not to let his feet touch the ground. He discovers that 300 years have passed, his family is dead, and his kingdom has fallen. He falls from his horse in sorrow, quickly ages, and dies. In practical matters that mark ritual transitions from life to death, women may wash the dead and prepare a body for burial, including wrapping and/ or dressing the corpse. Women also mourn the dead, and may be hired as official or professional mourners (moirologistres) in cultures from Ghana to Ireland to China to Mexico. Their job is to express the family’s and community’s grief by singing laments, beating their chests, rending their clothes, and sometimes cutting their own skin to express communal sorrow and loss. In many European, African, and Asian cultures, women are expected to lament the dead loudly and publicly; they may be paid to do so. While the ritual honors the deceased, the noise of keening and chanting may drown out their complaints that the dead person was cruel or unkind; the ritual provides professional mourners and those who hire them the opportunity to criticize the deceased without suffering any consequences. Women’s connection with death has also been expressed in the restrictions placed on them regarding the deaths of those around them. In the Victorian era in Britain, following the queen’s example, a married woman was required to mourn for a year after her husband died. This included dressing only in black and strictly limiting her socializing. After the mourning period, especially if her financial status was not secure, she was strongly encouraged to seek out another husband as soon as possible. Daughters, sisters, mothers, and other female relatives of a high-status dead male also had strict clothing codes; after varying periods, they were allowed to wear clothing with white borders of strictly regulated sizes, and eventually dark colors other than black. Female figures in various states of undress are used to adorn European and North American cemeteries. Sculpted women crouch, kneel, and sprawl especially across the graves of men. With their clothing apparently discarded in distress, they reflect actual patriarchal expectations for women to mourn extravagantly and publicly upon the death of a beloved man. Women frequently provide for the informal rituals associated with death. In rural North American Catholic and Protestant church basements, women provide a repast of sandwiches and dainties (small sweet cakes and bars) after a funeral service. ‘‘El duelo’’ (‘‘the duel’’) in Mexican American tradition offers a similar meal, sometimes in the home of the dead person’s family, provided by friends and relatives, especially women, who arrive to offer their condolences bearing gifts of food. As in the Jewish tradition of ‘‘sitting Shiva’’ (‘‘seven days of mourning’’), the idea is that the family is so bereft that its members cannot cook for themselves. In Mexican tradition, pan dulce (‘‘sweet bread’’) and cookies, foods that remind the family to trust again in the sweetness of life, are served at the funeral home; in Jewish tradition, hard-boiled eggs and lentils are served, symbols of the cyclical nature of life and the immortality of the soul. In early modern China, it was customary for the married daughters of Taoist and Confucianist families to

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provide pork for family funeral services to sympathetically imbue the corpse with yin energy, thereby helping to balance their energies for the afterlife. Men and women share some death-related roles equally. In balladry and legendry, both are capable of excessive mourning, which can cause harm to themselves or to others. Legends, folktales, and ballads concerned with disproportionate mourning demonstrate the dangers inherent in unhealthy levels of grief and clinging too tightly to the memory of the dead. Women are abducted by dead lovers; women who have been killed or abducted by fairies return to their homes to visit husbands and children; grieving widows and mothers are visited by dead loved ones with warnings and portents. The consequences for excessive grief, for the living as well as for the dead, can be dire. La Llorona of Mexican folklore is one such legend. In the ballad ‘‘The Wife of Usher’s Well,’’ a mother prays for her dead sons to return to her, until they finally do—to force her to accept their death. In ‘‘The Cruel Mother,’’ the title character refuses to acknowledge the deaths of children she herself killed, but is finally punished when they return to denounce their murderer. The idea that parents will be unable to reconcile themselves to the death of a child, and may wish for her or his return under any circumstances, is represented in W. W. Jacobs’ ‘‘The Monkey’s Paw,’’ which concerns a mother who so desires her dead son’s return that she wishes him alive without considering that he was horribly mutilated when he died. The same motif occurs in Stephen King’s novel and film Pet Semetary, which involves the return of a child from the dead in a changed and evil form. An inversion of the motif, in which a young girl attempts to return her dead mother to life, is portrayed in an episode of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Nor is there any shortage, in legend and popular culture, of attractive, sexually desirable, female revenants who seek living men to help solve their murders or help them exact revenge. See also: Ballad; Banshee; Cross-Dressing; Graves and Gravemarkers; Lament; La Llorona; Legend, Supernatural; Menstruation; Myth Studies; Nature/Culture; Region: Mexico; Rites of Passage; Women Warriors. References: Bennett, Gillian. ‘‘Alas Poor Ghost!’’ Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1999; Bourke, Angela. ‘‘More in Anger Than In Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 160–182. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Davidson, Hilda R. Ellis, and W. M. S. Russell, eds. The Folklore of Ghosts. Totowa, NJ: D. S. Brewer, 1981; Hernandez, Aracely. Northern Notes. ‘‘Dia de los Muertos.’’ DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 2002. http:// www3.niu.edu/newsplace/nndia.html (accessed August 10, 2008); King, Steven. Pet Semetary. New York: Doubleday, 1983; Narvaez, Peter, ed. The Good People: New Fairylore Essays. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991; Noxon, Marti, writer and director. ‘‘Forever.’’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Five, Episode 17. Premiered April 17, 2001; Palfrey, Dale Hoyt. 1995. Mexico Connect. ‘‘The Day of the Dead.’’ http:// www.mexconnect.com/mex_/muertos.html (accessed August 10, 2008); Palmer, Greg. Death: The Trip of a Lifetime. Collingdale, PA: Diane Publishing, 1993; Pentikainen, Juha. ‘‘The Dead Without Status.’’ Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies, eds. Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, 128–134. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Thomas, Jeannie Banks. Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003; ‘‘Understanding the Tradition of Shiva.’’ Toronto: Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel, 2005. http://www.benjamins.ca/ Static/shiva_background.htm (accessed May 21, 2005) Yolen, Jane, ed. ‘‘Youth Without

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Age, Life Without Death.’’ Favorite Folktales from Around the World, 457–465. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

Julia Kelso

Diet Culture Diet culture comprises all customs and practices associated with losing, or attempting to lose, body weight. It includes narratives, customs, and beliefs. Dieting is widely practiced in North America; women and girls particularly experience pressure to achieve and maintain a low body weight. Mainstream cultural judgments of women overvalue their physical appearance and favor underweight female bodies as most attractive. Thus, dieting is ubiquitous for contemporary North American women. Countless books, articles, television programs, advertisements, and films explore the alleged problem of overweight and give purported solutions through diets, proprietary food and vitamins, exercise regimens, and psychological techniques. It is nearly impossible to separate cultural aspects of dieting from reputable medical evidence about the dangers of excess weight, since physicians themselves suffer from bias against overweight women. Folklorist Jean Renfro Anspaugh, in Fat Like Us (2001), reports on interviews she conducted with dieters at the Rice House at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. As a dieter herself, she portrays sympathetically the trials of those who wish to lose weight, their frustrations when they are unable to do so, and their joys at success. She shows that the narrative that accompanies weight loss reflects struggle and changing self-identity. Anthropologist Mimi Nichter, in Fat Talk: What Girls and Their Parents Say About Dieting (2000), notes crucial differences between White and Black teenagers’ communications about body image. White teenagers verbally criticize their own and others’ weight and body shape, and talk extensively about dieting. However, they talk about dieting much more than they actually practice it. This ‘‘fat talk’’ seems to be a pivotal element of their socialization process. Black girls talk much less of dieting than do their White counterparts, and show greater acceptance of body weight and shape. For them, projecting attitude and self-confidence, not simply being thin, is the paramount factor of attractiveness. Stories of new diets spread rapidly and informally through word of mouth and the Internet, much as do urban/contemporary legends. Those based in folklore include the grapefruit diet, in which one eats a half grapefruit or drinks a glass of grapefruit juice with each meal; the cabbage soup diet, in which one consumes almost nothing but cabbage soup; and the negativecalorie diet, in which one consumes only those foods, such as celery, which purportedly require more energy to digest than they provide in calories. Less serious takes on the practice are the cotton ball diet, in which one eats cotton balls to experience a feeling of fullness and thus consume less actual food; or the amputation diet, in which one loses weight by amputating a limb. Feminists have long pointed out that the social pressure to diet stems from patriarchy’s need to symbolically and literally control women. Thin females

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take up less space and are less imposing, and a single-minded focus on weight can drain their energy and distract attention from worthwhile activities. Feminist scholars like Susan Bordo note that in North American mainstream society, weight preoccupation inflicts impossible goals on women. Media images of women have become progressively thinner. Fashion models, for example, must maintain such low body fat that they retain the look of prepubescent girls, but they also risk serious health problems from osteoporosis to heart failure. Societal pressures are often blamed for women and girls developing eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. Girls face contradictory pressures: surrounded by, and internalizing, the drive to be thin, while simultaneously besieged by a culture of food abundance. Women perceived as overweight are too often presumed to be unable to control their urges and behavior around food, which is translated into a moral failing comparable to that which stigmatizes women who fail to repress their sexual urges. Still, movements for fat acceptance—such as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance—have arisen in response to these pressures. See also: Beauty; Fashion; Feminisms; Folk Custom; Folk Medicine; Foodways; Magazines, Women’s and Girls’; Popular Culture; Sexuality. References: Anspaugh, Jean Renfro. Fat Like Us. Durham, NC: Windows on History Press, Inc., 2001; Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004; National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. n.d. http://naafa.org (accessed August 10, 2008); Nichter, Mimi. Fat Talk: What Girls and their Parents Say About Dieting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Theresa A. Vaughan Divination Practices Divination refers to the ascertaining of otherwise unknowable information through extraordinary means, such as via dreams or visions, trance states, supernatural contact, by the use of magical tools or devices, or through the intuitive interpretation of phenomena in the natural world. Diviners strive to answer questions that fall outside the range of ordinary methods of scientificrational inquiry. Typically, practioners pose questions about future events; past disasters whose causes cannot be explained; things unknown, hidden from sight, or removed in space; appropriate conduct in critical situations, including the healing of illness; determining the times and modes of religious worship; and making decisions about when to perform particular tasks. Divination practices are numerous and range from simple binary devices such as flipping a coin or acknowledging the appearance of omens to more complex pictographic systems requiring oral narrative interpretative methods such as the medieval European tarot system and the Chinese oracle, I Ching. The I Ching is one of the most complex, as well as the most studied, of divination tools; today it is used worldwide, including by many North Americans. American anthropologist Barbara Tedlock considers divination as an alternate, rather than an inferior, mode of cognition, one in which individual creativity operates, and ‘‘meaning emerges as a result of experiential immersion in the expressive patterns of the symbolic medium, which is grasped

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intuitively’’ (191–192). Seen in this light, women who practice certain types of skilled divination may be understood as exploring and mastering an intuitive way of receiving, representing, and transmitting knowledge and healing. Modern divination is often conducted in personal, informal settings, but many historical oracles required the cooperation of skilled specialists, support staff, and a dedicated sacred space for the performance of divination as ritualized theatrical enactments. The Old Nordic seidr, for instance, required a chorus of singers to help induce the trance state of the volva, or female diviner, who imparted information about agricultural outcomes and the personal destinies of the men and women in the audience. Anthropologists have attempted to classify divination according to various criteria. Zeusse’s well-known typology posits three major categories into which divination practices fall: intuitive divination, possession or trancemediated divination, and wisdom or systematized divination. Intuitive forms include the interpretation of dreams, visions, and omens, and tend to occur spontaneously in natural folk settings. Possession is traditional in institutionalized divination settings, such as that undertaken by the ancient Greek oracle, known as the Pythia, at Delphi. Likewise, seance mediums and others who enter into involuntary states often make contact with supernatural entities that may convey oracular insight. Other trance mediums claim to channel non-corporeal entities. By far the largest category, systematized divination practices include techniques such as sortilege (random selection) that employ devices, tools, or other means to perform a reading, often in conjunction with an interpretive commentary. Systematized divination methods include astrology (reading the stars via a horoscope), chiromancy (palm reading), haruspicy (studying the internal organs of sacrificed animals), tasseography (reading tea leaves), bibliomancy (interpreting random selections from sacred scriptures and other books), runes, dowsing (interpreting the movements of a divining rod or other object to locate water, precious metals, and other hidden things), numerology, the tarot, African Ifa divination (involving a wide variety of ritual practices designed to gain guidance and knowledge of the future), and the I Ching. An interpreter may use various and eclectic traditional means to interpret the results of a divination session. Divination practitioners often employ a number of different techniques to achieve a result. For example, numerological and/or astrological calculations might be incorporated into a tarot reading to divine pertinent information about the querent in order to better understand the characteristics of her personality and its role in her unfolding destiny. Importantly, as a necessary means of propitiating mysterious forces at work in disease or misfortune, the practice of divination often extends beyond mere diagnosis; a diviner may prepare medicines and/or talismans and/or prescribe or perform ritual expiations to promote the process of healing or to reverse bad luck. Divination has long been associated with women. The stereotypical fortuneteller and her crystal ball, for instance, and the modern conflation of romance and astrology come to mind. While such images of women as psychics and palm readers are hardly representative of the scope of divination practices or of the diversity of its practitioners, historically, in fact, in many peasant

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societies, women dominated personal and household divination, interpreting domestic omens and family members’ dreams. They also acted as folk healers, curers, and midwives, and often included divination in these activities. Divination by women is not confined to rural circumstances, however. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, young women in North America, England, and parts of Europe used traditional spells and formulae on specified occasions to divine a vision of a future husband or to determine who would next marry. In modern times, this type of love-and-marriage divination survives in the popular, ‘‘He loves me, he loves me not’’ daisy-petal counting formula and in a popular wedding tradition in which unmarried women guests line up to catch the bride’s bouquet; the one who catches it will be the next to marry. American New Age healers use a variety of oracles to address women’s concerns, including using a pendulum to determine the sex of an unborn child or employing the I Ching or tarot cards to divine the cause of psychic discord. Professional psychics may also enter a trance state to obtain hidden information for their clients regarding love, health, relationships, and careers, as well as for conveying spiritual guidance. North American popular culture has successfully coopted divination practices in combination with women’s interests in terms of magazine and newspaper horoscopes, astrology Web sites that calculate life purpose and romantic compatibility, and telephone hotlines for consulting psychics. Commercial versions of divination such as these may be perceived as less efficacious than traditional means. In any case, divination is commonly seen as a way of access to magical or supernatural explanations for our most cherished, basic, and ordinary concerns. See also: Curandera; Folk Belief; Folk Medicine; Fortune-Teller; Midwifery; Sex Determination; Wedding. References: Blacker, Carmen, and Michael Loewe. Oracles and Divination. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1981; Mair, Lucy. ‘‘Divination’’ in Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural, eds. Arthur C. Lehmann and James E. Myers, 262–269. Fourth edition. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1985; Nunez, Luis Manuel. Santeria: A Practical guide to Afro-Caribbean Magic. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, Inc., 1992; Parke, H. W. Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge, 1988; Peek, Philip M. African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991; Tedlock, Barbara. ‘‘Divination as a Way of Knowing: Embodiment, Visualisation, Narrative, and Interpretation.’’ Folklore, vol. 112, no. 2 (October 1, 2001): 189–197; Thiselton-Dyer, T. F. Folklore of Women as Illustrated by Legendary and Traditionary Tales, Folk-Rhymes, Proverbial Sayings, Superstitions, Etc. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1906; Von Franz, Marie-Louise. On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980; Wigzell, Faith. Reading Russian Fortunes: Print Culture, Gender and Divination in Russia from 1765. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Alina Autumn Christian Divorce Divorce is the legal dissolution of a state-sanctioned marriage. With the increase in the divorce rate in North America in recent decades, the divorce

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process has come to be acknowledged in many quarters as a contemporary rite of passage. Although still generally considered a mark of personal failure to make a marriage ‘‘work,’’ the announcement of an impending or completed divorce is now more often met with remarks like ‘‘Congratulations,’’ rather than ‘‘I’m so sorry to hear it.’’ During the colonial period in the United States, men and women could be granted a divorce on the grounds of adultery or desertion. If a married person was discovered having an extramarital affair, or if one spouse had abandoned the marriage bed for at least two years, a divorce could be granted; only the man was legally permitted to remarry. Women rarely obtained any economic benefit from divorce, and were more likely impoverished by it, while men profited from having fewer expenses. Since obtaining a divorce was such an ordeal, women often opted simply to desert unfaithful or abusive husbands to live as well as they could on their own. After the American Revolution, more states granted divorce for cruel treatment in addition to adultery and abandonment. Divorced women (with or without children) were not usually provided financial support, and were stigmatized as persons ‘‘fallen from the married estate’’ due to some failing of their own. Canada permitted divorce on the grounds of sexual impotence, along with desertion and adultery in the 1700s. However, by 1867, divorce was possible only with proof of adultery. After the two world wars of the twentieth century, North American divorce rates rose dramatically, despite the fact that divorce was still relatively difficult to obtain. For middle-class and upper-class women, who had benefited by becoming part of the workforce while their male partners were away at war, greater financial independence inspired confidence to seek independence from unhappy or abusive marriages. By and large, heterosexual North American women were beginning to view men in a different light, and divorced women were becoming more readily accepted by society because divorce was more common. Especially among the White, Protestant middle class, marriage came to be viewed not solely as an economic relationship maintained for the survival of the partners and their children, but as a source of personal fulfillment. Hence, divorce came to be seen in some quarters as a personal remedy rather than as a social or spiritual illness. Divorce became common during the last half of the twentieth century, especially in the United States, Canada (legalized in 1968), the countries of the European Union, Japan, and Korea. The Roman Catholic Church disallows divorce as a matter of doctrine because it breaks the sacramental bond of marriage. As a consequence, it was not until 1997 that divorce became legal in Ireland, and not until 2004 in Chile; as of 2005, it was still illegal in Malta and the Philippines. While some segments of North American society continue to push for stricter divorce laws, evidence points to the conclusion that divorced women are better off emotionally than those who remain in troubled marriages. An American study published in 1985 revealed that five years after divorce, two-thirds of women are happier with their lives; similar results were obtained by British researchers in 2005. Currently, the primary reasons for divorce in North America are adultery and desertion; provided sufficient evidence, most states also permit divorce

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on the grounds of non-support, gross neglect of duty, alcohol and drug addiction, bigamy, and physical or mental cruelty. Of U.S. divorce proceedings, 55 to 60 percent are initiated by the wife. Her action, however, is frequently precipitated by the husband’s request. Coincident with the rise of the women’s movement, no-fault divorce emerged during the 1970s and 1980s, allowing couples to dissolve marriages without apportioning blame. Many individuals concerned over the apparent ease of divorce started to blame the women’s movement for the destruction of the family. Politicians increasingly encouraged women to remain in their marriages. The late 1980s saw increased social hostility toward women who sought to live independently from husbands to pursue their own careers. The NBC network ran a report that proposed that the more a woman achieved in her career, the greater were her chances for divorce. Television dramas such as thirtysomething and sitcoms like Kate and Allie portrayed divorced women as embittered and career-driven, suggesting they would be much happier as soon as they remarried. The television networks went so far as to marry off the lead females in Kate and Allie and Moonlighting to bland characters in order to demonstrate the network’s belief in marriage. Cultural critics and politicians labeled mothers who divorced their husbands as irresponsible, a danger to their children, and a detriment to society. The film Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), based on an actual couple’s experiences, vilified the mother for leaving her child. The War of the Roses (1989) portrayed a couple attempting divorce finally driven to murder one another. In the 1990s, The First Wives’ Club (1996) involved three women who financially supported their husbands at the start of their marriages supplanted by younger women. In it, the older women are advised by Ivana Trump, playing herself, who tells them: ‘‘Don’t get mad, get everything.’’ See also: Class; Consciousness Raising; Feminisms; Film; Folklore About Women; Marriage; Popular Culture; Rites of Passage; Sexism; Women’s Movement. References: DiCanio, Margaret. The Encyclopedia of Marriage, Divorce, and the Family. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1989; DiFonzo, J. Herbie. Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997; Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Random House, 1995; Frith, Maxine. ‘‘Women happier than men after divorce, study shows.’’ The Independent (UK), July 4, 2005. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/women-happier-than-menafter-divorce-study-shows-497550.html (accessed August 9, 2008); Phillips, Roderick. Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Claire Dodd Dolls Human-like figures made for ritual, amusement, and educational purposes, dolls have been frequently associated with the domestic training of female children. Scholars have begun to debate whether these objects could be religious articles or children’s toys, but perhaps not both. Recent work on play and fertility ritual utilizing African sculpture, Hopi kachinas, and dolls in Alaskan Native cultures project a continuum of community

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involvement with dolls that may begin in childhood but does not end there. Dolls appeal across ages and genders in folktales, foodways, music, dance, ritual, popular beliefs, mass culture, and craft. In regard to folktales, Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature lists dolls who prompt forgetful fiances to remember their brides; act as ‘‘magic statues’’ in Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, and Eskimo tales; answer for fugitives in Greenland; hold kings in their clutches; furnish treasure in Italian tales; and marry humans or become fairies in Indian tales. In Europe, the merging of the confection dolls of medieval and Renaissance Europe with tales of passion resulted in stories like ‘‘The Sugar Puppet,’’ which tells of an Italian princess, who, fearing her husband’s rage, leaves a life-sized doll made of candy in her bed. The prince stabs it, repents, and the couple reunites. Sexual tension often accompanies the folkloric use of dolls in Anglo American tales. In an example that draws on foodways, music, dance, and ritual in Native American culture, male and female adults clothe and feed Hopi kachinas, and specific communities address the figures for divine intervention. Clifford Geertz (1987) notes that in the Sa’lakwmanawyat ceremony, the Sa’lako dolls, or ‘‘the two little girls,’’ dance to the ‘‘Grinding Song’’ with the help of their handlers. ‘‘Then, when the two little girls have ground their sweet-corn meal fine, they scoop it onto small wicker plaques and pass it among the people, so they may partake of it,’’ in what he calls ‘‘an act of communion,’’ a ‘‘sacred blessing’’ intended to reinforce community values and bring happiness to the audience, the performers, and the dolls’ caretakers. Those who provide the meal for the ceremony do so with the hope that their grandchildren will learn to grind maize, regarded as a crucial female contribution to traditional Hopi society. In Latino communities, dolls can also assume magical properties; brujas (witches) may work magic or put a hex on someone via homemade dolls, as is more commonly associated with Voudon (‘‘voodoo’’). Also among La~ tinas, in the rite of passage called the quinceanera, the final doll that a girl receives from her madrina (sponsor) symbolizes her passage from girlhood to young adulthood. While dolls remain culturally linked to concepts of the feminine, especially in North American cultures, dolls have not existed solely to impress caretaking skills onto young girls. In fact, Miriam FormanekBrunell (1993) finds that middle-class Anglo girls in the United States in the late nineteenth century actively resisted such training by ‘‘staging frequent doll funerals.’’ Although some female children have performed rituals to rid themselves of domesticated dolls, American adults of both sexes have attributed power to dolls they possessed. Wendy Lavitt (1982) tells of a Union soldier, who, upon finding a rag doll on a Southern plantation, kept it as a talisman, carried it throughout the war, and returned safely home with it. Wayland Hand (1981) reports that dolls appeared in U.S. popular beliefs in mid-twentiethcentury Ohio: a Metropolitan Opera baritone propped a battered ‘‘mascot’’ on his dressing table during all of his performances for good luck, and a woman noted that, if an old doll kept in a dresser was moved in any way, she experienced misfortune.

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Popular belief about the power of dolls to benefit or harm humans continually reappears in American mass culture via movies and television. Jacqueline Fulmer (2003), examining the 1995 horror film Tales from the Hood, notes that it borrows elements from African American folklore, including dolls. A doll carrying the spirit of a murdered slave kills an African American public relations man in retribution for his laughter at a Klansman’s racist jokes, and then, along with an army of other spirit-inhabited dolls, eats the Klansman himself. Ruth Bass (1990) notes that dolls have connections with the dead in African American lore—doll heads, small cups, or toy animals used to be placed on the graves of small children to assuage those who died young, much like the murdered slaves in Tales from the Hood. As with the dolls in Tales, such objects serve to inspire deference in the living as much as to placate the dead. The notion of dolls coming to life, either as the benign Hopi ‘‘little girls’’ or as the vengeful slave dolls in Tales from the Hood, echoes the Jewish legend of the Golem and has inspired films such as The Devil Doll (1936), Dolls (1986), Child’s Play 1, 2, and 3 (1988, 1990, and 1991), culminating in The Bride of Chucky (1998), all of which involve dolls coming to life to take the lives of humans. Ovid’s story of Pygmalion, of a man’s desire to create the perfect woman, also reappears in popular culture: window-dressing models come to life in One Touch of Venus (1948), Mannequin (1987), and Mannequin Two: On the Move (1991). A little girl’s longing for her dead mother in Life-Size (2000) brings to life a fashion doll, played by real model Tyra Banks. Reflecting popular culture, yet not mass-produced, KISS (Kisekae Set System) digital paper dolls, software originating with male Japanese computer programmers, emphasize the erotic manipulation underlying the Pygmalion theme. By clicking a mouse, users undress and re-dress dolls—drawn as schoolgirls, pixies, dominatrixes, anime ( Japanese animation), or Western cartoon characters, but most posed as pinup girls—on a computer screen. As described in Steven Heller’s Sex Appeal: The Art of Allure in Graphic and Advertising Design (2000), ‘‘the open-ended play of paper dolls shifts into a game of interactive striptease.’’ KISS consumers interact and exchange dolls on Web sites, a very different form of folk community than that of the Hopi Sa’lako dolls, but nonetheless a community of adults finding a kind of fulfillment through the creation and manipulation of dolls. Dolls in folklore reflect more than childhood amusement and education; they also mirror adult sexuality from a variety of angles. From the nineteenth century onward, wedding-cake dolls, miniature bride-and-groom pairings—first created with flour paste, then manufactured in pipe cleaners, bisque, celluloid, and plastic, sometimes dressed by family members— celebrate heterosexual marriage at the intersection of foodways, handicraft, and mass culture. In the United States, hobbyists of varying sexual orientation repaint Barbie dolls to become ‘‘Trailer-Park Barbie,’’ or Ken dolls to become ‘‘Kendra,’’ thereby blurring distinctions between class, gender, and folk art versus mass-production. See also: Barbie Doll; Folk Belief; Folk Group; Folktale; Foodways; Gender; Graves and Gravemarkers; Marriage; ~ Popular Culture; Quinceanera; Ritual; Sexuality.

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References: Ashliman, D. L. A Guide to Folktales in the English Language. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987; Bass, Ruth. ‘‘Mojo.’’ Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes, 380– 377. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990; Cameron, Elisabeth L. Isn’t S/He a Doll?: Play and Ritual in African Sculpture. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1996; Faraone, Jim. ‘‘Steven Pim/Grant Salminen/Jennifer Scaff King.’’ Fashion Doll Makeovers III: Learn from the Artists, 62–63. Cumberland, MD: Hobby House Press, 1999; Fulmer, Jacqueline. ‘‘Men Ain’t All’’: A Reworking of Masculinity in Tales from the Hood, or, Grandma Meets the Zombie.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 115, nos. 457/458 (2002): 422–442; Geertz, Armin W., and Michael Lomatuway’ma. Children of Cottonwood: Piety and Ceremonialism in Hopi Indian Puppetry. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987; Hand, Wayland D., Anna Casetta, and Sondra B. Thiederman. Popular Beliefs and Superstitions: A Compendium of American Folklore. Boston: G. K. Hall and Company, 1981; Heller, Steven, ed. Sex Appeal: The Art of Allure in Graphic and Advertising Design. New York: Allworth Press, 2000; Lavitt, Wendy. American Folk Dolls. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1982; Lee, Molly C., ed. Not Just a Pretty Face: Dolls and Human Figurines in Alaska Native Cultures. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Museum, 1999; Page, Linda Garland, and Hilton Smith. The Foxfire Book of Toys and Games: Reminiscences and Instructions from Appalachia. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985; Thompson, Stith. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955.

Jacqueline Fulmer Doula A doula is a woman professionally trained to support and comfort another woman during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. She may also give nutritional advice to the mother during her pregnancy. Doula, a Greek word, means ‘‘servant-woman.’’ In North America, there are two main types of doulas—those who assist women during labor, and those who attend to the new mother in her home for up to several weeks after the birth. A doula differs from a midwife in that she does not generally perform any medical tasks and is responsible only for emotional and spiritual aid to the mother. Historically, the role of assisting a woman during childbirth with care, support, and comfort belonged to family members, close friends, or midwife assistants. The popularity of paid, professionally trained doulas in North America coincides with the rise of the alternative-birth movement of the 1970s, a response to the twentieth century’s increasingly medicalized birth procedures, in which a woman labored alone with intermittent nursing and was usually drugged for the delivery. Doulas feel that their role is to provide some of the assistance traditionally given by female friends and family, increasingly absent in industrialized societies. Their work provides a much more positive birth experience for the mother than the allopathic medical system offers. They generally encourage the presence of the father, but feel that they offer both parents a calm and experienced presence in what can be an extremely stressful situation. Doulas may have strong opinions about medical intervention in the birth process. Most feel that their role is to serve as advocates for laboring women. They know and can clearly state the woman’s needs and

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preferences when she may have difficulty articulating them, whereas the medical profession may not always be counted upon to be so respectful. Many doulas have the skills to catch babies, but this is not properly part of their role; they are usually trained in non-medical and non-pharmacological forms of pain relief, such as massage, aromatherapy, and visualization and relaxation techniques. Postpartum doulas help the family in the days immediately following birth. They may aid with establishing breastfeeding, cleaning, cooking, and tending the new baby or other children. They are also present to answer questions that the new mother may have about childcare, and seek to provide reassurance, help, and much needed rest for her. Becoming a doula does require certification, akin to midwifery; the relationship between doulas and the medical profession in North America is somewhat ambivalent, although an increasing number of medical doctors feel that doulas offer important maternal support without excessively challenging medical care decisions. In this respect, doulas are generally better accepted by the medical profession than are midwives. Various major studies have shown that the presence of a trained doula during birth significantly reduces length and complications of labor and improves both physiological and psychological outcomes. While some midwives perceive doulas as a threat to their own supportive role, most midwives welcome them and the continuous emotional and physical support they provide. See also: Breastfeeding; Childbirth and Childrearing; Folk Medicine; Midwifery; Pregnancy. References: Campera, L., C. Garcia, C. Diaz, O. Ortiz, S. Reynoso, and A. Langer. ‘‘‘Alone, I wouldn’t have known what to do’: A Qualitative Study on Social Support during Labor and Delivery in Mexico.’’ Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 77, no. 3 (1998): 395–403; DONA International. n.d. http://www.dona.org (accessed August 10, 2008); Klaus, M. H., J. H. Kennell, and P. H. Klaus. Mothering the Mother: How a Doula Can Help You Have a Shorter, Easier, and Healthier Birth. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993.

Theresa A. Vaughan Dowry The dowry consists of the objects a woman takes with her to her husband’s house after marriage (in patrilocal societies). These goods may include textiles, jewelry, money, and household items. In many parts of Europe, a woman, in preparation for her marriage, would accumulate useful things for her dowry chest. In Europe, it was considered custom, not law, for the bride’s family to give her a marriage gift, and the tradition remained among European immigrants to North America. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, Pennsylvania German brides customarily received a wooden chest that was often painted with their names or initials. This personal piece of furniture was most likely filled with clothes, and also with pots and pans, cutlery, and fabrics to be used in her new home. While old Pennsylvania German chests survive, scholars can only speculate about the kinds of objects that were placed within them. The

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contemporary dowry traditions of Turkey, however, provide us with an instance in which the contents of the dowry chest are well documented. When a wedding takes place in a Turkish village, the dowry chest is ceremoniously carried from a woman’s natal home to her new husband’s. A bride’s chest is filled with her handcrafts, such as scarves with tatting along the edges, embroidered kitchen and bathroom towels, and pillowcases. Village women also add rugs that they have woven with their sisters, mothers, or female companions, and saddlebags to be carried by their future husbands to market, displaying the women’s weaving skills for all to admire. The pile of rugs displayed in a young woman’s home signals her productivity, artistry, and availability for marriage. As in many dowry traditions, in Turkey a girl prepares herself for her marriage by engaging in the creation of items to be used in her future home. Her dowry chest contains items made by her, purchased objects, and even heirloom pieces received from previous generations. Most women make decisions as to which of these things to use in the home, which to keep and pass on to their daughters, and even which to sell if the need for emergency cash arises. Rugs and other textiles passed from one dowry chest to another provide a wonderful resource of traditional designs for weavers. Among women in India, and, to some extent, Indian immigrants in North America, the generic term ‘‘dowry’’ encompasses three distinct kinds of gifts, all referred to as dowry. Customarily, two principal gifts go from the bride’s family to the groom’s house: the sacred gift of a virgin—their daughter—and the secular gift of a negotiated dowry in return for the acceptance of the daughter as a bride. In addition, the bride receives from her parents a trousseau—a personal gift of clothing and jewelry that is not technically part of the dowry, but is colloquially called ‘‘dowry’’ as well. When a union is being negotiated among the parents in an arranged marriage, one of the key questions to be settled is the amount the groom’s family expects to receive. Many people, especially those living in villages, will state a sum of cash, and they may add other items, such as livestock or appliances. The assumption is that the husband will provide his new wife with food and shelter for the rest of her life, through his own earnings and his family’s assistance. Since the woman will not work outside of the home (though she will surely work hard inside of it), her monetary contribution to the household arrives with her in the form of the dowry provided by her parents. One rationale for giving one’s daughter a dowry that includes expensive pieces of jewelry is to pass on to the daughter her share of the family wealth, since the ancestral home, the furnishings, and other property will generally be given to the sons. It is common for families to marry off their daughters before arranging the marriages of their sons. The reason for this is to show that the family is prosperous enough to accumulate and give away multiple dowries—one for each daughter—before receiving any dowry from the families of their sons’ brides. Less-affluent families will recycle bits of the dowry, marrying a son first to be able to marry a daughter next. Parents give their daughters gold jewelry, which may be liquidated in case of an emergency. Other items included in the dowry also serve the

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bride, though indirectly. Parents hope to buy a respected social position for the daughter in her new home by sending with her things for the family to enjoy, such as a refrigerator, a stove, or a color television set. The groom’s family commonly requests a bicycle, a motor scooter, or, more rarely, a car. Expensive dowry items tax the financial capacity of the bride’s family: the more the household items cost, the less money there is to buy jewelry for her. Although the bride may receive immediate gratification by arriving with many coveted gadgets, these are not (like her jewelry) hers exclusively, and, most importantly, she may not sell them for immediate cash. Appliances and vehicles, unlike gold jewelry, devalue with time and cannot be secretly sold. The Indian example shows that the parents are responsible for providing their daughters with the household necessities for married life. While this was the case in the United States when conventional European dowry traditions were still followed, now friends, not family, are the providers of the items needed for the new life. Guests at a bridal shower give a woman the kinds of personal items usually received as part of her trousseau, and guests at the wedding give the new couple the household items historically received in the dowry: linen, cutlery, and crockery, in addition to small appliances. See also: Brideprice; Class; Courtship; Crafting; Daughter; Divorce; Embroidery; Engagement; Folk Art; Folk Custom; Folk Group; Folklore About Women; Gender; Housekeeping; Immigration; Marriage; Material Culture; Needlework; Rugmaking; Sewing; Sexism; Virginity; Weaving; Wedding; Women’s Work. References: Elson, Vickie G. Dowries from Kutch: A Women’s Folk Art Tradition in India. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, 1979; Fabian, Monroe H. The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest. New York: Universe Books, 1978; Fruzzetii, Lina M. The Gift of a Virgin: Women, Marriage, and Ritual in a Bengali Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982; Glassie, Henry. Turkish Traditional Art Today. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993; Goody, Jack, and T. J. Tambiah. Bridewealth and Dowry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Pravina Shukla

E Elder Care Elder caregiving is defined as providing assistance for senior citizens who cannot care for themselves. The contributions of women in mothering children are universally recognized. The role of women in caring for elders, however, is less celebrated; even more than for their roles in childcare, women have been responsible for providing care for their aging parents and in-laws, even in cultures that designate sons as responsible for elder care. Traditionally, the needs of elders were handled first by wives, then by daughters, daughters-in-law, and other female relatives or close friends. One of the most well-known folkloric caregivers is a granddaughter, Red Riding Hood, whose adventures begin when she takes a meal to her infirm grandmother. But as more women enter the workforce and the elderly population grows, the social and economic impact of elder care on women is becoming more complex; it is also becoming better understood. Elder-care duties range from simply providing companionship, emotional support, or recreational activities, such as taking someone for a walk, to providing personal care and hygiene such as bathing, dressing, grooming, and home-based medical treatments. In many folk groups, caregiving women assist family members in their spiritual preparations for death. Caregiving often extends to other services such as housekeeping, food preparation, shopping, home maintenance, and providing transportation. In extreme cases, such as with persons suffering from dementia, the caregiver also handles legal and financial matters on behalf of the aged individual. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration on Aging (AOA), 75 percent of elder caregivers are women. An AOA study found that women caregivers spend 50 percent more time helping older family members than do men. More than half of the women are employed outside the home, and often find that their caregiving responsibilities adversely affect their jobs. Elder-care issues are more prominent, albeit little researched, in North American minority populations as women in these cultures participate more frequently and more intensively in caring for their aging relatives than do members of the dominant culture, who

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increasingly rely on nursing homes and other for-profit institutions to provide the daily care and support their elders need. Even with this increasing reliance upon professionals, a great many women family members are still involved in providing emotional care for elderly relatives. And, despite or because of the increasing reliance on professionals to care for the elderly, there is a growing body of folk narrative about various experiences of dealing with elderly parents. Personal-experience narratives emerge in practice, as one person relates her experiences either to a friend who has just begun the process or to friends who function as the caregiver’s support network; narrators and listeners—as in other informal therapeutic networks such as those for breast cancer survivors—exchange tales, providing support and empathy by example, as well as laughter and tears. Another neglected source of the folklore of elder care is professional caregivers, who have their own networks and sites for exchanging information, stories, and experiences about their clients, the medical system, and social services bureaucracies. The exchange of personal-experience narratives provides critical information as well as emotional support during extended periods of caregiving. Such exchanges also occur frequently among professional and family care providers, who, in the optimal situation, provide support for each other as well as for an elder. Medical developments in the United States and Canada are producing societies of people who not only live longer, but who suffer from chronic rather than acute medical conditions. Unlike acute conditions, chronic medical conditions are expensive, prolonged, and frequently interfere with a person’s daily activities. Care of the chronically ill requires more than dedication. Women commonly face the burden of simultaneously caring for aging parents, their own children, and employment commitments. Consequently, women caregivers commonly suffer from stress conditions brought on by guilt, time limitations, financial costs, and serving multiple social roles. Women caregivers experience a higher incidence of depression and other health disorders than do women in the general population. On the other hand, women often report that despite the hardships, the experience is enriching. Cultural and personal attitudes about caregiving range from invocations of the biblical injunction to ‘‘Honor thy father and thy mother’’ (Exodus 20:12) to expression in pessimistic folktales of women’s resignation to their fates (see Ashliman). For many caregivers, the folk saying ‘‘It’s a blessing in disguise’’ has acquired new and vivid meanings. Deborah Hoffman’s Academy Award-nominated documentary film, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (1994), for example, is a superb illustration of a caregiver’s efforts to retain her good humor as her mother falls victim to Alzheimer’s disease. The well-being of caregivers is an evolving area of social concern, evidenced by a proliferation of research studies on and an increasing number of organizations and support groups, many of which are accessible on the Internet. Public policy is changing as evidenced in the United States by the passage of the Older American Act of 2000, which established the National Family Caregiver Support Program, and in Canada by the passage in 2003 of British Columbia’s Community Care and Assisted Living Act. See also: Aging;

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Daughter; Folktale; Grandmother; Healing; Nursing; Personal-Experience Narrative; Red Riding Hood; Women’s Work. References: Abel, Emily K. Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000; Ashliman, D. L. ‘‘Aging and Death in Folklore.’’ n.d. http://www.pitt.edu/dash/aging.html (accessed May 24, 2007); Elder Care Online. n.d http://www.econline.net/ (accessed June 20, 2006); Family Caregiver Alliance (FGA): National Center on Caregiving. ‘‘Caregiver Heath: A Population at Risk.’’ http://www.caregiver.org/caregiver/jsp/content_node.jsp?nodeid¼1822 (accessed August 9, 2008); Hoffman, Deborah. Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter. P.O.V. Independent Directors Series. Boston: WGBH Television (PBS), 1994; McCleod, Beth Witrogen, ed. Caregiving: The Spiritual Journey of Love, Loss, and Renewal. Second edition. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2000; ———. And Thou Shalt Honor: The Caregiver’s Companion. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2002.

Gilda Baeza Ortego Embroidery Embroidery enriches textiles using needle and thread, occasionally with a full complement of accessories and magical materials such as shells, mirrors, feathers, beads, quills, buttons, sequins, and coins. Embroidery styles tend to be decorative and more aesthetically determined than is the basic ground fabric. Embroidery is an inexpensive and adaptable art form. Women can stitch in between household tasks, can embroider at night after finishing daily duties, and can carry their embroideries with them. Due to the individualistic nature of stitching, along with the limitations of needlework conventions, embroidery is often classed as a minor genre relative to weaving and sewing. Its alliance with domesticity and enduring association with decorative ‘‘women’s work’’ further separate it from mainstream scholarly interest. General discussions of embroidery ordinarily emphasize description and technique over theoretical possibilities and aesthetic analysis. As a universal medium with a rich stylistic and symbolic repertoire, however, embroidery is well-suited for studying women’s cultural expressiveness within the sphere of women’s folklore. Most embroiderers are women, but men and women do collaborate in cases where men weave and women apply the distinctive embroidery that gives the material its particular identity and aesthetic form (for example, Central African Kuba textiles). As a cultural expression, embroidery indicates lineage and status, is spiritually and symbolically potent, and visibly manifests tradition, innovation, and change. It can be prescribed yet mutable; for example, religious patterns cross over into secular pieces, thus disseminating the arcane and elevating the domestic. In some non-European traditions, separate bands of embroidery with magical properties offer protection against evil forces during rites of passage when participants are most vulnerable; talismanic designs are placed on clothing to shield susceptible points of entry for spirit possession at the head, neck, chest, and back. In seventeenth-century Dutch art, spinning and weaving symbolize industry and virtue while embroiderers were depicted as both virtuous and lascivious. According to patriarchal Protestant morality, embroidery represented a condemnable

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luxury criticized for its opulence, sensuality, vanity, and foolishness, which, by association, extended to embroiderers’ behavior as well. Embroidery belongs to post-loom decoration, in which threads are either counted or ‘‘free.’’ Counted stitches follow obvious right-angled warp and weft grids by calculating number of stitches to determine size, direction, and pattern (for example, cross-stitch, running, or counted satin stitch). Embroidery stitches also move freely across the surface, thus defying basic structural constraints such as grid lines, fabric width, and seams. Freestyle embroidery creates curvilinear motifs using stitches that bend and undulate, including chain stitch, satin stitch, long stitch, and short stitch. Dense, lush patterns that entirely cover the ground fabric with little waste on the underside resemble weaving and tapestry, while other embroideries highlight the contrast between clusters of complex ornamental patterns and areas of unadorned fabric. Embroidery’s relevance to the study of material culture and gender is critical to the interplay of context, aesthetic choice, and social interaction; it provides a vehicle for the exploration of issues of creativity as well as a basis for the interpretation of views about stitching held by insiders and outsiders. See also: Folk Art; Needlework; Sampler; Women’s Work. References: MacAulay, Suzanne P. Stitching Rites. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000; Paine, Sheila. Embroidered Textiles: Traditional Patterns from Five Continents. London: Thames & Hudson, 1990; Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch and the Making of the Feminine. London: The Women’s Press, 1984; Schneider, Jane. ‘‘The Anthropology of Cloth.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 16 (1987): 409–448; Weiner, Annette B., and Jane Schneider, eds. Cloth and Human Experience. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Suzanne P. MacAulay Engagement Engagement is a formal declaration of the intention to marry. Becoming engaged (betrothed, affianced) is usually publicly announced by a couple or by their parents. Engagement is regarded as a binding act and a forerunner to marriage. In patriarchal cultures, it is generally expected that a man will ask for the ‘‘hand’’ of the woman he wishes to marry from her father or other male guardian of her sexuality. If he receives permission, he is then free to ask the woman herself; traditionally, he does so in a half-kneeling posture, enlisting some variant of the formula, ‘‘Will you marry me?’’ His proposal of marriage is often accompanied by his presentation to her of an engagement ring; alternatively, he may wait for her affirmative response before giving her an engagement present. Since the advent of modern feminism, it is no longer unheard of for a woman to propose marriage to a man—or to another woman in locales where same-sex marriage is legal (a few U.S. states and throughout Canada)—but it is possible that his acceptance of her proposal will come back to the couple in the form of taunting or disparaging jokes about his (or her) ‘‘manliness’’ later in the marriage. The act of becoming engaged can be an elaborate affair in which the giver tries to surprise his or her intended with a ring hidden in food or

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drink, or in multiple boxes, which the recipient must open until the smallest box reveals the gift. To further add to the recipient’s delight, the ritual may be enacted in an exotic location (an expensive restaurant, for example) or in a very public place (at a football game, perhaps, or on television). But sometimes becoming engaged is more subtle and private, particularly if there is a chance that a marriage proposal might be refused. The giving (usually by a man) and receiving (usually by a woman) of an engagement ring are symbolic of the couple’s commitment to marry; when a North American woman wears a diamond ring on the fourth finger of her left hand in public, she is announcing her impending status as a bride. In some countries, both members of a betrothed couple are expected to wear such a ring; however, the marketing to and wearing of engagement rings by men is a recent phenomenon. In contemporary North America, an engagement ring most frequently consists of a single, clear diamond mounted on a gold band; however, in European countries, colored gems or plain bands are more popular. The customary use of clear diamonds for engagement rings resulted from a massive advertising campaign in the 1940s by a private South African corporation, De Beers (now 45 percent owned by Anglo Americans), the world’s largest diamond-mining and brokerage company. The engagement ring may double as a wedding ring. The history of engagement rings may go back to ancient times, but can most reliably be traced to the late medieval period in Europe, when the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Lateran Council in 1139 decreed a mandatory waiting period between betrothal and marriage—the engagement period—ostensibly to help couples to avoid making a lifelong, monogamous commitment to one another (the dissolution of which could cost them their immortal souls) under the influence of sexual passion. In some Christian denominations, ‘‘banns’’—formal and repeated announcements of a couple’s intent to marry—are an essential step to a religiously sanctioned marriage. This custom also originated in medieval Europe, where such public announcements were deemed necessary to determine that there were no other claims on a betrothed person, either because of a secret marriage or another, previous, or privately exchanged promise to marry. An engaged woman might receive handcrafted items, clothes, and/or foodstuffs instead of an engagement ring. In some cultures, engagement is seen as the beginning of marriage; hence, if an engaged woman were to decide to break her engagement, she would be required to file for divorce. In this case, if the man to whom she is engaged dies, she is expected to mourn his death as his widow. In others, a ring (or other object or objects of substantial value) is given to the bride in lieu of a dowry. And in other cultures, the engagement present is understood as a financial investment (or insurance) for the woman to cash in if her husband divorces her or if she becomes a widow. In such cases, if a woman decides to break her engagement, she is expected to return the engagement ring to the man who gave it to her; however, this custom has been legally challenged in recent years as some women claim the gift is theirs to keep. Such challenges represent an interesting intersection of legal practice and social custom.

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Engagement celebrations are meant to bring together families and friends to announce the engagement publicly. Friends and family members congratulate the couple and/or toast them as a sign of their recognition of the couple’s changed social status. Such celebrations might involve not only eating and drinking, but also singing, dancing, and gift-giving, usually of items that the couple, especially the bride-to-be, will use in their household when they are married. Some engagement parties are large and elaborate, involving caterers and live bands paid to perform in a hired hall. Others are more intimate and less expensive. Today, a North American couple’s engagement may also be announced in the couple’s community’s newspapers. Following the engagement party, the couple’s relationship is expected to exclude other suitors. In all cultures that mandate or acknowledge an engagement period before marriage, it symbolizes a serious promise of commitment on the part of two individuals, and often two families, to merge. While many people view engagement as a testing period for the love and commitment of the intended couple, most engagement customs actually stem from concerns about the couple’s—and their families’—economic and social status rather than about the fostering and protection of romantic love. See also: Dowry; Folk Custom; Marriage; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Wedding. References: Ballard, Linda May. Forgetting Frolic: Marriage Traditions in Ireland. Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies in association with the University of Belfast, 1988; Charsley, Simon R. Rites of Marrying. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991; Laverack, Elizabeth. With This Ring: 100 Years of Marriage. London: Elm Books, 1979; Mordecai, Carolyn. Weddings: Dating & Love Customs of Cultures Worldwide including Royalty. Phoenix, AZ: Nittany, 1999.

Zainab Jerret Erotic Folklore Erotic folklore comprises the traditional practices that express love, sex, various sexualities, and the sociosexual power relations that are played out in and across those sexualities. Depending on one’s political, moral, and aesthetic values, erotic folklore may be distinguished as romantic, bawdy, vulgar, obscene, pornographic, or simply ‘‘dirty.’’ Erotic expressive forms include the heart-shaped valentine presented to the beloved on Valentine’s Day; the disparaging sexual gesture made with mouth, hand, or hips; the singing of sentimental love ballads and rollicking bawdy songs; the performance of bawdy rhymes, riddles, and limericks; the belief that certain foods enhance sexual arousal; and the sexual acts that people engage in when aroused. Additionally, people tell a wide range of stories concerning the pleasures and dangers that can accompany sex (personal-experience narratives, legends, folktales, and jokes). Folk speech enlists an erotic lexicon that, depending upon the performance context, can range from the sweetly intimate to the derisively distant. Male genitalia include ‘‘a set of balls’’ that may be described metaphorically as ‘‘the family jewels,’’ and a penis that may be referred to variously as a ‘‘prick,’’ ‘‘pecker,’’ ‘‘cock,’’ ‘‘whang,’’ ‘‘shaft,’’ ‘‘wiener,’’ ‘‘tallywhacker,’’ or

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‘‘dick.’’ In turn, female breasts become ‘‘boobs,’’ ‘‘boobies,’’ ‘‘tits,’’ and ‘‘knockers,’’ and the parts of female genitalia are named variously as a ‘‘pussy,’’ ‘‘gash,’’ ‘‘cherry,’’ ‘‘cunt,’’ the ‘‘nether regions,’’ or simply ‘‘down there.’’ Similarly, engaging in sexual intercourse may be as formal as ‘‘copulating,’’ ‘‘having conjugal relations,’’ or ‘‘fornicating,’’ but frequently it is ‘‘sleeping together,’’ ‘‘making love,’’ ‘‘fucking,’’ ‘‘grinding,’’ ‘‘knocking boots,’’ ‘‘getting it on,’’ or simply ‘‘doing it.’’ As children, girls explore sex and its primary biological ramification (pregnancy) through the sharing of folk beliefs about the body, sexual jokes, and traditional rhymes: (Girl’s name) and (boy’s name) up in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G First comes love Then comes marriage Then comes (girl’s name) with a baby carriage.

Later, as adolescents, girls continue sexual exploration by means of such games as ‘‘Spin-the-Bottle’’ and ‘‘Truth-or-Dare,’’ in which girls or girls and boys are required to perform a sexual act and/or tell personal-experience narratives about sexual acts they have performed. The sharing of personalexperience narratives of heterosexual and lesbian encounters continues into adulthood as a major genre through which women explore and define the erotic possibilities of the biological and social body. Frequently, the biological and social dangers associated with sex are explored through the telling of urban legends. For example, the legend ‘‘The Stuck Couple’’ is about a heterosexual couple who are involved in an extramarital affair. While engaging in sexual intercourse, usually in a small sports car, the couple becomes physically ‘‘stuck’’ in mid-coitus; they are eventually discovered by a passing police officer or motorist who calls for help. In order for a doctor to be able to disengage the stuck couple, a wrecking crew must partially dismantle the car, and the woman is left worrying about how she is going to explain the condition of the car to her husband. And while, in legend, heterosexual sex with a partner may prove embarrassing and/or a danger to the social self, sexual performances that, in one way or another, are viewed as aberrant may prove to be deadly. If legend is a means to explore sexual danger, song is frequently used to attest to sexual pleasure. Historically, female military personal and college sorority sisters have had access to a corpus of rollicking bawdy songs (for example, ‘‘Roll Me Over in the Clover, Roll Me Over and Do It Again’’) to be performed during bouts of social drinking. Similarly, women blues singers like Bessie Smith have sung the bawdy blues: I woke up this morning / with an awful aching head My new man had left me / just a room and an empty bed Bought me a coffee grinder / got the best one I could find So he could grind my coffee / because he had a brand new grind He’s a deep-sea diver / with a stroke that can’t go wrong He can touch the bottom / and his wind holds out so long He knows how to thrill me / and he thrills me night and day

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He’s got a new way of loving / almost takes my breath away Lord he’s got the sweetest something / and I told my gal friend Lou By the way she’s raving / she must have gone and tried it too. (Taft 1983: 237)

Such wordplay is also endemic to women’s erotic humor, whether in the form of a quick one-liner spoken by a grandmother to her granddaughters, ‘‘Before you marry any ol’ hairy-legged boy, be sure to look carefully into his genes (jeans),’’ or as a joke about male sexual incompetence, as in the case of a tale about a sailor who is on shore leave and visits a prostitute but is too drunk to perform sexually: As he huffed and puffed in his efforts to get his money’s worth, he asked how he was doing. ‘‘Oh, about three knots,’’ replied the lady. ‘‘Three knots?’’ he asked. ‘‘Yeah,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s not hard. It’s not in. And you’re not gonna get your money back.’’

Through their performances of erotic folklore, women become active agents engaged in a social dialogue about the female body as both a biological entity and as a product of ongoing sociocultural construction. See also: Folk Belief; Folk Music and Folksong; Folktale; Foodways; Girls’ Games; Humor; Joke; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Personal-Experience Narrative; Sexuality; Valentine’s Day. References: Green, Rayna. ‘‘Magnolias Grow in Dirt: the Bawdy Lore of Southern Women.’’ Southern Exposure, vol. 4, no. 4 (1977): 29–33; McEntire, Dee L. ‘‘Erotic Storytelling: Sexual Experience and Fantasy Letters in Forum Magazine.’’ Western Folklore 51 (1992): 81–96; Paros, Lawrence. The Erotic Tongue: A Sexual Lexicon. Seattle: Madrona Publishers, 1984; Randolph, Vance. Roll Me in Your Arms: ‘‘Unprintable’’ Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, Vol. I: Folksongs and Music and Blow the Candle Out: ‘‘Unprintable’’ Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, Vol. II: Folk Rhymes and Other Lore, ed., G. Legman. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992; Taft, Michael, ed. Blues Lyric Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Garland Press, 1983; Whatley, Mariamne H., and Elissa R. Henken. Did You Hear about the Girl Who . . . ?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, and Human Sexuality. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Cathy Lynn Preston Ethnicity Often confused with or considered synonymous with the term ‘‘race,’’ ethnicity is defined in terms of historical or national origin, distinctive cultural traits and practices, and/or a community created around ethnic or cultural identification factors such as language, culture, and religion. Ethnicity can be plural and/or contextual. For example, a person may be English among French speakers; English Canadian among Canadians; and Canadian among North Americans. Ethnicity first came into focus in discussions of feminism during its second wave, in which feminists of Color critiqued liberal and radical feminism as ethnocentric and color-blind. The Combahee River Collective (1986), a group of Black feminist theorists formed in 1974, asserts that feminism must

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address the concerns of women of Color, and that the only advocates for women of Color are indeed women of Color themselves. The collective argues that those who share an ethnic or cultural identity with others will become one another’s best allies based on these cultural characteristics. Identity and ethnicity mark differences among feminists, giving birth to debates about identity politics, a position that demands that women and men ask and answer the question, ‘‘With what aspect of my identity should I identify? With which community does my allegiance, based upon this question of identity, lie?’’ An activist social-justice critique is implicit in this question. However, as feminist philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff argues, identity politics is vague and nowhere defined by either its detractors or advocates. How does identity formation matter in terms of political, social, and cultural constructs? Further, problems specific to women arise when values ascribed (rightly or wrongly) to the group conflict with women’s concerns (such as pressure from male leaders to not use birth control and to have large numbers of children). Too often, recognition and support for women’s issues is absent from male leaders’ understanding and discourse, and women feel they must choose between ethnic and gender loyalty. Some women explicitly reject feminism for this reason; they feel that their ethnic allegiance is primary. Others reject the sexism in their ethnic movement and feel more comfortable as feminists. Still others, like politician Rosemary Brown in Canada, or theorist bell hooks in the United States, refuse to be coopted by feminist White women or ethnic men, and work to ensure recognition of the intersections of oppressions, not only by race/ethnicity and gender, but also by sexual orientation, class, ability, and a myriad of other aspects. Folklorists and anthropologists have long recognized a distinction between endogenous identity—a group’s own notion of itself—and exogenous identity—created and referenced by those not of the group. For example, the term ‘‘Native American,’’ referring to the Indigenous or Native peoples of the United States (Canadians use ‘‘Aboriginal,’’ ‘‘First Nations,’’ ‘‘Indigenous,’’ ‘‘Native,’’ and, in legal contexts, ‘‘Indian’’) is exogenous: their homogenous identity is externally constructed. ‘‘American Indian’’ (and later ‘‘Native American’’), an apparently unified ethnic category, actually incorporates thousands of peoples of varying languages, cultures, religions, and worldviews. To divide and conquer the tribal power of Indigenous peoples, the U.S. government created legislation to forcibly remove many Native peoples from their ancestral homelands into marginal rural areas called reservations or rancherias, and, later, to urban areas, with promises of jobs and security. Urban relocation in the 1950s and 1960s was the culmination of government policies designed to assimilate Natives into mainstream culture, further isolating families and communities. Colonization has created a diaspora of Native Americans within the borders of the mainland United States as well as in Hawaii, Alaska, and other areas where the U.S. government has exerted its influence. However, tribal peoples continued to connect with one another and created social-cultural networks that would later give birth to the pan-Indian movement. Even the formation of tribal identity itself is problematic at best. Traditionally, tribal clan systems defined their own membership and identity.

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Now, the U.S. government makes the final decision. Endogenous definitions are often very different from those imposed by outsiders. In many cases, including those of the Muskogee (Creek) and Laguna people, Native American societies are matrilineal (that is, lineage is defined through women), matrifocal (kinship systems are focused on matrilineal descent), and traditionally gynocratic (women make principal decisions; see Gunn Allen 1992). The colonizing powers of the United States and Canada not only imposed their own definition of ‘‘Indian,’’ but also framed its significance in patriarchal, patrilineal, and sexist terms. In Canada, under the notorious Indian Act Section 12(1)(b), First Nations’ women lost their ‘‘Indian’’ status and right to live on their family and community reserves if they married White men. Protests, political actions, and national and international court cases eventually led to Bill C-31, which, like its predecessor, treats First Nations’ women differently than their brothers, but has at least removed the most sexist and colonialist provisions. In most tribal cultures, self-identity comes first from family, second from clan, and finally from tribal or national identification. For example, in the Muskogee Nation, one identifies oneself by tribal town, clan affiliation, tribal affiliation, then by Native ancestry. Only rarely would an individual self-define as ‘‘American Indian.’’ Indigenous Hawaiian peoples have a long tradition that enjoins one, when meeting others in a group setting, to relate through song/chant the ancestral formation of identity by repeating the names and deeds of ancestors, identifying the place of birth, the ancestor’s place of birth, and the relationship to the landscape from which one is formed. Ancestral identity, language, landscape, and genealogy form Indigenous Hawaiian self-identification; the designation ‘‘native Hawaiian’’ is given in subjection by the colonizing power. Traditional Indigenous Hawaiian and traditional Muskogee identities, therefore, predate their subjection. Ethnicity also plays a role in the lives of women who self-identify and/or are identified by mainstream cultures as White. Among North American Jews, for example, Sephardic and Ashkenazi women view one another differently. Some Jews do not view themselves as White at all. No longer affiliated with land or language—or even ancestry—‘‘ethnic’’ is a word that has become for many Whites a designator for ‘‘non-White.’’ When asked about their ethnicity, they may think in terms of ‘‘ethnic clothing,’’ ‘‘ethnic music,’’ or the ‘‘ethnic foods’’ aisle in their supermarkets, not about the fact that they have Belgian, Swedish, Welch, Dutch, German, and/or English heritages. Young White Americans, in particular, may not know their family histories beyond two or three generations; but ethnicity does not cease to be complex when it is denied or forgotten. Other and perhaps older White North Americans retain a strong sense of their ethnic identities, each for her own reasons, and will respond to the same question without hesitation: Sicilian, Ukrainian, Irish, Norwegian, Spanish, Cajun, Gullah, or Basque, for example. Yet other White groups with different histories feel stigmatized in North America, among them Poles, Appalachian Scots-Irish, and Newfoundlanders. Members of the Caribbean, Mexican, and South American diasporas in North America, on the other hand, express amazement that White

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Americans seem not to understand the difference between a Dominican and a Haitian, or between a Guatemalan and an Argentine. A widely told joke relates that a Latina can be Cuban in Miami, Chicana in San Diego, Puerto Rican in New York, and Mexican in Texas—all while knowing herself to be Salvadoran—because as long as she is speaking in a Spanish accent, it makes no difference to White people. Asians in North America voice similar complaints when Koreans are mistaken for Japanese, for example, or Hmong for Chinese. Different generations of women may also experience ethnicity differently. White North American notions of childrearing, which consider the development of individuality and independence a requirement, may conflict with expectations from the home country. Immigrant women in North America, often without access to learning English, can be isolated in their homes, or at best, in ethnic community enclaves where they can provision their families and maintain their houses in their original languages and foodways. Sometimes their children acquire considerable power because they must translate for their mothers during school visits, medical appointments, and interactions with government officials. The children, in turn, particularly girls, feel pressure from their parents to maintain family and ethnic honor as defined in their original culture, most often associated with chastity and modesty, directly at odds with the styles and expectations of mainstream North Americans. Further, in patriarchal and patrilineal societies (which trace kinship and ancestry through the male line), a man marrying outside of his ethnic group brings to it his wife as a new member, along with their children. Women, however, are pressured to marry within the group, because a woman marrying outside the group is considered lost to the community, whatever her personal feelings may be. Studies of ethnicity often ignore women’s contributions to identity, especially when male or female fieldworkers identify public male culture as normative. Recently, work on areas of tradition such as foodways has rectified to an extent the underrepresentation of women’s ethnic cultures. Studies of foodways often show the remarkable creativity of women in producing foods that follow their families’ tastes, sometimes in the face of the lack of availability of foodstuffs used in their native or ancestral countries. The complex interrelations of sexism, scholarship, and ethnicity can be seen in the tradition of Morris dancing, brought to the United States and Canada and extensively popularized by English immigrants of the 1960s. Historic scholarship on this practice from England suggests that it is a male tradition, and sees the extensive participation in North America of female Morris dancers as an indication of non-tradition at best, and as a betrayal of the practice at worst. In fact, however, research has shown that women danced Morris in England from its early history, and continued to do so (albeit as a minority of dancers) to the present. Thus, North American women Morris dancers are an extension of an ethnic tradition, not a deviation from it. Ignorance about the complexities of ethnicity in the early twenty-first century has contributed to wars, genocides, and mass migrations; the ideological myth embodied in its trivialization and dismissal is pernicious in a

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world where most people use the categories of ethnicity to structure their lives. As Judith Butler (1997) argues, ‘‘Power imposes itself upon us, and, weakened by its force, we come to internalize or accept its terms. What such an account fails to note, however, is that the ‘we’ who accept such terms are fundamentally dependant on those terms for our existence’’ (2). Women in ethnic groups understand this relationship with power because they must live it daily. See also: Feminisms; Fieldwork; First Nations of North America; Folk Dance; Folk Group; Foodways; Humor; Immigration; Politics; Race; Tradition; Violence. References: Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998; Brown, Rosemary. Being Brown: A Very Public Life. Toronto: Random House, 1989; Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997; Combahee River Collective. ‘‘Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties.’’ http://www.buffalostate.edu/orgs/rspms/combahee.html (accessed August 10, 2008); Greenhill, Pauline. Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994; Gunn Allen, Paula. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Second edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992; hooks, bell. Feminism Is For Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000; Jacobs, Beverley. ‘‘Gender Discrimination Under the Indian Act: Bill C-31 and First Nations Women.’’ In Feminism, Law, Inclusion: Intersectionality in Action, eds. Gayle MacDonald, Rachel L. Osborne, and Charles C. Smith, 175–199. Toronto: Sumach Press, 2005; Le Espiritu, Yen. ‘‘‘We Don’t Sleep Around Like White Girls Do’: Family, Culture, and Gender in Filipina-American Lives.’’ Signs, vol. 26, no. 1 (2001): 415–440; Minh-ha, Trinh. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Anne Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991; Moraga, Cherrie L., and Gloria E. Anzaldua. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table—Women of Color Press, 1983; Stern, Steven, and John Allan Cicala. Creative Ethnicity: Symbols and Strategies of Contemporary Ethnic Life. Logan: University of Utah Press, 1991.

Carolyn Dunn and Liz Locke Eve In Jewish, Muslim, and Christian religious traditions, Eve is the first woman created by God. Her name is derived from the Hebrew, meaning ‘‘living,’’ and she is considered the mother of all humankind. The first chapter of Genesis presents two versions of the creation story. In the first (1:26–28), ‘‘God created man [sic] in his own image; . . . male and female he created them.’’ In the second version (2:4–24), God created the first human, Adham (or Adam), from ‘‘the dust of the ground.’’ Declaring that ‘‘It is not good that the man should be alone,’’ God caused him to sleep and removed one of his ribs to form a woman. This second version is frequently cited as justification for the subordination of women, both within the church and in daily life. The first version is favored by those (notably Jews and Muslims) who prefer a more egalitarian interpretation. God placed Adam and Eve in Eden, a garden in which grew ‘‘every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.’’ In the midst of this garden

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stood the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God told Adam and Eve that they could eat freely from any tree except for these two, from which they would die. A serpent, usually interpreted as a personification of evil, told Eve that she would not die from eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, that instead, ‘‘your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’’ Eve ate the fruit and gave some to Adam. Their eyes opened, they saw that they were naked, and they covered themselves. God confronted them, cursed them for their disobedience, and drove them from Eden. The role of Eve in the creation story has had a profound influence on Judeo-Christian attitudes toward women. Eve is blamed for bringing mortality, sin, and evil into the world. Although her ‘‘original sin’’ was disobedience, later interpreters such as Augustine argued that all humankind has inherited a sinful nature through subsequent acts of sexual intercourse. The association of sin with a woman and with sex permeates many Western religious denominations. In Greek mythology, Pandora is similarly blamed for unloosing evils into the world through disobedience. In contrast, Prometheus is celebrated as a culture hero (a mythological figure that teaches a group its cultural patterns, ‘‘how to be the people’’) for disobeying the gods and bringing fire to the people of the Earth. The creation stories of other cultures, including Native American groups, frequently include a female figure whose fecundity and generosity produces life on Earth. Some scholars suggest that the recorded tale of Eve is a deliberate and monotheistic attempt to counter earlier creation stories featuring female deities, particularly the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish. ‘‘No other text has affected women in the Western world as much as that found in the opening chapters of Genesis’’ (Kvam et al.: 1). See also: Goddess Worship; Helpmate; Jewish Women’s Folklore; Legend, Religious; Lilith; Muslim Women’s Folklore; Sexuality. References: Deen, Edith. All of the Women of the Bible. New York: Harper & Row, 1955; Kvam, Kristen E., Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, eds. Eve & Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Moyers, Bill. Genesis: A Living Conversation. New York: Doubleday, 1996; Murphy, Cullen. The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998; Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Random House, 1988; Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

Laurel Horton Evil Eye The evil-eye belief complex stems from the notion that the stare of a particular person has the power to convey harm to a person or other object of its gaze. Despite variations in causes and effects, evil-eye practices and expectations have in common the belief that ‘‘having the evil eye’’ refers to individuals who are perceived to have had more than their fair share of bad luck and ill health and consequently possess the uncanny ability of projecting harm onto others and the possessions of those whom they envy.

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Belief in the evil eye, also known as the ‘‘malevolent eye,’’ is ancient and widespread, spanning the cultures of the Indo-European and Semitic world, the Near East, the Mediterranean, South Asia, northern Europe, and north and east Africa. In all instances, the evil eye is singular and primarily connected with women, pregnancy, and fertility, but its targets are also commonly associated with domestic animals, fruit trees, and crops, that is, all things fecund. This belief complex requires that traditional precautionary behaviors be enacted in order to avoid, discourage, and/or negate the effects of the evil eye, including specific gestures such as spitting, and the wearing of round or horn-shaped amulets and talismans, the most common of which is a blue pendant (called nazarliklar in Turkey) enclosing a miniature reproduction of a human eye. As other apotropaic strategies (those designed to avert evil), Azerbaijani elders recommend the wearing of a cutting from a plant locally known as uzarlik (Peganum harmala), and Asian Indian women may draw black lines around their eyes, not only to shield themselves from the evil eye, but to prevent themselves from inflicting it on others. Wearing images of animals with unusual eyes—such as foxes, grasshoppers, snakes, fish, snails, toads—may offer protection; colonial Americans were partial to wearing heart-shaped lockets as insurance against the evil eye. The evil-eye belief complex has raised curiosity and inspired scholarship dating from classical antiquity, through the European Renaissance, and into the present day. It is generally acknowledged that whether voluntarily or involuntarily, the evil eye is motivated by envy, and thus steeped in what anthropologist George Foster dubbed ‘‘the image of limited good’’ (1979). The notion of ‘‘limited good,’’ generally identified with a culture’s agricultural peasantry, articulates a worldview in which there is always a finite amount of a resource, whether it be luck or life force, exemplified by the notion that the gain of one inevitably comes at the expense of another. Casting the evil eye is, therefore, considered a powerful means of attempting to redistribute limited resources through its capacity to drain the good luck and sap the life force possessed by a family or an individual in order to benefit its envious practitioner. The belief complex explains the paradoxical behavior of parents and grandparents who appear to treat their precious children harshly, when, in fact, they are purposely taking preventative measures so as not to attract the evil eye to them. In ‘‘Wet and Dry, the Evil Eye: An Essay in Indo-European and Semitic Worldview,’’ Alan Dundes (1980) identifies an innate accommodation of the concept of limited good in his analysis of a substratum of folk belief in which all life depends upon liquids, and the loss of liquids corresponds with loss of life. Thus, fluids, especially the non-eliminative bodily fluids— milk, semen, and blood—have fundamental significance, and are often the perceived targets of the evil eye, which is believed to be cast especially on breasts and testicles. Hence, the evil eye is frequently blamed for the drying up of livestock’s milk supply and lack of fecundity in bulls. According to Dundes, the traditional apotropaic gestures of tugging the earlobes (an expression of upward displacement performed by both males and females), women covering their breasts, and men touching their genitals are

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unconscious efforts to symbolically counter the evil eye’s curse of sterility and other forms of bad luck. See also: Cosmetics; Cursing; Farm Women’s Folklore; Folk Belief; Pregnancy; Superstition. References: Dundes, Alan. ‘‘Wet and Dry, the Evil Eye: An Essay in Indo-European and Semitic Worldview.’’ In Interpreting Folklore, 93–133. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980; ———. ed. The Evil Eye: A Folklore Casebook. New York: Garland Publishing, 1981; Foster, George McClelland. ‘‘The Image of Limited Good.’’ In Tzintzuntzan: Mexican Peasants in a Changing World, 122–52. New York: Elsevier, 1979; Gravel, Pierre Bettez. The Malevolent Eye: An Essay on the Evil Eye, Fertility and the Concept of Mana. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995; Holmes, Hannah. ‘‘The Skinny on the Evil Eye.’’ Discovery Online, April 24, 1997. http://www.discovery.com/ area/skinnyon/skinnyon970425/skinny1.html (accessed August 9, 2008); Maloney, Clarence, ed. The Evil Eye. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976; Onians, Richard Broxton. The Origins of European Thought. Salem, NH: Ayer Company, Publishers, 1987; Peterson, Jean, and Arzu Aghayeva. ‘‘The Evil Eye: Staving Off Harm—With a Visit to the Open Marketplace.’’ Azerbaijan International, 8.3 (Autumn 2000). http://www. azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/83_folder/83_articles/83_evil.html (accessed February 16, 2005).

Maria Teresa Agozzino

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F Family Folklore Family folklore comprises traditional expressive behavior and its products transmitted by family members to other family members. Topics include relatives, family events, and family ways of being and doing. Families include people united by blood, marriage, civil union, and adoption, as well as those who love and care for one another. Family folklore includes stories, jokes, and songs about family members and events as well as the ways family members share them with one another; festivals the family celebrates, such as religious and national holidays; festivals that celebrate family, such as weddings, reunions, and funerals; festivals that individual families invent for themselves and pass on through the years; foods, cooking instructions, ways of eating, and methods of gathering to eat as a family; family naming traditions; a family’s ways of dancing; expressions and gestures a family uses; visual records of family life, such as arrangements of items inside and outside the home, photographs, photograph albums, videotapes, computerized albums, embroideries, and quilts; tombstone design and cemetery decorations; occupational, song, story, and craft traditions carried on within a family; and fieldwork methods used within family settings. Folklorists have long been welcome in the homes of families. Once back at their desks, however, most professional and amateur folklorists in North America before the 1970s discussed the material they collected in families as regional or ethnic, religious or occupational folklore. They approached the family as a source of folklore materials, not as the subject of their study. Several, though, published a family story or two as ‘‘family folklore,’’ usually without analysis, in local journals. In 1958, Mody Boatright called on folklorists to collect ‘‘an important source of living folklore’’—the ‘‘family saga,’’ individual stories with a variety of themes that preserved a family’s way of seeing itself in history. Interested in a generic approach, Boatright asked what forms and motifs made up the family saga. A second mode of inquiry, a small-group approach, came soon after from Kim Garrett, who suggested that every family who recognizes itself as a unit has its own traditions, including stories, taboos, and expressions.

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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the study of family folklore burgeoned. Folklorists’ growing interest in folklore as communication within and between small groups, and their consideration of more privatized forms of folklore such as personal-experience narratives; feminists’ focus on women’s lives and concerns; African American scholars’ explorations of personal identity and their reevaluation of earlier assessments of the Black family; and Alex Haley’s Roots, the exploration of his African American family’s history, all contributed to an increased interest in studying the family as the subject of its own folklore. Women folklorists took the lead in family folklore studies as they turned their gaze toward their own families. In her 1966 study of her family’s legends about their ancestor Caddy, Kathryn L. Morgan showed what collecting family stories had to offer folklorists. Asking questions about family stories’ functions, she suggested that her African American family’s stories operated as buffers against the ravages of racism and served as an alternative system of education since Black history had been ignored by the schools. Karen Baldwin, in her 1975 dissertation on her central Pennsylvania mountain family, gave family folklorists a theoretical foundation for their work when she declared the family to be ‘‘the social base of folklore.’’ The family, she showed, is not just a group that generates its own traditions; rather, it is the ‘‘first folk group, the group in which important primary folkloric socialization takes place and individual aesthetic preference patterns for folkloric exchange are set.’’ Margaret Yocom in her 1980 dissertation on her Pennsylvania German family detailed the issues involved in personalfamily fieldwork. In her 1983 dissertation, Marilyn White analyzed interracial and intraracial relationships in rural Virginia from 1865 to 1940 as seen in her African American family stories. Male folklorists who worked in the first years of the family folklore field turned to the study of multiple families. In 1975, Stanley Brandes published family narratives of lost fortunes that are told by White, lower-middle, and working-class citizens of the United States. He found that the tellers of such stories deflect onto ancestors the anxiety they feel for not achieving top economic success in a capitalist country that maintains that all individuals can become economically successful. And Steven Zeitlin in 1978 published his dissertation on the stories of families throughout the United States, discovering common themes that sweep through family stories in the United States, themes that revolve around the characters of family members (heroes, survivors) and the transitions in family histories (migrations, courtships). Fieldwork was an early concern, especially since the first family folklorists chose to work with their own families. Earlier discipline-wide and regional fieldwork guides often described family folklore fieldwork as ideal for the novice because it was easily conducted, but as more and more folklorists began working with their own families, the discussion about such personalfamily fieldwork deepened. Baldwin, Morgan, Yocom, and Susan Sherman with her Jewish relatives detailed concerns particular to such fieldwork among intimates. With other scholars, they challenged the notion of objectivity, recognizing it not only as an impossible goal but also a

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counterproductive one for personal-family fieldworkers in particular. These scholars have discussed the importance of including oneself in family activities as a member of the group as well as the necessity for exploring and using one’s involvements; later discussions about reflexivity and reciprocity, as well as feminist reminders that the personal is political, have all reinforced family folklorists’ positions on the challenges of such fieldwork that cuts close to the bone. Questions about fieldwork among family members continue to interest folklorists, as the work of Kim Miller and Susan Scheiberg shows. As the study of family folklore continued, it engaged with questions that lay at the heart of Folklore as a discipline. Folklorists are interested in how traditional materials are passed on to others: what are the characteristics of this process of transmission? Lucille Burdine and William B. McCarthy in their study of an extended Ozark family, for example, showed how folklore is not handed on ‘‘en bloc’’ from person to person, generation to generation, but rather that each element of folklore finds its own sympathetic channel of transmission in different members of a family. Other studies by Baldwin, Yocom, and Jane Beck discussed gender differences in transmission as well as attitudes of ownership and deference between generations. Folklorists have puzzled over the generic nature of folk narratives, and family scholars began to ask how the individual stories related to the whole of a family’s repertoire. Family stories, often brief and often elliptically told, usually do not take the form of legend, folktale, or memorate. Boatright and William Wilson saw family stories as anecdotes that together comprise a larger saga or novel, and emphasized that each anecdote must be heard in light of other anecdotes for the larger story to be understood. Baldwin emphasized that a family’s ‘‘narrative is a composite of changing and interchangeable parts,’’ that since no one person is the ultimate source, many must be heard so their piece of the narrative composite can be included. Folklorists have been concerned about the ways gender intersects with folklore, and family folklorists have turned to evidence of gender-role stratification in storytelling, material culture, and more. Baldwin and Yocom, for example, studied how family stories and storytelling differ among men and women in their Anglo American and Pennsylvania German families. While they found women’s telling in these specific contexts to be more collaborative, interruptible, and filled with information and genealogy, men’s telling is often uninterrupted and more competitive, their story beginnings and endings are formally marked, and their stories make a point worth telling. Yocom explored gender differences in the transmission of woodcarving and knitting skills in an extended Anglo and French Acadian family in Maine. And Thomas Adler’s 1981 study of gender and family food preparation found that men’s cooking traditions in the family are often limited to one or two celebratory meals a week—often Sunday breakfast—or to outdoor meals with meat, while women cook the mundane, everyday, diversified meals. Also from the 1980s to the present, family folklore study has engaged with multiple social issues, including economic stress on families, abuse in families, ‘‘family-values’’ discourses, and the multiple forms of the

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contemporary family. Phyllis Scott Carlin, for example, has written about the narratives families tell who are swept up in ongoing economic crises as many are forced to give up the way of life that has sustained them for generations. Alan Dundes, Janet Langlois, and Ed Walraven have considered parentchild interaction, influenced by changing economic and social factors, as it is configured in dead-baby jokes, stories of violence against children, and legends of La Llorona in a garbage dump. In her 2001 study of the narratives women tell as they leave abusive relationships, Elaine Lawless documented a painful side of family life. She shows how slowly becoming able to tell their stories helps women heal and regain power in their own lives. The work of Steven Zeitlin and others in the Family Folklore Section of the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife explored how families experiencing divorce or abandonment by one parent use ritual and storytelling in the reconstruction of their single-parent families. Elizabeth Stone, interviewing families across the United States, recorded family members’ stories of abuse and abandonment and how individuals transformed stories about hurtful relatives into stories that could lead them down new and healthier paths of life. Scholars of family folklore also have contributed to the current American melee over ‘‘family values’’ (a politically charged phrase often used to signal the ‘‘conventional, heterosexual family’’) by writing about folklore in the multiple forms that contemporary families take. Family folklore scholars understand that since no one family pattern is statistically dominant, contemporary families are increasingly diverse, including single-parent, two adults of any gender with or without children, households of single adults united by their care for each other, and more. Folklorists’ research with adoptive, blended, and stepfamilies, for example, has led them to investigate such practices as ‘‘Gotcha Day,’’ a yearly festivity that a family holds to celebrate the day their adopted child arrived. In his 1993 research of gay male families, Joseph Goodwin discussed the structure of gay families as that based almost totally on levels of closeness and the families’ use of nicknames, jokes, stories, and ritual. Folklorists have documented ceremonies of commitment and Vermont’s civil unions, as well as the legal marriage ceremonies of gays and lesbians in Denmark and Norway. They have also turned to the family traditions that have grown up around the Names Project’s AIDS quilt and other memorial processes surrounding the AIDS pandemic. Folklorists also have explored how family members, given their different families of origin, and often given their different religions, ethnicities, races, or places of birth, negotiate their various traditions, creatively blending them into new versions of old practices that can sustain their new families. Family folklorists interested in folklore and literature have often turned to the work of poets; fiction writers; writers of creative non-fiction, biography, and autobiography; and professional storytellers who incorporate family folklore in their presentations. Michael Ondaatje’s description of a day’s storytelling in his Ceylonese family provides a taste of the possibilities: [W]e will trade anecdotes and faint memories, trying to swell them with the order of dates and asides, interlocking them all as if assembling the hull

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of a ship. No story is ever told just once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgments thrown in . . . [A]ll day my Aunt Phyllis presides over the history of good and bad Ondaatjes and the people they came in contact with. Her eye . . . will suddenly sparkle and she will turn to us with delight and begin ‘‘and there is another terrible story . . .’’ (1984: 26) See also: Courtship; Divorce; Festival; Fieldwork; Folk Group; Folk Photography; Foodways; Graves and Gravemarkers; Joke; La Llorona; Marriage; Naming Practices; Personal-Experience Narrative; Ritual; Storytelling; Tradition; Tradition-Bearer. References: Adler, Thomas A. ‘‘Making Pancakes on Sunday: The Male Cook in Family Tradition.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 40, no. 1 (1981): 45–54; Baldwin, Karen. ‘‘‘Woof!’ A Word of Women’s Roles in Family Storytelling.’’ In Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, eds. Susan Kalcik and Rosan Jordan, 149–162. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Beck, Jane. ‘‘Newton Washburn; Traditional Basket Maker.’’ Traditional Craftsmanship in America, ed. Charles Camp, 72–76. Washington, DC: National Council for the Traditional Arts, 1983; Boatright, Mody C. ‘‘The Family Saga as a Form of Folklore.’’ The Family Saga and Other Phases of American Folklore, eds. Mody C. Boatright, Robert B. Downs, and John T. Flanagan, 1–19. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958; Brandes, Stanley. ‘‘Family Misfortune Stories in American Folklore.’’ Journal of the Folklore Institute, vol. 12, no. 1 (1975): 5–17; Burdine, Lucille, and William B. McCarthy. ‘‘Sister Singers.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 49, no. 4 (1990): 406–417; Carlin, Phyllis Scott. ‘‘‘That Black Fall’: Farm Crisis Narratives.’’ Performance, Culture, and Identity, eds. Elizabeth C. Fine and Jean Haskell Speer, 135–157. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992; Dundes, Alan. Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1987; Garrett, Kim. ‘‘Family Stories and Sayings.’’ In Singers and Storytellers. ed. Mody C. Boatright, 273–281. Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, Vol. 30. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1961; Goodwin, Joseph. ‘‘My First ExLover in Law: You Can Choose Your Family.’’ Southern Folklore 51 (1994): 35–47; Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. New York: Delta, 1977; Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997; Langlois, Janet. ‘‘Mothers’ Double Talk.’’ In Feminist Messages, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 80–97. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Lawless, Elaine. Women Escaping Violence: Empowerment Through Narrative. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2001; Miller, Kim. ‘‘All in the Family: Family Folklore, Objectivity and SelfCensorship.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 56, nos. 3/4 (1997): 331–46; Morgan, Kathryn L. Children of Strangers: The Stories of a Black Family. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980; Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. London: Picador, 1984 [1982]; Scheiberg, Susan L. ‘‘A Folklorist in the Family: On the Process of Fieldwork among Intimates.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 49, no. 2 (1990): 208–14; Sherman, Sharon R. ‘‘‘That’s How the Seder Looks’: A Fieldwork Account of Videotaping Family Folklore.’’ Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 23, no. 401 (1986): 53–70; Stacey, Judith. In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996; Stone, Elizabeth. Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us. New York: Penguin, 1988; Sullivan, Maureen. The Family of Women: Lesbian Mothers, Their Children, and the Undoing of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004; Walraven, Ed. ‘‘Evidence for a Developing Variant of ‘La Llorona’.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 50, no. 2 (1991): 208–17; White, Marilyn M. ‘‘‘We Lived on an Island’: An AfroAmerican Family and Community in Rural Virginia, 1865–1940.’’ PhD diss., Austin: University of Texas, 1983; Wilson, William A. ‘‘Personal Narratives: The Family Novel.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 50, no. 2 (1991): 127–149; Yocom, Margaret R. ‘‘Family Folklore and Oral History Interviews: Strategies for Introducing a Project to One’s Own Relatives.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 41, no. 2 (1982): 251–274; ———. ‘‘‘Awful Real’: Dolls and

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Development in Rangeley, Maine.’’ In Feminist Messages, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 126– 154. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Zeitlin, Steven. ‘‘‘An Alchemy of Mind’: The Family Courtship Story.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 39, no. 1 (1980): 17–33; Zeitlin, Steven J., Amy J. Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker. A Celebration of American Family Folklore: Tales and Traditions from the Smithsonian Collection. Cambridge, MA: Yellow Moon Press, 1993 [1982].

Margaret R. Yocom Fans, Language of The language of fans refers to messages conveyed by manipulating the positions of hand-held fans, a form of communicative coding practiced in many cultures throughout modern history, but especially by upper- and middleclass European women during the Victorian era. Thought to have come to China from Korea sometime between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, hand fans are made in a variety of shapes from a wide assortment of materials. By the eighteenth century, they were considered essential accessories in a woman’s wardrobe in Europe and North America. Their use to encode non-verbal messages was common when social norms disallowed open conversation, particularly between men and women. One early system of fan language developed in Spain, where it consisted of about fifty different gestures. Its codification passed through a series of translations; by the time it was available in English, the list was reduced to thirty-three movements. Among these are carrying a fan in the right hand in front of the face to mean ‘‘Follow me’’; twirling it in the left hand to mean ‘‘We are watched’’; holding a shut fan to the heart to mean ‘‘You have won my love’’; resting a shut fan on the right eye to mean ‘‘When may I be allowed to see you?’’; and shutting a fully opened fan very slowly to mean ‘‘I promise to marry you.’’ Some researchers claim that common European use of ‘‘language of the fan’’ originated as a publicity ploy by a Parisian fan maker, Duvelleroy, who included a French translation of the truncated list of actions and their meanings with every fan that he sold. The use of fan gestures was sufficiently widespread in Europe during the eighteenth century that satirical artist William Hogarth included images of women conveying a variety of fan messages in his paintings and engravings. Despite the fact that young women’s academies of the Victorian era in London and Paris offered instruction in advanced fan-language technique, much of the communication made possible by a fan is easy enough to interpret; peeking over the edge of a fan to indicate coyness or snapping it closed to indicate refusal are actions that do not require instruction to interpret. Due in part to the increased availability of air conditioning, the use of hand fans has declined markedly in most parts of the world in recent decades. Anyone familiar with the language of fans today is unlikely to encounter many contemporaries with whom to share its nonverbal messages. Yet, interest in the topic has not completely disappeared. The fan itself as an art form is the subject of occasional exhibitions, and still appears from time to

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time in the performing arts, notably dance and opera. Classes in the language of fans are sometimes offered in summer camp programs for young girls, as a matter of historical and aesthetic interest; and the topic is revisited from time to time in the popular press through feature articles and in advertising material published by manufacturers and sellers of decorative fans. See also: Coding; Fashion; Flowers, Language of; Folk Dance; Gender; Girl Scouts/Girl Guides; Material Culture. References: Delorey, Barbara. ‘‘Creating an Image: The Evolution of 18th-Century Dress Beginning with our Bicentennial or Is There Life After Simplicity?’’ http:// www.18cnewenglandlife.org/18cnel/delorey1.htm (accessed August 9, 2008); ‘‘Girl Scouts Get the Low Down on Juliette Low.’’ In Family News (Winter) 6. Girl Scout Council of Cumberland Valley, Nashville, TN, 2004; ‘‘Have You Noticed?’’ Newsletter of Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing: Latin American Faculty News, June 2003. http:// www.istd.org/latin/facultynews/june2003/haveyounoticed.html (accessed August 10, 2008); Kwon, Nancy. ‘‘European, East Asian Fans on Exhibit.’’ iArt News, 2002. http:// www.artseoul.net/artnews/news02/e08asianfan.html (accessed August 10, 2008); McMath, Meredith Bean. Inquire Within: A How-to Guide of Victorian Entertainment. Purcellville, VA: Run, Rabbit, Run Productions, 2003; Rosenthal, Angela. 2001. ‘‘Unfolding Gender: Women and the ‘Secret’ Sign Language of Fans in Hogarth’s Work.’’ The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, eds. Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, 120–141. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001; ‘‘The Uses of Fans.’’ In Cool Breezes: Handheld Fans in Twentieth-Century American Folk Art, Fashion, and Advertising (Program Guide). Kansas City: Mid-American Arts Alliance and ExhibitsUSA, n.d.

Julia Arrants Farm Women’s Folklore Once called ‘‘farmer’s wives,’’ farm women have long been devalued as workers, even though their labor, usually unpaid, has been an essential part of most agricultural operations. Since men were traditionally considered heads of households, women usually gained access to land only through marriage. In the past century, however, an increasing number of North American women have farmed without men. In the United States, from frontier times to the present, women have taken part in the hard work of farming, including decision-making and bookkeeping. Depending on the season and mode of production, farming has required traditional skills and activities of the entire family, with men and women typically having interdependent spheres of work. Women’s roles have always been critical and multiple, ranging from fieldwork, animal husbandry, household management, food production and preservation, to child rearing, family and community building, and ‘‘making do’’—providing as much year-by-year economic stability as possible within such a risky enterprise. As a result, the productivity of farm women has resulted not only in a substantial body of lore, but also in a multitude of recognizable narratives, generated both within and without the group. Bawdy jokes about ‘‘the farmer’s daughter’’ can serve as an example of one type of lore promoted about women in agriculture, although most certainly not by farm women themselves. Rather, the experiences of farm women support personal narratives

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that emphasize strength in the face of adversity, reflections on the rewards and pitfalls of country life, stories of cleverness and industry, and a plethora of lore about ways to manage household and farmyard affairs: predicting weather; doing laundry; planting vegetable and flower gardens; nursing with herbs and other home remedies; and handling unruly animals, children, and men. Farm women often see themselves as the heroes in their stories, and rightly so. In the past, farm women often functioned as ‘‘petty entrepreneurs,’’ earning income from auxiliary enterprises, such as selling eggs, making butter, raising and selling flowers or fruit such as strawberries, or by boarding hunters or schoolteachers. This so-called ‘‘egg and butter money’’ might keep the farm running in lean times, or allow for extra comforts in more prosperous years. Farm women’s income was a fundamental, if invisible, part of the family budget. Women’s farm work has often included tending animals, especially cows and chickens. The significance of women as poultry raisers was demonstrated by the prevalence of cotton print bags for poultry feed from 1940– 1960. Poultry feed manufacturers hired New York fabric designers to create prints that would entice their women customers, who reused the bags for clothing and other household needs. The feed bags themselves became important items for exchange and sale. Women made up such a large part of their customer base that manufacturers also sponsored national feed bag sewing contests. Farm women often joined extension clubs, which taught and promoted programs on food safety, health, and other issues of special concern to women. Extension clubs also guaranteed regular and welcome social activity. In the United States, women’s farm labors began to shift in the early part of the twentieth century. Until then, even non-farm women in villages still raised their own chickens, pigs, cows, and vegetables in kitchen gardens, responsibilities that have become increasingly rare. In rural towns, as homes were modernized, women’s duties changed to emphasize their role as consumers rather than producers; in the countryside, women’s farm responsibilities became less socially valued. By the 1940s, farm women began to feel self-conscious about outdoor chores, often leaving field and tractor work to their husbands. In the past sixty years, the number of farms in the United States has declined from about 6 million to 2 million. Similarly, in Canada, farm numbers have steadily decreased over the last five decades, losing 55 percent of its farms between 1951 and 1991, and continuing to lose more than 10 percent during the last decade. Currently, as reproductive duties and other household chores have decreased, North American farm women have begun spending more time in the fields and barns, replacing other farmworkers. Conversely, farm women have for years taken off-farm work to finance costly health insurance and provide steady income for their families. There is a global trend toward the ‘‘feminization of agriculture.’’ For example, women have increasingly participated in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement of the past decade or so. CSAs consist of small agricultural operations that market a variety of produce directly to

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consumers, who generally purchase a ‘‘share.’’ The share system underwrites the risk involved in any agricultural venture in exchange for several months of fresh vegetables, fruits, and sometimes eggs, meats, flowers, or herbs. As women purchase shares from CSAs, another level of social reciprocity can develop from these local operations—recipe exchanges, potlucks, and the like—further contributing to the building of community infrastructure. Elsewhere in the world, women are also deeply involved in agriculture. In Mozambique, for example, for every 100 men in agriculture, there are 153 women. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, women grow 70 percent of all food for family and local consumption. Although there have been large differences worldwide in the lives of farm women, as women in agriculture strive to participate in a shifting marketplace, the era of globalization now begins to coalesce at least some of their economic and environmental concerns. See also: Gardens; Region: Sub-Saharan Africa; Sewing; Wage Work; Women’s Clubs; Women’s Work. References: Adams, Jane. ‘‘Farm Women, Class, and the Limits of Nostalgia.’’ Journal of Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 92, no. 4 (Winter 1999/2000): 325–48; Fairbanks, Carol, and Bergine Haakenson, eds. Writings of Farm Women, 1840–1940: An Anthology. New York: Garland Publications, 1990; Jones, Lu Ann. Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002; McMurry, Sally. From Sugar Camps to Star Barns: Rural Life and Landscape in a Western Pennsylvania Community. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001; Neth, Mary. Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; North Central Regional Center for Rural Development. ‘‘Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): Supporting Women and Communities.’’ Women in Agriculture Conference, April 6–7, 2006. http://www.ncrcrd.iastate.edu/projects/csa/womeni nag.pdf (accessed February 1, 2007); Schmidt, Kimberly D. ‘‘‘Sacred Farming’ or ‘Working Out’: The Negotiated Lives of Conservative Mennonite Farm Women.’’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 22, no. 1 (2001): 79–102; Van de Vorst, Charlotte. Making Ends Meet: Farm Women’s Work in Manitoba. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2003; Walker, Melissa, ed. Country Women Cope with Hard Times: A Collection of Oral Histories. Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004; Weber, Devra Anne. ‘‘Raiz Fuerte: Oral History and Mexicana Farmworkers.’’ Oral History Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (1989): 47–62.

Ruth Olson Fashion A popular style of dress, manners, and living prevailing in a culture or subculture, fashion can be understood as a practice of production and consumption as well as a form of material culture. In societies experiencing rapid change such as now prevails in the economic Northern Hemisphere, it can be conservative and retrogressive in its social effects. However, it can also offer its users, particularly women, opportunities to recognize their power to create while resisting domination. Fashion is not exclusively a modern Western practice. Fashion’s processes of comparison, emulation, and differentiation are also found in stable social settings. The archaeological record provides evidence that systematic changes in style have sporadically happened historically and across cultures,

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suggesting fashion has always been a part of the human experience. Researchers debate whether changing uses of ornamentation to indicate identity and social contrast can be defined as ‘‘fashion.’’ However, a more inclusive definition places emphasis on sociocultural and economic analysis rather than on any moralizing comparison of modern fashion’s supposed superficiality with traditional dress or costume’s supposed authenticity. In the past, scholarship on fashion defined exclusively as Western and capitalist was limited by its focus on psychological factors and social status. Without questioning the assumption that men’s clothing was outside of fashion codes, women were seen as the exclusive followers of fashion. Taken out of the context of patriarchy, a woman’s pursuit of fashion was viewed as an emotional abnormality in need of explanation, and/or as the display of her husband’s wealth and strivings for social status. Because of patriarchal obsessions with women’s appearance and homemaking functions, then, fashion ‘‘has served traditionally as the cultural sign of the feminine’’ (Benstock and Ferriss 1994: 4), passive and irrational. As consumer capitalism and practices of accumulation become more pronounced and permeate everyday life to a greater extent, the dynamics of fashion are complex, requiring more nuanced analysis and critique. Assuming that clothing and ornament found outside Western consumerist fashion systems are unchanging representations of historical practice overlooks the conscious choice to differentiate that people make in a globalizing world. In the economic South, dress may remain relatively stable in direct resistance to pressure from international capital. For Indigenous peoples, recovery of historic clothing, particularly if it has been subject to suppression by missionaries or colonial rulers, may be embraced as a marker of ‘‘authentic’’ identity. Only rarely, however, is this fashion completely unchanged from its precolonial forms. Newer functional and decorative elements may be borrowed or strategically deployed. A woman may wear Western trousers at home for comfort, and more traditional skirts and dresses to market when selling her wares to Western tourists, emphasizing the public and private contexts for materializing identity. On the other hand, conversion to conservative forms of Christianity or Islam may lead to rejection of precolonial dress on the grounds it is ‘‘backward’’ or ‘‘obscene.’’ Women bear the brunt of such perceptions: their dress becomes indicative of community piety and their bodies a site for moral debate. There is an important distinction between the actual everyday wear of ordinary people and the codification of national costumes during the era of nation building. Such costumes are invented traditions based on historical styles but are frozen, ritualized, and primarily used to legitimize the nationstate. Images of the half-clad Marianne of revolutionary France and the more respectable Britannica and Miss Canada symbolized collective yearnings while real women were largely disenfranchised. Typifying non-dominant peoples on the basis of costume was a projection of nationalist thinking onto colonized peoples; the resulting image of the Other as strange and exotic was then used to consolidate identity in the centers of North America and Europe. This logic exemplifies now-debunked theories of unilineal cultural evolution (evolutionary racism) wherein the wearing of fewer clothes,

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while tittilating, is equated with a lower level of cultural development or social evolution. More recently, fashion designers from the economic North have appropriated traditional folk dress for economic gain. Taken out of context, such clothing may simply figure in rapidly shifting fads. Their wearers, seeing them purely in aesthetic terms, remain ignorant of the local cultural codes embodied in the styles. Such appropriation may be well meaning: an item of clothing or jewelry such as a Palestinian scarf or Norse Pagan rune may be worn as a sign of political solidarity or spiritual identification by middleclass North American women. In fully capitalized societies where identities are strongly marked by commodified forms of dress, reflexivity has made fashion’s codes more nuanced and layered. While once it was possible for designers to dictate styles from above, now they often look to the urban folk culture of the street for inspiration. Young, creative women play on meanings already inherent to styles and items to construct a unique, distinctive look that resists their cooptation into the mainstream fashion system. A good example of this phenomenon is the Doc Marten: a comfort shoe originally made for postwar German women, its patented sole was used in men’s work boots in the United Kingdom by the 1960s. Soon after, disenfranchised White working-class young men appropriated the boot into a look intended to threaten the middle classes and non-White immigrants. In the 1970s, the punk movement picked up the Doc and gave it an international cachet of rebellion. Gay men wore Docs to perform masculinity, while grrrls—the progeny of the grunge movement—combined Docs with ultrafeminine items such as lace camisoles and skirts to confuse the codes of gender. Fashion design has long been a medium for talented and business-savvy women such as Coco Chanel and Donna Karan to succeed. But it can have wider-ranging effects. For example, the Freedom Quilting Bee, a group of poor, Black women in Wilcox County, Alabama, capitalized on the elite fashion for quilts and quilting designs in the 1960s to form a cooperative. They simultaneously supported the civil rights movement, stimulated economic growth in their community, raised members’ living standards, fostered interest in the art of quilting, and inspired other cooperatives. Similarly, Coast Salish knitters of southern Vancouver Island, mostly women, have produced Cowichan sweaters for more than a century. While their products are recognized around the world, the Aboriginal women who make them remain largely invisible. These resourceful women continue to provide for their families by knitting, but increasingly they are refusing to be exploited by buyers who purchase their goods cheaply and then sell them at inflated prices in urban Canada and the United States. See also: Folk Costume; Knitting; Material Culture; Quilting. References: Benstock, Shari, and Suzanne Ferriss, eds. On Fashion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984; Brydon, Anne, and Sandra Niessen, eds. Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational Body. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988; Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; Holland, Samantha. Alternative Femininities:

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Body, Age and Identity. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004; Palmer, Alexandra, ed. Fashion: A Canadian Perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Anne Brydon

Female Genital Cutting Female genital cutting (FGC) designates a range of customs that involve modifying, and/or removing external female genitalia for non-therapeutic purposes. Sometimes referred to as ‘‘female circumcision’’ or ‘‘female genital mutilation’’ (FGM), these practices are currently most prevalent in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and areas of Central and South America, although they have been recorded at various times throughout the world. Most girls who undergo FGC are between the ages of four and twelve, although performing the surgery on teenage women is not unheard of; the surgeon is usually a female elder with no medical training. Current estimates place the number of women worldwide who have undergone some form of FGC at between 100 and 160 million; statistics generally exclude girls who have undergone intersexual genital cutting because they were born with ambiguous genitalia. The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies FGC into four types, of which three are primary. In the least invasive, the prepuce or hood around the clitoris is removed. Most common in Muslim countries, this form is sometimes referred to as ‘‘Sunna circumcision’’ and is considered parallel with male circumcision, required of all Muslim men. A second form of FGC is excision, the removal of the clitoris and often parts of the labia minora. Clitoral removal can be the procedure’s goal, or a consequence of an improperly performed operation. A third form is infibulation, removal of the labia minora and sometimes part of the labia majora, with the remaining labia majora sewn together, leaving a vaginal opening that may be as small as the width of a matchstick. This type of FGC is sometimes called ‘‘Pharaonic circumcision’’ and is traditionally held to have been practiced in ancient Egypt. Women who are infibulated usually undergo circumcision and excision as well. Non-primary types of FGC include cauterization of the clitoris, and piercing or stretching of the clitoris and/or labia. Reasons/rationales for the custom of FGC vary. Practitioners cite hygiene, aesthetics, control of female sexuality, increased submissiveness and/or obedience to a husband, and/or insurance that the recipient will remain a virgin until marriage, thereby maintaining her family’s honor. In many cultures, FGC, as an integral part of puberty rites, marks a girl’s transition to womanhood. In others, including Kenya, Uganda, and some West African countries where a woman may be expected to prove her fertility by delivering a child before marriage, she may undergo FGC postpartum. FGC has received sharp criticism in the global North since the early twentieth century. Many view the practice as a brutal assault on girls that results in fear, pain, denial of sexual pleasure, lifelong suffering, and significant health consequences. The prevalence of AIDS in some areas where FGC is practiced heightens concerns about the transmission of HIV during the procedure. All

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forms of FGC can result in infection, cysts, abscesses, chronic pain, scar tissue, and increased risk of infertility. Excision permanently interferes with female sexual response and destroys a woman’s ability to achieve orgasm. Infibulation can result in incomplete elimination of urine and/or menses, leading to chronic infection and pain. Infibulated women must have the fistula (the opening left for drainage of urine and menses) forcibly enlarged for first sexual intercourse and for childbirth. In the cultures that practice infibulation, a woman’s labia are often resewn when her husband is away, after childbirth, or to heighten her husband’s sexual response. Numerous charities and educational outreach organizations work toward halting FGC through educational and legal means. Sweden outlawed all forms of FGC in 1982, the United States in 1996, and Canada in 1997; Mexico has no legislation concerning the practice. FGM is explicitly condemned in the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination Against Violence Against Women (1993), the Declaration and Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995), and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights and its Protocol on Women’s Rights (2003). Though outlawed for many years in locations such as Sudan, FGC continues to be widely practiced because laws are not enforced. Among countries and/or ethnic and cultural groups that perform FGC, attitudes are mixed. Some women and men condemn the custom. Increasingly, successful grassroots movements are working to change pro-FGC ideas. Their members may agree in part with outsiders’ criticisms, but insist that permanent change can come only from within, using indigenous terms and concepts, rather than from imposed foreign values. In Egypt, the reported death of a girl from a botched circumcision brought the topic out in the open for discussion. Publicizing an event normally kept hidden has helped people to question the practice. Most North Americans were unaware of FGC until Stephanie Walsh won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her photograph of a FGC rite in Kenya, although African American author Alice Walker explored the topic her 1992 novel Possessing the Secret of Joy. Those who support FGC argue for its supposed health benefits (although evidence does not indicate any medical benefit) and necessary role in the transition of girls to adulthood. Folklore often supports its continued practice. For example, some African peoples, such as the Igbo of Nigeria, believe that uncut women will conceive the children of spirits, rather than their husbands’, with dire repercussions for the community. Some argue that outsider assertions that excision destroys female sexual response are based upon inaccurate or ethnocentric understandings of human sexuality. Evidence suggests that change will take several generations. Reports abound of parents who condemn the practice, and forbid it for their daughters, only to find that grandparents or older community members have had the procedure performed in order to conform to cultural norms. Indeed, some who disapprove allow their daughters and granddaughters to undergo FGC out of fear that the girls will be considered aberrant non-adults and be stigmatized within their communities. Additionally, parents and grandparents are concerned that girls who do not undergo FGC will be unable to find a marriage partner within their local communities, and thus will eventually move far away.

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FGC is a social custom, not a religious practice and, as such, was commonly practiced in Anglo North America during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Though both male and female sexual impulses were considered immoral and offensive, women’s sexuality was seen as particularly dangerous; women were considered ideally asexual. Doctors sometimes prescribed excision (especially clitoridectomy) as a cure for masturbation, promiscuity, and nymphomania—uncontrollable female sexual desire—which could be diagnosed in women showing any sexual response or desire whatsoever. Indeed, as recently as the 1950s, physicians in Europe and North America used clitoridectomies to treat hysteria, epilepsy, mental disorders, depression, and lesbianism. Clitoridectomies and other forms of FGC are currently imposed on intersexed newborns—those born with genitals corresponding to both male and female binary norms, or with ambiguous genitals—in Europe and North America. In these cases, the adverse effects of FGC are complicated by the secrecy that invariably follows such operations; parents and physicians alike seek to conceal the facts of their surgery from children and adults. Further, the default location for gender assignment is often female, justified by the saying ‘‘You can make a hole, but you can’t build a pole’’ (Chase 2006: 302). Intersex activists oppose this procedure, arguing that sex-assignment operations should be performed only on adults, and only when they request assignment to one sex or the other. See also: Androgyny; Daughter; Folk Belief; Gender; Grandmother; Marriage; Sexuality; Transgender Folklore; Violence. References: ‘‘Broken Bodies, Broken Dreams: Violence Against Women Exposed.’’ n.d. http://brokendreams.wordpress.com/2007/01/18/female-genital-mutilation-part-2/ (accessed August 10, 2008); Chase, Cheryl. ‘‘Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism.’’ The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 300–314. New York: Routledge, 2006. Originally published in GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 189–211; Female Genital Cutting Education and Networking Project. n.d. http://www.fgmnetwork.org/index.php (accessed August 10, 2008); Moen, Elizabeth. ‘‘The Sexual Politics of Female Circumcision.’’ n.d. http://www.etext.org/Politics/Progressive.Sociologists/authors/Moen.Elizabeth/ The-sexual-politics-of-female-circumcision.EMoen (accessed August 10 2008); Prazak, Miroslava. ‘‘Introducing Alternative Rites of Passage.’’ Africa Today, vol. 53, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 19–40; Sexuality Education Resource Centre Manitoba. n.d. http://www.serc.mb.ca/ SERC/content/article/femaleGenitalCutting/view?market¼SP&topic¼WA&subject (accessed August 10, 2008); Slackman, Michael. ‘‘Voices Rise in Egypt to Shield Girls from an Old Tradition.’’ The New York Times, September 20, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/ 09/20/world/africa/20girls.html?ex¼1347940800&en¼05458b185d64b2fc&ei¼5090& partner¼rssuserland&emc¼rss (accessed August 10, 2008); World Health Organization. ‘‘World Health Organization Factsheet on Female Genital Mutilation.’’ n.d. http:// www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en/ (accessed December 23, 2007).

Theresa A. Vaughan Feminisms Folklore about feminism includes all discourses about feminism and feminists: the individuals and movements struggling against White capitalist heteropatriarchy at all levels—personal, institutional, and global. Feminist theorist bell hooks argues that ‘‘feminism is a movement to end sexism,

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sexist exploitation, and oppression,’’ and cautions that it is not ‘‘always and only about women seeking to be equal to be men,’’ nor is it ‘‘anti-male’’. Feminist perspectives rarely get popular attention, but when they do it is usually only one form, radical feminism, that is highlighted, albeit in a distorted mode. In fact, feminism draws upon a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, some of which are intrinsically women-centered, and others of which draw upon perspectives like liberalism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Before we can fully appreciate the folklore-related content of various forms of feminism, it is important to note that these philosophical orientations have similarities and differences. Liberal feminisms subscribe to ideas that most self-described social conservatives in North America would support. For example, they hold that reason and education are primary resources for improvement in the world; therefore, correcting misconceptions about women will improve their lot. Contemporary liberal feminists feel that the rights and privileges traditionally granted to men should be extended to women. They seek change through formal structures like politics, the law, and education, and their watchword is equality. Liberal feminists have certainly gained new opportunities for some women (mainly White and middle-class) as well as a more developed public consciousness about women’s inequality. However, liberal feminism lacks an analysis of the ways in which institutionalized (structurally ‘‘traditionalized’’) forms of inequality based, for example, on class, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality, are difficult to dislodge through reasoning alone. Further, liberal feminisms presume a strong distinction between the public and private spaces of women and men, without necessarily recognizing the ways in which those spaces interact. Socialist and Marxist feminisms are particularly valuable for their attention to those interactions. They locate the economy as a primary source of women’s oppression, and are particularly attentive to the ways in which labor is divided into men’s waged production outside the home and women’s unpaid reproduction inside it. They see the traditional family household as propping up an exploitative capitalist system by reproducing wage-earner men and caregiver women, while supporting the wage-earning potential of men by making the care of men and children the responsibility of women. Socialist and Marxist feminisms describe how women serve as a reserve army of labor to be called upon when they are needed (for example, in wartime) to work in production, but to be sent back to the home once men are again available. They also note that women’s work—traditionally unpaid or lower paid because of the fiction that women work only for extras and that there is a male breadwinner at home to provide for children—also serves to keep wages low overall, particularly when women move into hitherto male-dominated professions. This division of labor serves capitalism by setting wage-earning women against wage-earning men rather than uniting them against an economic system that exploits both. Radical feminists have critiqued socialist/Marxist feminism’s reliance upon traditional family structures; they see the oppression of women as fundamental to society, as a model for understanding all other forms of oppression. Not surprisingly, they have been critical of concepts of gender—the

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sociocultural deployment of sex—as well as noting the apparently biological inequities between women and men. Thus, reproduction itself—making babies—is seen by some radical feminists as the source of women’s oppression. Their solution, however, is not to eliminate heterosexual reproduction altogether, but to value mothering as a central institution in society. They also note, contra liberal feminism, that the state (as much as individual men) is the source of violence against women and other forms of male control over female sexuality. Anti-racist feminisms challenge the notion that differences between women and men are fundamental sources of oppression, noting that the state and individuals also foster inequities between people of Color and others through immigration policies and race-specific notions of appropriate behavior between the sexes. They have been particularly critical of the absence of women of Color and their concerns from feminist agendas and feminist organizations alike. Psychoanalytic feminisms suggest that women need to better understand both the political and the personal dimensions of their lives though an awareness of the role of the unconscious in shaping experience and knowledge. Many see psychoanalysis’s famous foreparent, Sigmund Freud, not as a male chauvinist asserting fundamental female and male differences, but instead as a cultural anthropologist giving an account of the ways in which patriarchal society processes women to be subordinate through an arcane but effective system of unconscious indoctrination. Psychoanalytic feminisms concentrate in positive ways upon mothering, sexual pleasure, and femininity. More recent feminisms challenge other viewpoints for proffering big theories and seeking objectivity and universality, which they see as illusory. They view all humans in culture as socially constructed, multiply identified, and inherently contradictory. This perspective, sometimes called ‘‘postfeminism,’’ has been criticized from other feminist positions as a patriarchal ploy to ensure that now that women have gained some measure of progress against oppression, they are returned to a space wherein claims about gender, patriarchy, and women have no basis. Others feel that postmodern feminisms ask that feminism itself become self-critical rather than relying upon its critics to define it: feminism must become more attentive to what we can and cannot know about the world, and what kinds of claims we can and cannot make about ourselves and others. In the first wave of feminism, which began in Canada and the United States in the early nineteenth century, feminists sought access to education and to political processes including, but not limited to, the vote. Even during this period of strenuous political and social activism, feminists deployed humor among other tools for change. In 1914, feminists from Manitoba, the first Canadian province to give women the vote (1916), went to the Legislative Assembly asking to be enfranchised. They were refused. The next day, they presented a show at a local theater, featuring a ‘‘mock Parliament’’ and ‘‘a humble delegation of men, pleading for the vote,’’ only to learn that ‘‘nice men don’t want the vote’’ (Grant, 432). The performance was not only a successful fundraiser for the cause of women’s suffrage, it also ‘‘set the

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whole province laughing at the old conception of chivalry . . . as a substitute for common, old-fashioned justice’’ (ibid., 433). Feminism’s dour reputation blossomed during its so-called second wave, beginning in Canada and the United States in the 1960s and focusing indepth on the social and cultural inequities women face. The source of this manifestly erroneous belief in humorless feminists may be in attempts by purveyors of sexism to excuse their behavior and words by suggesting that they were merely joking. For example, sexual harassers often try to thus explain away their displaying posters of naked women or telling jokes that stereotype women as stupid, hypersexualized, and/or incompetent. Feminists’ refusal to accept these actions as humor, recognizing their underlying controlling and othering purposes, finds a parallel in the current widespread acceptance in North America that racist, and to a lesser extent classist, ableist, and homophobic behaviors and words are not only unacceptable, but also, under some circumstances, illegal. Countering such sexist acts and words, feminist humor and other forms of its folklore involve confronting negative aspects of people’s characters and personalities that they can change, such as hypocrisy and racism, but is often misunderstood because it is fundamentally ironic. Although the third wave of feminism in the 1990s and later has actively rejected the stereotype of feminism as hyperserious and feminists as selfobsessed, their discourse has had little impact on popular and media discourse. One stereotype implicit in this idea is the belief that feminism is fundamentally limited to endless discussion of trivial matters, that it is purely academic. The mainstream media in Canada and the United States foster the idea that feminists are all talk and no action, often by publicizing feminist concerns but not feminist solutions. They offer the impression that we are ivory-tower dreamers, unable to deal with reality and action. Some newcomers to feminism, particularly those who identify as third wavers, are concerned that so much time and energy has gone into the efforts of feminists to define their differences. They often suggest that all feminists should agree on a series of aims that we would sequentially fight and win. This idea may seem initially attractive, yet feminists also need to recognize that women and other marginalized groups have different experiences and varying needs across the world. What may seem crucial for White middle-class women in Toronto or Atlanta may seem outlandish to Palestinian women living in occupied Gaza. Multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminisms draw attention in particular to the concerns of folk who have traditionally been marginalized not only by mainstream cultures and politics in the economic North, but also by feminism itself. ‘‘How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?’’ ‘‘That’s not funny!’’

Some Euro North Americans believe that feminists lack a sense of humor. Regina Barreca recalls her own folklore about feminists: I thought being a feminist meant I couldn’t wear lipstick or crave men with small behinds. I thought that ‘‘feminist’’ meant I couldn’t send Peanuts cards to guys who I was afraid wouldn’t call back, or buy stockings with seams.

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I thought ‘‘feminist’’ meant no more steamy flirtations or prolonged shopping trips. I thought it meant braided hair and short nails, maybe mandatory tofu. I certainly associated feminism with humorless, dour, and—worst of all— unblinkingly earnest women (1991: 174).

The stereotypes Barreca alludes to remain current, especially in mainstream media, but fail to do justice to the multiplicity of feminists and feminisms. ‘‘How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?’’ ‘‘Eleven. One to screw in the bulb, and ten to form a consciousness-raising group to discuss the sexist implications of the word ‘screw.’’’

The stereotype that feminists are anti-sex—indeed, that we would rather discuss sex than have sex—has a multiplicity of implications for feminists and feminism. Regina Barreca’s ‘‘boyfriend, relatives, professors, and other disreputable sources’’ told her that feminists were ambitious, sharp-tongued, a little too smart for their own good. They told me that only women who couldn’t get laid got political. They told me what was perhaps the biggest and most interesting lie of all: that independence and ambition were unattractive in a woman (1991: 174).

The idea that only lesbians are feminists—and further, that women are lesbians only because we can’t persuade a man to have sex with us and/or that lesbian sex isn’t sex because no penis is involved—simultaneously dismisses both the political and personal aspects of feminism. American evangelist Pat Robertson’s definition of feminists and feminism—articulated in a fund-raising letter attacking the proposed Iowa Equal Rights Initiative, but often said to have been put forth at the 1992 Republican Convention—is now an item of folklore: ‘‘Feminism is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians’’ (see Moi 2006). Such disdain for politically progressive ideas: families comprising something other than a male, a female, 2.5 children, and a dog; reproductive choice; religions other than Protestant Christianity; and any sexuality other than hetero, is not shared by feminists. Many appropriate his definition to indicate that we celebrate all in feminism that anti-feminists spurn. ‘‘How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?’’ ‘‘One, to write a thesis.’’

Without suggesting any disrespect to privileged academic feminists in Euro North America, it must be recognized that feminism is a worldwide, multilevel movement, with multiple theories, analyses, and perspectives. Even within North America, multiple feminisms flourish. Aboriginal and Chicana feminisms, for example, focus on developing anti-colonialist as well as anti-patriarchal knowledge, recognizing the need for making space for women to use their original languages and to have a voice that is not dependent upon the ability to communicate in the mainstream language—English. And Black feminists or womanists (a term that has its origin in Alice Walker’s 1983 collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens:

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Womanist Prose), compelled by a different history in North America, have developed a literature distinct from those of second-wave liberal, Marxist, existentialist, and psychoanalytic feminisms; the radical force of womanist concerns is conveyed by Walker’s phrase, ‘‘Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.’’ Feminism is a philosophy, a method, a politics, a worldview, and a way of life by no means limited to women, the academy, or a particular people, place, or time; nor does it lack in action or practical concepts for change— what is lacking is mainstream reports and support of those alternatives. See also: Activism; Class; Consciousness Raising; Folklore About Women; Gender; Humor; Joke; Politics; Race; Sexism; Sexuality; Wage Work; Women’s Folklore; Women’s Work. References: Barreca, Regina. They Used To Call Me Snow White . . . But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor. New York: Penguin Books, 1991; Bhavnani, KumKum, ed. Feminism and ‘‘Race.’’ London: Oxford University Press, 2001; Cotera, Maria. ‘‘Feminism: The Chicana and Anglo Versions: A Historical Analysis.’’ In Twice a Minority: Mexican American Women, ed. Margarita B. Melville, 217–234. St. Louis: C. V. Mosley Co., 1980; Grant, Diane. ‘‘Nellie McClung and the Redlight Theatre.’’ Canadian Women’s Issues. Vol. 1: Strong Voices, eds. Ruth Roach Pierson et al., 430–434. Toronto: James Lorimer and Co., 1993; Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘Folklore.’’ In Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, ed. Lorraine Code, 211–212. New York: Routledge, 2000; Hernandez, Daisy, and Bushra Rehman. Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. New York: Seal Press, 2002; hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000; Locke, Liz. ‘‘Folklore and Feminism.’’ Folklore Feminists Communication, 1997. http://www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/ffc.html (accessed August 10, 2008); Moi, Toril. ‘‘‘I Am Not a Feminist, But . . .’: How Feminism Became the F-Word.’’ PMLA vol. 121, no. 5 (October 2006): 1735–1741; Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Third edition. Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 2002 [1981]; Ouellette, Grace J. M. W. The Fourth World: An Indigenous Perspective on Feminism in Aboriginal Women’s Activism. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2002; Shakhovtseva, Elena. ‘‘‘The Heart of Darkness’ in a Multicolored World: The Color Purple by Alice Walker as a Womanist Text.’’ 2000. http://spintongues.vladivostok.com/shakhovtseva2.htm (accessed February 12, 2005); Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Reprint edition. New York: Harvest Books (Harcourt), 2003 [1983].

Pauline Greenhill and Liz Locke Festival Festivals are special events, almost always involving revelry and merrymaking, that celebrate an event, person, or specific interest important to a body of like-minded individuals. Thousands of festivals are held by North Americans each year, and many of them celebrate women and aspects of women’s and girls’ lives. From film and music festivals, to regional cuisine and quilting festivals, and saints days’ processions, and from the International Yukon Storytelling Festival in Whitehorse, to the Midwest Mime and Clown Festival in Indiana, to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and Semana Santa (Holy Week) among the Raramuri (Tarahumara) people of northwest Mexico, festivals are many-splendored undertakings requiring the time, energy, dedication, and money of many individuals.

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Festivals provide entertainment and serve the social needs of the groups who identify with whatever is being feted. They allow people who may have only a single thing in common—a love of chocolate, perhaps, or of motorcycles, or of a saint—to feel a sense of belonging and of self-celebration, but they also mark the boundaries between those who identify from an insider’s perspective with a festival’s theme and activities and those who come from outside to observe. With few exceptions, festivals simultaneously educate outsiders and bring communities together, all in a celebratory context in which everyone can enjoy themselves. Festivals are generally classified as either calendrical or interest-specific. Calendrical festivals are occasions for celebration that recur at regular calendar intervals. Religious festivals usually fall into this category. For example, a ten-day pan-Mexican celebration of the Virgin Mary begins every December 3 and culminates on December 12, the day of her appearance to Juan Diego on Tepayac in 1531. While tourists are offered services and goods to satisfy their needs during the festival, the core of the celebration is experienced only by Mexican people for whom the Virgen de Guadalupe is a marker of Catholic religious identity, since the miracle was not only that the Virgin appeared but that she appeared to a Native person. An interest-specific festival is generally an organized matrix of performances constructed around a single idea, person, event, or item of material or oral culture enacted to celebrate or promote a region, folk group, sport, story, occupation, skill, art, musical genre, food, local hero, political cause, or historical period, to name a few. Governments, private institutions, community groups, activist groups, and businesses often sponsor festivals in this category. Increasingly aware of the economic and social issues provoked by cultural tourism, folklorists and anthropologists are producing ever more debate and scholarship regarding festival production and presentation. Most commercially marketed cultural festivals exhibit tensions between the sponsor’s need for economic success and its desire to represent the specific folk group’s identity in ways that satisfy its members. In a commercial festival designed largely for the pleasure of outsiders, the intended audience dictates what happens; in a festival intended to be community-centered, those attending will not differ greatly from those planning or performing at the event. Publicly funded folklife festivals, sponsored and organized by local, state, federal, and not-for-profit organizations in the United States, tend to mediate between commercial and in-group events with performances, discussions, demonstrations, and talks specifically designed to explain, educate, and showcase cultural traditions for a mixture of audiences. Although a festival is technically distinct from a fair, carnival, rodeo, parade, heritage day, or other community celebration, any such celebration that includes a performance stage is likely to be described as a festival by visitors, performers, and organizers alike. Fairs composed mainly of competitions and demonstrations commonly host a festival stage for musical performances, storytelling, and dance associated with the community. Conversely, performance festivals often include workshops, exhibits, live demonstrations, and craft sales and displays. Agricultural festivals usually

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feature livestock, vegetable produce, music, and cooking competitions. The International Rice Festival of Crowley, Louisiana, for example, hosts a frog jump, a football game, the crowning of a queen and king, musical stages, and a livestock show. The Southern Womyn’s Music Festival in Unadilla, Georgia, includes workshops, craftswomen, and a pet show. Festivals can be housed during a weekend in temporary tents, placed in a rural field, use existing city buildings over the course of a month, or fall anywhere between in terms of location and duration. Many festivals, particularly those associated with religious traditions, incorporate some form of procession. At the week-long vela (harvest festival) held in Jalapa, Mexico, to honor Saint Sebastian, for example, a young woman is crowned queen by the mayor at the culmination of a procession of women in long, hand-embroidered dresses. On the second day of the vela, women on foot and men on horseback process to the Chapel of Saint Sebastian, where the women leave offerings of flowers and food at the feet of his statue. Religious festivals, also known as holidays (‘‘holy days’’), may have relatively few organized performances, consisting instead of a primary activity presented by a religious leader and selected participants. Pageants in festivals at Christmas, Eid, Purim, and other holy days often enlist children as the main performers. Such presentations are not necessarily rehearsed; rather, members of a congregation or religious group view them as affirmations of community beliefs. Such pageants function to signify and create inclusion and thus community. Outsiders may be welcomed, but they will see an event presented on the community’s own terms, not one designed for their entertainment. The holding of festivals predates written records. Euro North American festivals owe much to their Greek and Roman predecessors. Since ancient times, festivals have functioned not only as community entertainments, but as rites of reversal, mechanisms for the controlled release of pent-up frustration, anger, and potential rebellion by encouraging temporary subversions and reversals of the normative social order. The ancient Athenian Thesmophoria (Festival of Demeter), a three-day festival at which citizen-wives slept in makeshift huts on the Pnyx Hill, for example, rigorously excluded men. It was probably the only time in which upper-class Athenian women were allowed to take time away from their homes and families. In a society notoriously famous for its radical gender bipolarity, ‘‘For this short period, the men were displaced, and the women took over their position at the core of the city’s civic life’’ (Blundell, 164). And in honor of the legendary fifthcentury Argive warrior-poet Telesilla, who led Argos’s young women to victory against Spartan invaders, the Argives celebrated Hybristika (Festival of Impudence) on the anniversary of the battle, putting the women into men’s tunics and cloaks and the men in women’s dresses and head-coverings (Lefkowitz and Fant, 129). The Roman Empire had its many public pageants, games, and gladiatorial contests, often called spectacles, to distract and entertain its citizens. But it also celebrated the annual preplanting Festival of Bona Dea (Good Goddess) at the homes of the city’s generals, praetors, and consuls, who had to go

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away while their wives and other women took over to celebrate at night ‘‘with great amounts of festivity in the revels and music as well’’ (Lefkowitz and Fant, 292–293). Later, medieval European Catholics celebrated the bawdy and irreverent Feast of Fools in late December at which ‘‘license [was] permitted . . . because it was customary of old among the Pagans that during this month slaves and serving-maids should have a sort of liberty given them, and should be put upon an equality with their masters, in celebrating a common festivity’’ (Thurston). In this and similar festivals, a beggar might be crowned king for the day, an ass might be ‘‘worshipped’’ in church, and the rich would serve food and give coins to their less fortunate neighbors. Today, festivals continue to provide opportunities for people to poke fun at, even to renounce for a limited time, otherwise sacrosanct cultural values. Frequently these involve cross-dressing in a subversion of gendered norms. Dia de los Locos (Day of the Crazies) in Mexico, for instance, is a contemporary rite of reversal. During this annual celebration of spring, men not only dress in women’s clothing but fully disguise themselves as women and girls. At the Farmer’s Ball in Asheville, North Carolina, for reasons no longer remembered, men traditionally wear skirts to the contra dance. And at the Festival of Saint Sebastian mentioned above, at dusk the women climb the saints’ chapel’s bell tower to pelt the men below with fruit and party favors ranging from T-shirts to soft household gadgets such as Tupperware in a rite that some interpret as an act of their assertion as the matriarchs of the community. During Cajun Mardi Gras in Louisiana, rural women turned this centuries’ old tradition on its head to create their own courirs (runs), during which they mask, costume, and ‘‘cut up’’ in order to receive money and ingredients for community gumbo dinners. Contemporary women’s festivals often accommodate discussion groups and venting sessions as part of this ‘‘safety valve’’ function of festival. The three-day Women’s Voices Festival at Bean Town Ranch in Plantagenet, Ontario, celebrated in July since 1997, for example, provides a festival setting in which women may explore issues especially important to them through the arts, crafts, music, and comedy. Women’s roles in public festivals tend to fall into three broad categories, the importance of which have waxed and waned over time. Historically, women and girls prepared foods considered significant to community identity, sometimes demonstrating how edibles were made, and almost always selling refreshments to hungry crowds. Women produced and sold handicrafts, particularly needlework. And women were enlisted as symbols of fertility—a pregnant woman would walk at the head of an agricultural parade, or the newest mother and child would portray the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus in a performance. In most regions of North America, women representing fertility have been a smaller part of festival history than in Europe; where such roles are found in contemporary North America, they tend to be associated with a European or Latin American precedent. After World War II, women’s overt roles as fertility symbols all but disappeared in the festival context until the rise of women’s festivals in the 1970s. Among the reasons for this near-extinction were the increase in

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women of reproductive age working outside the home, and therefore distanced from the site most commonly associated with motherhood; the rise of second-wave feminism, which encouraged women to think of themselves as more than reproductively fertile; and concerns over associations between traditional folk symbols and the abuses of folklore perpetrated by Nazi publicists. In Christian communities, doctrinal differences between Catholic and Protestant Christian theologies and between Pagan and Christian beliefs also determined when and where women may celebrate themselves or be celebrated as fertility symbols. Many Jewish women have revived the monthly Rosh Chodesh (new moon) ceremony, traditionally a women’s celebration. The reclamation of the Lambda symbol (l) at women’s festivals focused on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender cultures is but one example of renewed interest in women’s fertility symbolism in the festival context. Modern uses of women’s fertility symbolism, however, contrast radically with previous historical and cultural assumptions in that they now connote assertions of female autonomy in matters of sexuality and fertility. Workshops, storytelling about births, and fertility rites revived and revised from pre-Christian goddess worship are some examples of the ways in which many women’s festivals currently celebrate female fertility. Women are increasingly conspicuous as both festival headliners and as organizers and administrators. The Kerrville Folk Festival and the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife, to take two examples, have female directors and board members. The first U.S. National Folk Festival was set up by Sarah Gertrude Knott in 1934. In Canada, the Winnipeg Folk Festival and other such events are coordinated largely through the efforts of female administrators, and women run many smaller community-focused festivals. At the oldest and perhaps best-known women’s event in the United States, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, the governing board and all volunteer workers are female; and Canadian musician Sarah McLaughlin, who ran Lilith Fair from 1997–1999, did so on behalf of women in the pop, rock, and folk music industries. There has been a recent proliferation of women’s film festivals run by and for women, although not exclusively. These include the International Women’s Film Festival held in St. John’s, Newfoundland, each October; the Madcat Women’s Film Festival, held in San Francisco’s Bay Area in September; and Women’s Video and Visionarte, a lesbian film festival held in Mexico City each August. The Pinkster Festival, which began in New York’s Hudson Valley in 1737 as a market festival for enslaved Africans in Dutch society, today acknowledges the oppression of slavery in New York and the triumph over it. African American women lead the festival’s storytelling activities to honor to the matriarchs of African history. And at the Essence (magazine) Music Festival, held in New Orleans in July, seminars such as ‘‘Take Back the Music’’ offer forums for the discussion of the sexual exploitation of Black and other women in the music industry. Each May, Canada holds a wide variety of Asian Month Heritage Festivals, which may include Japanese tea ceremonies, Indian classical dance performances, Chinese folk dancing, Hmong stand-up comedy, Filipino poetry;

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Vietnamese puppetry, Korean musical performances, and Taiwanese storytelling, to name a few genres on display. The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center of San Francisco has since 1998 held its annual six-week-long United States of Asian America Festival, which showcases the talents of Bay Area cultural performers in theater, film, literature, dance, and the visual arts. Mexico City’s annual Puerta de las Americas (‘‘Gateway to the Americas’’) Festival hosts Mexican, Japanese, and Korean cultural events at dozens of venues throughout the city. Some festivals, such as Native American powwows in Canada and the United States, and festivals celebrating the Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim faiths, may have certain gender-specific activities. Men may be excluded from watching particular dances performed by women and vice versa, or participants may be prohibited from taking a role designated to another gender in a religious ceremony. But for the most part, there are few festival activities that actively discourage women’s participation. Rather than being confined to women-only presentations and performances, as was so often the case in the past, women have become integral to activities across the wide array of genres that festivals present. At the September Pamplonada in Mexico, for example, young women jump the barriers set up in the streets to run with the bulls—and with the men. In the southern United States, competitions at old-time and bluegrass music festival, traditionally the purview of White males, show marked increases in female competitors. In 1935, Galax, Virginia’s Old-time Fiddlers Convention had a female winner only in the dulcimer competition. In 2006, women placed in the top-ten ranking in all nineteen categories, excepting Dobro, mandolin, and bluegrass banjo. Even Morris dancing, a performance art exclusive to men since the Victorian era, has begun to see a resurgence of interest from female performers. Canada and the United States host several all-female Morris dance teams or ‘‘sides’’ in addition to mixed-gender sides. Likewise, male participation has begun to increase in festival genres previously considered female domains: beauty and popularity pageants. The crowning of a king and queen, or the bestowing of some other honorary title—‘‘Miss Bunny’’ at the Rabbit Festival in Louisiana, for example—now embraces male as well as female participants. Although there are still some festivals where the queens—usually women aged sixteen to twenty-four— reign alone, men are playing greater roles. And some festivals present reversals of the traditional female beauty pageant by auctioning male ‘‘slaves’’ to raise money for charities and political causes, or holding beauty contests in which men in bathing suits saunter across stages for the delectation of female spectators. Such competitions tend to be tongue-in-cheek amusements. In some cases, fund-raising festivals that previously relied on a popular vote or on a panel of judges’ adjudication to crown its competition winners have moved to crowning ‘‘queen’’ the woman who has raised the most money. Recently, North America has seen a rise in beauty contest parodies in festival contexts. The No-Regrets Majorettes and the Menopausal Mafia, among others, dress themselves as beauty queens to march in parades. In Jackson, Mississippi, the Sweet Potato Queens, dressed in large red wigs, fishnet

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stockings, and sequined costumes fitted with padded hips, breasts, and buttocks, marched in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade; these middle-aged women mounted a flatbed truck and threw potatoes at the audience. Humorous gender bending reverses not only stereotypes about female beauty and passivity, but explicitly parodies associations of youthful beauty with the crowning of queens at small-town festivals. Women’s festival participation today covers the gamut from audience to administration. Where their roles were once limited to the arenas of fertility, food, and handicrafts, women are now winning string-band competitions, whooping it up at jam sessions, and leading thoughtful discussions and workshops on everything from breastfeeding to social justice in the festival context. See also: Activism; Beauty Contest; Cross-Dressing; Film; Folklife; Folk Music and Folksong; Foodways; Gender; Lilith Fair; Material Culture; Processional Performance; Saints; Sexuality; Storytelling; Virgin of Guadalupe; Women’s Music Festivals; Women Warriors. References: Babcock, Barbara, ed. The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978; Blundell, Sue. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995; Browne, Jill Conner. God Save the Sweet Potato Queens. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001; Davis, Susan G. Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986; Demott, Tom. ‘‘Jalapa Honors its Saint, Visitors Join the Fun.’’ Festivals in Jalapa, Mexico. n.d. http://www.transitionsabroad.com/publications/magazine/ 0005/festivals_in_jalapa.shtml (accessed August 10, 2008); Falassi, Alessandro, ed. Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987; Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Maureen B. Fant. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A SourceBook in Translation. Second edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992 [1982]; Scullard, Howard Hayes. Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1981; Smith, Melanie, and Kathryn Forest. ‘‘Enhancing Vitality or Compromising Integrity? Festivals, Tourism, and the Complexities of Performing Culture.’’ Festivals, Tourism and Social Change, eds. David Picard and Mike Robinson, 133–151. Clevedon, North Somerset: Channel View Publications, 2006; Thurston, Herbert. ‘‘Feast of Fools.’’ In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06132a.htm (accessed August 10, 2008); Ware, Carolyn E. Mardi Gras: Cajun Women and Mardi Gras: Reading the Rules Backward. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007; Wilson, Joe. Folk Festivals: A Handbook for Organization and Management. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983; ‘‘Women’s Voices Festival.’’ Plantagenet, Ontario, n.d. http://guides.hotel book.com/sisp/index.htmfx¼event&event_id¼27757 (accessed August 10, 2008).

Wendy Welch Fieldwork Fieldwork is a research methodology that centers on personal encounters between researchers and the people they consult. It includes many practices, including interviewing, participating in events, observing performances, recording and photographing performances, holding telephone and e-mail conversations, and discussing research texts with consultants. In short, fieldwork is the work of attention to almost every interaction, gesture, statement, and detail of the cultural world under study. It usually involves researchers traveling to the home areas of their consultants. Above

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all, fieldwork is an intimate activity that can often results in friendships and webs of responsibilities that last a lifetime. Women folklore fieldworkers have contributed to the growth of the discipline since it was in its infancy in the late 1880s. Since then, women fieldworkers’ perspectives have brought to the discipline new materials and groups to study as well as new ways of conducting fieldwork and theorizing the results of their labors in the field. Ideological differences in feminist theoretical perspectives notwithstanding, feminist folklore fieldworkers display genuine interest and commitment to women’s causes and concerns. They employ feminist theories and approaches in choosing topics, observing, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting fieldwork data to understand and highlight the experiences, positions, roles, and other social conditions of the people whose traditions they study. Women folklorists have long been conducting fieldwork and adding to the knowledge of cultural traditions. When folk music collecting began in earnest in New England in the 1920s, for example, women led the way, both as singers and collectors. Although men held positions in North America’s academic Departments of Folklore and at the Library of Congress, there were several dedicated, self-taught folk music collectors who assiduously traveled the roads of New England looking for singers, reciters, and other musicians. Looking back on her 1940s fieldwork, collector and musician Eloise Hubbard Linscott (1897–1978) told journalist Carol Knapton: ‘‘Lots of things I’ve done haven’t been very ladylike. [I didn’t plan on a career but] housework irritates me so. I’d save a nickel at a time from the household budget. I never asked my husband for a cent. When I had enough saved up in the tin box and my husband didn’t need the car, I’d map out a route, one way going and another way coming back. I’ve been all over New England . . . to record and write down tunes, words, and dance steps’’ (Needham MA Times, November 11, 1976).

Though laced with irony, the comments of early folksong collectors Fannie Hardy Eckstorm and Mary Winslow Smith in their 1927 Minstrelsy of Maine: Folksongs and Ballads of the Woods and the Coast show both the dedication and the challenges that early women folklore collectors faced: The editors of this volume fully realized that collecting these songs was a man’s job. We knew very well that we could not go into lumber camps and the forecastles of coasting schooners . . . where the unprinted, and too often unprintable, songs of the kind we must seek originate and flourish. Had a man been competent to perform the task expressed an intention of preserving these songs, we should not have undertaken the work. But no man appeared steeped in balladry and versed in folk-music, understanding the hearts of the people and wise to interpret what he found in them. The old songs were fast vanishing.. . . So we volunteered for a service for which we professed no special fitness, and soon we found that it was far from being a forlorn hope. (vii)

Folklorists had long collected materials from women, but both men and women collectors perceived them as regional or occupational, for example,

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rather than in gendered terms, that is, as folklore performed by women that centered on women’s concerns. A significant shift in perspective came as feminist folklorists in the early 1970s began to conduct fieldwork that viewed the folklore women perform as women’s folklore and urged others to do likewise. Women fieldworkers maintain that it is insufficient to simply collect traditional material from women and call it ‘‘women’s folklore’’; instead, fieldwork must be conducted with the goal of focusing on or including women’s traditions in meaningful ways. Fieldworkers provide information on the full context of the collected traditions: how and when do women tradition bearers perform their traditions? How have they learned their traditions and how do they teach others? Who may or may not be present when they are performed? What other materials are in their repertoires? What is the history of a traditional performance? Having such information about traditional items and their contexts—including the identities of performers and audiences, interaction styles, performance modes, and physical locations—provides a better understanding of what a tradition means to the individuals or groups involved, how it fits in with major issues in their lives, and why they may have chosen to perform it at this time. Biographical information about research participants, such as age, gender, occupation, and other aspects of personal identity, helps to give a fuller picture of traditional materials and their roles in performers’ lives. Folklore fieldworkers follow a code of ethics outlined by the American Folklore Society (AFS), which includes an obligation to explain the research project fully, to ensure the privacy of consultants who want anonymity, to conduct all interactions with honesty, and to share the collected materials with consultants. Because women fieldworkers recognize the multiple aspects of women’s folklore, they often use multidisciplinary approaches. And because women fieldworkers tend to be intrinsically motivated by their research interests, many have conducted fieldwork with little or no institutional funding. Often, fieldworkers prefer relatively lengthy stays among their research consultants to help better understand a tradition’s multiple social contexts. When Kathy Neustadt (1992) conducted her multiple-year field study of a Rhode Island clambake, for example, she worked alongside her consultants at each stage of the event. While in the field, folklorists write down their observations, record performances (audio and video), photograph cultural details, participate in events, and, in general, meticulously document their field site, carefully labeling their recordings and photographs, transcribing their recordings, and translating texts as necessary. Throughout their fieldwork and research, women fieldworkers usually maintain a feminist viewpoint, that is, they seek to deconstruct previous paradigms constructed by male-only models and also to provide detailed studies on the experiences of women. They ask such questions as how the collected materials express women’s identities and their relationships with each other—women and men; what the practice of these materials shows about women and the cultures they live in; and how the materials serve to reinforce restricted images of women, subvert the status quo, or negotiate

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change. Women’s fieldwork provides data on women’s experiences that challenge and then rewrite gendered stereotypes and other erroneous cultural concepts. Carol Mitchell (1978), for example, examined joking traditions that have been the focus of other, primarily male, scholars and their male joke-tellers; but she asked about the differences between male and female joke-tellers. And Robbie Johnson (1972) looked at traditions previously ignored—the verbal art of a Texas madam—and discovered how one women used stories and jokes to control her customers and support her women workers. African American and Chicana fieldworkers have used their fieldwork and analysis to simultaneously challenge their own and their consultants’ marginalization on the bases of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, as well as gender. Zora Neale Hurston is particularly well-known not only for exposing racism but also for blending genres of fiction and memoir with traditional tales in ways that illuminated her society as well as her texts. Women’s folklore fieldwork and scholarship has both changed prevailing theories and established new ones. Richard Bauman’s performance-centered theory, for example, has been central to Folklore Studies since the 1970s, but as Tamara Burk points out, the theory is based on research with male singers and storytellers who perform solo. Burk’s essay on collaborative storytelling among women (1996) added a new perspective to performance theory and encouraged other fieldworkers to do the same. Feminist fieldworkers have also introduced new field methodologies that have resulted in more inclusive ways to analyze and interpret field data. Elaine Lawless developed reciprocal ethnography, a practice whereby fieldworkers and consultants work with each other during each step of the research process, including analysis and interpretation. Because they want their consultants’ knowledge and viewpoints to be a major part of their research texts, women fieldworkers rewrite contemporary ethnographic practices by including ample selections of their consultants’ voices in their publications. Some reciprocal ethnography experiments have included blends of ethnographic and creative writing. Gender and marital status are always factors in fieldwork, and women fieldworkers may encounter resistance or face repeated scrutiny in their field sites. Many female performers may be reluctant to perform for anyone but other women, especially if the material is personal or bawdy. Thus, in all-female get-togethers, women fieldworkers can obtain different materials than can their male counterparts, and often note varying genres and performance modes. Unmarried women conducting fieldwork in male-centered societies may encounter uncooperative community members, and sometimes danger. On the other hand, married fieldworkers who have children, for example, may find it easier to establish rapport with married women consultants who also have children. In her study, Ellen Lewin (1995) discovered that lesbian mothers identified more closely with other mothers, heterosexual or homosexual, than they did with single lesbians such as herself. Fieldwork experiences affect not only those being studied but also those conducting the research, often instilling a new awareness in both parties of the limitations and benefits of their social roles. Women fieldworkers develop confidence in their research abilities. And since feminist folklore

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studies give interlocutors the opportunity to express their views, they may feel a new worth in both themselves and their traditions. Many women develop lifelong friendships with their field consultants, and report personal satisfaction and professional growth from long-term associations with consultants who are often as passionate about their traditional materials as the fieldworkers. Often, feminist fieldworkers give back to the communities they study by establishing cultural programs, working gratis for local museums and historical societies, and sometimes becoming social and political advocates for the women they study. Much more folklore fieldwork remains to be done in areas where, for example, women have crossed occupational gender barriers—among construction workers, firefighters, commercial truck drivers, taxi drivers, medical doctors, and professional wrestlers. Today’s women folklorists are increasingly studying such populations. See also: Ballad; Feminisms; Folk Music and Folksong; Joke; Storytelling; Tradition; Tradition-Bearer; Women’s Folklore. References: Bourke, Angela. ‘‘More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 160–182. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Burk, Tamara. ‘‘Collaborative Group Performance Among Three Generations of Women.’’ Women and Language, vol. 19, no. 1 (1996): 3–8; Cant u, Norma E., and Najera-Ramirez, Olga, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Collins, Camilla A., ed. Folklore Fieldwork: Sex, Sexuality, and Gender. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1990; Golde, Peggy, ed. Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences. Second edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986; Hollis, Susan Tower, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, eds. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Hurston, Zora Neale. Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States. Compiled in the late 1920s. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001; Johnson, Robbie Davis. ‘‘Folklore and Women: A Social Interactional Analysis of the Folklore of a Texas Madam.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 86, no. 341 (1972): 211–224; Lawless, Elaine J., ed. Holy Women, Wholly Women: Sharing Ministries of Wholeness Through Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993; Lewin, Ellen. ‘‘Writing Lesbian Ethnography.’’ Women Writing Culture, eds. Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, 322–335. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Mitchell, Carol. ‘‘Hostility and Aggression toward Males in Female Joke Telling.’’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1978): 19– 23; Neustadt, Kathy. Clambake: A History and Celebration of an American Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1992; Panini, M. N., ed. From Their Female Eye: Accounts of Women Fieldworkers Studying Own Communities. Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation, 1991; Radner, Joan Newlon, ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Sawin, Patricia. Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth Through Her Songs and Stories. Logan: Utah State University, 2004; Yocom, Margaret R. ‘‘‘Awful Real’: Dolls and Development in Rangeley, Maine.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 126–159. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Zainab Jerret and Margaret R. Yocom Film Film here includes folkloristic films and videos about women, the folklore of women in feminist and feature films, and women who make folkloristic films and videos.

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Perhaps the best known early and influential female filmmaker to use the theories and methods associated with folkloristics is Maya Deren, whose avant-garde Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) includes a shot of Deren in a domestic space staring through a glass into something beyond or within herself. Her reflexive gaze foreshadows the postmodern turn to reflexivity in folkloristics, and many of her films touch on folklore topics. In 1947, she received a Guggenheim fellowship to conduct research on the rituals of Haitian Vodun. Her resultant work includes a book, audio recordings, and Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985), a posthumously edited film made from footage shot from 1947 to 1954. While Deren was recognized for her experimental films, ethnodocumentary filmmaker Margaret Mead wanted to capture the ethos of a culture that could not be adequately conveyed without recording its visual dimension. Her Trance and Dance in Bali (1952), made with Gregory Bateson and Jane Belo, is especially noteworthy for folklorists; it records a ritual as a complete event, an approach that would not become theoretically significant in folklore scholarship until much later. Another early female filmmaker was the controversial Leni Riefenstahl, who staged the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremburg using thirty-six cameras carefully angled to capture the action for Triumph of the Will (1935). Less well-known are her contributions to the ‘‘mountain films,’’ intended to capture the ‘‘spirit of the folk’’ during the Weimar cinema era that preceded the Third Reich. The romantic images of mountain people in a towering landscape were meant to highlight their allegedly natural purity via a somewhat simplistic notion of ‘‘man against nature,’’ thereby embodying conceptions about tradition and folklore as rural and nationalistic. Most early folkloristic films tend to document folklore perceived as an entity, evidenced, for example, by Bess Lomax Hawes’ The Georgia Sea Island Singers (1974/1963), made with Edmund Carpenter and Alan Lomax. Staged against a dark background and shot outside of the usual performance context, the performers sing four songs for posterity (Hawes in Sherman 1998: 67). Using films to document textual data in a new way came about, in part, because of a theoretical shift to emphasize context. Hawes changed her style for Pizza-Pizza Daddy-O (1969), which documents twelve African American girls performing eight singing, handclapping, and line-dance songs on a Los Angeles playground. Its textual bias is revealed by editing that cuts out most of the girls’ interaction between games, but the filmmaker’s move toward event studies is clear. Also in 1969, Sharon Sherman used an event model for Tales of the Supernatural (1970), which includes a group of teenagers telling tales that, years later, would be labeled urban legends. In a sense, her film is a test of theories about narrating as process, interaction, and event. In 1983, Sherman again emphasized event over entity with Passover: A Celebration, a video that focuses on a Seder (ritualized dinner) and family folklore. Many other female filmmakers have documented folklore topics. Judy Peiser, with Bill Ferris, created Fannie Bell Chapman, Gospel Singer, an intimate portrait of a faith healer and singer in Centerville, Mississippi (1975). Twenty-five years later, she produced All Day and All Night:

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Memories from Beale Street Musicians (1990), a slice of blues performances and remembrances in Memphis, Tennessee. Folklorists Elaine Lawless and Betsy Peterson (with filmmaker John Winninger) made Joy Unspeakable in 1981, a video about Oneness Pentecostals in southern Indiana; and Elaine Eff revealed the artistry of The Screen Painters (1988) as they decorated the screen doors of homes in Baltimore, Maryland. Marjorie Hunt and Paul Wagner documented the community of The Stone Carvers (the 1985 Academy Award Winner for Outstanding Short Documentary), the men who built the National Cathedral in Washington, DC; the film highlights the significance of ethnicity, occupation, and family. Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) depicts gay, cross-dressing African American and Latino men who attend balls in New York City dressed as they might in the White middle-class that has rejected them; they live in ‘‘houses’’ (informal families), have their own lingo, and attempt to be ‘‘real’’ (to dress and walk so as to copy their mainstream counterparts as closely as possible). Livingston’s documentary calls attention to itself as a film while presenting a performative subject. Susan Levitas’s The Music District (1996) portrays four styles of music played by men in the neighborhoods of Washington, DC: a rhythm-and-blues quartet, a go-go group, a brass ‘‘shout’’ band, and a jubilee-style gospel quartet. Feminist films often document women’s folklore that has been devalued or disregarded. Much of women’s art, for example, is folk art. In The Painted Bride (1990), Amanda Dargan and Susan Slyomovics present a henna artist who creates elaborate designs on the hands and feet of a brideto-be in the mehndi tradition of India and Pakistan. With her partner Irving Saraf, Allie Light produced films that honor two female visionary artists: Grandma’s Bottle Village: The Art of Tressa Prisbrey (1982) and The Angel that Stands By Me: Minnie Evans’ Paintings (1983). Pat Ferrero is wellknown for documenting the personal significance of quiltmaking in Quilts in Women’s Lives (1980); she used quilts to tell the story of women’s social history in the nineteenth century in Hearts and Hands (1987). As a symbolic visual representation, quilts are ubiquitous in feminist films. For example, Elizabeth Barret’s Quilting Women (1976) shows the special artistry and affinity Appalchian women enjoy at a quilting bee; and Sharon Sherman’s Kathleen Ware, Quiltmaker (1979) examines the relationship between a quiltmaker’s repertoire and personality, and quilting and economics. The quilt is both literal and symbolic in feature films such as How to Make an American Quilt (1995), which weaves together the stories of women who create a quilt for a wedding present. Women who make films tend to concentrate on art in women’s everyday lives. One such film, made by a non-folklorist but widely screened in Women’s Studies, Film Studies, and Folklore courses, is Clotheslines (1981) by Roberta Cantow. How women use laundry as expressive behavior is brought to the screen in a series of images and voice-overs that reveal the social implications of doing the wash. By women and about women, Clotheslines is a self-examination of women’s lives. Another look at women’s concerns, Union Maids (1976), by Julia Reichart, James Klein, and Miles Mogulescu, juxtaposes on-camera interviews with archival footage as

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three women discuss the roles of female workers and union organizers, thereby highlighting both feminist issues and women’s folk history. In a similar vein, Jenny Cool draws upon personal-experience narratives to examine the pressures society places on women in a commuter culture; in their housing development outside of Los Angeles, women discuss the destructive effects of suburban living in Home Economics: A Documentary of Suburbia (1994). As already noted, women also document the folklore of men. Sharon Sherman looks at a chainsaw carver in Spirits in the Wood (1991), and at a male garage/funk/pop music band in Kid Shoes (2001). Likewise, there are many men’s film topics of interest to or about women. For example, Tom Davenport’s When My Work Is Over: The Life and Stories of Miss Louise Anderson, 1921–1994 (2000) portrays a talented African American storyteller; John Cohen’s 1981 film Sara and Maybelle documents the founding sisters-in-law of country music’s influential Carter Family; and Les Blank, with Mauren Gosling, folklorist Chris Simon, and Susan Kell, study GapToothed Women (1987), which explores the feminist issue of what beauty means for the members of a folk group who share only two things in common: being female and having gapped teeth. As a rule, feminist film attempts to disentangle images of women as objects for the gaze of men from their agency as women. When more women gained access to film schools in the late 1960s, they began to claim a sense of self through film. Documenting the lives of ordinary women whose stories had been ignored by the still-male-dominated film industry, their early works served especially well as vehicles for consciousness raising. As feminist filmmakers stretched the limits of documentary film practice by personalizing their work, often presenting their tales through experimental editing, Women Make Movies, a multicultural, multiracial, non-profit media arts organization (and today a major distributor of women’s films) was born. Filmmakers Elisha Miranda, Sofia Quintero, and Sonia Gonzalez have since founded Chica Luna (‘‘Girl Moon’’) Productions, a company dedicated to challenging stereotypical images of women of Color. Their projects include F-Word (the F is for ‘‘feminism’’), a multimedia project in New York City that trains young women (sixteen to twentyfive years of age) ‘‘across the racial, sexual, economic, and linguistic spectrum’’ in the filmmaking arts and sciences of screenwriting, directing, producing, cinematography, editing, and working with actors; their selected films are shown at Chica Luna’s annual short film festival (Rice, 50–51). Reflexivity, a strategy that acknowledges the filmmaker’s presence in the film itself, frequently prevails in documentaries made by women (Ruby 1982; Sherman 1986). For Not a Love Story (1981), director Bonnie Klein and ex-stripper Linda Lee Tracy conduct fieldwork in the pornography industry to create a journey narrative of their responses, demonstrating again that, for women, the personal is political. As a result of this experience, Tracy became a filmmaker. For Zulay, Facing the 21st Century (1993), Argentine filmmakers Jorge and Mabel Preloran develop a relationship with Zulay, an Otavale~ na, who first shows them rituals, dances, and other activities in her region of Ecuador, and then comes to visit them several times in Los Angeles. The film becomes a dialogue as Mabel and Zulay, more and more deeply connected as women and as immigrants, take over,

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and Zulay herself begins to edit the film. In Stranger with a Camera (2000), Elizabeth Barret examines the killing of a Canadian filmmaker in Kentucky in 1967; she questions her home community as both a member and as a filmmaker, weaving her personal story into the substance of the film. In feature films, domesticity, sexuality, ritual, and celebration continue to inform films about women. As stories that bring these elements of women’s lives together, many focus on weddings, as do Steel Magnolias (1989) and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). Feature films may also employ biographical studies of women. For example, Songcatcher (2000) bases its story loosely on the life of folksong collector Olive Dame Campbell. Prey for Rock ’n Roll (2003) draws upon a play written by Cheri Lovedog, a tattoo artist, rock singer, and songwriter from Los Angeles. As lead actor and front person for Clam Dandy, actress Gina Gershon sings Lovedog’s songs written during the 1980s heyday of punk rock. We watch as her ‘‘chick band’’ tries to ‘‘make it’’ while the seedy side of rock ‘n’ roll comes to the forefront, as do tattooing as a folk art and rock bands as folk groups. This semiautobiographical feature film is certainly a reflexive enterprise for Lovedog, but Gershon becomes reflexive as well when she makes a television documentary series about touring with a band while promoting the film. Feature films often stereotype women as either dangerous or weak. Witch figures appear repeatedly, from The Wizard of Oz (1939) to The Witches of Eastwick (1987) to Bewitched (2005). Women and girls are frequently characterized by mainstream film as damsels in distress; the woman-in-jeopardy plot is commonplace, but especially typical of animated films based on folktales, as in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Cinderella (1950). The smart woman also makes appearances in feature films. In Candyman (1992), for example, a female graduate student conducts research on the combined urban legends of ‘‘Bloody Mary’’ and ‘‘The Hooked-Arm Man,’’ a figure who has scared teenagers in lovers’ lanes for decades. In the past, women directed films but did not shoot them; today, with advances in digital technologies, the camera is often in the hands of a woman. And more educational film facilities are available. Appalshop, for instance, makes films about Appalachia; the University of Oregon Folklore Program trains students in how to make films about folklore subjects; and a number of summer institutes offer film and videomaking courses. From films and videos about such traditional topics as folk dancing, midwifery, and weaving to those that examine Neo-Pagan folklore, drum circles, hot-air balloon enthusiasts, and topless dancers, the topics women choose to document are personal, political, and constantly evolving. See also: Beauty; Body Modification and Adornment; Consciousness Raising; Family Folklore; Fieldwork; Folk Art; Folk Group; Gullah Women’s Folklore; Handclapping Games; Henna Art/Mehndi; Jump-Rope Rhymes; Laundry; Legend, Urban/ Contemporary; Mass Media; Personal-Experience Narrative; Popular Culture; Quiltmaking; Wedding; Women’s Movement. References: Erens, Patricia. ‘‘Women’s Documentary Filmmaking: The Personal is Political.’’ New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal, 554–65. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988; ———. ed. Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Georges, Robert A. ‘‘Toward an

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Understanding of Storytelling Events.’’ Journal of American Folklore 82 (1969): 313–28; Juhasz, Alexandra J., ed. Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film And Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001; Kaplan, Anne E., ed. Feminism and Film. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Mulvey, Laura. ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’’ In Movies and Methods, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols, 303–315. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985; Rice, LaVon. ‘‘Mujeres Making Movies: Three Latinas band to change media and the arts.’’ Colorlines (July/August 2007): 50–52; Rich, B. Ruby. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998; Ruby, Jay, ed. A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982; Sherman, Sharon R. ‘‘That’s How the Seder Looks’’: A Fieldwork Account of Videotaping Family Folklore. Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 23, no. 401 (1986): 53–70; ———. Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video, and Culture. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998; Women Make Movies. n.d. http://www.wmm.com.

Sharon R. Sherman First Nations of North America In most Indigenous societies of North America, the role of women is complementary in nature but equal in importance to that of men. Female power, wisdom, and labor are all necessary to maintain the balance and harmony that characterize Aboriginal life. Women often play an essential role in the origin and creation stories of many First Nations. In the Iroquois account, creation is set in motion by a woman who falls from the Sky World onto a turtle’s back. She suggests to the animals who come to her aid that if they can find some dirt, she will cause it to grow into the Earth. When one of them succeeds in bringing up a small amount of soil from the bottom of the ocean, she walks around it until the Earth is formed. For the Hopi, a Pueblo people of the southwest, it was two female spirits who first created the animals, and then Spider Woman who created pairs of men and women to people the Earth. Women are honored in most creation stories as the origin of life. Even when they are not the prime movers, they may be present and actively involved in creation. For the Navajo (Dine), it was First Man and First Woman who brought the world into being, and who discovered Changing Woman, the ancestor of the Navajo people. For the Acoma, a Pueblo people of New Mexico, the world begins with the birth of two sisters in a dark, underground place. Guided by a spirit who teaches them to pray and sing, they bring stones, seeds, and animal images upward to the light and together they complete the work of creation. It is through women that sacred ceremonies as well as means of sustenance are given to the people. White Buffalo Woman brought the Sioux seven great gifts, which include the Sun Dance, the sweat lodge, and the calumet (pipe). She taught them how to live and pray. Selu gave the Cherokee corn and beans, and in her death, taught them how to cultivate both. And it was a woman, the wife of Bull-By-Himself, who helped the Blackfoot men learn how to plant tobacco. Women’s role in sustaining life is recognized not only in myth, but also in traditional practices. Women of the village tribes of the Upper Missouri

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River—Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara—performed public ceremonies before the planting of corn to ensure a good harvest. Cayuga women had a series of song-and-dance rituals for the success of their corn and bean crops. And in 1826, Henry R. Schoolcraft described a former Ojibwe practice in which, after the corn was planted, a woman walked around the field at night, naked, to ensure a successful crop. Among the Tigarmiut of northern Alaska, women played an essential role in the success of the whale hunt. In preparation for a coming hunt, the captain’s wife took a newly made sealskin float to her husband’s boat, where, singing her special songs, she passed it under the bow. Once the whale was sighted, she accompanied her husband to the launching of the boat, positioning herself so that the boat would touch her before it was taken to open water. She then lay down on the ice where the boat had been launched, facing inland. The crew paddled the boat back toward her, the harpooner ready as if to strike. But as they came close, he dipped the harpoon in the water, and the boat turned seaward. The captain’s wife returned home without looking back. There, for the entire period of the hunt, she was to do nothing but sit quietly, so that, just as she was motionless, the whale might not resist and give himself to the hunters. It was recognized that her behavior would affect the outcome of the hunt. Woman’s power is inherent; it comes from within, from her very nature as a woman. Perhaps the most respected—even feared—of woman’s powers is menstrual power. Nearly all First Nations used to isolate young girls during menarche, using this time to instruct them in their roles as women. Numerous taboos were associated with menstrual isolation, and care was taken that a girl not touch herself, or be in the presence of men’s weapons and sacred objects, so powerful was she during this time. Among the Tlingit, for example, a girl of high rank could be isolated for as long as two years; she could drink water only sparingly and through a bone tube; she had to wear a special head covering so that she could not look up at the sky; and she had certain dietary restrictions during this time. Among most First Nations, however, this isolation lasted only four days, at the end of which a feast was given by the family. Navajo girls are still honored with a four-day ceremony known as Kinaalda, in which the girl publicly makes the transition to womanhood by learning to grind corn and make a perfect alkaan, or corn cake, and has her body and spirit molded into a more beautiful form. On the final day of the ceremony, her power is so great that she shares it with others by blessing them one by one. Pregnancy is also a time of great power and innumerable taboos. Pregnant women were sometimes secluded from the rest of the community because of their potentially harmful power. Among the Ojibwe, expectant mothers were told not to roll over in bed, not to look at a corpse or a deformed person, and not to lie around, but to do hard work. Food taboos included turtle, porcupine, berries, and entrails. Violations of any of these prohibitions would have physical or emotional effects on the child. Women’s power might also be acquired either in a dream or by receiving it from someone who possessed that power. These powers are most often seen in medicine women, who have knowledge of specific herbs or

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treatments and are sought by tribal members for their healing powers. These women know precisely where to go to find the medicine needed, and how to use the medicine for which they have power. One medicine woman of great power was Essie Parrish, a Kashaya Pomo of California who died in 1979. At the age of eleven, she dreamed her power and song to heal people and used them both, along with ritual sucking, to draw out sickness. Later, she became leader and dreamer of the Bole Maru, the dream dance of the Pomo. Some women who have power are afraid to use it because it is greater than they are. Those who have power, any power at all, do not advertise it, do not speak of it, and are often in awe of it. It is only when they use that power that others become aware of it. Respect for power remains one of the essential marks of the North American Aboriginal person. Women could also be conduits of power for their husbands. The Mandan as well as other nations of the northern plains practiced ritual sexual intercourse, by which either spiritual power or membership in men’s societies could be transferred from an older man to the woman’s husband. Women were also important in the ceremonial life of Aboriginal people. For the Blackfoot, the opening of most sacred bundles required the participation of the bundle owner’s wife. Furthermore, the Blackfoot Sun Dance had to be vowed and given by a holy woman, that is, one who had always been faithful to her husband. Among most First Nations, women’s role was distinct from that of men. They were responsible for the lodge, which they usually owned. They gathered and prepared food. They collected—and sometimes chopped—firewood. The fields and agricultural pursuits were generally their domain. They also scraped and prepared hides, a difficult job made easier because it was a communal work. Women can be portrayed as facing inward, toward the camp or village circle; men faced outward, to the world beyond. Hunting, warfare, and politics were their domain. It was a balance not always evident to outsiders, but one necessary to the well-being and continuance of the people. Women and men each fulfilled essential roles in the life of the community. In the political realm, men may have had the most visible and active role, but that is not to say that women were silent. Among the Iroquois, a matrilineal society, the clan mothers could select and depose chiefs. Women also had their own council which served to advise the chiefs, and they could influence a decision on going to war by withholding necessary supplies. The Cherokee had their Beloved Women, such as Nancy Ward (ca. 1738– 1822 or 1824), who advocated for the Cherokee to stop selling their land to Whites, and whose proven wisdom and experience earned a dominant role in community affairs and council decisions for Cherokee women. A Blackfoot story tells of Napi, the Creator-Trickster, and his wife Old Woman, who were making some decisions about how humans would live. ‘‘Well,’’ said Napi, ‘‘I am to have the first say in everything.’’ ‘‘Fine,’’ replied Old Woman, ‘‘as long as I have the second say.’’ And that how it has been ever since; women have the final say. Or as Paula Dove Jennings (NianticNaragansett) has expressed it, it is right for men to stand in the forefront, and it is right for women to stand behind men, but it is right so that they can tell them where to go (The Native Americans: Northeast 1994).

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Stories of women who distinguished themselves in battle are found in many Aboriginal groups. It was not unusual for women to accompany war parties, but it was rare, and often by accident, that a woman participated in a battle. The daughter of Na-nong-ga-bee, an Ojibwe chief of Lac Courte Oreilles in Wisconsin, had accompanied her father and her brother to the signing of the Treaty of 1854. On the way home, they were ambushed by the Sioux. Both men were killed, but the daughter picked up her father’s rifle and killed and scalped two of the enemy. On her return to La Pointe, she was honored as a warrior. She married and lived until 1919. The Piegan warrior woman Running Eagle led many war parties to avenge her husband’s death at the hands of the Crow. She herself was killed leading a horse-stealing raid against the Flatheads. A woman’s role at the center of tribal life made her the bearer of culture, and in this role, she also created objects that were both useful and beautiful. At various times in almost all Aboriginal societies, she made and decorated clothing, pottery or baskets, mats or rugs. Like Spider Woman, Navajo women still weave rugs, Pueblo women still make pottery, and one only has to see a powwow to know that women of the First Nations are still making beautiful clothing, remain powerful in their dance, and continue to share in the work of creation. See also: Herbs; Initiation; Menarche Stories; Menstruation; Myth Studies; Politics; Pregnancy; Ritual; Tradition-Bearer; Warrior Women. References: American Indians, The. 21 vols. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1992– 96; Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz, eds. American Indian Myths and Legends. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984; Hilger, M. Inez. Chippewa Child Life and Its Cultural Background. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1992; Kehoe, Alice B. ‘‘The Function of Ceremonial Sexual Intercourse among the Northern Plains Indians.’’ The Plains Anthropologist, vol. 15, no. 3 (1970): 99–103; Mason, Philip P. The Literary Voyager or Musseniegun. Michigan State University Press, 1962; Native Americans, The: Nations of the Northeast. Dir. John Borden and George Burdeau. Turner Broadcasting Corporation, 1994; Peters, Virginia Bergman. Women of the Earth Lodges: Tribal Life on the Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995; Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998; Rainey, Froelich G. ‘‘The Whale Hunters of Tigara.’’ Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 41, part 2 (1947): 231–283; Sturtevant, William C., gen. ed. Handbook of North American Indians, vols. 5–15. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978–2004; Wissler, Clark, and D. C. Duvall, eds. Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Theresa Schenck Flowers, Language of The language of flowers refers to meanings attached to different types of flowers, primarily during the Victorian era. With their beautiful forms and sweet smells, flowers have been appreciated by all cultures that encounter them. They are mentioned in some of the earliest writings of humankind, and their images appear on pottery and other extant art from the earliest eras. Flowers have been valued for their beauty and perfume, and sometimes for their medicinal properties. During medieval times in Europe, flowers were commonly used to flavor both food and drink.

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Historically, it has been common to associate certain flowers with symbolic meanings. For example, in North America today, it is common to associate roses with love. That symbolism is further elaborated by color value: red roses symbolize passion, white roses a pure and chaste love, and yellow roses symbolize friendship. In France, chrysanthemums are associated with death, and any hostess would be shocked to receive them at a dinner party. Lilies are celebratory at Easter and grim at funerals; the French exchange liliesof-the-valley on May Day. At perhaps no time, however, was flower symbolism as highly elaborated as it was during Queen Victoria’s reign in England. In the mid- to late-1800s, numerous books were written on the meanings associated with flowers. One of the most popular, published in 1885 and still reprinted today, is The Language of Flowers by Kate Greenaway. Codes for understanding the language of flowers were usually presented in books of etiquette and proper social and business behavior. All well-comported middle- and upper-class women were aware of flower symbolism and its use in social interaction. One could send a message to a friend or lover through careful choice of flower types in a bouquet. This era saw a number of covert ways of expressing sentiment—more direct means of communication were considered in poor taste, or otherwise socially prohibited. The Victorians also had an elaborate language for the use of hand-held fans and for the disposition of stamps on envelopes. Flower meanings include examples such as these: bachelor button for celibacy; calendula for joy; forget-me-not for true love; gardenia for secret love; purple hyacinth for sorrow or apology; larkspur for fickleness; orange blossom for wisdom; snapdragon for deception; sweet pea for departure; and zinnia for thoughts of friends. Finality was bequeathed to relationships with a bouquet of wilted flowers, a very clear statement of displeasure and loss of affection. Appropriate flowers to convey an intended message were gathered into bouquets known as ‘‘tussie-mussies’’ and exchanged as gifts. Students of Victorian culture continue to disseminate information on the language of flowers, although it must be said that the use of this language is quite rare today. Still, it has made its way into North American popular culture and remains there, enlivened by etiquette writers such as Judith Martin, a syndicated columnist known as Miss Manners. See also: Coding; Gardens; Gender; Language of Fans; Popular Culture; Pottery; Tradition. References: Greenaway, Kate. The Language of Flowers. New York: Dover Reprint, 1993 [1885]; Laufer, Geraldine Adamich, and Ockenga, Starr. Tussie-Mussies: The Victorian Art of Expressing Yourself in the Language of Flowers. New York: Workman Publishing, 1993; Robinson, Nugent. Collier’s Cyclopedia of Commercial and Social Information and Treasury of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. New York: P. F. Collier, 1892.

Theresa A. Vaughan Folk Art Folk art has multiple meanings dependent on context and use. For the purposes of this entry, ‘‘folk art’’ will be used to refer to those traditional arts falling under the category of material culture, as opposed to

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performance, beliefs, knowledge, etc. The term ‘‘folk’’ embodies the collective, communal, and traditionally social aspects of creative expression, while ‘‘art’’ alludes to the aesthetic, symbolic, solitary, and imaginative spheres of artistic practice. ‘‘Folk’’ coupled with ‘‘art’’ offers the broadest sweep of cultural and aesthetic conventions corresponding to individual or group creative sensibilities, subject to the forces of tradition as well as catalysts for change. Folk art defined as a process emphasizes the dynamics of creativity and the transformative power of artistic action performed in a cultural context. Such a flexible definition highlights the sociocultural interplay among layers of artistic transmission and preservation, religious beliefs, ritual enactments, local aesthetic systems, and creative invention. During the early Renaissance, art conceptually separated from the cluster of folk arts, popular arts, and craft. The latter were considered subordinate to ‘‘fine art,’’ and a majority of them were associated with domestically produced ‘‘women’s work.’’ Thus, women’s creative activities were doubly segregated in terms of space and importance. Although women are among some of the most prolific and innovative folk artists, particularly in the field of textile production, they often play a secondary role to male artists or, in the commercial domain, to men acting as purveyors for the marketing and distribution of folk art objects. Both male and female artists are active in the traditional areas of non-commercial, culturally based folk arts, but within this category, the domestic arts (for example, spinning, weaving, basketry, sewing, cooking, baking, and family photography) are still more likely to be considered typical of women’s creative efforts. In the past, many academics, particularly art historians, judged folk art to be fixed and static representations of societal values, created by untutored individuals with little choice but replication, who performed automatically, or unquestioningly, within the constraints of unchanging traditions. Nevertheless, due to folk art’s evident resilience and adaptability, a few scholars, especially folklorists using a performance theory or ethnography of speaking perspective, looked beyond ‘‘instinctual expressions’’ and ‘‘dying traditions’’ to identify a different dynamic at work: change, which they regarded as a creative stimulus rather than as an agent of annihilation or extinction. Proponents of this view further suggest that traditional art forms and cultural realities simultaneously feed into each other in a round of reciprocal stimulation and creation. This attitude is more consistent with the inventiveness and diversity characteristic of folk art; it recognizes the innate human desire for creative expression channeled through history and tradition into a vibrant aesthetic of the everyday. Discussion about differences among folk art categories is less productive in the long run than is an examination of creative behavior in cultural contexts. Such terms as ‘‘outsider art’’ with its subsets of visionary, na€ive, and self-taught artists, as well as ‘‘peasant,’’ ‘‘popular,’’ ‘‘ethnic and tourist,’’ ‘‘vernacular,’’ ‘‘primitive,’’ and ‘‘traditional’’ arts, tend to be more useful for classification and analysis. Maintaining a focus on the dimensions and energies of the creative process avoids the pitfalls of such limiting boundaries in order to minimize categorical distance for the sake of relationship and meaning. There are several genres that fall under folk art in its most inclusive sense.

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The primary ones are painting, pottery, textile arts, carving, sculpture, basketry, furniture, jewelry, foodways, and environmental art (for example, yard installations, shrines, and buildings). Some of these are historically allied with women’s creativity, while others are crossovers that both contemporary male and female artists practice. For instance, the Lopez family of wood carvers from C ordova, New Mexico, is indicative of a trend wherein daughters and granddaughters join sons and grandsons to perpetuate family carving traditions. In traditional rural communities, men and women sandwiched their art-making between the all-consuming chores that were their livelihood, embroidering at night or sculpting during rest breaks. For others, like Navajo weavers, art was their main occupation, and women dominated the field. Painting is one of the more idiosyncratic of expressive media. For this reason, it is also the most problematic folk art genre. Folklorists tend to position aesthetic actions relative to key social values and communal traditions rather than identify them with eccentric fringe or marginal elements. Painting often leads to highly individualistic creations, but if viewed in relation to historical and sociocultural contexts, then a framework exists for judging creativity and innovation in cultural terms, that is, within specific rules and boundaries. It also helps, as in the case of Anna Mary Robertson Moses, ‘‘Grandma Moses,’’ when iconography, symbolism, and imagery are inspired by local scenes and traditions. The term ‘‘memory painting’’ refers to the way a folk artist channels the past into the present by reactivating memories through form, color, and image. The biographies of other folk artists attest to similar circumstances: a background of continuous employment, even hard labor, transmuted into ceaseless creative activities upon retirement. For instance, the Finnish folk painter Tyyne Esko was a single parent who embroidered her children’s clothing as a creative antidote to the persistent health problems and intolerable poverty of a harsh working life. Upon compulsory retirement due to back trouble and severe allergies, she diverted her creative energy into the production of more than 250 paintings, many of which depict themes connected to her own stories of privation and neglect exacerbated by blatant governmental prejudice and patriarchal bureaucratic disregard. Other folk artists created their work as a form of self-therapy. For example, Theora Hamblett, a Southern artist, painted childhood scenes as well, but used her art to sublimate emotions stemming from a personal history of family trauma. She was a driven artist who claimed that she could paint any subject any day of the week, excepting Wednesdays, which she reserved for dreams and visions. The work of Navajo painter Sybil Yazzie and Pablita Velarde, a painter from New Mexico’s Santa Clara Pueblo, exemplifies the ‘‘naturalistic style’’ of Native American painting prior to the 1960s. Images of ceremonies, dances, reservation life, and material culture, rendered in a characteristic two-dimensional style, were emblematic of certain expectations applied to a Native American ‘‘aesthetic’’ resulting from the promotion of southwestern tourist or ethnic arts beginning in the 1930s. Although the majority of these paintings depict cultural enactments, their representational style relates to

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an assimilation of dominant Anglo art methods adapted by a subordinate minority, especially in the manipulation of space, composition, and other formal elements. As tradition-bearers in their respective societies, Sybil Yazzie and Pablita Velarde, however, are more akin to ethnographic memory painters who fashion their narrative elements from a myriad of cultural details in the name of remembrance. A salient characteristic of folk painting is the number of visual particulars, images, and complex designs present in one composition to convey the richest possible story line without sacrificing any details. Works of some folk artists teem with motifs that appear to completely fill all available space with a sense of horror vacuo (fear of the void), banishing emptiness in favor of overabundance. In Native American painting, groups of moving figures are rhythmically placed against plain backgrounds, so that despite the profusion of elements, there is a feeling of infinite spaciousness as well as a timeless quality. This mood is common to ‘‘Indian painting’’ of that era and evolved from the visual synthesis of religious and temporal components. Similarly, Grandma Moses’ compositions are replete with a surfeit of detail that relates to an array of narrative possibility according to the degree of visual documentation necessary for a kind of total pictorial ‘‘recall.’’ There is something ‘‘homely’’ about her compositional arrangements, suggesting a feminine sensibility and an observant eye attuned to a theater of the ruraldomestic. Folk painting generally involves a flat, two-dimensional, non-illusionistic style that does not try to replicate nature or reproduce ‘‘what the eye sees;’’ rather, it depicts ‘‘what the imagination knows.’’ Representational elements are important for narrative truth, but are portrayed abstractly with flat applications of color, no shading or modeling, an emphasis on linearity and color edges, and exaggerations or distortions in relation to scale. Figures and background meld into the frontal picture plane, negating a sense of depth. Perspective is frequently interpreted through the vertical alignment of formal components piled up and trapped in shallow spaces. There is no suggestion of recession in space, but only an arrangement of elements suspended across the painting’s surface, held there by the internal logic of the composition. The notion of bodies physically occupying space is implied by overlapping figures rendered in profile or three-quarter view. In this way, the painter artistically communicates as much visual information as possible without having to contend with the complexities of illusionism’s proportioning and foreshortening techniques. Relationships among figures are often represented symbolically through a hierarchical scale that stresses importance (the largest being the most important) rather than the reality of actual size. Many of Tyyne Esko’s mini-self portraits stress her self-perception as a politically powerless but nevertheless obdurate and persistent social critic. This impression is conveyed in the way she continually and astutely inserts a wry mini-representation of herself into each painting. Through the creative process, Esko reclaims her power as an artist-witness, affirming her personal values by painting these scenes of inequity and injustice. The genre of pictorial narrative is not restricted to painting. Embroidery has also been used, chiefly by women, in different parts of the world to

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create commemorative scenes and utopian dreams, to portray cultural enactments, to satirize politics, and to record myths and legends. Because of its fluid, plastic nature, embroidery, like painting, is more susceptible to individualistic impulse and free invention than are other types of textile creations. Unlike most functional embroidered pieces, at least in Western European cultures, the primary subject matter of narrative embroidery indicates that it is intended to be displayed and ‘‘framed’’ in some way—placed on a wall, a bed, or clothing—and intended to be ‘‘read.’’ Many such compositions are signed, which is still more common in the fine art world of museums and galleries. To sign one’s work counteracts the prevalent notion of the ‘‘anonymous’’ and interchangeable folk artist, an idea long circulated among certain art professionals. Unlike the dominant two-dimensionality of folk painting, embroidery, with its dense rows of stitches, presents a surface thick with color and tactility. The selection of a wide variety of stitches enhances visual and narrative interest in the textural detail and three-dimensional qualities of embroidered compositions. Aesthetic decisions about formal elements such as perspective, shadow, texture, and surface highlights, transform embroidering pictorial compositions from replication to artistic action. The uneasy course of decision-making is riddled with risk and experimentation, ultimately tempered by the folk artist’s creative engagement with the artwork. An artistic form emerges from an internal crossfire of questions and responses operating within the artist’s mind and executed by her hand. The highly complex process of creative choice-making that infuses these pieces is reflected in the intensity of their artistic expressiveness. Some folk artists who are positioned as both insiders, members of a particular community, and outsiders, by virtue of their dedication to art practice as well as by their unique or visionary worldviews, frequently benefit from the creative advantage of their dual perspective. Such artists have intimate native knowledge combined with a critical distance necessary to conceptualize the familiar ‘‘from afar.’’ This is apparent in the embroidered pictorial narratives of Josephine Lobato, a folk artist in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The self-conscious synthesis of internal and external viewpoints within the context of her art work validates Lobato’s artistic mission to serve as a type of cultural commentator or tour guide to her own Latina/o culture. She is a prolific artist whose themes encompass aspects of the cultural landscape, ceremonial enactments, religious observances, myths and legends, and pictorial maps of significant sites dotted with portraits of local personalities. The majority of Lobato’s embroidered images and narrative scenes derive from her memories of the post-World War II 1940s, a transitional period for Latina/o people in the American Southwest. Her choice of such imagery, with its diverse pictorial content, provides clues to the folk artist’s process of evaluating acts of remembrance and cultural transformation in relation to tradition, change, and discontinuity. Folk artists like Lobato are compelled by ongoing creative restlessness that keeps generating ideas for new work while still engaged in creating its antecedents. Ulla Nordin, a Swedish embroiderer, is another such artist. She describes her inspirations, also derived from childhood reminiscences, in

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terms of her head ‘‘swarming with images’’ that come to her all of the time, triggering chain reactions of creative response. Tradition is the yardstick against which continuity and creative innovation are measured. The culturally determined legacy of borrowing and crossfertilization in the evolution of Navajo weaving places it within the tradition of ethnic folk arts. Because of its adaptability and eclecticism, however, over time Navajo weaving has also been responsive to the creative interventions and impulses associated with folk art. These are generated by dynamic artistic and cultural processes as well as historic forces (for example, the wool trade, interactions with Anglos and Spaniards, marketability, commercial versus traditionally prepared dyes, color preferences, changing symbolic repertoire, pictorial compositions, etc.). Early in the eighteenth century, during the Spanish colonial period, the nomadic sheepherding Navajo learned weaving from their sedentary Pueblo Native neighbors. Unlike the Pueblo, the majority of Navajo weavers are women, who pass on their techniques and aesthetic standards through a female-directed line of cultural transmission from generation to generation. Since the 1700s, weavers have traded their wool blankets and rugs while, in turn, their engagement with the marketplace has catalyzed the cycles of innovation and experimentation that characterize the lively history of these textiles. The aesthetic orientation of many Navajo weavings derives from women’s experience of living close to the natural world, observing the gradations in a lightsuffused sky from dawn to dusk, its horizon lines, colors, and cloud patterns, and the features of the land. Portable looms permit weavers some freedom to locate themselves at various spots on the landscape, to work surrounded by family, or alone on a mesa, perhaps with sheep for company. Another constellation of weaving designs draws from Navajo storytelling traditions of creation myths, ancestor stories, ceremonies, and sacred songs or chants. Many older textiles subtly display an underlying compositional structure correlating to sets of prayers or chants, which are visually symbolized in paired lines of motifs contrasted with varying configurations alternately repeated across the design field. Her familiarity with weaving and prayer composition prompted ethnologist Gladys Reichard to identify these formal arrangements as the ‘‘visual rhythm’’ of Navajo textile motifs, their aural counterparts echoed in the metrical patterns of prayer chants. Since prayers are considered intrinsic to the weaving process, the designs on Navajo blankets and rugs represent a spiritual belief system together with an aesthetic view of reality. Creative exchanges between Navajo weaving and Latina/o (Hispanic) Rio Grande textile traditions continue today in the work of women such as Eppie Archuleta, a contemporary southwestern weaver living in Colorado. Descended from an ancestral mother-line of Navajo and Latina weavers, Archuleta’s art represents an ongoing synthesis of styles, with injections of inspiration culled from magazine illustrations, museum collections, and textiles exhibits at the annual Santa Fe Spanish Market. Her work and the weavings of many of her contemporaries exemplify the vibrancy of an internal artistic dialogue that embraces revival and innovation as viable alternatives to the oft-cited dichotomy between the ‘‘authentic’’ and the ‘‘fake,’’ or non-traditional.

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Quilts are another genre of folk art that encompasses the functional and the decorative. They are the creative products of groups of women cooperatively creating and working together in quilting bees. Originally pieced from recycled scraps of clothing, sometimes appliqued, and then quilted through long hours of conversation and camaraderie, quilts are an assemblage of tangible traces of personal biographies and collective histories. While piecing is often an individual effort, or one in which an older relative might guide a younger one, the actual quilting frequently is a communal folk process, and quilts as composite aesthetic forms have much to say about the social nature of women’s and girls’ creativity and the potency of artistic activity vis-a-vis societal norms. Folklorists Joyce Ice and Judith Shulimson wrote about this social process in 1979. The notion of ethnoaesthetics or folk aesthetics (how groups judge its work and the values they assign to it) is vital to maintaining internal creative expressiveness within the quilting group; further, it guides quilters in their mutual reactions to and appraisals of finished quilts. Quilting is an amalgamation of European sewing methods inventively adapted to local aesthetics and materials (although imported trade fabrics were originally used). For example, while European and American missionaries taught many Indigenous women Western European sewing techniques, these women adapted and sometimes changed those techniques for already extant traditions of fabrication and design, whether hide-binding in North America, barkcloth construction in the Pacific, or African strip-weaving. This stylistic integration is notable in Cook Islands’ tivaevae, African American pieced quilts, and Hawaiian and Native American pieced and appliqued quilts. Borrowing and assimilation characterize the burgeoning relationship between Amish quilters and refugee Hmong needleworkers in Pennsylvania. Instead of a minority group incorporating and adapting the stylistic features of a dominant society, Hmong and Amish textiles share some technical and aesthetic affinities (for example, intricate hand-quilting skills, use of borders, or a preference for linear geometrical forms and solid colors), but quilters also appropriate particular aspects of their art from one another, for example, the distinctive color blocks on Amish quilts and Hmong virtuoso applique and reverse applique techniques. Hmong women traditionally create paj ntaub, ‘‘flower cloth,’’ with a combination of applique, geometric reverse applique, complex embroidery, and profuse fields of cross-stitch. Hmong ‘‘story cloths,’’ which document cultural traditions as well as the Vietnam War, emerged as a genre in Thai refugee camps. Missionaries encouraged this art form as a way to pass the time and create a saleable product for which women use traditional embroidery stitches to tell their tales. Men and boys, however, who learned to read and write, generally were the ones who drew the original designs for the stories. Over time, story cloths have acquired words in both Hmong and English, and women now make them in more ‘‘modern’’ colors, which appeal to their mostly American purchasers. Before the period of enforced migration from Asia, these ornamental panels were not only affixed to clothing, but served as showpieces to impress suitors with evidence of the stitcher’s skill, which would be critiqued to

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determine her suitability as a marriage partner. Children’s clothing was especially embellished with geometric maze-like patterns used as protection against malevolent spirits. Complicated apotropaic (evil-averting) designs were believed to deter bad spirits by trapping them within their convoluted, overlaid, and densely stitched decorations lacking any ‘‘escape routes.’’ The protective magical properties of African American strip quilts were based on similar symbolic trickery. African American quilters created bold, intricately fashioned patterns to attract evil forces, disorient them in a profusion of shapes and colors, and entrap them, depriving them of their ability to cause harm. Coding is another form of non-verbal symbolism found in women’s folk arts. Differing from the practices of protective and sympathetic magic previously described, coding reconfigures conventional imagery in a way that defiantly subverts common meanings in order to mask or camouflage political ideas that if blatantly expressed may threaten the dominant culture. Familiar examples of these strategies of subversion and transformation appear, for instance, in parodies of the traditional Sunbonnet Sue quilt patterns. Through a rich syntax of visual language, folk textiles have always been vehicles for encoded meanings; they are felt to embody magical forces and symbolic inversions that creatively negate and contradict official cultural codes, sustain artistic license, and challenge social norms. Pottery easily lends itself to the folk artist because clay is readily available, relatively inexpensive to work with, and a ceramicist can be as social or solitary as she likes, potting by herself or with others in a studio. Pottery maintains strong traditions, whether in the Appalachians, the American South, or the Southwest, yet it also offers opportunities for invention and creative change, as in the case of Helen Cordero (1915–1994) of Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico, who revived a nearly moribund tradition of pottery at Cochiti in the 1950s. Folklorist Barbara Babcock notes how Cordero reinvented and personalized a line of effigy storytelling figures inspired by memories of her grandfather telling stories to her and her cousins. Cordero invigorated and enhanced a now-popular figurative genre that extends to other pueblos and continues to generate endless creative variations, for example, grinning bears, tourists slung with cameras, men smoking, even a Navajo-style storyteller. In the case of Georgia Blizzard (1919–2002), clay was the only traditional contribution to her ceramic art. Her vessels and sculptures are characterized by a visual vocabulary drawing from nature, particularly its harshness and unpredictability. Her signature ‘‘woman pots’’ blend pre-Columbian fertility symbols with autobiographical elements. Blizzard empathized with future owners of her pots when she designed her hand-built ‘‘arks’’ to hold not only physical objects, but also ineffable experiences, emotions, memories, and ideas; hence, her work has strong poetic appeal. The importance of communicating to and connecting with others through one’s artistic expressiveness is also revealed in environmental works in which folk artists create installations from found objects. The scale and accumulation of recycled material in these art spaces is frequently impressive, reflecting the artist’s choice-making in vivid, complex arrangements, and always intended

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to be viewed and experienced by others. Wisconsin artist Mary Nohl (1914–2001) spent years transforming her family home and yard on the shores of Lake Michigan into a shrine to lost underwater worlds. Each fresh layer of sediment added to her installations generated new interactions and another round of involvement and appreciation. Tressa Prisbrey transformed her anguish over the loss of most of her family at age sixty into an intricate ‘‘Bottle Village’’ where she greeted visitors by asking if they were alone in the world; she then sympathetically invited them into her alternate universe, one that offered them solace. Folk art revivals are more than salvage or rescue operations. Whether a tradition is revered or altered, revitalizations of folk art genres have proven themselves to be powerful ways in which the past emerges freshly in the present. Training in techniques such as spinning, weaving, embroidery, and pottery in locales where these art forms have historical associations can invigorate and extend the possibilities of the present. Women tend to benefit from such projects not merely for the economic gain and the flexibility of working at home in the midst of families, but also for the boost in selfconfidence, the discovery that their creations are valued, and the sense of empowerment. Many women confirm that the most successful revival projects are consonant with their present lifestyles, provide a modicum of selfsufficiency, and offer a broad range of artistic expectations and goals. In all of the folk arts, external and internal forces spin around within the folk artist, each of whom attempts to resolve and finalize slippery concepts such as tradition, authenticity, and change. The most open-ended view of folk art opts for interpretations that are highly sensitive and responsive to the changeability of human nature and that honor the transcendent character of art-making as inherent to all peoples’ struggles and accomplishments. See also: Aesthetics; Coding; Embroidery; Folk Photography; Folklife; Foodways; Material Culture; Piecework; Pottery; Quilts; Sampler; Tradition; Weaving. References: Babcock, Barbara. The Pueblo Storyteller: Development of a Figurative Ceramic Tradition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990; Glassie, Henry. The Spirit of Folk Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989; ———. The Potter’s Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Ice, Joyce, and Shulimson, Judith. Beyond the Domestic: Women’s Traditional Arts and the Creation of Community. Southwest Folklore 3 (1979): 37–44; Jones, Michael Owen. ‘‘How Do You Get Inside the Art of Outsiders?’’ In The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, eds. Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf, 312–30. Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994; Klein, Barbro, and Mats Widbom, eds. Swedish Folk Art: All Tradition is Change. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994; Pershing, Linda. ‘‘‘She Really Wanted to Be Her Own Woman’: Scandalous Sunbonnet Sue.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Radner, Joan Newlon, ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Wahlman, Maude Southwell. Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts. East Rutherford, NJ: Studio Books, 1993; Zug, Charles G. III. ‘‘Folk Art and Outsider Art: A Folklorist’s Perspective.’’ The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, eds. Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf, 144–161. Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

Suzanne P. MacAulay

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Folk Belief Folk belief includes a wide range of performances, both oral and material, founded in faith, cultural knowledge, or popular tradition. It refers to an idea, but usually takes the form of an expression or behavior that describes or communicates how a person or group conceives of or relates to a range of social structures from everyday life to religious belief to natural systems and more. The observable expression of a folk belief is only part of its meaning, which can be explored only in its original context. The contexts of women’s folk belief include the realms of foodways, folk medicine, religion, parenting, and the supernatural, among many others. Particularly in the past, many folklorists failed to address whether the people they worked with actually believed the traditions they described. Without information about the social contexts in which particular examples are expressed, practiced, or performed, it is difficult to understand belief. Exceptionally, Canadian folklorist Helen Creighton opens her autobiography with the question, ‘‘Was it prophetic that I was born with a caul?’’ She gives a good indication of her varying levels of belief in her explanation that in Nova Scotia and elsewhere, infants born with portions of the placenta covering their face ‘‘will inherit second sight or at least a sixth sense, and this is true in a slight degree in my case’’ and that ‘‘a person so born need never worry. Things would always work out for them, and this has always been true for me’’ (emphases added, 1975: 1). Creighton’s case shows clearly how a more sympathetic understanding of belief and knowledge—often associated with women fieldworkers—can positively influence research results. However, ‘‘folk belief’’ is too often used in a pejorative sense to describe the allegedly irrational fears or misconceptions of rural, uneducated, and na€ive people. Folklorists’ attempts to redefine the term and/or to rename the genre have remained unsuccessful. Folk belief remains nearly synonymous with the even more loaded term ‘‘superstition,’’ generally connoted as a backward, uneducated belief in superhuman or supernatural powers. Contemporary folklorists are careful to note that while many folk beliefs are conscious, imaginative, and purposeful, others express cultural knowledge and understanding rather than belief, and some may be spoken or performed by people who don’t actually believe in them. At the same time, folk belief continues to be construed as a type of knowledge that is not verifiable or measurable by scientific or quantitative methods—which is not to say that folk belief is the opposite of knowledge (or knowledge misconstrued). Rather, it is a different way of knowing. Some folklorists and others would argue that Euro North American scientific understanding is itself extensively based upon beliefs, and the designation ‘‘belief’’—as opposed to ‘‘knowledge’’—for vernacular understandings is thus multiply problematic. What makes modern medicine, for example, different from magic is that Euro North Americans believe it to be knowledge rather than belief. Feminists argue that women’s understanding is often similarly dismissed as belief while men’s is approvingly termed knowledge. Folk beliefs are not only abstract expressions or symbolic actions; they may also shape actual behaviors and everyday practices. For example, a

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rhyme circulated especially by college-age students suggests that drinking ‘‘beer before wine, feeling fine; liquor before beer, nothing to fear; beer before liquor, never been sicker.’’ The verse may influence what the drinker consumes, but also the order in which she imbibes. Such verbal expressions reveal folk beliefs that result in actual behaviors. Many beliefs describe or prescribe North American women’s experiences and lives. They may concern women’s sexuality, domestic life, character, behavior, anatomy, physical ability, intellect, social roles, professional practices, and relations to men, family, nature, and deities, among other areas. Others reflect and reinforce beliefs about women. Prescriptions include a requirement for brides to wear ‘‘something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.’’ Similarly, many male-dominated (or formerly male-dominated) occupations hold beliefs that women negatively influence their work—that women bring bad luck on boats or into mines, for example. These ideas are effectively prescriptive in discouraging women from the activities described, and make it all the more difficult for women to break into such occupations. Beliefs can work for or against women. Ideas about witchcraft, for example, have been used by women positively to influence their own situations—to ensure that they are cared for by their family or community, who fear the witch’s curse. But witch beliefs can also be used against women by individuals who seek to control what they see as excessive feminine power, who may enact anti-witching spells or even pursue legal and religious charges against a purported witch. Similarly, women may draw on fairy beliefs to express themselves, but may be victims of violence if their power becomes too threatening. Irish folklorist Angela Bourke notes that fairy-abduction stories served women as alibis against problems with their children that might otherwise be blamed upon them, including: ‘‘sudden infant death, failure to thrive, birth defects, and a variety of congenital disabilities’’ which ‘‘correspond to the descriptions of babies taken away, or ‘swept,’ [by fairies] and replaced by mute, wizened, hairy creatures, or lifeless images’’ (571). For twenty-six-year-old Bridget Cleary, murdered by her family in 1895 in rural Tipperary, Ireland, however, the ‘‘narrative of fairy abduction may have empowered [her] for a while but then become a rationale for her torture and killing’’ (ibid.: 573). Several notable female scholars have extensively contributed to folklorists’ understanding of folk belief. British folklorist Gillian Bennett’s Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural deals with British women’s narratives of paranormal experiences. In Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse, she argues that two cultural options—rationalist and supernaturalist—are available to the women she studied for interpreting their experiences. The supernaturalist believes that her perceptions offer a faithful account of an event. In contrast, the rationalist view interprets supernatural encounters as dreams, hallucinations, or as the result of creative imagination. Rationalists generally employ this discourse in ridiculing persons who report such experiences, a standard response born out of pejorative attitudes toward folk belief. But Bennett very trenchantly points out that rationalism is a folklore tradition itself, adhering to inherited patterns of explanation and thought that

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compete with supernaturalist discourse. She argues that rationalism and supernaturalism are ultimately competing discourses, and that neither is more nor less ‘‘superstitious’’ than the other. Bennett also suggests that her subjects’ belief in the supernatural as a valid form of knowledge has a relationship to the gender roles they perform as middle-class, older British women. Bennett’s contribution to belief scholarship holds value both for its emphasis on the experiences of women, and for its basis in folklore fieldwork as a process of interpretation of belief-in-context. Folklorist Linda Degh conducted an extremely detailed study of one particular legend-teller, Janet Callahan, analyzing a remarkable document produced by Callahan herself that attests to her own extrasensory perception and visionary experiences. Careful not to impose her own concepts upon Callahan’s knowledge, Degh says ‘‘My role is to present her self-image, her legends and her meanings with suggestions concerning their socio-cultural, religio-ideological connections and relevance’’ (115). The resulting essay holds implications for women’s autobiography as well as for narrative, religion, and belief studies. For an ethnographic and semiotic perspective on folk belief, Elaine Lawless’ work on women preachers and women religious leaders is indispensable. She explores the practices of belief among Pentecostal women preachers and others within their communities, focusing on the relationships between spiritual expressions and the construction of identities. Her work shows that women need not be simply subjected to beliefs; they can in fact actively construct knowledge and ideas in order to positively influence their situations. Canadian Pamela E. Klassen similarly shows that a profound religious belief need not preclude a woman from acting forcefully, even in ways that seem contrary to traditional belief’s expectations, as in the example of Mennonite Agatha Janzen preaching from the pulpit. Similarly, American folklorist Margaret K. Brady argues that, for Mormons, ‘‘elements of folk belief within established religious systems both manipulate and are manipulated by women in an attempt to find power and meaning in their lives’’ (461). Lawless’ work has also crucially addressed the profound relationship between fieldworkers and those they work with. Empathy and understanding on the researcher’s part can immeasurably enhance research experiences, particularly when dealing with issues of folk knowledge and belief, where the insider may fear that the outsider will not understand, or may even ridicule her. Lawless’ solution is dialogue, respect, reflexive ethnography, and reciprocal ethnography. Understanding that knowledge and belief are held by both ethnographer and subject, she concludes, ‘‘The final phase of the hermeneutic circle, then, demands that we subject our interpretations to the interpretations of our subjects’’ (1992: 313). An excellent example of such reflexive belief scholarship is Jeanne Favret-Saada’s exploration of the cultures of witchcraft in France, Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Also methodologically compelling is Diane E. Goldstein’s work, ‘‘The Secularization of Religious Ethnography and Narrative Competence in a Discourse of Faith,’’ which discusses how an ethnographer’s belief system affects all belief-studies scholarship, suggesting that ‘‘ethnographic secularization’’ tends to cause scholars to focus on the form,

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aesthetics, and structure of an expression of belief, rather than on its more crucial functions and meanings. A particularly useful exploration of the concept of folk belief is Marilyn Motz’s ‘‘The Practice of Belief.’’ She calls for combining performance studies with the study of folk belief to create a theoretical and methodological framework for investigating ‘‘the practice of believing as a way of knowing’’ (339). Motz contests academics’ negative evaluation of folk belief’s ‘‘presumed inferiority’’ (341) as a way of knowing, common since the ascendance of Enlightenment thought. She traces how Cultural-Studies theorists discuss belief and traditional modes of knowledge as important sites for agency or subversion of a dominant system. Motz similarly sees the study of belief at the center of political practice, since such knowledge is the point of intersection for the individual and the group, the private and the public, the abstract and actions. As folklorists have long studied both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic beliefs, they know how crucial it is to consider the overall politics and power structures as well as the more individualizable features of artistic performance. But Motz also suggests that the criteria for considering the aesthetics of an expression of belief lie in the degree to which a given expression is useful for illustrating a belief within a group or for an individual. The combination of examining small groups and artists, politics, and art makes folklorists’ studies of belief respectful, insightful, and important. See also: Assault, Supernatural; Childbirth and Childrearing; Folk Medicine; Foodways; Gender; Personal-Experience Narrative; Politics; Popular Culture; Superstition; Witchcraft, Historical; Women Religious. References: Bennett, Gillian. Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987; ———. ‘‘Alas, Poor Ghost!’’ Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999; Bourke, Angela. ‘‘Reading a Woman’s Death: Colonial Text and Oral Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.’’ Feminist Studies, vol. 21, no. 3 (1995): 553–586; Brady, Margaret K. ‘‘Transformations of Power: Mormon Women’s Visionary Narratives.’’ Journal of American Folklore 398 (1987): 461–468; Cardozo-Freeman, Inez. ‘‘Serpent Fears and Religious Motifs among Mexican Women.’’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (1978): 10–13; Creighton, Helen. Bluenose Magic: Popular Beliefs and Superstitions in Nova Scotia. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968; ———. A Life in Folklore. Toronto: McGraw-Hill-Ryerson, 1975; Degh, Linda. ‘‘The Perceptional Life of Janet Callahan.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 55, no. 2 (1996): 113–136; Favret-Saada, Jeanne. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Trans. Catherine Cullen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980; Goldstein, Diane E. ‘‘The Secularization of Religious Ethnography and Narrative Competence in a Discourse of Faith.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 54, no. 1 (1995): 23–36; Lawless, Elaine J. ‘‘‘Your Hair is Your Glory’: Public and Private Symbology of Long Hair for Pentecostal Women.’’ New York Folklore, Vol. 12, nos. 3–4 (Summer-Fall 1986): 33–49; ———. ‘‘Brothers and Sisters: Pentecostals as a Religious Folk Group.’’ In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, ed. Elliott Oring, 99–113. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989; ———. ‘‘‘I Was Afraid Someone like You . . . an Outsider . . . Would Misunderstand’: Negotiating Interpretive Differences between Ethnographers and Subjects.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 105, no. 417 (1992): 302–314; Klassen, Pamela E. ‘‘Speaking Out in God’s Name: A Mennonite Woman Preaching.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, 242–249. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997; Mullen, Patrick B. ‘‘Belief and the American Folk.’’ Journal of American Folklore 113 (2000): 119–143; O’Connor, Bonnie Blair. Healing

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Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995; Rieti, Barbara. Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland. St. John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1991; ———. ‘‘Riddling the Witch: Violence Against Women in Newfoundland Witch Tradition.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, 77–86. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997; Simpson, Jacqueline. ‘‘Witches and Witchbusters.’’ Folklore 107 (1996): 5–18.

Jacqueline L. McGrath

Folk Costume In the past, the term ‘‘folk costume’’ referred to clothing, hairstyle, headgear, footwear, and accessories worn by Euro North Americans for special or traditional occasions such as weddings, festivals, and parades, or to the everyday wear of non-industrialized, non-Western, and/or Indigenous people. Today, scholars of material culture prefer to think of costume as part of the broader genre of ‘‘dress.’’ Dress includes not only objects worn, but also hair, jewelry, makeup, and other additions and modifications made to the human body. Given this formulation, folklorists understand that all groups have dress traditions, even if they are designed by a formal institution such as a school, religious, or governmental agency. Exemplars in popular culture may also inspire dress customs. Any group may also have costume or extraordinary dress for special occasions, including performance contexts. Bridal outfits, Asian Indian saris, African inspired clothing, and dresses for quin~ ceaneras (fifteenth birthdays) in Latin American cultures are some examples of unique clothing worn for both ceremony and fashion displays. Feminine dress in contemporary North America ranges from Girl Scout and Girl Guide uniforms (with one or more merit badges sewn onto the sash to identify a girl’s accomplishments) to square dance costumes designed by a dance school leader or by a dancer herself, from a business pants suit to T-shirts sporting logos or colors in support of social causes such as breast cancer research. Women have always played important roles not only in the design, creation, and wearing of dress but in developing and maintaining its aesthetic. Some immigrant and Indigenous North American women, especially those who are members of highly observant religious groups, continue to wear traditional dress. For example, Orthodox Jewish women often wear scarves and/or wigs in observance of tradition, as well as make sure that sleeves and skirts cover their elbows and knees; Muslim women may wear the hijab (headscarf) or the full-length chador (body scarf); women in Pentecostal and Amish groups wear lace caps, long hair, long sleeves, and long skirts; and many Asian Indian women wear saris long after their menfolk have taken up wearing European-style suits. Costume serves to illustrate personal, community, and cultural identities, and because women are often—consciously and unconsciously—tradition-bearers, both actually and symbolically, folkways that celebrate group cohesion and loyalties generally fall into their domain. A notable exception is haute

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couture, that is, exclusive fashions designed for upper-class women, increasingly designed by women, but still more often by men. Most women wear traditional costumes—clothing whose designs are handed down from previous generations—when they participate in cultural performances (such as weddings, musical, processional, or dance events) both as fashion and as symbols of group identity as well as in affirmation of their connection with previous generations. Women in certain occupational groups—flight attendants working on international flights or clerks in upscale hotels patronized by westerners, for example—may wear a version of traditional dress in accord with company policy. Immigrant women who have adopted conventional Euro American dress in their daily lives in North America may attend events of political or cultural significance wearing traditional clothes as emblems of national or clan identity. Conversely, Euro American women often temporarily adopt the dress of the regions they visit as tourists in order to identify with the people they encounter there. And folklorists and anthropologists sometimes wear clothing from the cultures they study to affirm their solidarity with those groups. Women from all cultural groups and ethnicities participate in the design, construction, and/or assemblage of clothing for performance and display. The seamstresses who sew the costumes that North American performers wear, however, often reside in the home country. For example, most Mexican American dance groups rely on costumes made in Mexico. Irish step dancers in the United States may design their own costumes, but nearly all import them from Ireland. Both classical and folk dancers from Asian Indian communities purchase costumes made in India. Lao and Vietnamese classical dancers in the United States either import their costumes (elaborate versions of everyday wear back home) or rely on local seamstresses within their own ethnic communities, as do children’s dance groups from those cultures. Weaving, sewing, knitting, dyeing cloth, embroidery, and lacemaking are still employed for traditional dress long after a group has stopped using these textile arts for the manufacture of everyday clothing. Examples of folk dress techniques encountered in North America include the bead and leather work of some First Nations groups, elaborately embroidered baby carriers among the Hmong, the art of sewing dancers’ bodies into their costumes among Thai immigrants, and the head wraps and loosely fitting garments favored by West African immigrants. Some North American women of African descent enjoy wearing brightly colored Ghanaian kente cloth— associated in the United States with the rise of the Black nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s—as fashion, a political statement, or both. Hairstyles, wigs, headgear, jewelry, makeup, and other bodily decorations also serve as everyday identity markers and for special cultural performances; some of these traditions are changing in the North American context and some remain stable. Irish American step dancers, for example, may curl their hair into ringlets following instructions provided by dancer-maintained Web sites. Mexican folkl orico dancers wear traditional makeup and jewelry, but today, they also often wear hair extensions. Asian Indian brides in North America apply henna tattoos (mehndi) to their hands in preparation for

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their weddings to indicate their change in status from single to married women, a practice that some Euro American and Canadian women have adopted purely as fashion. Among the highly assimilated Scandinavians of the American Midwest, however, the tradition of an eldest daughter wearing a white dress and a crown of candles on Saint Lucia’s Day (December 13) to herald the opening of the Christmas season has remained unchanged since the fifteenth century. Other dress traditions are not limited to women from a particular ethnic or cultural group. Anti-war and other activist groups such as CODEPINK Women for Peace use dress, specifically the color pink, to symbolize their collective political power as women. In recent years, women who have attained the age of fifty may wear red hats and purple clothes to signal membership in the Red Hat Society, a folk group inspired by Jenny Joseph’s poem ‘‘Warning,’’ which encourages older women to work against social constrictions. While dress and folk costume have been heavily documented as art and symbol for centuries, the study of women’s dress and costume is in its infancy. Much work remains to be done to discover how women use these forms to express identity, solidarity, rebellion, conformity, and pleasure. See also: Activism; Body Modification and Adornment; Fashion; Girl Scouts/Girl Guides; Hair; Jewish Women’s Folklore; Material Culture; Muslim ~ Women’s Folklore; Occupational Folklore; Quinceanera; Tradition-Bearer; Wedding; Women’s Friendship Groups. References: Eleuterio, Susan. Irish-American Material Culture: A Directory of Collections, Sites, and Festivals in the United States and Canada. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988; ———. ‘‘Irish, Chicago.’’ Encyclopedia of American Folklore, 631–633. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006; Hardwick, Patricia Ann. ‘‘The Spirit of Fiesta: Costume and the Performance of History, Community and Identity during Santa Barbara’s Old Spanish Days.’’ In Dress, Costume, and Bodily Adornment as Material Culture, ed. Pravina Shukla. Special Issue of Midwestern Folklore, vol. 32, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 2006): 67–82; Hertz, Carrie. ‘‘The Uniform: As Material, As Symbol, As Negotiated Object.’’ In Dress, Costume, and Bodily Adornment as Material Culture, ed. Pravina Shukla. Special Issue of Midwestern Folklore, vol. 32, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 2006): 43–46; Saliklis, Ruta. ‘‘The Dynamic Relationship between Lithuanian National Costumes and Folk Dress.’’ In Dress, Costume, and Bodily Adornment as Material Culture, ed. Pravina Shukla. Special Issue of Midwestern Folklore, vol. 32, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 2006): 211–234; Shukla, Pravina, ed. Dress, Costume, and Bodily Adornment as Material Culture. Special Issue of Midwestern Folklore, vol. 32, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 2006); Welters, Linda, ed. Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs About Protection and Fertility. New York: Berg, 1999.

Susan Eleuterio Folk Custom A ubiquitous and well-documented genre, folk customs are traditional and repeated practices that typically cluster around life cycle and calendar events, signifying some form of transition of a folk group member from one state of being to another. Sometimes called folkways, folk customs serve to facilitate, celebrate, commemorate, and commiserate across a broad spectrum of human relations, ranging from the personal (for example, henna markings and body piercings) to the familial (for example, the timing of the

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evening meal) to the international (for example, celebrations of New Year’s and Midsummer Day). In a foundational work, Rites of Passage, Arnold van Gennep (1909) explained that customs and ceremonies accompanying life change or crisis revolve around three major phases, which he labeled separation, transition, and incorporation (or schism), and that ritual accompanies the middle stage, such as occurs at the end of one year and the start of the new. Victor W. Turner further described the transitional or liminal (‘‘threshold’’) stage as a time removed from normative social structuring in which homogeneity and camaraderie prevail. Such generalized social bonding also applies to calendrical rites, which involve large groups or even whole societies coming together at a crucial liminal time. Thus, folk customs may be enacted by specific groups and/or whole communities. Life events marked by folk customs include transitions such as pregnancy, childbirth, baptism, initiation, graduation, courtship, marriage, divorce, retirement, death, and burial, and are demonstrated by traditions like throwing the bridal bouquet, placing a knife under a woman’s bed during labor to cut the pain, and Sadie Hawkins’ Day, the twenty-ninth of February, on which women are permitted—and even expected—to ask a man out on a date. Preferred settings for folk traditions such as dances, games, pranks, storytelling, and the manufacture of folk crafts are generally customary, including community halls, children’s playgrounds and hearths. Calendar customs are generally associated with the natural or agricultural calendar and often overlap with major events in the life cycle (for example, New Year weddings). In many instances, seasonal changes are acknowledged by festivals, which can be fixed (for example, El Dia de los Muertos, Carnival, Midsummer’s Day, and Kwanzaa) or moveable (for example, Cherry Blossom time, harvest, ice festivals, and Spring Break) and oftentime glossed with religious influence and appropriations, such as Halloween, St. Brigid’s Day, and Purim (the feast of Esther). Holy days and the anniversaries of historical events have long been favored as charters for traditional gatherings, and include performances of many and varied folk customs, such those associated with U.S. Independence Day (viewing fireworks, eating black-eyed peas); Hanukkah (lighting candles, playing dreidel games); Cinco de Mayo (playing mariachi music, breaking pi~ natas); Thanksgiving (eating turkey and pumpkin pie); Ramadan (applying henna, distributing sweets); Christmas (decorating the tree, creche building); Labor Day weekend (boating, picnicking); and Super Bowl Sunday in the United States (boisterously eating and drinking in front of the television set). Many of these traditions specifically locate women as food preparers and hostesses; however, there are also growing traditions in North America in which women and girls participate in Take Back the Night marches on U.S. Independence Day, and gather to watch and discuss advertisements aired during the football game on Super Bowl Sunday, especially during halftime. Because folk customs generally signify a conclusion or renewal of a period of time or stage in life, they are frequently accompanied by complementary superstitions, which manifest as symbolic measures to appease,

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prevent, and protect their enactors. For every celebration, there is potential and/or perceived disappointment; therefore, many customs have evolved through efforts to offset the feared bad consequences of a life or calendrical crisis, such as with the varied running-yellow-traffic-signal responses to lining one’s pocket with coins and/or paper money at New Year. Folk customs, then, are often overdetermined reactions to liminal periods, often revealing or reflecting a substratum of folk belief and latent magic. Invaluable collections of folk customs have been amassed, largely due to the salvage strategies employed by folklorists and anthropologists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as those by Violet Alford (1937) and Mary Macleod Banks (1937–1941; 1946). Contemporary scholarship, including works by Margaret Bennet (1992), Margaret Coffin (1976), Venetia Newall (1989), and Ethel Urlin (1990), abounds with domestic and calendrical folk custom descriptions Meanwhile, the appeal of traditionality has inspired many folk custom revivals, particular in festivals such as May Day celebrations (Maypole dances, garlanding) and at Renaissance fairs (open markets, juggling). Technically speaking, revivals fall under the rubric ‘‘folklorismus’’ because they lack continuous practice or performance; nevertheless, whether constant or contrived, folk customs are replete with social, cultural, economic, and political content and commentary; they function as sanctioned tension reducers while upholding cultural norms and maintaining conformity to accepted patterns of behavior; and they help to confirm social identities by validating the beliefs and justifying the rituals and institutions of and to those persons who perform them. See also: Beauty Contest; Charivari/Shivaree; Childbirth and Childrearing; Courtship; Divorce; Engagement; Evil Eye; Festival; Folk Belief; Folk Dance; Folk Group; Foodways; Graves and Gravemarkers; Henna Art/Mehndi; Initiation; Marriage; Material Culture; Menarche Stories; Preg~ nancy; Quinceanera; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Roadside Crosses; Sexuality; Storytelling; Tradition; Wedding. References: Alford, Violet. Pyrenean Festivals: Calendar Customs, Music and Magic Drama and Dance. London: Chatto & Windus, 1937; ———. Introduction to English Folklore. London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1952; Banks, Mary Macleod. British Calendar Customs: Scotland, three volumes. Publications of the Folklore Society 100, 104, 108. London: William Glaisher Ltd., 1937–1941; ———. British Calendar Customs: Orkney and Shetland. Publications of the Folklore Society 112. London: William Glaisher Ltd., 1946; Bascom, William R. ‘‘Four Functions of Folklore. In Contributions to Folkloristics, Folklore Institute, 40–64. Meerut, India: Archana Publications, 1981 [1954]; Bennett, Margaret. Scottish Customs from the Cradle to the Grave. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004 [1992]; Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction. 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997; Coffin, Margaret M. Death in Early America: The History and Folklore of Customs and Superstitions of Early Medicine, Funerals, Burials and Mournings. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976; Newall, Venetia. ‘‘Two English Fire Festivals in Relation to Their Contemporary Social Setting.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 31, no. 4 (1972): 244–276; ———. ‘‘Up-Helly Aa: A Shetland Winter Festival.’’ Arv 34 (1978): 37–97; ———. ‘‘Masking in England.’’ New York Folklore 11 (1985): 205–29; ———. ‘‘A Note on the Chinese New Year Celebration in London and its Socio-Economic Background.’’ in Western Folklore, vol. 48, no. 1 (1989): 61–66; Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969; Urlin, Ethel L. A Short History of Marriage: Marriage Rites, Customs, and

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Folklore in Many Countries in All Ages. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 1990; Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960 [1909].

Maria Teresa Agozzino Folk Dance Folk dance involves structured, often rhythmic movement, usually to instrumental music and/or voice accompaniment. Folk dance is an expressive form in which both women and men participate as performers, choreographers (creators of dance-movement patterns), and audience members. Historically, folklorists’ and anthropologists’ tendency to study culture from male perspectives has led them to neglect the more private domain in which many women’s expressive forms are found. Folk dance is a Public Folklore genre; however, perhaps due to its frequent association with the feminine domain, folk dance research is a relatively new phenomenon. Women scholars have dominated the field of folk dance research. Theresa Buckland, Adrienne Kaeppler, Joann Kealiinohomoku, and Anya Peterson Royce are among those who have helped to define folk dance and dance ethnography. Academic attention to traditional dance has increased since the mid-1980s, as folklorists, anthropologists, and other cultural scholars have considered the genre of folk dance useful for illuminating gender roles, identities, and politics. But even with the emergence of Dance Studies, and the field’s interest in the anthropology of the body, ‘‘the study of moving bodies remains on the periphery’’ (Reed, 504). More than twenty years after Adrienne Kaeppler’s articulation of what she calls ‘‘structured-movement systems,’’ few studies have analyzed the specifics of movement, much less in the context of female-dominated traditions and events. But there are exceptions. Jill Drayson Sweet, for example, describes genderrole reversals in San Ildefonso Navajo dance, though her emphasis on intertribe relations and attitudes toward marriage do not particularly focus on the experience of women. In this performance, forty women dancers play female and male roles, half of them dressing as men. Meanwhile, the men of the village dress as women, care for the children, and bring lunch to the dancers. Barbara LeBlanc studied Acadian dance forms and corresponding social relations in the Maritime Provinces of Canada. She conducted extensive research on traditional step dances in that region, including interviews with members of the Cape Breton Irish community. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, immigrants from all over the British Isles began to settle in the eastern half of the island of Cape Breton. These settlers handed down to their children the traditions of Scotland, including the art of step dancing, which many consider an extension of the Irish tradition. Movement and choreography in step dancing prioritizes footwork, with the upper body and arms held relatively rigid. Though debates persist about origins, the traditional music, song, and dance of Cape Breton are generally perceived as unique to the island and still central to its identity. Historian Linda Tomko attributes the increased visibility of folk dancing around the turn of the twentieth century to its use as a tool for assimilating

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immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. In progressive-era America, members of the dominant middle class used the institution of the settlement house to socialize young immigrant women in the proper roles, behaviors, and values of American society. Women put themselves and their bodies at risk for the sake of suffrage and labor rights at a time when their ambitions were growing beyond the confines of housework and motherhood. In this early era of American modern dance, female leaders were influential; woman-run institutions such as New York City’s Henry Street Settlement and Chicago’s Hull House sponsored artistic events and seasonal festivals. These phenomena occurred in the context of a separate sphere in which certain social institutions mediated folk dancing as a performative activity. In doing so, they took on the pedagogical mission of instilling in workingclass girls a sense of pride and pleasure in their bodies, giving them an alternative site to integrate the arts into their everyday lives, away from the morally questionable dance hall and the honky-tonk. Through the settlement house movement, women drew on folk dance traditions that had originated in Western Europe to form new vocabularies of movement. Thanks to the women of this era, dance became an important and accessible means for Americans to establish a sense of national heritage; that immigrantdriven expressive tradition remains powerful today. Canadian feminist folklorist Pauline Greenhill studied the practice of Morris dancing in Ontario, Canada. This allegedly ‘‘English,’’ ‘‘male,’’ ‘‘traditional’’ ‘‘dance’’ has taken distinctive North American forms, is now and has always been practiced by women as well as men, has incorporated extensive innovation as well as time-honored moves, and is associated with a full congeries of practices—performances, celebrations called ‘‘ales,’’ and extensive socializing within groups formed specifically for the purpose of doing Morris. Until recently, most English scholars’ definitions of Morris have asserted that it is a masculine practice. Historically, women Morris dancers were certainly in a minority. However, too many scholars went on to dismiss evidence of women performing identical steps to identical music as being outside the realm of Morris, using the circular argument that since Morris was a male dance, if women performed it, it was not Morris. They often bolstered this notion with arguments about the dance being ‘‘strong,’’ ‘‘aggressive,’’ ‘‘rough,’’ and so on, qualities usually more associated with masculine than with feminine pursuits. Further, groups of Morris dancers are called ‘‘sides’’ or sometimes ‘‘teams,’’ terminology more connected with sports (presumptively masculine) than with dance (presumptively feminine). However, like other homosocial (single-sex) events once associated primarily with men, women have made extensive inroads into contemporary Morris in North America. There are now mixed (male and female) and all-female sides as well as queer and transgender Morris, such as the White Rats of San Francisco, self-described as ‘‘the world’s first queer/pervert/ leather Morris team’’ (‘‘White Rat’s History’’). Another form of step dancing, more popularly known as ‘‘stepping,’’ has its origins in traditional African dance and has developed into a flourishing form over the past fifty years among fraternities and sororities of traditionally African American colleges. This phenomenon has been studied by

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Elizabeth Fine and by Jacqui Malone. In competitive African American step shows, fraternities and sororities ‘‘step off’’ against each other as teams performing synchronized routines. Although a step (a rapid-fire routine of rhythmic vocals and body percussion) can be set to music, some performers do ‘‘straight step,’’ which involves only the sound of the dancers clapping and stamping out a beat. The goal is to create a collective rhythm, not to showcase the virtuosity of individual performers. While this form of stepping echoes an evident heritage of African movement and communication patterns, the contemporary tradition took shape on college campuses. The ritual performance of stepping in Black fraternities and sororities may have developed from African American Masonic rituals. This form of dance has an extensive history and evolution, including the recent explosion of fraternity and sorority step shows. Their choreography dates back to the public dance contests of slave times, popular minstrel shows, 1920s Harlem cabaret performances, and Motown groups performing stylized moves. Elements of stepping also reflect drills practiced by Black men in the military during World War II and vaudeville tap routines. Stepping incorporates all of these cultural influences as well as children’s games, cheerleading, martial arts, and hip-hop moves. Step’s popularity burgeoned during the 1980s; Spike Lee’s 1988 film School Daze includes scenes of fraternity stepping. Few scholars have isolated forms of folk dance associated exclusively or primarily with women. For example, while practices such as belly dancing have received some attention, such analyses have mainly treated techniques and individual practitioners, rather than traditional folkloric forms in context. However, with a contemporary perspective, we can identify various emerging traditions of female-dominated movement that constitute a flourishing of the women’s folk dance genre. See also: Activism; Belly Dance; Cheerleading; Class; Ethnicity; Folk Costume; Gender; Sorority Folklore; Tradition. References: Buckland, Theresa J., ed. Dance in the Field. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999; Fine, Elizabeth C. Soulstepping: African American Step Shows. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Greenhill, Pauline. Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994; Kaeppler, Adrienne. ‘‘Structured Movement Systems in Tonga.’’ In Society and the Dance, ed. Paul Spencer, 92–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Kealiinohomoku, Joann Wheeler. ‘‘Folk Dance.’’ Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard M. Dorson, 381–402. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972; LeBlanc, Barbara. ‘‘Changing Places: Dance, Society, and Gender in Cheticamp.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, eds. Toronto: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997; Malone, Jacqui. Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996; Reed, Susan A. ‘‘The Politics and Poetics of Dance.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 503–532; Royce, Anya Peterson. The Anthropology of Dance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977; Sweet, Jill Drayson. ‘‘Play, Role Reversal and Humor: Symbolic Elements of a Tewa Pueblo Navaho Dance.’’ In Dance Research Journal 12.1 (1979–80); Tomko, Linda. Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; ‘‘White Rat’s History.’’ http://www.whiteratsmorris.org/history.html (accessed August 9, 2008).

Montana Miller

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Folk Drama A folk drama is a scripted performance involving mimicry and the distribution of roles among two or more players transmitted by traditional means among members of a folk group. The foregoing definition of folk drama works well enough in theory and for the North American traditions on which this volume focuses, but in practice there are important relationships among drama per se, dance, festival, spectacle, and related traditional display forms. Traditional dance and drama, however, reveal the greatest degree of overlap. In fact, in many world cultures the two genres are sufficiently intertwined to render distinctions between them little more than an academic exercise. A set of working distinctions is useful, however. While both dance and drama are ensemble activities—they involve the coordinated efforts of two or more people in the performance—dramas require narrative development. They have a plot; they tell a story. In order for this to occur, there must be conflict between a central figure or figures and others that seek to block the goals of the central character(s). Such conflict can be developed only when character roles are distributed among two or more players, whether the players are humans or, for example, puppets. Dance, of course, may be narrative in nature, but this is not a requirement. In order to accomplish the ensemble activities seen in both genres, the actions of individuals must be coordinated. In dance, coordination is accomplished at its most fundamental level by rhythmic accompaniment. Some forms, such as the square dance, go to even greater lengths and therefore provide the best examples of coordinated action in dance. In this case, the movements of dancers are not merely suggested by musical rhythms, but are dictated by the words of the square dance ‘‘calls.’’ On the other hand, in drama, the coordination of the ensemble is accomplished by means of the script: a set of directions (written or oral) encompassing both words and actions. Dance, as is frequently noted, is choreographed, while drama is scripted. Folk drama is customarily associated with festivals—those events that commemorate points of special significance to a celebrating community (for example, Ramadan, Christmas, and Passover). The reasons for the connection between drama and festival are very clear in some cases. The Christmas plays of the Hispanic Southwest, Los Pastores (‘‘The Shepherds’’), also known as La Pastorela, and Las Posadas (‘‘The Inns’’) are representative. Los Pastores, an often-elaborate reenactment the adoration of the Christ Child by shepherds (including a conflict between the archangel Michael and one or more devils who try to impede the shepherds’ travel), logically falls into the Christmas season and fits the working definition of folk drama presented above. Las Posadas, derived from St. Luke’s account of Joseph and Mary’s search for shelter on the nine nights from December 16 through December 24, dramatizes the sacred events commemorated by the holiday, combining the features of drama and procession and utilizing sung dialogue. New Mexican folk plays, Los Comanches, date back to the late 1700s and reflect the conflict that arose during the Spanish Conquest of the area. In the Christmas-based Los Comanches, Comanche people have

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kidnapped the Christ Child; the Mexican characters chase after them until all is resolved when the Comanche chief returns the child and offers gifts. While these plays suggest the range of folk plays proper, both are thematically consistent with the festival that provides the focus of events. On the other hand, the mummers’ plays of British and Anglo American Christmas tradition seem to have no connection to the occasion being celebrated. The plays get their name from the fact that they are brief dramas (‘‘skits’’) performed by groups of people (usually adolescent boys and young unmarried adult men) called ‘‘mummers’’ who traditionally travel in disguise from house to house begging refreshment within a community during the Christmas season. Today, most mumming performances have moved to pubs and street corners in the United Kingdom. The tradition has lapsed in North America, although there are notable exceptions. Herbert Halpert and G. M. Story document historical performances in Newfoundland, and Marie Campbell witnessed a play, ‘‘The Turkish Knight,’’ on Christmas Eve 1930 in Gander, Kentucky, that had been revived to honor her Christmas sojourn to that Appalachian community. In the British Isles—where folk drama traditions have received the most scholarly attention—direct female participation (as actors in the plays) is extremely rare and seems confined to modern revival performances. When the casts are not all male, the female members who do appear are characteristically used as a last resort to ‘‘fill out’’ the cast; they are commonly relatives of male cast members (Russell). Various explanations have been provided for the lack of female actors historically, one of the more popular theorizing that the plays descended from ‘‘men’s ceremonials’’ (Brody). More reasonable explanations for the gender bias involve ‘‘traditional strictures of behavior in the English countryside [that] forbade’’ public performance by women (Tillis). Moreover, the disorder associated with a mumming troupes’ perambulations, especially when alcohol was provided, could include fights with rival troupes and rough pranks on travelers encountered on the road. Direct female participation in the Anglo-influenced Western Hemisphere, then, was curbed by customary behaviors that attended the actual performances of the plays. In contrast, in the Hispanic tradition of the American Southwest, female actors have been documented not only in roles such as Gila, a young female shepherd, but in the part of the archangel Michael. The absence of female actors in British-derived New World traditions does not correlate with a lack of female characters. Female characters are common in the mummers’ dramas conventionally labeled ‘‘The Hero Combat’’ and ‘‘The Wooing Play,’’ cross-dressed in the conventional disguises characteristic of mumming house visits, and in the ‘‘Womanless Wedding,’’ a traditional drama performed as a North American community fundraiser well into the twentieth century. Characters such as Besom Betty (that is, Betty with a Broom), Dirty Bet, Bessie Brownbags, Dame Dorothy, and the Bride and Bridesmaids of the ‘‘Womanless Wedding’’ are less imitations of women than parodies of men parodying women. That is, the actors tapped to play women’s and girls’ roles are those males least likely to pass as female owing to male secondary sexual characteristics (for example, facial

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and body hair or a protruding Adam’s apple). The result is a deliberate collision of gender traits, a form of play consistent with the overall licensed, topsy-turvy behavior associated with festivals. The predominance of confusion as a motif, rather than cross-dressing per se, is underscored by stock characters such as ‘‘the Young Lady or Bride [who] exhibited a cow’s tail beneath the flounces of a starched petticoat’’ (Dean-Smith 1958, 253) and the Bessy of Appalachian tradition who—as a man with a cow’s face, horns, tail, and bells—not only create cross-gender dissonance, but cross-species dissonance as well. The preferential bias of folk drama toward male actors as a tradition in the British Isles and Anglo America notwithstanding, when analyzed in context, it becomes clear that women play a crucial role in performance events. Dean-Smith notes that in the performance proper, the players’ costumes provided by wives and sweethearts became vehicles for female creativity and even competition (1958). Moreover, while expressive license is widely reported for the mummers’ perambulations, their disorder is confined primarily to the roads; when festival play goes indoors (as in house performances), unruly elements become more subdued. Thus, from a broader interactional perspective, as agents of order in the homes to which traveling troupes appeal for a ‘‘stage’’ and refreshments (in Newfoundland, at least, the kitchen usually provides both), women exercise considerable control over the behavior of male folk drama performers. Outside the context of performance, women scholars have made significant contributions to folk drama studies as theoreticians, analysts, and collectors. Many of the earliest analyses of the genre, inspired by the work of Sir James George Frazer, sought to explain myth, ritual, and drama via reconstructions of ‘‘primitive’’ fertility magic, especially those rites based on an agricultural subsistence base. During the early decades of the twentieth century, classicist Jane E. Harrison (1850–1928) sought magical connections among Greek myth, ritual, and drama, while Jesse L. Weston (1850–1928), in Ritual to Romance, her analysis of the Arthurian Grail cycle, pursues similar arguments with regard to the mummers’ plays, sword dances, and Morris dances. Beginning in the 1920s, British scholars Violet Alford and Margaret DeanSmith turned their energies to the study of the folk play in the British Isles and North America as well as to stimulating interest in reviving lapsed traditions. Their work tended to prefigure today’s emphases on broader generic connections. Therefore, beyond adding to our knowledge of the plays, their work reinforced ideas about the interrelatedness of festival, dance, drama, song, and ritual. Violet Alford, like many of her colleagues, was drawn to folk drama material through an interest in traditional dance, but this focus inevitably became more distributed, resulting in works such as Pyrenean Festivals Calendar Customs, Music and Magic, Drama and Dance (1937) and a European survey of animal-masked performances, The Hobby Horse and Other Animal Masks (1978), that underscore the interdependence of display traditions. She eventually emerged as one of the leading authorities on sword dancing, although her major work on the subject, Sword Dance and

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Drama (1962), espouses a controversial hypothesis that links sword-dancing traditions with the customary rituals of miners and metal workers. In addition to her scholarship, she actively encouraged the revival and practice of the traditions she documented, most notably the Marshfield mummers play in the 1930s. Increasing disenchantment with the analysis of folk texts in isolation from traditional performance contexts in the latter decades of the twentieth century tended to lead scholars away from the old texts that intrigued the likes of Edmund K. Chambers, Alford, Dean-Smith, and others of their generation. Instead, the borders of the dramatic expanded, yielding to studies such as Anne C. Burson’s analysis of skits based on recurrent models rather than traditional texts, and Ian Russell’s consideration of the impact of martial arts films, advertising, and other influences of the mass media on a traditional mumming team. Of course, textual treatments have not disappeared entirely. An interesting example from the late twentieth century is Christine Herrold’s 1998 analysis of the standard Hero Combat play texts through the psychological lens of neo-Jungian feminist critical theory. For the most part, however, speculations about texts and origins, following the advice of Georgina Smith (1981) to look to social bases of folk drama rather than to ritual origins, have given way to the analysis of folk dramas as performance events and to consideration of their functions in contemporary contexts. See also: CrossDressing; Festival; Folk Custom; Folk Dance; Folk Group; Mass Media; Text. References: Alford, Violet. Pyrenean Festivals Calendar Customs, Music and Magic, Drama and Dance. London: Chatto & Windus, 1937. ———. The Hobby Horse and Other Animal Masks. London: Merlin Press, 1978; ———. Sword Dance and Drama. London: Merlin Press, 1962; ———. Brody, Alan. The English Mummers and Their Plays: Traces of Ancient Mystery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970; Burson, Anne C. ‘‘Model and Text in Folk Drama.’’ Journal of American Folklore 93 (1980): 305–316; Campbell, Marie. ‘‘Survivals of Old Folk Drama in the Kentucky Mountains.’’ Journal of American Folklore 51 (1938): 10–24; Cawte, Edwin C., Alex Helm, and Norman Peacock. English Ritual Drama: A Geographical Index. London: Folk-lore Society, 1967; Chambers, Edmund K. The English Folk-Play. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933; Dean-Smith, Margaret. ‘‘The Life-Cycle Play or Folk Play: Some Conclusions Following the Examination of the Ordish Papers and Other Sources.’’ Folklore 69 (1958): 237– 253; Green, Thomas A. ‘‘Folk Drama: Introduction,’’ in Journal of American Folklore 94 (1981): 421–432; Halpert, Herbert, and G. M. Story, eds. Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland: Essays in Anthropology, Folklore, and History. Toronto: Published for Memorial University of Newfoundland by University of Toronto Press, 1969; Harrison, Jane. Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912; Herold, Christine. ‘‘The English Mummers as Manifestations of the Social €  ^ Self.’’ Soci et e Internationale pour l’Etude du Th eatre M edi eval. Odense, 1998. http:// www.sdu.dk/Hum/SITM/papers/christine_herold.html (accessed August 10, 2008); Russell, Ian. ‘‘In Comes I, Brut King: Tradition and Modernity in the Drama of the Jacksdale Bullguisers.’’ Journal of American Folklore 94 (1981): 456–485; Smith, Georgina. ‘‘Social Bases of Tradition: The Limitations and Implications of ‘The Search for Origins’.’’ Language Culture and Tradition. A. E. Green and J. D. A. Widdowson, eds., 77–87. CECTAL Conference Paper Series, No. 2. Sheffield: Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, 1981; Tillis, Steve. Rethinking Folk Drama. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999; Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. London: Cambridge University Press, 1920; Wheat, John. ‘‘‘Los Pastores’: Continuity and Change In a Texas-Mexican

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Nativity Drama.’’ Journal of Texas Catholic History and Culture 5 (1994): 47–52; Woodside, Jane. ‘‘The Womanless Wedding: An American Folk Drama,’’ PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987.

Thomas A. Green Folk Group Although the definition of the term ‘‘folk group’’ has been highly contentious among folklorists since the founding of the discipline in England in 1848, in North America today a folk group is considered any group of people who share at least one common linking factor, such as an awareness of a shared tradition, whether defined by country, region, community, ethnicity, gender, family, school, occupation, religion, or any subgroup or interest thereof. Folk groups, then, may be as large as a nation or as small as a pair of siblings. Persons may both change groups and belong to several groups at any given time, usually according to their stage in life, habits, hobbies, and the day’s schedule. For example, an American teenager may go from belonging to a high school sports team to a college study group, and from being a Madonna fan to sharing in the customary life of a college Drama Department within a single year, maintaining meaningful contact with the members of all four groups. Likewise, a mother may simultaneously belong to a women’s friendship group, a union, an exercise class, a community service organization, and a carpool, all the while maintaining membership in various gender, family, ethnic, regional, and religious groups. The definition of a folk group was not always as broad as the one posited by Alan Dundes in 1980 and discussed above, and its simplicity has been strenuously contested. From the early days of folklore collecting by eighteenthcentury antiquarians and myth-ritualist and literary folklorists, and most explicitly by the anthropological ‘‘survival’’ school of folklorists championed by Edward Burnet Tylor, the folk were consistently identified as rural, uneducated peasants. This equation persists in some quarters. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, the Italian political activist Antonio Gramsci suggested a combination of the conservative view of the folk, that is, peasants, with a Marxist notion of the folk as persons occupying the lowest stratum of society, thus extending the definition of a folk group to the urban equivalent of rural, uneducated peasants, the urban proletariat. Every folk group has its own forms of lore that endow its traditions. Each operates simultaneously as a vehicle for the transmission and communication of a collective identity and as a ‘‘function of shared identity.’’ Folklorists often specialize, choosing to focus their research on a particular folk group, such as Appalachian folklore, children’s folklore, Chicano folklore, entertainment folklore, medical folklore, Mormon folklore, gay and lesbian folklore, or women’s folklore. Numerous notable studies focusing on specific folk groups have been undertaken, from Iona and Peter Opie’s pioneering collections of children’s folklore (1944 onward) to Sabina Magliocco’s breakthrough Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (2004). According to Jan Brunvand, female folk groups traditionally cluster around the domestic sphere, and include genres such as foodways,

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handicrafts, folk medicine, and family lore. However, Margaret Mills cautions against such a ‘‘distorted and limited folklorists’ view of both folklore and folkloristics.’’ After all, contemporary women’s and girls’ participation in groups ranging from cheerleaders to riot grrrls and from political organizing to covens, along with their roles in religious institutions, sororities, consciousness-raising groups, popular culture, academia, government, and nearly all branches of the armed forces would seem to indicate that the number and scope of female-specific folk groups cannot be limited by these characterizations. See also: Activism; Cheerleading; Clique; Consciousness Raising; Croning; Farm Women’s Folklore; Foodways; Girls’ Folklore; Jewish Women’s Folklore; Military Women’s Folklore; Muslim Women’s Folklore; Occupational Folklore; Popular Culture; Sorority Folklore; Tradition; Wicca and Neo-Paganism; Women Religious; Women’s Clubs; Women’s Friendship Groups. References: Bauman, Richard. ‘‘Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore.’’ Journal of American Folklore 85 (1971): 31–41; Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction. 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1987; Dorson, Richard M. The British Folklorists: A History. London: Routledge, 1999 [1968]; Dundes, Alan. ‘‘Who Are the Folk?’’ In Interpreting Folklore, 1–19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980 [1977]; ———. ‘‘Defining Identity through Folklore.’’ Folklore Matters, 1–39. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1989 [1983]; ———. ed. ‘‘Introduction to Gramsci, Antonio. Observations on Folklore.’’ In International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore, 131–36. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999; Mills, Margaret. ‘‘Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore: A Twenty-Year Trajectory toward Theory.’’ Western Folklore 52 (1993): 173– 192; Oring, Elliot. Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1986.

Maria Teresa Agozzino Folk Medicine Folk medicine may be defined as any unofficial health practice or belief. Folk medical beliefs may work apart from or in conjunction with whatever official medical system is in place within a society. Folk medical practices include acts done to heal or prevent illness (for example, eating garlic to cure a cold or not going outside with wet hair) and religious themes (for example, praying to prevent or treat disease). Folk medicine practices and beliefs are part of a complex system of beliefs, attitudes, and values that are ultimately personal and work with the logic of the individual. Historically, the study of folk medicine has focused on herbal remedies and traditional healers. As in other areas of Folklore Studies, scholars tended to collect their data from persons of low socioeconomic status, members of specific cultural and ethnic groups who transmit their information primarily through oral tradition (for example, root workers, curanderas, and herbalists), and rural residents, since it was believed that folk medicine would not be in evidence where scientific biomedicine was available and affordable. This idea is today known as the functional fallacy of folk medicine. A 1993 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 34 percent of Americans had used ‘‘unconventional intervention’’ within the previous

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twelve months. Unconventional interventions included herbs and spiritual healing, but not prayer, suggesting that the numbers actually might be much higher. This survey also found that the use of unconventional interventions increased with a person’s level of education (Eisenberg et al. 247– 252). ‘‘Official’’ is a relative term. Rooted in cultural context, it generally refers to approaches and practices that are authorized in a formal way. In the American context, scientific biomedicine is sanctioned medicine, regulated by a body of official intuitions, such as the Office of the Surgeon General and medical schools. Since folk medicine has no official standing with these institutions and frequently does not possess a formal authoritative body of its own, many of its forms are considered ‘‘unofficial’’ despite the endorsement of research, clinical trials, and personal-experience narratives. In spite of folk medicine’s lack of formal authoritative bodies, it does operate as a coherent system of knowledge. Such systems include consensus among a group of individuals who attest, for example, to the health benefits of Tai Chi or yoga. Even the personal health beliefs and practices of an individual practitioner, an herbalist, or a massage therapist, for example, are internally coherent. Because beliefs and practices are interdependent, one cannot consider one aspect of a health belief system in isolation. In general, the greater the number of relationships among the parts of a health belief system, the more stable it will be. If an individual’s personal health belief system is challenged, she will often construct a logic that accommodates new information without destroying the existing system. Due to the cost of medical-health insurance in the United States as well as in other countries, folk medicine may be a less expensive alternative. Many people feel that folk medical practices, such as the use of herbal remedies, are more ‘‘natural’’ for the body. Others, especially those faced with life-threatening diseases such as cancer, may enlist folk medical practices as means for combating the harsh side effects of chemotherapy and other treatments, or may turn to folk medicine in hope of a cure. The use of folk medicine in conjunction with official medicine often causes distress for medical professionals since many folk treatments have not undergone official medical testing or clinical trials, and the possibility of interaction, depending on the type of folk medical intervention used, may be a concern. Many patients who supplement treatment with folk medicine feel that medical practitioners are not open to alternative practices, and so do not inform doctors of their treatment plans for fear of rebuke. More frequently, however, individuals do share official medical test results with their alternative or folk health care practitioners. Folk medicine is frequently considered both a first and last resort. Overthe-counter medicines (OTC) or folk remedies are often used to combat the first signs of illness, and only after those methods do not work will a patient seek another’s advice, be it a doctor, folk medical practitioner, or a member of her folk group, including friends and family. Typically, after a patient has gone as far as she can through the official health care system, she will resort to alternative or folk medical practices for relief of her disease or symptoms.

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Women, especially those who suffer from menopause, frequently turn to alterative therapies or folk medical practices when they feel that their symptoms are not being taken seriously by medical professionals. Women report that symptoms such as rage during menopause are often overlooked or undertreated simply because no medical studies have been conducted to address them. When no conclusive evidence exists, when a woman’s symptoms are not typical, or when a woman does not trust the treatments official medicine suggests, she typically turns to oral tradition or the Internet to find others who have experienced similar symptoms. She looks for other methods of last resort, which often include folk medical practices. Women frequently make the medical decisions in a family, be it to see a doctor or other health care provider, apply a poultice, brew a tea, or enforce bed rest. Since women typically arrange appointments and oversee treatments for all family members, better understanding their decision-making processes, real concerns, and health beliefs is useful for health care professionals. See also: Curandera; Folk Group; Herbs; Menopause; Old Wives’ Tales. References: Adler, Shelley R. ‘‘Integrating Personal Health Belief Systems: PatientPractitioner Communication.’’ Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems, ed. Erika Brady, 115–128. Logan: Utah University Press, 2001; Brady, Erika. Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001; Eisenberg, David M., Ronald C. Kessler, and Cindy Foster. ‘‘Unconventional Medicine in the United States.’’ New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 328, no. 4 (1993): 247–252; Gevitz, Norman, ed. Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1988; Goldstein, Diane. ‘‘‘When Ovaries Retire’: Contrasting Women’s Experiences with Feminist and Medical Models of Menopause.’’ Health, vol. 4, no. 3 (2000): 309–323; ———. ‘‘Competing Logics and the Construction of Risk.’’ in Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems, ed. Erika Brady, 129–140. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001; Hufford, David. ‘‘Traditions of Disbelief.’’ New York Folklore, vol. 8, nos. 3 and 4 (1982): 47–56; ———. ‘‘Introduction.’’ Southern Folklore 54 (1997): 1–14; Kirkland, James W., Holly F. Matthews, C. W. Sullivan III, and Karen Baldwin, eds. Traditional Medicine Today: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991; Mattingly, Cheryl, and Linda C. Garro. Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000; O’Connor, Bonnie Blair. Healing Traditions: ‘‘Alternative’’ Medicines and the Health Professions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

Andrea Kitta Folk Music and Folksong Folk music is generally understood by folklorists as orally transmitted, unwritten songs and instrumental pieces performed by nonprofessional musicians. Its repertoires are generally specific to a region or ethnic group, and are passed down from generation to generation through personal interactions rather than by written notation or formal instruction. Folk music is the more inclusive term, comprising instrumental as well as solo and accompanied vocal pieces, the latter being termed ‘‘folksong.’’ Contemporary folk music can include materials transmitted through the mass media, but tends to follow the musical and textual styles of more traditional works.

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Women have always been central to the collection, composition, and performance of folk music in North America. Defined by its uncomplicated melodies, plain-speaking lyrics, and universal themes, folk music expresses and reaffirms the values, traditions, and life experiences of people from a specific region, ethnicity, community, or folk group, especially those based in rural rather than urban settings. The particular combination of melodic structure, instrumentation, lyrics, and subject matter is unique to the folk music of a specific locality or folk group, but due to its oral nature, folk music travels from one place to another with musicians and singers, and is shared with others through their musical performances. As a result, folk music evolves as it is transmitted from one person to another or is used in different contexts and for different occasions. Folk music, then, is something of a paradox, for although it is a highly personal and localized art form created and maintained by a particular community or social group, its oral essence and high level of mobility renders it a collective and universal form as well. Folk music performed in the United States and Canada is generally simple in form and most may be classified by its binary and ternary structures. Music in binary form has two sections that differ from one another melodically and lyrically; usually each section is repeated. Ternary forms have three sections: the first section is followed by a contrasting one, then by a repetition of the first section. Folksongs that narrate a story are most commonly performed as a ballad, lyric song, or epic. The ballad is perhaps the most common form found in North American folksongs of European origin; composed in stanzas, its lyrics comprise several verses, each employing the same melody, followed by a refrain or chorus. Lyric songs may be structurally similar to the ballad, with verses and refrains, but are thematically different; less frequently coherent narratives, they focus on the attitudes and emotions of the narrator. Epic refers to longer musical works that arrived in North America with emigrants from the Balkans, Scandinavia, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; they are usually accompanied by a musical instrument and sung to a melody that varies throughout the work. Communities throughout the United States and Canada—from Indigenous North American peoples to recent emigrants from Russia, South Asia, and the Middle East—create and sustain their own folk music traditions. Ethnic folk music traditions are identifiable through their particular use of instrumentation, melodic and vocal range, subject matter, and musical texture, as well as the contexts in which they are performed and the social significance that they acquire through them. What the recording industry today calls the ‘‘ethnic’’ folk music traditions of the United States and Canada include Native North American powwow music; Hispanic North American corridos and mariachi music; Jewish klezmer music; African North American spirituals, blues, and gospel music; Euro North American dance music tune types such as the jig, reel, polka, hornpipe, quadrille, waltz, schottische, springar, polska, and mazurka; Greek bouzouki ensemble music; Japanese taiko drumming ensembles; Russian balalaika ensemble music; and South Asian bhangra music.

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Hybridized folk music forms emerged in the United States and Canada resulting from musical collaboration among various ethnic groups residing—often for the first time—in close proximity to one another. Hybrid genres in North America are numerous, and include Cajun and zydeco music of the Louisiana-Texas border, which developed from cultural contact between Franco-Canadian (Acadian) immigrants and African Americans; ‘‘hillbilly’’ (bluegrass) music of the Appalachia region, which combined British and Irish folk ballads and fiddle tunes; the blues music of southern African Americans; southern religious hymns; conjunto, a Texas-Mexican music form that melds musical traditions from German and Hispanic settlers residing in Texas from the mid-nineteenth century; and Canadian M etis music, which combines Irish, Scottish, and French tunes with Plains First Nations dancing and rhythmic structures. Although the instruments used in folk music vary according to the group from which it emanates, some of those most commonly used in Euro North American folk music include the voice, fiddle, banjo, flute, whistle, dulcimer, accordion, guitar, harmonica, mandolin, bagpipe, washboard, Jew’s harp (or jaw harp), bones, spoons, musical bow, and, in recent times, piano. The musical instruments transplanted to North America from various regions of the world are countless, but include zithers such as the Finnish kantele, dulcimers such as the Hungarian cimbalom, bowed instruments such as the Yugoslavian gusle, lutes such as the Hawaiian ukulele, unfretted instruments such as the Japanese shamisen, and flutes such as the Middle Eastern nai. Traditional folk music often accompanies activities such as work, lifecycle events, rituals, social gatherings, and dances. Folksongs cover a wide range of subject matter and suit many purposes, including work songs, prison songs, war songs, lullabies, religious devotional songs, children’s songs, love songs, and protest songs. Women have been central to the creation, dissemination, and performance of folk music from its earliest origins. In particular, women were vital for music transmission in domestic spaces where, for example, they sang lullabies to children, hummed tunes to dull the drudgery of housework, and held kitchen parties to entertain each other. However, some women also attained broader recognition and performed for audiences of women and men in more public locations. Folksong lyrics have both defined and contested the roles and sociocultural positions of women throughout history. Many traditional songs paint lyrical portraits of women as household servants and domestics, decorative accoutrements to men, symbols of evil and temptation, or sources of diversion and entertainment. Many folksongs, however, can be read as oblique or coded commentaries that resist convention and offer alternatives. Numerous contemporary female folk musicians and singers have directly challenged stereotypical images of women by writing folksongs that present images of women as powerful, vital members of society on an even footing with men. Throughout the twentieth century, women have been essential in folk music’s development from a genre revolving primarily around community

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and family to one that is also firmly situated in the North American popular music milieu. Countless women have promoted and advanced the genre. Their activities have ranged from collecting and analyzing, to performing, to composing folk music. Many female scholars were vital to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century folk music scholarship, including Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838–1923), Frances Densmore (1867–1957), Natalie Curtis Burlin (1875–1921), and Helen Heffron Roberts (1888–1985), all pioneering figures in Native American song research. Other significant scholars in the field were Dorothy Scarborough (1878–1935), who collected in Virginia and North Carolina; Olive Dame Campbell (1882–1954), who researched in the Appalachian Mountains; Helen Creighton (1899–1989), who collected 4,000 songs from Gaelic, Acadian, Mi’kmaq, English, German, and African musicians residing in the Maritime Provinces of Canada; and Sidney Robertson Cowell (1903– 1995), who organized and directed a California Works Progress Administration project intended to document musical traditions in Northern California. Edith Fowke (1913–1996) gathered Canadian folksongs from such singers as LaRena Clark (1904–1991), an Ontario-based folksinger whose repertoire included British ballads, country and western songs, and lumbering songs. Two families of scholars, musicians, and composers—the Lomaxes and the Seegers—were vital to the establishment of American folk music scholarship and folk music performance in the twentieth century. Their work demonstrates the link between traditional folk music performed within and for small communities and contemporary folk music and song, often inspired by traditional forms but recently composed and dealing with current issues. The folk revival brought traditional forms to public attention. John Lomax (1867–1948) and his children Alan Lomax (1915–2002) and Bess Lomax Hawes (b. 1921) were pioneering figures in folk music archiving, collecting, and recording. John and Alan Lomax produced numerous songbooks and field recordings that helped define the folk music genre, and inspired numerous budding folk music performers. Folksong collector, educator, and folk music advocate Bess Lomax Hawes earned a reputation as one of the best folk music instructors in the United States in the 1940s, and, in collaboration with Jacqueline Steiner, wrote ‘‘M.T.A.’’ (better known as ‘‘Charlie on the M.T.A.’’ about a subway fare increase by Boston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority), later recorded by the Kingston Trio. The Lomaxes promoted and recorded several notable female folk singers, including Almeda Riddle (known as ‘‘Granny Riddle,’’ 1898–1986), a folk balladeer from Arkansas renowned for her repertoire of more than 600 songs; Vera Hall (1902–1964), who was one of the greatest singers of folksongs, blues, and spirituals in Alabama of her time; and Bessie Jones (1902–1984), a legendary singer based on the Georgia Sea Islands. Alan Lomax is also credited with assisting the career of Jean Ritchie (b. 1922). Ritchie was a member of a huge musical family who first settled in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky in the 1700s. She performed and recorded material from her family’s massive and far-reaching repertoire, produced original pieces, and published a number of folksong collections, including The Singing Family of the Cumberlands (1955).

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The academic research of married couple Charles Seeger (1886–1979) and Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953) created access to folk music resources that influenced and stimulated the careers of numerous folk musicians, particularly their own children—acclaimed folk singers Pete Seeger (b. 1919, Charles Seeger’s son from a previous marriage), Mike Seeger (b. 1933), and Peggy Seeger (b. 1935). In her early career, Ruth Crawford Seeger was a highly successful classical composer and pianist, but from the mid-1930s to her death, she devoted much of her work to folk music. Crawford Seeger incorporated American folksongs into children’s music education, collaborated with Alan and John Lomax on several folksong collections, and published her own collections, including American Folk Songs for Children in Home, School and Nursery School: A Book for Children, Parents and Teachers (1948). Members of the Seeger family are credited with fostering the careers of Hazel Dickens (b. 1935) and Elizabeth ‘‘Libba’’ Cotten (1895–1987), a folk singer from North Carolina who worked in the Seeger home for a number of years. Cotten was recognized as the source of the renowned ‘‘Freight Train’’ (Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes, Folkways Records, 1989). Cotten performed throughout the 1950s and 1960s at folk music concerts and festivals (including the Newport Folk Festival) and released a number of albums, including Elizabeth Cotten Live!, which won a Grammy Award for best folk recording in 1984. During the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, all kinds of music and song became accessible to audiences beyond the immediate communities of their performers through dissemination in songbooks and as commercial music recordings. As the recorded music industry grew, folk music changed from a form created and enjoyed only in its communities of origin to an identifiable genre distinct and separate from other styles, such as country, blues, and various ethnic music traditions. Distinctive genres became more pronounced as record companies and radio stations attempted to increase their profitability by producing music that would appeal to specific commercial audiences, thereby to sell more recordings and attract more radio listeners. As a result, within the commercial recording industry, the term ‘‘folk music’’ most frequently came to refer to folksongs accompanied by acoustic instruments, while instrumental folk music without vocal accompaniment became identified as ‘‘ethnic’’ or ‘‘traditional’’ music. As a byproduct of this process of commercialization, folk music and song came to be associated with social change and leftist politics. In the late 1920s and 1930s, North America was experiencing an economic depression and political activists were looking for an artistic medium that could articulate the hardships of the times. Union organizations began to appropriate folksongs for use at rallies, and numerous folk singers wrote protest songs that spoke eloquently of the need for social and political reforms to remedy unjust living and working conditions. Notable female balladeers of this era include Ella May Wiggins (1900–1929), an ardent union member who was shot by anti-union demonstrators. Her best known folksong is ‘‘The Mill Mother’s Lament:’’

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We leave our homes in the morning, We kiss our children good-bye, While we slave for the bosses, Our children scream and cry . . . How it grieves the heart of a mother, You everyone must know. But we can’t buy for our children, Our wages are too low. . . . But understand, all workers, Our union they do fear. Let’s stand together, workers, And have a union here. (Alloy, 1976)

Other female folk singers of the time whose works detailed the miner’s condition include Mary Magdalene Garland (1880–1960), a coal miner’s wife from Kentucky who spoke out about miners’ working conditions, sang at union meetings and on picket lines, and later recorded songs for the Library of Congress, and her half-sister Sarah Ogun Gunning, who also sang folksongs addressing the miners’ plight. More sedate folk music was popular with middle-class American audiences throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. However, two groups, the Almanac Singers and the Weavers, were key to the continued propagation of folk music during these decades. The Almanac Singers featured a frequently changing collective of musicians, including Pete Seeger (b. 1919, as noted above), Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), Lee Hays (1914-1981), Millard Lampell (19191997), Burl Ives (1909-1995), Butch Hawes (1919-1971), and Bess Lomax Hawes (b. 1921). They were the most recognizable and popular folk music group throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, performing traditional folk music, anti-war ballads, and union songs at hootenannies (informal gatherings of musicians and their guests) during their heyday. The group disbanded shortly before the onset of World War II, when patriotic ideology linked to the war effort supplanted the socialist agenda the Almanac Singers expressed. Folk music boomed in popularity by the late 1950s and early 1960s. The increased interest signaled the onset of the North American folk music revival, a movement spurred by middle-class, college-educated musicians disillusioned with the political and social climate of America who looked to the past—albeit a romanticized one—to find solutions to contemporary problems. Because folk music had been associated with leftist politics and political dissent since the 1920s, it was a logical choice of musical genres in a newly emerging climate of social unrest. Folk music groups began to enjoy large-scale success in the commercial music milieu. These included the Weavers, a postwar quartet that featured Pete Seeger, Fred Hellerman (b. 1927), Lee Hays (1914-1981, as noted above), and singer Ronnie Gilbert (b. 1936); the Kingston Trio, whose ‘‘Tom Dooley’’ topped the pop charts in 1958; and the award-winning trio of the mid-1960s, Peter, Paul, and Mary, which featured the voice of Mary Travers (b. 1937). Other musicians, most notably Bob Dylan (b. 1941), first

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discovered America’s folk music on recordings such as the Smithsonian’s monumental Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music. They felt compelled to perform works from those albums as well as to compose music of their own in a similar vein. Folk music performances thrived in the United States and Canada in the 1960s. Coffeehouses from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, to Montreal, Quebec, to New York City’s Greenwich Village often showcased folk musicians. Several festivals, most notably the Newport Folk Festival (founded 1959) and the Mariposa Folk Festival (founded 1961) headlined folk music performers. The revival was a rediscovery of North America’s musical roots, with folk music metamorphosing into the soundtrack for the large-scale political and social movement that was taking place at the time. The civil rights movement, anti-war protests, and women’s struggles for equality shaped the 1960s, and folk music spoke to the climate of the times. Reminiscent of the 1920s, folk music was once again treated as a viable and forceful medium for voicing political and social dissent. Many folk singers, such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie (b. 1941), and Joan Baez (b. 1941) held strong political convictions and wrote protest ballads and other political songs modeled on traditional folk music. Canadian-born, Native American folk singer Sainte-Marie was one of the first female folk singers involved with the Vietnam War protest movement, and her song ‘‘Universal Soldier’’ (Illuminations, Vanguard Records, 1969) became a rallying cry for protestors against the war. The 1960s women’s movement attracted women songwriters and performers in the folk revival, and the careers of a number of them were fostered by the social climate of the times. Peggy Seeger (b. 1935) of the acclaimed Seeger family was one of the first women prominent on the folk scene in the 1950s and 1960s. In songs such as ‘‘I’m Gonna Be an Engineer’’ (Different Therefore Equal, Folkways Records, 1979), which became one of the anthems of the women’s’ movement, Seeger excelled at singing ballads from a feminist perspective. Female musicians such as folk-blues singer Odetta Felious (b. 1930), Rosalie Sorrels (b. 1933), Caroline Hester (b. 1937), Hedy West (b. 1938), Judy Collins (b. 1939), Sylvia Fricker (b. 1940) of the duo Ian and Sylvia, Kate Wolf (1942–1986), Maria Muldaur (b. 1943), Jackie DeShannon (b. 1944), and Mimi Fari~ na (1945–2001) were also vital players in the folk revival scene. Many of these musicians enjoyed commercial and critical success in a variety of musical styles for decades to come. Joan Baez emerged at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival as the first female folk musician of the 1960s to become a star. She released her first album in 1960, and it was an immediate hit. In 1962, Baez appeared on the cover of Time magazine, signaling her rise in status to the undisputed ‘‘queen of folk.’’ Throughout her five-decade career, Baez has been highly visible and vocal as a political activist, beginning with her now-famous appearance on stage with Marin Luther King, Jr., at the 1963 march on Washington, DC, where she sang ‘‘We Shall Overcome.’’ Toward the end of the 1960s, Baez’s style began to gravitate toward country music, but she remained one of the

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most popular folk artists of the decade. Baez has continued to record and perform into the new millennium, with her music sometimes bordering on country, pop, and rock music. Folk musicians of the revival often interspersed self-penned music with folk standards in their live performances, but traditional folk music was the primary draw for most audiences. As the 1960s drew to a close, many performers who had first made names for themselves as folk musicians were now garnering press and attracting audiences based on the merits of their original compositions. From roughly 1968 to 1977, a singersongwriter era developed, characterized by highly personal, often autobiographical lyrics. Rock, pop, folk, and gospel musicians alike worked within this format. Canadian Joni Mitchell (b. 1943) was the first folk-oriented female singersongwriter to gain commercial success, and she is widely credited for blazing a path for struggling women singer-songwriters. Throughout her enduring and highly successful career, Mitchell’s body of work always featured poetic sensibilities, innovative guitar techniques and tunings, the integration of divergent musical styles, and deeply introspective and imaginative lyrics. Many other acclaimed singer-songwriters of this period melded folk in varying degrees within their own music, including Carole King (b. 1942), Carly Simon (b. 1945), Kate McGarrigle (b. 1946), Anna McGarrigle (b. 1944), Linda Ronstadt (b. 1946), Laura Nyro (1947–1997), Holly Near (b. 1949), Joan Armatrading (b. 1950), and Rickie Lee Jones (b. 1954). The singer-songwriter style waned in the late 1970s as pop, disco, punk, and rock music grew to dominate commercial music, but the musical aesthetics of the singer-songwriter remained part of the popular music scene in North America throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, even if it was not commercially central. Throughout the 1980s, metropolitan areas in the United States, such as New York City, Washington DC, and Boston were once again centers where many folk singers earned commercial exposure. Sweet Honey in the Rock, an African American female a cappella ensemble, was founded in Washington, DC, in 1973. The group has musical roots in various African American genres, including spirituals, hymns, gospel music, jazz, and the blues. Performing first as a quartet and later as a sextet, Sweet Honey in the Rock has featured more than twenty musicians during its thirty-plus-year career. The group won a Best Traditional Folk Recording Grammy award in 1989 for its version of Leadbelly’s ‘‘Grey Goose.’’ The Fast Folk Cooperative, a singer-songwriter organization established in New York City in 1982, was a means for songwriters to release their first recordings. Fast Folk’s initial goal was to document the folk music scene centered in Greenwich Village during the 1980s, but over the next two decades it grew to include a record label, a concert series, a touring live revue, and a community of folk musicians who performed regularly and released their own recordings. Female folk musicians who got their start on the Fast Folk record label include Shawn Colvin (b. 1956), Julie Gold (b. 1956), Suzanne Vega (b. 1959), Lucy Kaplansky (b. 1960), Michelle Shocked (b. 1962), and Tracy Chapman (b. 1964).

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Folk music again came into the spotlight in the late 1980s largely due to the remarkable success of a handful of musicians. The overwhelming commercial success and critical acclaim of these four—Emily Saliers (b. 1963) and Amy Ray (b. 1964) of the Indigo Girls, as well as Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman—ushered in a new wave of record-company investment in female singer-songwriters. Suzanne Vega came to prominence in 1985 with the hit single ‘‘Marlene On The Wall’’ from her self-titled debut, followed by the top-ten-selling single ‘‘Luka’’ from her 1987 album Solitude Standing, which went on to sell millions of copies. Tracy Chapman’s 1988 self-titled debut album sold more than ten million copies worldwide, had the hit singles ‘‘Fast Car’’ and ‘‘Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution,’’ and earned Chapman three 1988 Grammy Awards. The Indigo Girls’ self-titled first album sold more than a million copies, contained the chart-reaching single ‘‘Closer to Fine,’’ and earned the duo a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording in 1989. Female musicians with roots in folk music came to control a portion of the commercial music scene, signaling the beginning of a music style known as the ‘‘nu folk revival,’’ ‘‘folk roots revival,’’ and ‘‘new folk movement.’’ Artists who had struggled to make names for themselves throughout the 1980s, such as Lucinda Williams (b. 1953), Nanci Griffith (b. 1954), and Shawn Colvin finally earned the recognition they deserved. The success of the nu folk movement offered inspiration for women musicians who wanted to express themselves through music that freely and unabashedly crossed the boundaries of pop, rock, punk, and country music, creating hybridized music forms such as folk-rock, folk-pop, folk-country, and folk-punk music. Musicians working in these hybridized genres sought to create highly personal and unique music. Although their music encompasses a wide variety of styles, they share an overriding desire to create ‘‘authentic’’ music, shown by their use of acoustic instruments, uncomplicated costumes and minimal makeup, quirky or eccentric personas, and autobiographical lyrics and spare musical forms. Throughout the twentieth century, folk music and folksong changed to suit modern performance contexts and new technological advancements, in part by appropriating stylistic elements from other music genres with which it came into contact. Contemporary folk music defies categorization and often cuts across musical styles; rock, pop, rhythm and blues, and country musicians frequently compose music that could be defined as folk music. However, certain qualities continue to thread through folk music, such as confessional lyrics, a lack of overt reliance on electronic amplification, and a thematic focus on common life experiences. See also: Activism; Ballad; Folk Group; Lullaby; Occupational Folklore; Politics; Tradition; Tradition-Bearer; Women’s Movement. References: Alloy, Evelyn. Working Women’s Music: The Songs and Struggles of Women in the Cotton Mills, Textile Plants, and Needle Trades, Complete with Music for Singing and Playing. Somerville, MA: New England Free Press, 1976; Ammer, Christine. Unsung: A History of Women in American Music. Portland, OR: Amadeus, 2001; Briscoe, James R. Contemporary Anthology of Music by Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997; Burns, Kristine Helen, ed. Women and Music in America Since

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1900: An Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002; Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Music Revival. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996; Cohen, Ronald D. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002; Grattan, Virginia L. American Women Songwriters. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1993; Pendle, Karin Women and Music: A History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001; Whitely, Sheila, ed. Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Erin Stapleton-Corcoran Folk Photography Folk photography is concerned with photography—an artistic and documentary element of both material and popular culture—as it is used by ordinary people to document everyday life. The commercialization and technological democratization of photography for non-elite consumption has made photography a shared life experience and presence for most North Americans, as well as an expressive medium strongly associated with women, families, and the domestic sphere. If not from photography’s arrival in 1839, certainly since the latter part of the nineteenth century with the introduction of the Kodak camera and the rise of amateur photography, photographs have chronicled the lives of common persons. As an artifact that resides in a context—a literal and figurative frame—the photograph should be considered for both its surface qualities and the more subtle information it holds about the human condition. By treating photography customarily as a flat art, photographic scholarship has privileged surface analysis, accomplished exclusively by scrutinizing its composition and other formal characteristics of the picture plane. While this is one appropriate level of appreciation and understanding of photos, in considering folk photography it is equally necessary to adopt methods for the contextual study of photographic images, in which women would represent not merely the subject matter for, or the creators of, images, but the chief (though not exclusive) guardians of generational stories catalogued in photograph files, albums, scrapbooks, slideshows, and, most recently, household items featuring digitized images, ranging from personalized calendars to customized mousepads. Photographs act as visual cues for the behavior of persons connected with them; that is, they frequently encourage an intimate viewer to engage in a dialogue specifically corresponding to the imagery. Pictures may serve as a catalyst to the viewer-listener’s sharing of narrative memories, or even tangentially related stories, as is common in the ritual act of presenting the contents of a family album to a guest as after-dinner entertainment. However, if not fastidiously tended, family photographs risk becoming pedestrian, devoid of emotional meaning, and become artifacts, collections of images whose specific importance resides in their function within social and historical memory. Because photography is a relatively new phenomenon, the context of its making sometimes remains accessible, at least in part. Often, the photographer or others linked directly to the photographic event are still available

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to researchers. Interviews, oral histories, and other records of personal contact may then accompany visual scholarship. With good fieldwork, the student of photography and its lore can capture and preserve interactions between people and their contexts through material images. Daniel Wojcik’s study of photographs purportedly representing apparitions of the Virgin Mary is a good example. While photography receives explanation and embellishment from verbal expression, it is a language in itself. Every photographic image has a surface and a deep structure. The communication of a photographic message is coded, containing a subtle set of rules for the transmission and reception of visual information. People assign their own meanings to images, and yet, when viewed in large numbers, snapshots begin to resemble each other, falling into recognizable categories. Photographic images are, therefore, generalizable, signaling social and aesthetic meanings using consensually agreed upon patterns (for example, obligatory smiles, the group shot with an identifying placard placed in front) and visual tropes (newlyweds with all the reception guests, the new baby peering from beneath a crib blanket), at once showing the unique faces of family members and the familiar poses and occasions American viewers have come to regard as emblems of a family’s history. In this sense, the study of photographs concerns itself with the history of everyday life. Once the hand-held camera had freed photographers from costly and cumbersome tripods and flash units, shooting in more remote locations and with quicker exposure times became achievable. The revolution in technology inevitably influenced both choices of photographic subjects and their manner of representation. Prints became affordable and plentiful, and thus less formally posed. Marianne Hirsch and Jerald Maddox, among others, approach homemade photography as a folk medium, concerned more with documenting vernacular culture than with technological savvy or pretensions to art. To the extent that women have traditionally been charged with the role of culture-bearer, they are similarly the keepers of most homemade photographic images. Whether generating, arranging, displaying, or exchanging photographs, women preserve the images, and with them the memories, that have become mainstays of family folklore. However, since few well-developed studies on women and folk photography are available, the field remains open to further study. See also: Family Folklore; Film; Oral History. References: Adams, Timothy Dow. Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999; Coke, Van Deren, ed. One Hundred Years of Photographic History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975; Hirsch, Marianne, ed. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997; ———. The Familial Gaze. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999; Ohrn, Karen Becker. Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980; Sayre, Maggie Lee. ‘‘Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre’’: Photographs of a River Life. Ed. Tom Rankin. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1995; Wojcik, Daniel. ‘‘‘Polaroids from Heaven’: Photography, Folk Religion, and the Miraculous Image Tradition at a Marian Apparition Site.’’ Journal of American Folklore 109 (1996): 129–148.

Linda S. Watts

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Folk Poetry Rhythmic and/or rhyming texts, intended for reading, chanting, recitation and/or singing, including local compositions as well as traditional verse, often highly symbolic and relevant to a community’s knowledge, beliefs, and views, are considered folk poetry. Folk poetry is an extremely diverse genre. It can include verse for or by children—nursery and skipping rhymes; materials related to particular occupations from peddlers’ cries and military cadences to cowboy poetry; written short verses communicated in graffiti and autograph books; lyric, narrative, and epic song texts; traditional as well as event-specific recitations, including African American toasts; and written verses for family and community circulation. Arguably, many kinds of folk poetry—ballads, lyric folksongs, epics, and newer forms like rap—are distinctive because of the integral importance of tunes and musical accompaniment. However, folklorists have often considered together verses intended for singing, recitation, and reading, and the line between them is a particularly difficult one to draw in current societies, as it was in literate cultures of the past. The texts or the rhymical/verse structures of songs may be the bases for both serious and parodic folk poetry for singing, reciting, or reading, suggesting that the distinctions between them may be detected primarily in terms of performance. And the same tunes can be used for entirely different song texts, suggesting a less-than-unbreakable link between music and verse content. Folk poems of various types—original and traditional, irrespective of performance mode—say a great deal about the perspectives of women and men on their society, and about sociocultural organizations of gender in general. Many religious poetic texts like the Ramayanas of India are recited, and probably also authored, by men. In Iran, historical battle poetry is associated with men, dirges and laments with women, and wedding verse is recited by both sexes. Seven of the fifteen ‘‘amateur poets’’ whose gender could be identified in Cynthia Lamson’s collection of Newfoundland counterprotest verse about seal hunting are women; one used a feminine pseudonym ‘‘Minnie Ha-Ha.’’ However, in the additional categories of published, performer, and public-figure poets, only one woman is found, leaving a maximum of nine out of twenty-six writers who could be women. Though some Eastern European folk poetic traditions have historically been restricted to male bards, many others are strongly associated with women. Women often perform ritual songs associated with weddings, funerals, and calendar customs—Christmas, Easter, Saints’ Days, etc. In Brazil, the broadside literatura de cordel is almost exclusively masculine, since it is a professional activity requiring literacy and conflicting with women’s traditional roles. But many forms traditionally associated with men, and misogynist lyrics like those found in many forms of male rap, also offer sites wherein women can express themselves. The gendering of folk poetry can be deceptive. It might seem that cowboy poetry, relating to a quintessentially masculine occupation, would not be written or performed by women; however, they are performers as well as audience members at cowboy poetry gatherings in Canada and the

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United States. In the Canadian province of Alberta, women and men write and perform poetry about pioneer life—farming and homesteading—more than about ranching. Much of what is called ‘‘cowboy’’ poetry in the United States may similarly refer to any and all aspects of life on the western plains. The groups or communities to which folk poetry is directed are extremely diverse. They may be ethnic groups, rural communities, age groups, religious congregations, or special populations like prisoners, friends, families, and so on. Folk poetry is read, recited, or sung because of its expression of ideas and sentiments that the poet or presenter feels will be useful to the community or group to which it is directed. Since gender relations are pervasively significant in all cultures, folk poetry often says a great deal about women and men and their interactions with one another. Take, for example, this song text from nineteenth-century Iran: Daughters? One is enough. If there are two, well, Mother is not without help. If there are three, the ceiling beams will break down. If there are four, calamity is complete. If there are five, it is a deep darkness. If there are six, send out a crier. If there are seven, think of husbands. Still, may God bless the girls; Still, may God’s name protect the girls (quoted in Soroudi 1990: 552).

Folk poetry may at times reflect social relations, but it may sometimes also address them adversarially, as in this Brazilian folheto, based on the Jorge Amado novel, Tereza Batista, in which the male author counters conventional views of sex workers: The prostitute is a human being like any other, Therefore, if treated with respect she can tomorrow lead a more honorable life as wife and mother, no longer dimming the radiance of the Immaculate Virgin-Mother of Christ (quoted in Slater 1982: 157).

While not the most progressive view imaginable, this perspective counters the notion that all sex workers are irredeemably damned. Not all folk poetry by men shows women in a negative light, but such presentation is not uncommon, as in Texas prisoner Johnny Barone’s poem about his life experiences: Once in jail he came to know, Of his wife and best friend Joe, She told his sons that he was dead, Married Joe and shared his bed (quoted in Burns 1993: 45).

The poet makes his wife directly responsible for most of the evil in his life. However, as Roger Renwick noted, folk poets may extol the conventional

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virtues of women too, as in verses composed to nurses as thank-you’s after a hospital visit, praising their nurturance, kindness, and so on. A Macedonian wedding text speaks eloquently about the bride’s situation: Give me your blessing, Oh darling father, for I must leave you for a strange household, for a strange household, and for strange people. Though not my father, I’ll call him father, I’ll call him father, he’ll not say daughter. Though not my mother, I’ll call her mother, I’ll call her mother, she’ll not say daughter (quoted in Sazdov 1991: 193).

Many ritual occasions call for focus upon particular female participants. In Luri (Macedonian) wedding verse, the mother-in-law is an ambivalent figure: O girl, get up, get up, it is better there than here. The mother-in-law you’ll have is sweeter than sugar. O girl, get up, get up, it is better here than there. The mother in law in store for you is worse than a viper (quoted in Amanolahi and Thackston 1986: 108).

The above text also reflects the structuring of much folk poetry in terms of parallels and opposites, as will be discussed below. Luri dirges also reflect gender relations between women: A mother dies, and a daughter next to her Spreads her black tresses over the body.

Or: A daughter and her mother are at the riverbank When they do not see each other they pine for each other.

And between the sexes: My grave is narrow, for no brother dug it. The mourning for me is cold, for no sister wailed.

Or: Girls with fathers sit in honor; Girls without fathers welter in blood.

There are often touching commentaries on the importance of women: Mother, mother, I shall never call you mother again. You have left me behind like a mountain ewe’s lamb.

Cross-culturally, women are frequently placed in the role of mourners, often as semiprofessionals extemporizing chanted dirges and/or mourning songs. Irish Gaelic lament poetry—keening—allows a mourning woman to express praise for the deceased. But a woman can also direct anger against a priest who tells her to accept her lot as a widow, against her husband for dying and leaving her, or against the abuser she is burying: You used to give me The thick end of the stick,

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The hard side of the bed, The small bit of food, —That was all I expected (quoted in Bourke 1993: 174).

Much folk poetry paints a bleak picture of women’s lives. Ingrian (Finnish/Russian) wedding songs advise the groom to beat his wife, but not to injure her excessively, and indoors rather than publicly. Women ethnographers often un/dis/cover resistance in verse-making traditions. Lila AbuLughod shows that Bedouin women’s poetry does not indulge in the stereotypical representations of compliant, invisible Islamic women. She cites a Bedouin wedding verse that offers a negative view of polygyny: Better death, blindness, poverty, and destitution than a match with a married man (quoted in Abu-Lughod 1986: 217).

Folk poetry about heterosexual relationships is abundant cross-culturally. The Serbian ‘‘Death of Omer and Merima’’ is a tale of family opposition to lovers which ends, as so many of this story type do, with their deaths. In one version, the parallels so often evident in folk poetry take another form familiar cross-culturally—plants growing from the lovers’ graves which link the two: When just a little time had passed, From Omer springs a young green pine, Another springs from Merima: About young Omer’s Mera’s wreathes, Like silky thread a nosegay binds; About both trees, the wormwood climbs (quoted in Zimmerman 1986: 141).

Indeed, much love poetry expresses misery: Tears won’t bring your sweetheart endure your malady patiently Tears won’t bring your sweetheart pay no mind and be quiet (quoted in Abu-Lughod 1986: 263).

Or: The wounds, oh beloved, of your love heal some days then open again.. . . My wounds were just about healed and today oh my torment, they tore open (ibid.: 264).

But heterosexual relationships are not always unhappy. ‘‘Maiden of Kosovo’’ is about lovers reunited on the battlefield because he recognizes the gold ring he gave her, and she recognizes the gold shawl she gave him. Misogyny is rampant in folk poetry, especially that which is composed and/or presented by men. But alternative visions are also possible. Dianne Dugaw found cross-dressing ballads throughout Anglo European and North American traditions, in which bold women become sailors, highway robbers, and soldiers. Though these songs appear to be particularly popular with women singers, men also perform them. Indeed, the almost exclusively male-performed Brazilian literatura de cordel includes many texts with a woman-warrior theme. But the attitudes expressed toward such

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women in these songs cannot be generalized; one singer and audience member might see them as personal role models, where another finds them abhorrent and unfeminine. In a genre as diverse as folk poetry, it is difficult to locate specific common qualities. Indeed, folk poetry’s symbolic and communicative aspects make it richly interpretable. For example, a series of verses which appear in as diverse a group of genres as ballad, lyric folksong, and African American blues, are these: Who’s Who’s Who’s Who’s

gonna gonna gonna gonna

shoe your pretty little foot, glove your hand, kiss your ruby red lips, be your man?

Papa’s gonna shoe my pretty little foot, Mama’s gonna glove my hand, Sister’s gonna kiss my ruby red lips, And I don’t need no man (Greenhill 1997).

This traditional Euro North American song text exemplifies the repetitive and paralleling structures that make folk poetry so easy to remember, but it also says much about gender assumptions and relations in Euro North American society. Most readers/listeners would assume that the first speaking persona is male. He is probably addressing a woman who is his lover or some other relative, questioning her about her economic situation, but also about her sexual availability. The woman’s response in the second verse implies familial dependence but sexual autonomy—or even lesbianism. Folk poetry is highly adaptable to circumstances. Note the extreme semantic shift when the identities your/my are reversed (as is frequently the case in traditional versions of this text): Who’s Who’s Who’s Who’s

gonna gonna gonna gonna

shoe my pretty little foot, glove my hand, kiss my ruby red lips, be my man?

Papa’s gonna shoe your pretty little foot, Mama’s gonna glove your hand, Sister’s gonna kiss your ruby red lips, And you don’t need no man.

Now the first speaker is female, and her questions have become somewhat plaintive, while the second speaker could be male or female, the tone either dismissive or reassuring. The structures of folk poetry make it not only memorable, but also multiply interpretable. See also: Ballad; Folk Music and Folksong. References: Abu-Lughod, Lila. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986; Amanolahi, Sekandur, and W. M. ^ a^ Thackson. Tales from Luristan: Tales, Fables and Folk Poetry from the Lur of Bal Gari^va. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986; Bourke, Angela. ‘‘More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 160–82. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

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1993; Dugaw, Dianne. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Greenhill, Pauline. True Poetry: Traditional and Popular Verse in Ontario. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989; Greenhill, Pauline, ed. Special Issue: Folk Poetry. Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 15, no. 1 (1993). Also see intra Richard A. Burns, ‘‘Prison Folk Poetry: The Barone Trilogy,’’ 41–53; Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘‘Who’s Gonna Kiss Your Ruby Red Lips?’: Sexual Scripts in Floating Verses.’’ In Ballads Into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child, eds. Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts, 225–36. Berne: Peter Lang, 1997; Lamson, Cynthia. ‘‘Bloody Decks and a Bumper Crop’’: The Rhetoric of Sealing Counter-Protest. St. John’s, NF: ISER, 1979; Renwick, Roger. English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1980; Sazdov, Tome. ‘‘Macedonian Folk Poetry, Principally Lyric.’’ Oral Tradition, vol. 6, nos. 2/3 (1991) 186–199; Slater, Candace. Stories on a String: The Brazilian Literatura de Cordel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; Soroudi, Sorour S. ‘‘Folk Poetry and Society in Nineteenth-Century Iran.’’ In Proceedings of the First European Conference of Iranian Studies, eds. Gherardo Gnoli and Antonio Panaino, 541–52. Rome: Instituto Italiano Per Il Medio Ed Estremo Oriente, 1990; Zimmerman, Devrnja. Serbian Folk Poetry. Columbus Ohio: Kosovo Publishing, 1986.

Pauline Greenhill Folklife Folklife comprises the traditionary culture of a group and the study of that culture. The combination ‘‘folk’’ and ‘‘life’’ (and its equivalent in Scandinavian languages and German) appears in nineteenth-century documents. As a specialized term, the English word is derived from twentieth-century Swedish usage (folkliv), and suggests a particular approach toward the study of traditional culture. Folklife, like all aspects of culture, tends to be strongly gendered. The distinction between women’s folklife and men’s folklife in a particular culture generally corresponds to the sociocultural distinctions between women and men, and between the feminine and the masculine as defined by that culture. One important aspect of women’s folklife today is the way in which women use traditional communicative forms to express and sometimes to contest their positions in their cultures. The distinction between the terms ‘‘folklife’’ and ‘‘folklore’’ tends to be one of emphasis rather than one of subject matter. Current usage is quite diverse. Some sharply distinguish an older approach to folklore from a newer approach to folklife. But many scholars combine the terms— ‘‘folklore’’ and ‘‘folklife’’—regarding them as more or less synonymous or as referring to identical materials from only slightly different perspectives. Folk Studies began as the study of items that could be recorded on paper. Texts of tales and ballads attracted by far the most serious and consistent attention, and folklore centers collected them in folklore archives and published them in folklore journals. As other materials came under consideration, they were denominated by new coinages, ‘‘folk music,’’ ‘‘folkways,’’ ‘‘folk art,’’ ‘‘folk architecture,’’ etc. Emphasis was on the materials themselves. Analysis tended to be comparative or historical, seeking answers to the questions 1) what does this item tell us about the lost culture of this people? or 2) what is the original form of this item and how has it migrated from culture to culture? North American folkloristics continues to place much emphasis on folk materials. Jan Brunvand’s popular textbook

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American Folklore (1998, fourth edition) for instance, is largely organized into chapters with titles such as ‘‘Folktales,’’ ‘‘Superstitions,’’ ‘‘Folk Gestures,’’ and ‘‘Folk Costumes.’’ By the late 1800s, however, a more integrated approach to folk materials emerged in Sweden with the establishment of Skansen, the great outdoor folk museum in Stockholm. There, traditional buildings from throughout Sweden were rebuilt and grouped to exhibit the way of life of those who had lived and worked in them. The emphasis at Skansen was on the past, but in time Swedish researchers came to realize that materials and activities like those they studied not only survived in contemporary times, but continued to have a functional role in their own social life and that of their contemporaries. In other words, folkliv was a part of modern everyday Swedish culture. Folklife Studies thus began with the realization that there are traditional materials that have a functional place in the researchers’ own contemporary culture. The emphasis shifted from comparative patterns of a particular genre across cultures to the place of the genre in the overall pattern of a particular culture, and from what the item revealed about the lost past to what it revealed about the lively present. This more holistic approach also heralded a change in focus from items to the people in whose lives those items functioned. Thus, folklife shifted study from the history of items to the ethnology or ethnography of item-producers. Consequently, Folklife Studies became more anthropological than literary or historical, more concrete than abstract, and more concerned with process than with product. The communities studied were no longer just the rural, agricultural, and unlettered—so-called ‘‘folk cultures.’’ Gradually the urban and even the middle class came into the folklife specialist’s purview. The folklife specialist could study culture from the insider’s perspective, while the folklorist was usually an outsider studying material that was culturally or at least socially foreign. Folklife studies also have tended to focus on the executors of arts, crafts, and subsistence skills, rather than on oral traditions or music. The folklife approach, with its emphasis on process and producer, facilitated the emergence of the field dubbed ‘‘public folklore,’’ perhaps more properly called ‘‘public folklife.’’ Public folklife specialists work with state and national governments and private foundations to promote folklife. Since many traditional artists are women and/or come from families, communities, and ethnic groups that are financially pressed and/or politically marginalized, public folklife has exhibited a strong social and political thrust. The shift in emphasis from folklore to folklife has also proved a boon to feminist scholars who seek to foreground the skill and genius of traditional women and their contributions to folk culture and to culture as a whole. An early description of American folklife appeared in Scribner’s in 1930. There, Ruth Suckow created a remarkably detailed and perceptive evocation of the common folklife of older English-speaking White communities across much of the United States. She wrote about the language, manners, architecture, festivity, crafts, livelihoods, games, dances, songs, values, foodways, aesthetics, and communal gatherings of what she termed ‘‘just common ordinary Americans.’’ Suckow even used the term ‘‘folklife’’ to refer to the whole, rich, varied cultural expression she observed.

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However, Suckow’s essay makes no reference to Scandinavian folklife studies. Credit for introducing the Scandinavian approach to the United States usually goes to Alfred Shoemaker of the University of Pennsylvania. He had learned about folkliv when he first visited Folk Studies centers in Sweden and elsewhere in the 1930s. He realized that an approach to studying folk culture that emphasized folk arts, crafts, and subsistence skills was ideal for someone like him who was interested in studying and promoting his own Pennsylvania Dutch cultural milieu. Folklife Studies outside of Pennsylvania did not make much headway in North America until the 1960s, when restless young scholars both there and abroad saw in folklife a less elitist and more relevant approach to Folk Studies. At the same time that students were taking folklife as their starting point in approaching folk materials, however, three movements in the field began to converge; and each has its proponents today. One was the ‘‘text and context’’ movement, which sought to establish and study the context or sitz in leben of the folklore item—its real-life situation and the persons in the real-life situation who produced it. A parallel movement involving the performance-oriented study of expressive culture emphasized the action that produced the item and the person who produced it. A third movement considered the repertoire of a folk performer as a whole, asking what that repertoire revealed about the art, the artist, and the process of transmission— often cross-generational. Representing a convergence of influences from European Folk Studies and from within American folkloristics, the folklife approach had become dominant in American Folk Studies by the turn of the twenty-first century. Folklife is often described as ‘‘expressive culture.’’ This aspect of folklife inspires celebratory rhetoric. Mary Hufford, for instance, writes: Folklife is community life and values, artfully expressed in myriad forms and interactions. Universal, diverse, and enduring, it enriches the nation and makes us a commonwealth of cultures.. . . Today the study of folklife encompasses all of the traditional expressions that shape and are shaped by various communities.. . . The traditional knowledge and skills required to make a pie crust, plant a garden, arrange a birthday party, or turn a lathe are exchanged in the course of daily living and learned by imitation. It is not simply skills that are transferred in such interactions, but notions about the proper ways to be human at a particular time and place. Whether sung or told, enacted or crafted, traditions are the outcroppings of deep lodes of worldview, knowledge, and wisdom, navigational aids in an ever-fluctuating social world. . . . [c]onferring on community members a vital sense of identity, belonging and purpose (2002: 238–241).

Furthermore, as Hufford also points out, the people of a community, by living their folklife in a particular place, make that very place expressive— for example, in the way they celebrate its streams in their dances, or plant trees reminiscent of the old homeland, or in the way, through religious ritual, ‘‘the passion of Christ is annually mapped onto urban landscapes in the Good Friday processions’’ (2002: 241). In a formulation useful for the study of gender in small, relatively stable, traditional societies, Ivan Illich (1982) describes gender as a system of

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‘‘dissymmetric complementarity’’ that extends to every aspect of traditional life: subsistence, art, and ritual. For example, some food activities are women’s and some are men’s; some of the work of turning material (animal skin, flax, cotton, or wool) into clothing is women’s work, and some men’s; and some tools are reserved for women, and some for men—or women handle a tool one way and men another. Women walk differently, use their hands differently, and speak and sing differently from men. Family resources may be divided, for instance, with the children belonging to women and the animals to men. Traditional space, too, is gendered: women avoid men’s spaces and vice-versa, though a plaza that belongs to the women in the morning might belong to the men in the late afternoon. This complementarity is dissymmetric because some elements on one side of the divide may have no corresponding elements on the other. If women do the buying and selling in the market, for example, one cannot necessarily point to an aspect of men’s lives that corresponds to that activity. In this view, the domains of women and men in such systems may be absolutely separate, but each is equally essential to the functioning of the society. Nevertheless, there are no universals. Women generally care for young children and prepare the daily family food, and men, generally speaking, hunt and make war; but almost any activity might be the domain of either sex. There are cultures in which women are expected to engage in what Euro North Americans think of as masculine activities, such as handling all trade and financial transactions, serving as high chief, or officiating at public religious functions. Conversely, activities Euro North Americans might think of as feminine fall into men’s domains in some cultures. Though weaving, for instance, is women’s work among the Navajo, among the neighboring Hopi, it is men who weave for their people, including weaving the traditional blanket dresses of Hopi women. Strongly gendered societies and cultures are not necessarily unfair to women and girls. While they may limit potential realms of female activity, they restrain male activity just as rigidly. Moreover, patriarchal societies in particular can create oppressive positions for both women and men, however disproportionately. Nevertheless, in matrilineal societies especially, social privilege may be equitably distributed. And in some patrilineal societies as well, such as the Newfoundland outport society described by Hilda Chaulk Murray (1979), an equitable and satisfactory apportionment of labor, resources, and happiness may be attainable for all its members. In the differentiating and industrializing cultures of the West, as Illich notes, the underlying gender system has been eroding for a thousand years. Nevertheless, folklife—and popular culture, too—still tend toward gendering most, if not all, aspects of cultural life. In the gendered cultures that we have inherited, there are traditional elements that constitute a distinct ‘‘women’s world.’’ First among them is the home, especially the kitchen. Therefore, women’s folklife includes foodways, recipes, and the preparation of staple foods for later consumption, including churning, cheese making, sauerkraut making, and grinding corn and coffee. Women also observe traditional ways of apportioning space in the home, arranging the kitchen and other rooms, and raising vegetables and flowers.

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In recent years in mainstream North American culture, gardening has become regendered, with men usually raising the vegetables and women the flowers. This change may be a direct result of the ‘‘victory gardens’’ of World War II. At that time, families who had not practiced vegetable gardening were encouraged by the federal government to take up the growing of food. The tending of those new ‘‘war gardens’’ usually fell to the father or grandfather who was still at home. After the war, vegetable gardening remained a men’s hobby. Traditional women’s crafts are those connected with providing clothing, sundries, and comforts for the family and the home. These include spinning, weaving, and sewing, often using traditional patterns; needlework and embroidery, including samplers; knitting and crocheting; lacemaking, beadwork, quilting, rugmaking, and pottery and basketmaking. They include creating utilitarian items for everyday use as well as fancier items for the parlor, for Sunday or holiday best, or for a daughter’s trousseau. The aesthetic observable in these crafts reflects the folklife of the whole culture out of which such crafts emerge. Sometimes, too, a particular craft such as quiltmaking becomes the focus of the aesthetic energies of an individual woman or her community. An annual cycle takes place within traditional homes and communities involving women both as women and as members of their families. Home customs for holidays such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, winter nights, and summer days are part of women’s folklife. Seasons and festivals sometimes require special decorations or the establishing of home altars, which are traditionally the responsibility of the women of the house. Within the home and family, women also carry out customs for all the stages of life (rites of passage), including birth, breastfeeding, childrearing, menarche, adolescence, courtship, marriage, menopause, aging, and death. Historically, North American women have cared for the ill and the aged and laid out the dead. They are often a source of traditional medical beliefs and practices, some purely magical, some consistent with scientific-medical practice. Women’s storytelling, particularly informal storytelling in all-woman groups, includes many anecdotes about home, family, and events associated with the stages of life. Women have had customary niches in community life as well. In church, school, and community, they organize festivals, cook spaghetti dinners, and hold bake sales and rummage sales. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at White community dances in Appalachia, the American heartland, and as far east as the Canadian Maritimes, the fiddlers and guitar players were likely to be men, while women might have provided backup and rhythm on piano. In other communities and ethnic groups, women’s music-making might be confined to the home, draw upon a different repertoire, or exhibit a style different from men’s music-making. In traditional Greek communities, for instance, all church music was provided by men. Similarly, in bars and at dances, the band was composed of men, though there might be a woman singer or belly dancer. In the home, women sang lullabies, songs for children, and other traditional songs, both solo and a cappella. In other

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communities, women had opportunities for public performance more or less equal to those of men and shared in a single community repertoire and style. In traditional Black churches, for instance, both women and men have had many opportunities as musicians. In North American cultures, women have held certain traditional occupations, including midwife, nurse, schoolteacher, secretary, pieceworker, waitress, nursemaid or nanny, farm wife, prostitute, and preacher. Each occupation embodies a wealth of traditional beliefs and practices. In much of North America, as in much of the world, the traditional occupations of divination, fortune-telling, curing, and performing of or instructing in rituals to enhance luck—good and bad—are also linked with women. Practices connected with the female body are another important element of women’s folklife. In addition to fashion and costume, these may take the form of body adornment with henna art, scars, brands, or tattoos, or hairstyles such as cornrows, braids, or the coils of uncut hair typical of members of certain Protestant evangelical denominations. Women’s folklife also includes beliefs about the female body, its functions and sexuality, attitudes regarding the female body, and complementary or opposing beliefs and attitudes regarding the male body. It is important to remember that the character of women’s folklife, whether in the home or community, depends upon the ethnicity, class, and regional group or groups to which women belong. Women’s folklife on a Navajo reservation differs from that of a West Virginia mining camp, as does the folklife of a university professor from that of the laborer who cleans her house. Of course, in contemporary North American culture, there are many individuals and families who ignore or violate inherited gender codes, whether by choice or by necessity. For example, automobiles are traditionally associated with men and the male domain (though often affectionately given women’s names), but a single mother who must rely on an old car to get her back and forth to work must of necessity learn to keep the vehicle running. A woman who grew up working in her father’s Midwestern smalltown garage, but who marries a man from New York City whose family never owned a car, may find that both expertise and inclination make her the family auto mechanic. Contemporary women likewise continue to create new traditions or ~ adapt older traditions in folk or folk-like ways. These include the quinceanera, menarche parties, lesbian commitment ceremonies, processional performances, croning, women’s friendship groups, and bachelorette parties and divorce parties. Especially interesting is the way that folklife traditions have been adopted for humanitarian and political purposes. A paradigmatic instance of this impulse was the 20,000-woman march on Washington, DC, on August 4, 1985, recalling the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. attack on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in protest against the proliferation of nuclear armaments. A major feature of the march was a fifteen-mile-long ribbon exhibiting women’s needlework in its many forms, which was wrapped around the Pentagon and other federal buildings. This event combined two forms of folklife that have often been drawn upon for humanitarian and political purposes. Mass marching has a long

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tradition in American life, surfacing whenever the voiceless have demanded to be heard. The most famous occasions of regular mass marches in twentieth-century U.S. history are the miners’ (and the miners’ wives’) marches in the southern Appalachian coal fields in the 1920s and 1930s and the Black civil rights marches of the 1960s. In recent years, women have used mass marches to serve political ends, such as the Million Mom March on Washington, DC, in May 2000 (to demand gun control), and to serve humanitarian ends, such as the annual nationwide walks known as Making Strides Against Breast Cancer (to raise money for cancer research) and Take Back the Night (to promote awareness of rape). Needlework—especially quilting—for ceremonial purposes also has a long tradition. Women have made quilts to mark occasions in their lives or more commonly in family life. A quilt might be made for a wedding, for a birth, to celebrate a life, or even for the acquisition of the first family dog. Lakota and Sioux women create star quilts for use in ceremonial events such as welcoming a new child, performing a healing, honoring an individual, or burying the dead. And on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana, basketball-star quilts honor the coaches and families of basketball players. But the creation of quilts as political or humanitarian statements is relatively new. Many of the units that made up the 1985 fifteen-mile ribbon were quilts. In 2000, the International Year for the Culture of Peace, an American group created a quilt known as the Cloth of Many Colors. This nearly milelong quilt was presented at the United Nations and also wrapped around the Pentagon. The AIDS Quilt, with blocks sewn in memory of those who have died from the disease, continues to grow, and portions of it tour the United States; it is displayed on football fields or in gyms of large university field houses. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, American women, schoolchildren, and people from around the world spontaneously created quilts that they sent to the Pentagon. Initially, these quilts were hung in the Pentagon, but the number grew so great that a foundation was created to curate them. The World Trade Center Memorial Quilt Project was organized to create quilts with contributed blocks to be sewn into five quilts honoring the deceased at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, Bedford County, Pennsylvania (where one of the hijacked planes crashed), and New York City’s fire and police departments, respectively. Blocks came in from forty-seven states and fourteen countries. The finished quilts, though of different sizes, averaged almost ninety square feet apiece in size. Not only are North American women living their folklife—they are drawing upon it in ways that are simultaneously deeply traditional and brilliantly innovative. See also: Aesthetics; Ballad; Body Modification and Adornment; Class; Folk Art; Folk Custom; Folk Music and Folksong; Folktale; Foodways; Gardens; Gender; Processional Performance; Public Folklore; Quiltmaking; Quin~ ceanera; Rites of Passage; Sexuality; Storytelling; Women’s Work. References: Bronner, Simon J. ‘‘Alfred Shoemaker and the Discovery of American Folklife.’’ In Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture, 266– 312. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998; ———. Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc, 2002; Cantwell,

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Robert. Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993; Hufford, Mary. American Folklife: A Commonwealth of Cultures. Washington: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Reprinted in Bronner 2002: 237–247; Illich, Ivan. Gender. New York: Pantheon, 2002 [1982]; MacDowell, Marsha L., and C. Kurt Dewhurst. To Honor and Comfort: Native Quilting Traditions. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1997; Murray, Hilda Chaulk. More than Fifty Percent: Woman’s Life in a Newfoundland Outport, 1900–1950. St John’s, NF: Breakwater Books, 1979; Suckow, Ruth. ‘‘The Folk Idea in American Life.’’ Scribner’s Magazine 88 (September 1930): 245–255. Reprinted in Bronner 2002: 145–160.

William Bernard McCarthy

Folklore Feminists Communication Folklore Feminists Communication (FFC) is a Web-based American publication begun as a printed newsletter in 1973 to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information relevant to the study of women’s folklore. With the rise of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s (and feminist scholarship by the early 1970s), women trained as professional folklorists in the United States organized the Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society to discuss areas of special concern to women in the academic field of Folklore. They adopted as the section’s official newsletter Folklore Feminists Communication, which had already begun circulating ideas relating to women as folklorists and to women’s folklore as an exciting new field of study. The Women’s Section’s concerns were several. First, women wanted a venue to meet and converse with other women folklorists about feminist scholarship and the problems associated with participating in the maledominated field of Folklore in particular and academia in general. Second, they began to assess the implications of feminist theory and scholarship in the work that male and female folklorists had been doing, or had been failing to do, as a result of patriarchal bias in the field. From these concerns would spring much of the recent American scholarship focused on women as academic, public, and community folklorists, and as cultural actors in general, as well as scholarship focused on those areas of folklore and folklife traditionally associated with women (embroidery, quilting, pregnancy and childbirth, and elder care, among others) as legitimate areas of inquiry and study in the field of Folklore. Folklore Feminists Communication has, over the years, been a place for short articles about folklore and feminism; communication about the concerns and achievements of members of the American Folklore Society Women’s Section; meeting information and minutes from annual meetings; commemoration of group rituals (such as the triannual ‘‘croning’’ of section members who have passed their fiftieth birthdays); and other matters of concern to section members. Folklore Feminists Communication currently operates as a Web-based information site and can be accessed through the American Folklore Society (http://www.afsnet.org). Paper copies of past issues are held by a many university libraries in the United States, and permanent archives exist at the

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Utah State University Fife Folklore Archives. See also: American Folklore Society Women’s Section; Croning; Feminisms; Women’s Folklore. References: ‘‘Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society.’’ http://www.artlore. net/ffc.html (accessed August 9, 2008).

Theresa A. Vaughan

Folklore Studies Association of Canada The Folklore Studies Association of Canada/Association canadienne d’ethnologie et de folklore (FSAC/ACEF), founded 1976, encourages research and education in Folklore/Ethnology in Canadian universities, museums, and archives. Its multidisciplinary, international membership comprises academics, researchers, curators, archivists, and students as well as libraries, museums, archives, and universities. FSAC/ACEF operates bilingually in Canada’s official languages. Its use of both the English word ‘‘folklore’’ and its French counterpart ‘‘ethnology’’ recognizes the double heritage of Folklore/Ethnology Studies in Canada. FSAC/ACEF acts to develop excellence, increase competence, and support study, education, and research, as well as to promote, publish, and disseminate it. FSAC/ACEF belongs to the Humanities and Social Science Federation of Canada, and normally holds annual meetings with its Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities, where members present formal papers, hold workshops and roundtables for professional development, and discuss current issues. Several have been held jointly with the Canadian Women’s Studies Association, offering additional opportunities for feminist collaboration. FSAC/ACEF publishes an annual bulletin containing meeting abstracts and schedules, minutes, and executive reports, and (with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Fonds quebecois de la recherche sur la societe et la culture) the refereed biannual journal Ethnologies (formerly Canadian Folklore canadien [CFC]). Many of its academic papers, book, film, record reviews, and research notes are feminist and women-centered, but related thematic issues include Women and Tradition/Femmes et traditions (15#2, 1993), Masculinities/Masculinites (19#1, 1997), and Wicca (20#1&2, 1998). FSAC/ACEF’s Web site provides an executive list, calls for papers for FSAC/ACEF events and publications, consultations, announcements of prizes, and links to relevant sites. From FSAC/ACEF’s beginnings, women have been active and visible. Onethird of its presidents—Catherine Jolicoeur, Nancy Schmitz. Edith Fowke, Carole Carpenter, Kay Stone, Jocelyne Mathieu, Vivian Labrie, Diane Tye, and Barbara LeBlanc—and two of the five editors of CFC/Ethnologies—Carole Carpenter and Nancy Schmitz—have been women. In 1990, FSAC/ACEF established the Luc Lacourciere Memorial Scholarship Fund, awarded to the top student in Folklore/Ethnology Studies at the end of his or her first year of graduate studies at a Canadian university. The majority of winners have been female. From 1978 to 1984, FSAC/ACEF gave the Distinguished Canadian Folklorist award, the first going to Edith Fowke, and three other

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women also received it (Helen Creighton in 1981, Carmen Roy in 1982, and Simonne Voyer in 1983). In 1985, reflecting its interest in supporting and encouraging all kinds of work in folklore/ethnology (not only academic), FSAC/ACEF began awarding the Marius Barbeau Medal. Again, the first recipient was a woman, the Acadian composer and singer Edith Butler. In 1987, it went to LaRena Clark, a remarkable source singer (that is, directly connected with the tradition and not a revival performer) from Ontario with a repertoire of more than 500 songs; in 1995 to Dorothy Burnham, a museum textile specialist and author; in 1999 to dance ethnologist Simonne Voyer; and in 2002 to Nancy Schmitz, retiring professor of Anthropology at Universite Laval, Quebec and outgoing editor of the Bulletin and Ethnologies. See also: Region: Canada; Women Folklorists. References: Canadian Folklore canadien 1 (1979)–19 (1997); Ethnologies 20 (1998– ); Folklore Studies Association of Canada/ Association canadienne d’ethnologie et de folklore. http://www.celat.ulaval.ca/acef (accessed August 10, 2008)

Pauline Greenhill Folktale € Translating the German Volksmarchen (the people’s ‘‘little story’’ or ‘‘news’’), the term ‘‘folktale’’ refers to one of the main prose narrative genres that folklorists study. In contrast to belief narratives like myth and legend, the folktale features fictional characters in culturally meaningful situations, centers on the ordinary, and is primarily for entertainment. Classified into tale types by the Finn Antti Aarne and the American Stith Thompson in the early twentieth century, the folktale groups a number of subgenres, including the animal tale, religious tale, joke, and formula tale. But the most prom€ inent is the ‘‘tale of magic’’—the Zaubermarchen in German or conte merveilleux in French—also known in English as the ‘‘wonder tale’’ and more commonly as the ‘‘fairy tale.’’ Women—as characters, tellers, writers, listeners, and readers—have historically engaged with and been powerfully associated with this particular kind of folktale, found in both oral and literary traditions. While for the most part folktales were collected for print in the nineteenth century and later, they also were part of much older and classic literary texts ranging from the Panchatantra and the Arabian Nights to Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and the Italian Pentamerone. Nowadays, a few old-world folktales featuring female protagonists such as Snow White, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel are particularly popular in North America thanks to books and films for children. But the range of female folktale characters is much broader and includes more resourceful and wise, though less-known, female heroes from the oral traditions of Europe, Appalachia, Native America, and Africa. While ‘‘fairy tale,’’ from the French conte de f ees, is a misnomer in that fairies are scarce in these stories, magic does play a distinctive part in them. ‘‘Once upon a time’’ signals that a story—some will call it a folktale, others a fairy tale—is coming our way and we should suspend disbelief because, whether told or printed, this story will not conform to realism. But the

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German and French terms, Volksm€archen and conte de fees, also point to different genealogies: the folktale is firmly rooted in orality and a group’s traditions and aesthetics, while the fairy tale is identified with printed texts that may or may not emerge from an oral tradition and are often signed by an author. This is undoubtedly a significant distinction. Clearly, when a literary fairy tale has no counterpart in oral tradition, it is not a folktale. However, the oral traditions of storytelling and the literary traditions of authored texts have been intertwined throughout history, which has made it problematic to draw a sharp distinction between ‘‘authentic’’ folktales and ‘‘inauthentic’’ literary tales. For example, ‘‘Cinderella’’ is a widely told folktale— classified as ATU 510 by folklorists—with hundreds of versions recorded all over the world, but it has also been part of literature since Giambattista Basile’s sixteenth-century Pentamerone. Most modern performances and adaptations of it are based on the French literary version by Charles Perrault. In common usage, the boundaries between folktales and fairy tales are often blurred. And increasingly in scholarship, that blurring is accepted and results in a fruitful probing of the dynamic relationship between folklore and literature. While the expressions ‘‘old wives’ tales’’ and ‘‘Mother Goose’’ point to women as the traditional tellers of folktales, it is through collections edited by men like Charles Perrault in France, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in Germany, Andrew Lang in England, and through Walt Disney’s movies that these tales are now best known. Feminist writers and scholars have worked to expand and transform this limited canon wherein ‘‘persecuted heroines’’ abound by producing more woman-centered anthologies, recognizing the varied and coded art of women storytellers, rediscovering neglected women writers of fairy tales, reevaluating and revising well-known tales, and performing and writing new ones. Continuing to serve both normalizing and emancipatory social functions and articulating diverse aesthetics, the folktale keeps on performing magic—especially for women—into the twentyfirst century in different media. Thus, following a few observations about the overall genre and about tales of magic in North America, this entry focuses on the tales of magic or fairy tales in both oral and literary traditions; and on the tales’ relation to women and to feminist scholarship primarily in a European and American context. Usually set in distant times and generic places, tales of magic most commonly tell the story of a rather unpromising male or female hero who, often aided by a magic helper, overcomes extraordinary challenges and is rewarded, at times with royal marriage. Think Jack or Cinderella. Within these tales’ worlds, a mix of the supernatural and the ordinary is accepted as natural, and the hero’s magically achieved success coincides with the restoration of a naturalized order. Leaving home is often required for the test to begin; at other times something is missing and must be found. ‘‘Departure’’ and ‘‘lack’’ are two of the narrative ‘‘functions’’ that the formalist Vladimir Propp identified as constitutive of folktale plots. The journey is transformative, like rites of passage. Protagonists are often children or young men and women who assume a ‘‘new’’ social role and sense of being once they have proven themselves.

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Symbolism and transformation are key elements that allow for imagining change and for recognizing hidden resources. This paradox works on multiple levels of meaning, from the psychological to the social, so that—in different historical or cultural contexts and in specific performances or retellings—a tale may tip toward either subverting or reproducing stock social arrangements; however, wonder and convention are both consistently at play. Recognizing the dynamics of variation and tradition has been a challenge that folktale scholars have addressed in a range of ways. But there is a long-standing consensus among folklorists that a credible analysis will be based never on just one, but on a number of versions of a tale or plot. More recently, attention to performance—its emergent quality or situated dynamics— has productively supplemented text-based studies and emphasized the artistry and contextualized elements that pertain to individual tellings. Folklorists have relied on two important reference tools for the basic study of folktales and more specifically of ‘‘tales of magic.’’ The AarneThompson (AT) Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography (1910; 1928 and 1961) catalogued Indo-European folktales based on plot, identified tales of magic as tale types AT 300–749. It was revised in 2004 into the more comprehensive Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, edited by Hans-J€ org Uther (ATU). Stith Thompson’s six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1932–1936; second edition 1955–1958), identified small but significant narrative units recurring in folklore and across tale types. While specific categories and headings for tale types and motifs have been criticized by women scholars as embodying a male view of the world, useful regional and national indexes for tale types and motifs have since appeared. Starting in the nineteenth century, the collection, study, and classification of folktales dominated European folkloristics for a long time. Scholars have persuasively shown how this interest in folktales—of which the collection € Kinder- und Hausmarchen (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812, 1815) by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm is a foremost example—was tied to the rise of nationalism, the establishment of bourgeois values, the increasing domestication of women, and the production of childhood. Whether studying multiple versions of a tale type or a range of folk and literary tales in a specific context, scholars of folktales in the 1970s became increasingly attentive to their variable social and ideological functions. Feminist scholarship has played a crucial role in this development. Such studies often incorporate elements from other well-established approaches to folktales in Psychology, Sociology, Linguistics, Literary Studies, Myth Studies, and Children’s Literature programs. Recent significant texts that attest € to the general vitality of folk- and fairy-tale studies are the Enzyklopadie des € Marchens (see entries like ‘‘Frau,’’ ‘‘Frauenm€archen,’’ ‘‘Die geschw€atzige Frau,’’ ‘‘Erz€ahlen, Erz€ahler,’’ ‘‘M€adchen,’’ ‘‘M€adchen ohne H€ande,’’ or ‘‘Mutter’’); the Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern (2000); the Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (2004), edited by Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen; and Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, edited by Donald Haase and Anne Duggan.

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Most people in the United States today, however, accept folktales and fairy tales without giving them much thought. They identify the tale of magic with Walt Disney movies and illustrated children’s books featuring canonical texts associated with the Grimm brothers, Charles Perrault, or Hans Christian Andersen. These stories are thus loosely understood to be for children—which then translates into the tales being escapist or trivial fantasies—and to be inescapably tied to the Old World. Vivid metaphoric images from folktales, such as the red cap, magic mirror, and gingerbread house, and stock expressions like ‘‘golden goose,’’ ‘‘prince charming,’’ and ‘‘fairy-tale wedding’’ permeate contemporary American culture and have become part of everyday language, but they do not in most cases originate with American folk traditions. Tales of magic did, nevertheless, have a place in the American oral tradition, and thanks to oral recordings in Appalachia dating back to the 1930s, as well as to the comparative work of scholars, we can identify these stories’ distinctive features. In American magic tales, as Carl Lindahl explains in American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress, opening formulas include the abbreviated ‘‘One time’’; characters often inhabit mountain cabins and farms rather than castles; the hero receives less magic help than her/his European counterpart; the giant is the most common opponent, while the dragon is extremely rare; and marriage is not as commonly a part of the happy ending. Furthermore, as Kay Stone asserted in ‘‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us’’ (1975), just as the apparently simple but quick-witted Jack acquired specific traits as a story hero in the new world, female heroes in the American folktale tradition were and are more resourceful and active than in those popularized by Disney and Perrault. Regrettably, they are scarcely known to the general public; Tom Davenport’s film Ashpet: An American Cinderella (1990), for example, tells a story based on Appalachian versions that are unfamiliar to most contemporary American viewers. As powerfully symbolic stories, magic tales have not had the same impact on men as on women. While gender and class socialization is an important ideological ingredient of the genre, scholars agree that, as adults, it is primarily women who continue to engage with fairy tales. This may be related to the romance themes that are associated in contemporary culture with fairy-tale plots, but more generally tales of magic script a range of relationships—between mother and daughter, siblings, father and daughter, older women and coming-of-age girls—that do not involve heterosexual courtship and romance exclusively and are more broadly familial and social. Inspired by feminism, North American women’s discussions in the 1970s focused on fairy-tale protagonists as positive or negative role models for modern girls and women: did identifying with fairy-tale heroines encourage women to be passive and dependent (Marcia Lieberman) or to be active and resourceful (Alison Lurie)? But it was soon clear that such polarization could not do justice to the variety of folktale heroines and folktales. For every self-effacing and docile Beauty and Cinderella, there was a brave Kate Krackernuts who frees her stepsister and a sleeping prince from their respective spells, or a ‘‘wise girl’’ who could solve riddles and unmask injustice. Disobedience and wit as well as submission and silence can be

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positive attributes for folktale heroines. Woman-centered anthologies such as Tatterhood and Other Tales, edited by Ethel Johnston Phelps (1978), Angela Carter’s The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (London, 1990; reprinted as The Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book in the United States, 1990), and Kathleen Ragan’s Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World (1998) provide a range of possibilities for selfreflection that demonstrates how folktales and tales of magic are, to quote Kay Stone in her article, ‘‘Misuses of Enchantment,’’ both ‘‘problem-creating’’ and ‘‘problem-solving’’ narratives for women (1985: 133). Furthermore, some oral versions of ‘‘Little Red Riding Hood’’ portrayed a clever girl who escaped the wolf by using her wits; others depicted her as defenseless, a devoured victim, or one in need of rescue. In The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context (1983), Jack Zipes showed how interpreting a tale and its representation of gender, sexuality, and violence gained tremendously from considering its many versions, each in relation to social and ideological milieus. Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s and Maria Tatar’s studies of the production of gender and childhood in the Grimms’ tales also proved how the Brothers’ editing, and not the women tellers, worked to silence female protagonists. And Kay Stone’s reception-based research revealed that, regardless of the versions they have been exposed to, women often refashion the most passive heroines’ plots to reinterpret them in a more positive light. When analyzing the folktale in North America, ethnic and cultural diversity also make a difference. Tales from the British and Irish traditions were popular in Appalachia, but circulating in oral and printed form we find African American folktales—animal tales especially—in the South, and also Native American, Mexican American, French Creole, and Italian American tales. However, with Native traditions, the Western classification of narratives as ‘‘folktales’’ in contrast to ‘‘legends’’ or ‘‘myths’’ is especially problematic. For the African American tradition, the work of women folklorists and retellers—for example, Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935) and Virginia Hamilton’s Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales (1995)—has been significant in making these stories known where the damsel in distress is not typical, and humor plays an important role in heterosexual relations. Scholars of folk and fairy tales have also given much consideration to the role of gender in both the tellers and the audience of folktales. The narrator Sheherazade from the Arabian Nights, the famous Arabic-language collection that in its first 1704 European translation became an influential Orientalist example of exotic fantasy, has as the female trickster par excellence more recently been the focus of much feminist analysis of gendered telling. When nineteenth-century male scholars collected oral tales from women, these tellers were primarily seen as bearers of a tradition, not of knowledge. Their ‘‘uneducated’’ words were then edited and interpreted within an aesthetics and narrative of history that demanded the ‘‘disenchantment of the world’’ for the sake of modernity. The confinement of ‘‘old wives’ tales’’ to the premodern meant that they held a privileged spot as records of the past, but were nevertheless trivialized and othered.

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In contrast, folktales collected in the 1870s by Laura Gonzenbach in Sicily from mostly female storytellers exemplify how narrative repertoire, performance, themes, and meaning are affected when women are telling stories to other women. Spoken in Sicilian dialect, printed in high German, Gonzenbach’s collection was subsequently translated into standard Italian and thoroughly researched by folklorist Luisa Rubini, and only recently made available in English as La Bella Angiola and The Robber With a Witch’s Head by Jack Zipes. These tales exemplify at once the potential for women’s cross-cultural communication with one another and their difficult negotiation of class and national differences. The appropriation of women tellers’ authority by male authors has a long history in the Western narrative tradition going back, in Karen Rowe’s and Martha Weigle’s accounts, most emblematically to Ovid’s taking over as master ‘‘talespinner.’’ In his poetic retelling of the weaving and storytelling contest between the divine Minerva/Athena and the human Arachne, the woman in etiological fashion is then transformed into the first spider by the goddess she dared to challenge. In her fascinating and sweeping study of narrative and visual culture, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, Marina Warner points to the often derided Mother Goose as having Sybil as well as Saint Anne and the Queen of Sheba as forgotten authoritative antecedents. Establishing this genealogy then allows Warner to read both gossip and silence in connection to fairy tales as ‘‘stratagem[s] of influence’’ and self-assertion (1994: xxv). While women’s voices have been muffled—by being labeled as dangerous, or literally silenced, or dismissed as trivial—folk and fairy tales as told by women nevertheless can deliver what Joan N. Radner notably called ‘‘coded’’ messages to a listener, reader, or scholar whose epistemological framework is woman-centered. In widely different cultural contexts, Margaret Mills’ Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling (1991), Isabel Cardigos’ In and Out of Enchantment: Blood Symbolism in Portuguese Fairy Tales (1996), and Lee Haring’s ‘‘Creolization as Agency in WomanCentered Folktales’’ from the Indian Ocean (Fairy Tales and Feminism 2004) exemplify methodologies for collecting tales whose performance relies on complex gendered mediation and produces different meanings for women and men. Significantly, these studies and others emphasize the centrality of women’s bodies and embodied experiences to the tales’ production of meaning in performance. Two contemporary storytellers in North America have written eloquently about such dynamics in their own lives and performances. Susan Gordon, a professional storyteller from Maryland, works mostly in therapeutic settings (‘‘The Powers of the Handless Maiden’’ in Feminist Messages). Kay Stone, a folklorist and storyteller in Winnipeg, Manitoba, wrote Burning Brightly: New Light on Old Tales Told Today (1998), which considers the revival of storytelling in a range of American and Canadian communities, and traces her own interpretive journey over the years with the performance of a specific tale, ‘‘The Curious Girl.’’ Contemporary women writers in North America have also taken inspiration from folk and fairy tales in a range of ways. Among the best known is

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Jane Yolen with, for instance, The Girl Who Cried Flowers and Other Tales (1974). Author of the insightful study Touch Magic (1986), Yolen has written fiction for adolescents and children that is rooted in the folktale tradition (including the Holocaust-related novel Briar Rose in 1993) and seeks to revise its gender bias (see the humorous Sleeping Ugly in 1981). Like Yolen, Terri Windling has authored fairy tales, written about women and fairy tales, and edited collections of traditional and retold tales. Among the many volumes Windling coedited with Ellen Datlow are Snow White, Blood Red in 1993 and A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales in 2001. The connection of folktales and fairy tales with fantasy as well as the specific focus on adolescents as readers are imaginatively at work in the writing of Susan Fletcher (whose 1998 Shadow Spinner imagines the intervention of a crippled young girl in the storytelling that frames The Arabian Nights), Los Angeles-based Francesca Lia Block (The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold [2000]), and Caribbean Canadian Nalo Hopkinson (whose Skin Folk [2001] collects exuberant creole retellings of ‘‘Red Riding Hood’’ and ‘‘The Kind and the Unkind Girl’’). These collections are but the tip of the iceberg for twentieth-century North American fairy-tale fiction and poetry that put women at center stage. Others have included not only The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum (1900), which in folktale fashion features young Dorothy’s quest and the quintessentially good fairy and evil witch, but also Anne Sexton’s acerbic anti-Grimm poems in Transformations (1971), Robert Coover’s provocative retelling of ‘‘Snow White’’ in ‘‘The Dead Queen’’ (1973) and haunting novel Briar Rose (1996), Margaret Atwood’s many ‘‘Bluebeard’’ fictions, including Bluebeard’s Egg (1983) and The Robber Bride (1993), and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices (1997)—a magic-filled novel that is also a strong indictment of violence against women. In England, Angela Carter’s extraordinary collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) provides multiple permutations of the ‘‘Beauty and the Beast’’ theme in well-known fairy tales focused on heterosexual relations, courtship, marriage, and the experience of menarche. Irish scholar and fiction writer Emma Donoghue bends the heterosexual fairy-tale plots to tell about women’s solidarity, desire, and love for one another in Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997), a collection of short stories centered on the multiple valences of orality. Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry (edited by Wolfgang Mieder in 1985) and The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson in 2003) offer a wide sampling of English-language fairy tale and anti-fairy tale poetry, much of which plays on tales with women protagonists and on the theme of women’s acculturation. If marriage, procreation, and transformation have been at the heart of the tale of magic since Apuleius’s ‘‘Cupid and Psyche’’ and the Arabian Nights, these themes have also been central to women’s literary tradition of fairytale writing at least since the emergence of the French conte de f ees in the late seventeenth century, best exemplified by the elegant and fanciful tales of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and in contrast to the better-known fairy tales

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by Charles Perrault. In particular, together with studies of Madame Le Prince de Beaumont’s 1757 ‘‘Beauty and the Beast’’ and of Victorian literature, the scholarly recovery and revaluation of women’s French and German fairy tales (for English-language translations, see Jack Zipes’ 1991 Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantment, and Shawn C. Jarvis’s and Jeannine Blackwell’s 2001 The Queen’s Mirror: Fairy Tales by German Women, 1780–1900) have illuminated creative efforts to establish a female narrative voice and style in the literary fairy tale, then an emerging and increasingly maledominated genre. Even though the tales’ extravagance was labeled as ridiculous by the French academy of the time, and their ideological inflections vary widely, politics—both of the state and of the body—figure prominently in these women’s texts. While Cristina Bacchilega’s Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997) analyzes late twentieth-century English-language fictions (Atwood’s and Carter’s especially) that revision well-known fairy-tales with a focus on the production of women’s subjectivity and sexuality, Elizabeth W. Harries’ excellent Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (2003) has a much fuller historical scope. Many believe that the folktale and fairy tale are a genre of the past, hopelessly tied to premodern economies and nineteenth-century gender arrangements. However, well-known tales continue to permeate Western popular culture. Film provides many examples, and here too woman-centered and romance-focused texts—though not necessarily their feminist interpretations—dominate the scene. Jokes and soap operas are, Angela Carter asserted, the twentieth-century folktales, the ‘‘invisible luggage’’ that we carry and repack. Cathy Lynn Preston’s essays ‘‘‘Cinderella’ as a Dirty Joke: Gender, Multivocality, and the Polysemic Text’’ (Western Folklore 1994) and ‘‘Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale’’ (Fairy Tales and Feminism 2004) offer a perceptive analysis of recent ‘‘Cinderella’’ texts, including the movie Ever After (1998), television shows, and advertisements at women.com (also known as http://www.ivillage. com). The blurring of fiction and nonfiction in contemporary ‘‘fairy-tale’’ texts that JoAnn Conrad noted in ‘‘Docile Bodies of (Im)Material Girls: The Fairy-Tale Construction of JonBenet Ramsey and Princess Diana’’ (Marvels & Tales 1999) has, in Preston’s assessment, at least some potential for social transformation that includes shifts from stereotypical gender relations associated with the Perrault and Grimm tradition. The sexual politics of folk and fairy tales as well as their representations of gender will continue to surprise given that such narratives are still emerging in new contexts and media, and our knowledge of oral and literary traditions—especially when it comes to women’s—is limited. Edited by Donald Haase, Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (2004) offers an up-to-date bibliography of English-language critical studies on the topic, provides a thorough overview of feminist fairy-tale scholarship, and includes essays that promise to expand the scope of research on women and tales of magic. In addition to the mirror images of Snow White and her crafty (step)mother, folktales have offered to their readers powerful fairies, bold maidens, brave sisters, bawdy wives, wise girls, and older women for

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self-reflection. In the 1998 collection edited by Kate Bernheimer, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, there are a range of perspectives on how tales of magic have framed and invigorated contemporary women’s writing in English; and among the many Internet fairy-tale resources, SurLaLune Fairytales.com includes annotated tale texts as well as essays and a lively site for discussion that often has a woman-centered or feminist bent. As narratives characterized by ‘‘pleasure in the fantastic’’ and ‘‘curiosity about the real’’ (Warner 1994: xx), folk and fairy tales have over the centuries and in different social contexts offered an imaginative outlet for desire while maintaining a strong grip on ordinary social life. Women have much to say and much at stake both in the reevaluation of ‘‘old wives’ tales’’ and in the ever-multiplying transformations of the genre. See also: Cinderella; Coding; Courtship; Feminisms; Gender; Gossip; Joke; Marriage; Menarche Stories; Mother Goose; Mothers’ Folklore; Myth Studies; Old Wives’ Tales; Red Riding Hood; Rites of Passage; Sleeping Beauty; Tradition-Bearer. References: Aarne, Antti, and Stith Thompson. The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography. Second revision. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1961; Bacchilega, Cristina, and Steven Swann Jones, eds. Perspectives on the Innocent Persecuted Heroine in Fairy Tales. Special issue of Western Folklore, vol. 52, no. 1 (1993); ———. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997; Benson, Stephen. ‘‘Craftiness and Cruelty: A Reading of the Fairy Tale and Its Place in Recent Feminist Fictions.’’ Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory, 167–246. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003; Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987; Cardigos, Isabel. In and Out of Enchantment: Blood Symbolism and Gender in Portuguese Fairy Tales. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1996; Haase, Donald, ed. Fairy Tales and Feminism. New Approaches. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004; Harries, Elizabeth E. Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; Jarvis, Shawn C. ‘‘Feminism and Fairy Tales.’’ Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Jack Zipes, 155–159. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Lindahl, Carl. American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003; Marzolph, Ulrich, and Richard van Leeuwen, eds. Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. Vols. 1–2. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2004; Mills, Margaret. ‘‘A Cinderella Variant in the Context of Muslim Women’s Ritual.’’ In Cinderella: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes, 180–199. New York: Wildman Press, 1982; Radner, Joan Newlon. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Rowe, Karen E. ‘‘To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale.’’ In Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, 53–74. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986; Shoaei Kawan, Christine. ‘‘A Masochism Promising Supreme Conquests: Simone de Beauvoir Reflections on Fairy Tales and Children’s Literature.’’ Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 16 (2002): 29–48; Stone, Kay. ‘‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us.’’ Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975): 42–50. Reprinted in 1975, 42–50, in Women and Folklore, ed. Claire R. Farrer. Austin: University of Texas Press; ———. ‘‘The Misuses of Enchantment: Controversies on the Significance of Fairy Tales.’’ In Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, eds. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik, 125–145. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; ———. Burning Brightly. New Light on Old Tales Told Today. Toronto: Broadview Press, 1998; SurLaLune Fairytales.com. n.d. http://www.surlalunefairytales. com/index.html (accessed June 16, 2005); Tatar, Maria. Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004; Uther,

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Hans-J€ org, ed. The Types of International Folktales, a Classification and Bibliography. Based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. FF Communications no. 284. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2004; Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrar, 1994; Windling, Terri. ‘‘Women and Fairy Tales.’’ The Endicott Studio Forum, 1995. http://www.endicott-studio. com/forwmnft.html (accessed 16 June 2005); Zipes, Jack, ed. Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. New York: Methuen, 1986; ———, ed. Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Cristina Bacchilega Foodways Foodways refers to the network of activities and beliefs surrounding food. Food is a source of both power and oppression for women. Through food, women love, nurture, display competence and artistry, construct relationships, and strengthen social ties; through food, women also find themselves tied to the garden and home, restricted by the daily routine of preparing meals. For many women, food itself is a source of both great delight and of much consternation. Many folk traditions and beliefs concerning women and food have emerged from these complexities. Women’s folklore of food refers to food traditions associated with women and to the ways in which women use food as an informal, unofficial medium through which they communicate artistically and construct meaningful connections with their pasts, places, and other people. Among folkloristic approaches to exploring women, food, and folklore are women’s foodways as gendered foods and food practices; forms of folklore related to women’s foodways; and food as a medium for communication and power. Historically, many aspects of foodways have been considered women’s work. Food products (the raw materials, the ingredients, and the dish itself) are informally gendered in dominant U.S. culture—salad, quiche, and lighter foods are associated with femininity. The labor involved in procurement of food was traditionally divided by gender: men were hunters of large, potentially dangerous game, while women trapped smaller animals (rabbits, opossum, and birds) and fished from local streams or ponds. Men farmed the large fields and cash crops, while women tended herb and vegetable gardens near the home (kitchen gardens) for the family table and medicines; men butchered the larger animals, while women frequently took on the indoor work (rendering the fat, creating smaller cuts of meat, and making sausage). Women usually ran the henhouse, collected the eggs (or asked children do it), butchered poultry, milked the family cow, and gathered wild berries and nuts. In the United States today, where most food is procured from supermarkets, women still tend to take primary responsibility—at least for generating the shopping list, if not for actual shopping. Preservation of food (canning, freezing, and drying), if they are done at all, remain women’s chores. Historically, the kitchen was a woman’s domain. She was allowed and expected to rule the household from this room. It was frequently the gathering place for close friends and family members, the emotional center of

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the household; yet, it also physically separated women from the rest of the family. Cooking was a necessary household skill, and a marketable one for securing a husband. Today, cooking is recognized as potentially artistic and financially lucrative. As its status has risen, so has the number of male cooks. (This phenomenon may reflect a shift in childrearing and homemaking responsibilities among some men, as well as other factors.) ‘‘And he can cook, too!’’ is a declaration of approval for a man being considered for the role of romantic partner. Although the professionalization of cooking brought more respect to the activities of food preparation, there is still a tendency to call men ‘‘chefs’’ and women ‘‘cooks.’’ Women’s cooking tends still to be the everyday, routine variety—simple meals consisting of plain dishes—while men’s cooking tends to be more celebratory, lucrative, and public. Presentation in foodways refers to the physical appearance of prepared food. Women are expected to make table decorations and to present meals in an attractive way, in short, to add ‘‘a feminine touch.’’ Women are expected to eat daintily, not to ‘‘shovel it in’’ as men do. Cleaning up after a meal tends to be a women’s responsibility. Although men and children may help out, women tend to be blamed for a messy kitchen; such a kitchen is perceived as a reflection of her incompetence or intentional rebellion. Foodways’ material forms include kitchens, cookware, cookbooks, recipes, and other tangible items associated with food preparation and consumption. As Meredith Abarca claims, ‘‘when women define the kitchen as their space, they engage in their own everyday acts of agency’’ (22). Cooking equipment (stoves, tables), kitchen tools, and eating implements often carry memories and may be treasured as heirlooms passed down by relatives. Dishes, silver tea services, and silver tableware are traditional wedding gifts. (Silverware is also a traditional gift for a couple’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.) Cookbooks and written recipes are vivid documents of women’s foodways—and lives. Recipes are passed down from family and friends; artistically rendered recipe cards may be given as gifts. Many women treasure their mothers’ and grandmothers’ handwritten recipes and keep them in special boxes or scrapbooks. Oral forms of women’s foodways include sayings related to food, personalexperience narratives, and spoken recipes (‘‘a pinch of this, a pinch of that’’), all of which may reflect underlying assumptions about both food and gender relations. For example, many girls are taught early that the ‘‘way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.’’ Once a husband is secured, his responsibility as ‘‘breadwinner’’ means that he ‘‘brings home the bacon,’’ while the proper place of women is ‘‘barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen.’’ And if a wife allows her husband too little independence, she is said to keep him ‘‘tied to her apron strings.’’ Anecdotes and personal-experience narratives about food are a significant part of women’s conversation. Women tell such stories to teach, comfort, create bonds, and entertain. Generally dismissed as ‘‘kitchen gossip,’’ such tales offer critiques of women’s lives and relationships with men, children, and other women. Women use food as means to nurture themselves and others: chicken soup for a cold, hot toddies for chills, and poultices and herbal teas for

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healing. Women’s customary foodways lore also includes rituals, celebrations, and practices that are distinctive to and representative of women’s ~ traditions, such as croning parties, bridal showers, and quinceaneras. Food is oftentimes the focal point of women’s social events and an excuse for gathering at ‘‘coffee klatches,’’ tea parties, and dinner parties. Such customs help to create community as well as shape personal relationships. Foodrelated rituals and beliefs may mark a woman’s passage through life: girls are generally expected to make cookies to distribute to schoolmates on special occasions, hold tea parties for friends, and play ‘‘mother’s helper’’ in the kitchen, all of which focus their attention on relationships and the domestic sphere. The role of food in shaping an adolescent girl’s body—and therefore her social standing and physical attractiveness—is a major source of folklore. Traditions of dieting, along with folk beliefs and narratives concerning weight loss or gain, frequently become an integral part of women’s lives by the time they reach puberty. Folk groups develop around specialized diets (such as vegetarian, vegan, or gluten-free) and dieting—especially since the advent of the Internet—and official organizations for dieting and fitness encourage members to develop personalized cooking and eating rituals (prepare a dessert if you want it, for instance, or light a dinner candle when you eat alone). Menarche comes with a number of food traditions. In the past, custom kept most menstruating women away from their usual domestic routines: their touch purportedly made fruit trees barren, mayonnaise curdle, bread fail to rise, wine turn to vinegar, meat rot, jam fail to set, and preserves spoil. Other menstrual foodways are attempts to ease dysmenorrhea, such as eating no salt or consuming large quantities of milk or soy products during the week before menstruation. Latina girls are warned that eating certain foods such as avocados and hot peppers will cause cramping. With adolescence also comes the role of food in romance. A gift of chocolates from a male (or female) admirer on Valentine’s Day is a public symbol of love. During courtship, the feminine role of nurturer is reversed with the expectation that suitors will pay for women’s meals on dates. On the other hand, a girl may state her independence or lack of romantic interest by insisting on paying her own way, by ‘‘going Dutch.’’ Food also plays a role in failed romances: girls and women are generally forgiven for ‘‘drowning’’ their disappointment by overeating foods usually forbidden to the diet-conscious female—quarts of ice cream, bags of cookies or potato chips, or whole jars of peanut butter at a single ‘‘meal.’’ Romances leading to marriage are also marked by food traditions—bridal showers and luncheons, the wedding rehearsal dinner, the reception, and, most significant of all, the wedding cake. Although the standard wedding cake is a multitiered white cake with white icing and delicate decorations, including bride and groom dolls on top, variations on the theme may reflect a bride’s personal identity and interests. As ephemeral art, cakes as material objects may embody both cultural and personal preferences. As the foregoing attests, sexuality and food are closely connected in women’s folklore. This is also true of much folklore about women. In many

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cultures and throughout history, countless metaphors in common parlance suggest that women can be cultivated and consumed in the same way that food is (see Henry 1992 on ancient Greece and Parker 1991 on contemporary Brazil). Femaleness and food are sometimes conflated, and attractive women are described by myriad food terms—honeybun, cupcake, hot tamale, Georgia peach, sugar, dish, tart, and hot tomato. Tradition identifies some foods—chocolate, oysters, ginseng, asparagus, and chili peppers—as aphrodisiac; it also suggests the eating of specific foods in sexually provocative ways (eating a firm banana may be seen to mimic fellatio; eating a juicy peach may be thought to mimic cunnilingus). Foodlore also plays a role in contraception and conception; certain foods are believed to have particular effects. These beliefs may appear in urban legends, such as one in which a woman sues a spermicide manufacturer because she became pregnant despite eating contraceptive ‘‘jelly,’’ and another that claims that douching with Coca-Cola is an effective way to prevent pregnancy. Pregnancy carries its own food traditions. Some concern the effects of certain foods on the fetus—caffeine and alcohol may cause fetal abnormalities and/or delivery complications (corroborated by allopathic medicine); too much chocolate, sugar, and spicy food may predispose an infant to hyperactivity. Other traditions concern the mother’s health and comfort: tomato sauce causes heartburn; expectant mothers should drink extra milk for the calcium; and red meat provides needed iron. Folk remedies for morning sickness suggest nibbling on crackers throughout the day; having someone else do the cooking; and eating whatever the pregnant body craves, lest the baby be born with a birthmark—that is, if the mother craves shrimp, the baby may be born with a birthmark in that shape. This last has led to many anecdotes about searching for particular foods that are out of season or hard to obtain and about odd food combinations—in the United States, ‘‘pickles and ice cream’’ has become emblematic of pregnancy. Some women develop pica (cravings for non-food items such as chalk or ashes). In accord with a custom thought to originate in Africa, where people might eat the enzyme-rich, white clay in termite mounds, some pregnant Black women in the rural American South practice geophagy (earth-eating). Breastfeeding has given rise to a great deal of folklore. Techniques for getting an infant to nurse are passed down through oral tradition, as are beliefs about particular foods to eat (drinking milk or beer helps the milk to flow; chili peppers, tomato sauce, and spicy foods turn the milk sour). Stories (frequently humorous) about breast milk are common: it is intentionally or unintentionally used as coffee creamer, in puddings, ice cream, or baked goods. Breastfeeding in public is associated with a material culture of clothing and folklore about how to arrange both clothes and baby so as to hide one’s breasts or the act of nursing. Foodlore is also associated with menopause. Certain foods (currently flax and soy among Euro Americans and Canadians) are believed to help relieve hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, and other discomforts. Recent terminological distinctions attest to an increasing interest about how, what, and why we eat. The term ‘‘gastro-politics’’ refers to differential access to food production, distribution, and consumption based on class,

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ethnicity, gender, and locale. For example, historically, one of the few means women had for earning money was through food—as cooks in affluent homes, as caterers, or as cottage-industry food producers. ‘‘Egg-and-butter money’’ was the cash earned by farm women’s entrepreneurship. The ‘‘cultural politics of food’’ refers to the power to define what is healthy, nutritious, or appropriate food. Within the home, mothers and grandmothers generally have that power; however, within the larger society, it belongs to the medical and scientific establishments and to food production and marketing companies, many of which are male-centered and male-dominated. Women tend to have more control over ‘‘commensal politics,’’ power concerning eating together: deciding on menus, portion sizes, choice of recipes, selection of ingredients, and presentation of food in the home. As sugar-laden ‘‘fast foods’’ have become ubiquitous in the dietary lives of most Americans, they have taken a particular toll on Indigenous Hawaiian and Native North American populations, in which diabetes is 2.6 times more likely to occur than among Whites; girls and women are especially prone to develop this disease. Noting the 50 percent increase in diabetes rates among Native peoples over the last decade, Wynona Duke and Margaret Smith of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota and Terrol Dew Johnson of the Tohono O’odham Reservation in Arizona have revitalized the dietary and cultural importance of indigenous foods, especially tepary beans (eaten plain or in stews), wild rice, and cholla (cactus) buds. Johnson explains by saying that when Coyote was running with a bag of tepary beans, he tripped and the white beans flew into the sky, creating the Milky Way. ‘‘You’re not just seeing these beans. You’re seeing the whole culture. That bean holds our language, our songs, our history’’ (Hernandez, 26). Along with efforts to convince Natives to eat less fry bread (seen by many as contributing to negative stereotypes), the tepary bean may be the key to many Aboriginal cultures’ survival. Food is also a medium for resistance to social norms or individual circumstances or relationships. A refusal to cook can be a blatant and intentional ‘‘rebellion,’’ as in the case of former presidential wife Hilary Rodham Clinton’s 1998 statement that she doesn’t bake cookies or in the case of a Latino wife whose husband was granted a divorce because she refused to make him labor-intensive and time-consuming homemade tamales. Women can also show disdain for stereotyped gender assumptions by ‘‘chowing down,’’ that is, by heartily enjoying their food. In this context, women’s eating disorders (especially anorexia and bulimia) are interpreted as a bid for power. Resistance through food can also be coded expressions of sentiments or opinions that would be unsafe or unwise for a woman to voice publicly. These ‘‘feminist messages’’ are read and can be interpreted correctly only by other members of her group. Joan Radner suggests five coding strategies. Trivialization uses activities considered innocuous and innocent to convey meaningful and significant information and opinions, such as holding a bake sale to support anti-war activism. Incompetence is a claim or demonstration of inability at conventionally feminine activities as a way of resisting social expectations. For example, burning food when making dinner may express

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a woman’s resistance to the social norm that women do the cooking. Appropriation is the borrowing by women of male-associated activities, as in businesses managed by women hosting parties through informal networks, such as Tupperware parties. Gender-role inversion in foodways can also be a form of women’s resistance, when, for example, a woman carves the Sunday roast or holiday turkey, oversees cooking on an outdoor grill, drinks beer, or relaxes while her husband prepares a meal and cleans up afterward. See also: Aphrodisiac; Breastfeeding; Coding; Courtship; Croning; Diet Culture; Engagement; Farm Women’s Folklore; Gardens; Gender; Gossip; Herbs; Housekeeping; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Menarche Stories; Menopause; Menstruation; Personal-Experience Narrative; Pregnancy; ~ Quinceanera; Recipe Books; Scrapbooks; Sexuality; Tradition; Wedding; Women’s Friendship Groups; Women’s Work. References: Abarca, Meredith E. Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Working-class Mexican and Mexican American Women. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 2006; Avakian, Arlene Voski, ed. Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. New York: Berg, 2005 [1997]; Avakian, Arlene Voski, and Barbara Haber, eds. From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005; Bower, Anne L. ed. Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997; Counihan, Carole M. The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power. New York: Routledge, 1999; ———. ‘‘Food as Women’s Voice in the San Luis Valley of Colorado.’’ In Food in the USA: A Reader, eds. Carole M. Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 295–304. New York: Routledge, 2002; Counihan, Carole M., and Steven L. Kaplan. Food and Gender: Identity and Power. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998; Henry, Madeleine M. ‘‘The Edible Woman: Athenaeus’s Concept of the Pornographic.’’ Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin, 250–268. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992; Hernandez, Daisy. ‘‘Got Tradition?: American Indians use native foods to fight diabetes and revive Indian culture.’’ Colorlines (Summer 2005): 24– 27; Inness, Sherrie A. Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; Inness, Sherrie A., and Clifford Ashby. Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001; Lanser, Susan S. ‘‘Burning Dinners: Feminist Subversions of Domesticity.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 36–53. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Long, Lucy M. ‘‘Holiday Meals: Rituals of Family Tradition.’’ In The Meal, ed. Herbert Meisselman. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers, 2000; Mikkelson, Barbara. Snopes.com. ‘‘Killer Sperm.’’ http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/sperm.asp (accessed August 10, 2008); Parker, Richard G. Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991; Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986; ———. Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. New York: Viking, 2004; Schenone, Laura. A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005; Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks they Wrote. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; Turner, Kay, and Suzanne Seriff. ‘‘‘Giving an Altar to St. Joseph’: A Feminist Perspective on a Patronal Feast.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 89– 117. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Williams, Brett. ‘‘Why Migrant Women Feed Their Husbands Tamales: Foodways as a Basis for Revisionist View of Tejano Family Life.’’ Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The

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Performance of Group Identity, eds. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, 113–126. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Lucy M. Long Fortune-Teller A fortune-teller is a divination specialist consulted about the future or problems in the present, who may or may not be paid for the service and is often self-described as a ‘‘reader’’ or ‘‘advisor.’’ Fortune-telling, along with other methods of divination such as the Chinese I Ching, Celtic runes, and Greek oracles, reflects the human desire for meaning and order, as well as anxiety regarding the unknown. Traditional divinatory activity involving women has often been concerned with childbirth and marriage. Dactyliomancy is one method used to predict the sex of an unborn child. In one variant, a ring is tied to a string and held over a pregnant woman’s belly. Circular movement of the ring indicates that she is carrying a girl, while a boy is forecast if the ring moves back and forth like a pendulum. Numerous rituals are employed for predicting a woman’s marriage prospects. These include passing a small piece of bridal cake through a wedding ring, then placing the cake under the woman’s pillow to prompt dreams of her future husband. In the North American context, the term ‘‘fortune-teller’’ generally encompasses astrological counselors and palm, tarot card, and tea-leaf readers, among others, who may be consulted in both informal and professional settings. Although fortune-telling as an income-generating activity has expanded from traditional settings to mass-mediated forms, including newspapers, television, and the Internet, the interstitial nature of fortune-telling as an occupation has made it a popular home-based enterprise for women. Romani (‘‘Gypsy’’) women have traditionally told fortunes to help support their families, leading to the stereotypical image of the fortune-teller adorned with scarves and jewelry, gazing into a crystal ball. Unfortunately, police officials promote this image, along with the admonition that all such persons are charlatans and criminals. Popular culture does a serious disservice to both Roma and non-Roma with such portrayals. While consumer awareness of psychic services is important, stereotypes and ethnic slurs advance racist attitudes while obscuring core issues of belief, control, and the complexity of regulating paranormal commerce. In both domestic and commercial fortune-telling, an important part of the dyadic process is the ability to ‘‘read’’ clients psychologically, whether consciously or unconsciously. Generalized, formulaic statements such as, ‘‘You have had trouble with a family member in the past,’’ help to establish rapport, encouraging the client to speak more freely about herself and the issues for which she seeks counsel, and to apply the fortune-teller’s generalizations to her specific situation. (This is often referred to as the ‘‘Barnum effect.’’) Such aspects of fortune-telling have led to debate regarding the degree, and even the existence, of psychic or precognitive ability. However, as with any such vocation, practitioners manifest a wide range of skills, ethical commitments, and spiritual inclinations. See also: Curandera; Divination Practices; Folk Medicine.

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References: Andersen, Ruth E. ‘‘Romano Drabarimos in Pennsylvania: The Marketing of Tradition.’’ Keystone Quarterly, vol. 2, nos. 1–2 (1983): 46–57; Aphek, Edna, and Yishai Tobin. The Semiotics of Fortune-Telling. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989; Benes, Peter. ‘‘Fortunetellers, Wise-Men, and Magical Healers in New England, 1644–1850.’’ In Wonders of the Invisible World: 1600–1900, ed. Peter Benes, 127–48. The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 1992. Boston: Boston University, 1995; Rusted, Brian. ‘‘‘The Palm at the End of the Mind,’ or Narrative Fortune Telling as Urban Folk Therapy.’’ New York Folklore, vol. 10, nos. 1–2 (1984): 21–38.

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G Gardens Gardens, especially those associated with private homes, are often considered a woman’s domain, providing a space for various activities appropriate for and associated with the female gender. Women have been able to express their artistry, guarantee their importance to the domestic economy, and assert their ability to nurture and heal through their cultivation and use of plants from their gardens. From earliest times, the gathering and cultivation of plants was associated with women, as hunting was associated with men. Images such as Mother Earth or fertility goddesses draw connections between the fecundity of nature and the reproductive power of women. In patriarchal societies, this association is frequently cast in negative terms, as the unconstrained disorder of the natural world contrasted with the strictures of civilization and the rationality of the man-made environment. Flower and other ornamental gardens have long been considered an outlet for aesthetic expression particularly appropriate for women. Flowers beautify the home, traditionally the primary sphere of female influence. Therefore, the cultivation of flowers outside, as well as their arrangement in bouquets within the home, fell to women as a part of their traditional homemaking work. Especially with the development of the ‘‘cult of domesticity’’ during the Victorian era, in which a woman’s role was to create a tranquil oasis where her husband could escape the rigors of the workaday world, a woman’s skill in creating beautiful gardens was considered essential to a tranquil home life. In Western societies, the art of flower arranging is an offshoot of this appreciation for fine gardening, and is similarly considered a feminine art, whether practiced by men or women. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gardens containing vegetables and other useful plants were also a part of the home, particularly the kitchen, and therefore women’s responsibility. Gardens that provided food, seasonings, and medicinal plants contributed to the domestic economy, and gave women a modicum of economic power, even in times and cultures in which such power was considered the prerogative of

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males. Among economically disadvantaged populations, a woman’s garden could be a significant addition to a family’s income, producing food to eat or sell. Canning competitions, common at county fairs all over the United States, are community festival events that reflect the importance of women’s roles in providing for the family through the cultivation and preservation of foodstuffs. Home-garden cultivation and the use of medicinal plants in folk medicine practices can enhance women’s power in male-dominated societies. Generally, the power of plants to heal disease and relieve pain is associated with magic, putatively granting women who hold that power the role of priestess or witch. The figure of the curandera in Latino cultures demonstrates this ambiguity. A curandera, a woman skilled in healing and medicinal plants, was an honored member of frontier Hispanic societies, and the practice of consulting such women for relief from illness has not entirely disappeared from contemporary Latino communities. But the ability of these women to wield the power of life and death is also viewed with suspicion in strongly patriarchal cultures; the line between the curandera (healer) and the bruja (witch) frequently marks a distinction without a difference. See also: Aesthetics; Curandera; Family Folklore; Festival; Flowers, Language of; Folk Medicine; Herbs; Mother Earth; Nature/Culture; Women’s Work. References: Burgess, Karen E. Home is Where the Dog Is: Art in the Back Yard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996; Goldsmith, Raquel Rubio. ‘‘Seasons, Seeds, and Souls: Mexican Women Gardening in the American Mesilla, 1900–1940.’’ Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850–1990, eds. Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan, 141–56. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994; Gundaker, Grey, and Tynes Cowan, eds. Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998; Kitchner, Amy. Windows into the Past: Mexican-American Yardscapes in the Southwest. Senior thesis. University of Arizona, 1987; Ortner, Sherry. ‘‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’’ in Women, Culture and Society, eds. Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 67–88. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974; Waldenberger, Suzanne. ‘‘Barrio Gardens: The Arrangement of a Woman’s Space.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 59, nos. 3 and 4 (2000): 232–245; Westmacott, Richard. African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

Suzanne Waldenberger Gender ‘‘Gender’’ is a term used to distinguish socially transmitted norms about masculinity and femininity from ‘‘sex’’ by those distinctions that are understood to be inherent in biology. Sex in binary (male versus female) symbolic systems is generally determined by categorizing genitalia as male, female, or ambiguous; sexual orientation refers to the direction of one’s sexual interest toward members of the same (homosexual), different (heterosexual), or both sexes (bisexual). Gender is the set of characteristics and behaviors determined by society to be appropriately masculine or feminine. Any conflation of them in this binary system is generally labeled androgynous (from Greek, ‘‘man-woman’’), with connotations of greater or lesser stigmatized deviance depending on prevailing social norms. Gender is constructed in

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each culture and era to normalize what is appropriate and inappropriate for men and women to do, wear, think, and say. Psychologist John Money first used the term ‘‘gender’’ in 1955 to discuss sexual roles (behaviors), later adding the term ‘‘gender identity.’’ Anthropologist Ann Oakley took up the term in reference to socially constructed masculinity and femininity in contrast to sex, which she defined as the anatomical and physiological characteristics that express biological maleness and femaleness. Anthropologist Gayle Rubin first used the term ‘‘sex/gender system’’ to emphasize the ways in which sexually differentiated bodies are socially organized to produce ideas of gender difference. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is credited with coining the legal term ‘‘gender discrimination’’ in reference to cases involving attempts to invalidate laws protecting the civil rights of girls and women. In an early use of the term in its contemporary sense, physician Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, employed American sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s research to explore the childhood acculturation process that distinguishes sex from gender, concluding that gender roles learned by two years of age are usually irreversible, even if they seem to contradict the sex of the subject. In Western cultures, gender roles are taught as an informal part of the socialization process, beginning as soon as parents dress their infant girls in pink and their boys in blue. Although patterns are changing in some segments of society, most homes and schools still offer dolls and domestic items as playthings to girls, and toy trucks, airplanes, and guns to boys. By the time children are old enough to enjoy popular cultural forms like the Walt Disney Company’s The Little Mermaid (whose heroine is a perfectly passive subject sacrificing herself for the man she loves) or George Lucas’ Star Wars (in which male figures of all ages, species, and religious persuasions are alternately admired and defied by a single main female character), they have already fully internalized the Mother Goose rhyme, whether they have heard it or not: What are little boys made of? ‘‘Snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails That’s what little boys are made of!’’ What are little girls made of? ‘‘Sugar and spice and all things nice That’s what little girls are made of!’’

In North America, the act of choosing which public restroom to enter, for example, employs numerous gender-conditioning components. The women’s restroom door displays a picture of a person in a skirt, and the men’s has a picture of a person in pants; as intended, we take these pictures as cues. Men in kilts don’t enter the ‘‘skirt washroom,’’ nor do trousered women enter the ‘‘pants’’ one. These deceptively simple icons encode an extremely complex system of unspoken assumptions. They indicate not only that there are two types of bathrooms which precisely match two traditional gender choices, but they also tell us the types of clothing choices expected of women and men. Conventional wisdom teaches, for example, that biology has determined that men are stronger than women and that women have a greater tendency

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to tears than men, when in reality, some women are stronger than most men, and many men cry on a regular basis and some women do so only rarely. Although not all human societies have such strictly enforced rules, in most cultures the normal socialization of boys and girls inculcates anxiety, embarrassment, and fear in people who cross gender divides. North American girls who display the gender characteristics of boys—playing sports, fighting, talking loudly—are often labeled ‘‘tomboys.’’ Boys who play with girls or enjoy playing with dolls are dubbed ‘‘sissies.’’ Parents have long been warned that such behaviors are predictors of homosexuality or transgenderedness, despite the prevalent rejection of this notion in the fields of psychiatry and sociology. A further indication of the separability of sex and gender lies in the fact that gender roles and characteristics change over time and within cultures based on class perceptions, ethnic and cultural status, and religious or regional traditions. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century middle- and upper-class North American girls were conditioned to aspire to grow up to become housewives and mothers; the ideal role for adult women was to be a married, stay-at-home mother, rather than a single woman, one who worked outside the home, or a lesbian. But in areas of Ireland during the same period, normative women’s roles included becoming a nun, a woman expected to neither marry nor bear children. In the 1950s in the United States, the use of cosmetics was considered a gender characteristic of heterosexual girls and women. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, heterosexual men who wore eyeliner were likely signaling their membership in the folk group known as Goths. In some African and Native American cultures, face and body makeup is reserved for warrior men rather than for women. South Asian culture acknowledges hijras (from Urdu for ‘‘impotent ones’’)—androgynous, cross-dressing, queer, or transgendered individuals (not castrated ‘‘eunuchs,’’ despite that common mistranslation)—who, though frequently ostracized, function in Indian life as sex workers, entertainers, and mourners. The Ramayana epic, in which the god Rama appears as a hijra, is often cited as a charter for their right to exist. Six hijras have won local and state elections in India since 1999, and one holds a seat in parliament. In some Native North American groups, mixed-gendered (‘‘two-spirited’’) individuals dressed differently from men and women in ways that indicate the acknowledgement of a third gender. However, even in cultures where the binary sex/gender system is strictly enforced, it changes over time. In recent years, the mass media—especially television—have played significant roles in both shifting and reinscribing North American perceptions of binary gender. The talk-show craze of the 1990s increased the visibility of transgendered individuals, traditionally hidden, ostracized figures; however, they did so, for the most part, by portraying them as socially unacceptable freaks. Saturday Night Live’s ‘‘Pat’’ character—whose gender/sex other characters try to divine, without success—simultaneously reinforced the idea that masculinity and femininity should be distinct and recognizable. The social construction of gender has been central to feminist Anthropology’s assertion of the universal subordination of women. Sherry B. Ortner,

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who first put forth the case in 1972 in an essay entitled ‘‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’’ argues that the cross-cultural associations of women with nature (mainly through their connection with biological reproduction and childrearing) and men with culture (that which transcends nature’s limitations) explains why women (like nature) are universally devalued in patriarchy. Critics have pointed out that the association of women with nature and men with culture is itself a cultural argument, and that nature is as much a cultural construct as is culture; however, Ortner’s argument remains compelling. Language is a central concern for gender studies. Robin Lakoff, for example, traces women’s speech patterns as reflective of their subordinate positions in culture. Some feminist linguists argue for the existence of female linguistic subcultures based on cross-cultural explorations of gendered speech performance; others are convinced that the problem is not only that women and men have different speech styles that can be mutually incomprehensible (as in Deborah Tannen’s 1990 book, You Just Don’t Understand), but that linguistic processing interprets women’s and men’s language differently, and with inflections of power and hegemony. Consider, for example, the following ‘‘floating verses’’—stock sections used in different traditional folksongs and ballads: Who’s Who’s Who’s Who’s

gonna gonna gonna gonna

shoe your pretty little foot? glove your hand? kiss your ruby red lips? be your man? (Greenhill 1997: 225)

Most Euro North Americans hearing these lines probably assume that the speaker is male and his addressee female. The questioner’s gender is determined partly by default—in the absence of clear evidence, a masculine speaker is assumed. Men’s speech in Euro North American culture is presumed to be directly and baldly expressed, as this is. The text will also be interpreted via a White, middle-class, political economy of heterosexual relationships. The expectations for the exchange of power, services, and activities are governed by gender expectations: ‘‘shoe your foot/glove your hand’’ refers to the necessity of taking care of a woman’s material needs (usually by a husband); ‘‘kiss your ruby red lips’’ links this to sexual service exchange, and ‘‘be your man’’ confirms the gender of the supplier. It’s impertinent to ask these questions of a man because he’s expected to provide for his own material and sexual needs, in the marketplace if necessary. The response, however, opens up a range of possibilities: Papa’s gonna show my pretty little foot Mama’s gonna glove my hand Sister’s gonna kiss my ruby red lips And I don’t need no man (ibid.).

Many folklorists (mostly men) have persisted in interpreting the response within a heterosexual structure, often ignoring the last line, or explaining it away as ‘‘I don’t need a man . . . till you come home’’ or ‘‘I don’t need a man . . . except you.’’ Yet readers seeking a queer analysis can point out that

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the respondent has a woman to see to her needs for affection (a ‘‘sister’’ need not necessarily refer to a biological relative), and that the last line is an unequivocal rejection of the need for men as husbands, lovers, suitors, or erotic partners. Presumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality combine in patterned ways. This sex/gender paradigm of ‘‘gender as social construction’’/‘‘sex as biology’’ has been problematized by several influential scholars, including Judith Butler, Thomas Laqueur, and Anne Fausto-Sterling, who question the sustainability of the category of biological sex. Each argues that sex is at least partially socially constructed in ways that exploit an either/or, male/female conception. They posit that either/or constructions fail to account for the complex relationship of sex to gender; nor do they account for the multiplicity of forms biological sex can take. The presence of mutable sex in many national folklore traditions indicates a rather fluid understanding of sex as a static biological category. Seamus Deane’s novel Reading in the Dark, for example, discusses the Irish legend of ‘‘Francis and Frances,’’ who were so spiritually connected that they spontaneously exchanged sexes and ‘‘paid no notice’’ to the change. The tale is told to inculcate fear and suspicion of rural people in the young narrator, but it also casts suspicion on our traditional reliance upon the primacy and naturalness of the social characteristics we used to identify with a person’s sex. See also: Androgyny; Ballad; Childbirth and Childrearing; Cosmetics; Cross-Dressing; Feminisms; Folk Group; Folk Music; Lesbian and Gay Studies; Lesbian Folklore; Mass Media; Mother Goose; Nature/Culture; Popular Culture; Sex Determination; Sexuality; Transgender Folklore. References: Abelove, Henry, Michele Barale, and David Halperin, eds. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993; Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 10th anniversary edition. New York: Routledge, 1999 [1989]; ———. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993; Comfort, Alex. Sex in Society. Originally published as Sexual Behavior in Society. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1963 [1950]; Duberman, Martin, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, eds. Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: Plume, 1990; Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic, 2000; ‘‘50 Key Terms: Gender.’’ University of Manchester School of Social Sciences. n.d. http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/sociology/course_mate rials/sy2891/_notes/gender.htm (accessed May 23, 2005); Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘‘Who’s Gonna Kiss Your Ruby Red Lips?’: Sexual Scripts in Floating Verses.’’ In Ballads Into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child, eds. Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts, 225–236. Berne: Peter Lang, 1997; Lakoff, Robin Tolmach, and Mary Bucholtz. Language and Women’s Place: Text and Commentaries. Revised and expanded edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 [1975]; Lancaster, Roger N., and Micaela di Leonardo, eds. The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. New York: Routledge, 1997; Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992; Money, John. Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972; Nicholson, Linda, ed. The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge, 1997; Oakley, Ann. Sex, Gender, and Society. London: Temple Smith, 1972; Ortner, Sherry B. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996; Rubin, Gayle. ‘‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.’’ In Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly

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Review Press, 1975; Watson, Paul. ‘‘Offering India’s Voters a Unique Perspective.’’ London Times, May 9, 2004. http://www.apihr.org/AAApercent20Newpercent200 Ohanaper cent20News/offeringindia’svotersauniqueperspective.html (accessed May 26, 2005).

Erin Clair Girl Scouts/Girl Guides Girl and adult members of a youth organization such as the Girl Guides of Canada/Guides du Canada (GGC), whose membership was 80,000 girls and 20,000 adults in 2007, and the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA), whose 2007 membership was 2.6 million girls and 1 million adults, are members of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS). It’s the largest organization of girls and young women in the world with 10 million members in 145 countries. Girl Scouts and Girl Guides have an extremely complex and syncretic folk culture, appearing frequently in caricatures in North American popular culture. Full of tradition and clearly part of mainstream culture, Girl Scouting and Girl Guiding have a history of promoting cultural change by empowering girls and women, and both now recognize an increasingly diverse membership with respect to race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability. Inheritances from female folk culture clearly distinguish them from Boy Scouting, although outsiders sometimes erroneously attribute Boy Scout features and terminology to Girl Scouting and Girl Guiding (as in the misnomer, ‘‘Girl Scouts of America’’). North American Girl Guiding came to Canada in 1910 and to the United States in 1912, having developed from Robert Baden-Powell’s British Boy Scouting and from the Baden-Powell family’s British Girl Guiding. American founder Juliette Gordon Low renamed her group ‘‘Girl Scouts’’ in 1913, causing much controversy. Robert Baden-Powell’s early military influence is visible in the groups’ uniforms, ranks, flag ceremony, and patch (merit badge) programs, but largely disappeared as a driving force during the twentieth century. While Canadian Girl Guiding remains closely related to British Girl Guiding, both GGC and GSUSA possess an inheritance from North American women’s service and educational organizations, and transformations of Native American cultures appear in both groups’ camplore. As members of WAGGGS, GGC and GSUSA each have a three-part promise and a ten-part law intended to inspire girl and adult members to embody ideals of character, citizenship, and service. The promise’s three parts correspond to service to one’s country and religion (flexible wording supports religious diversity), helping others, and living by the Guide/Scout law; these virtues are symbolically represented by the trefoil (a three-leaved icon) and a hand sign (three fingers of the right hand raised together). As national organizations, each encourages patriotism, but the Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting ideal of world friendship promotes patriotism as an active part of citizenship, not as a form of international competition. There is a trend in Muslim communities in the United States, increasingly under scrutiny since the attacks of September 11, 2001, for girls to join troops as a means to visibly express their full participation in mainstream American culture; at the end of 2007, Minneapolis, Minnesota, boasted ten predominantly Muslim

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Girl Scout troops. The national organizations encourage consistency of programs and message within their countries, although administrative subdivisions often create local variations. Girl Scouting and Guiding include many fruitful areas for folklife study such as music, storytelling, play, camplore, foodways, ceremony, ritual, festival, and material culture. Across Girl Guiding and Scouting culture, one may find the themes of female empowerment, friendship (often expressed as ‘‘sisterhood’’), service, leadership, and love of nature. Popular culture caricatures generally emphasize (and exaggerate) the organizations’ slogan (‘‘Be Prepared’’), promotion of camping and hiking, militaristic or Native American inheritances, high ideals (the ‘‘goody-goody’’), achievement programs, and annual cookie-selling fundraiser. However, the complexity of North American Girl Scouting and Guiding cultures, their marginalized status resulting from their affiliation with females and children, and local variations result in significantly different insider and outsider perceptions of the meanings and values they contain and perpetuate. See also: Camplore; First Nations of North America; Folk Group; Folklife; Folklore about Women; Gender; Girls’ Folklore; Girls’ Games; Lesbian Folklore; Muslim Women’s Folklore; Popular Culture; Ritual; Women’s Friendship Groups. References: Degenhardt, Mary, and Judith Kirsch. Girl Scout Collector’s Guide. Lombard, IL: Wallace-Homestead, 1987; Girl Guides of Canada-Guides du Canada. n.d. http:// www.girlguides.ca; Girl Scouts of the USA. n.d. http://www.girlscouts.org; Green, Rayna. ‘‘The Tribe Called Wannabe: Playing Indian in America and Europe.’’ Folklore 99 (1988): 30–55; Groth, Susan and Charles Tuft. ‘‘‘Here We Sit Like Birds in the Wilderness Waiting for Our Dessert’: The Girl Scout Program and Ordering Space in Camp Sacajawea’s Dining Hall/Main House.’’ Children’s Folklore Review, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 3–30; ———. Scouts’ Own: Creativity, Tradition, and Empowerment in Girl Scout Ceremonies. PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1999; MacFarquhar, Neil. ‘‘To Muslim Girls, Scouts Offer a Chance to Fit In.’’ New York Times, November 28, 2007. http://www. nytimes.com/2007/11/28/us/28girlscout.html?_r¼1&oref¼slogin (accessed November 28, 2007); Manahan, Nancy, ed. On My Honor: Lesbians Reflect on their Scouting Experience. Northboro, MA: Madwoman, 1997; Tedesco, Laureen. ‘‘Making a Girl into a Scout: Americanizing Scouting for Girls.’’ In Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures, ed. Sherrie A. Inness, 19–39. New York: New York University Press, 1998; Tucker, Elizabeth. Tradition and Creativity in the Storytelling of PreAdolescent Girls. PhD diss., Indiana University, Bloomington, 1977; Wells, Patricia Atkinson. ‘‘The Paradox of Functional Dysfunction in a Girl Scout Camp: Implications of Cultural Diversity for Achieving Organizational Goals.’’ In Inside Organizations: Understanding the Human Dimension, eds. M. O. Jones, M. D. Moore, and R. C. Snyder, 109–17. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1988.

Susan Charles Groth Girls’ Folklore Girls’ folklore includes the accumulated traditions and the inherited and newly invented products and practices of preadolescent and adolescent women. Children’s culture in general is rarely taken seriously by adults, and in patriarchal societies, girls’ culture suffers the additional stigma of being associated with females. However, its gravity for its young women participants cannot be overstated.

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In Anglo American cultures, much of girls’ folklore involves sorting and manipulating a hierarchy of insiders and outsiders, popular and unpopular girls. Other traditions are concerned with the girl’s future, often circumscribed in domestic and heterosexist terms. Girls’ folklore includes such traditions as divination rituals, affirmations (actions and words to reinforce the truth of a statement), friendship rituals, coded messages, secret languages, ordeals, and rhymes. The structure of girls’ rituals and games changes with the social climate of the times. In the eighteenth century, young maidens played ring- or line-singing games as part of the courting process. Girls in Euro North America today play such games primarily for their entertainment value, but some also use them to influence their social standing in girls’ society. Rhymes chanted as part of skipping routines to determine the identity of one’s true love and the style in which they may live offer a good example. In divination rhymes such as Jam, jam, apple tart Tell me the name of my sweetheart/A B C . . .

and Does he love me? Yes, no, maybe so. Will we get married? Yes, no, maybe so. Where will we live? House, church, garbage can. How many children will we have? One, two three . . .

The answer is given when the jumper trips on the rope. Players can leave the result to chance, but skilled skippers can trip at the right moment to ensure the desired end, rope turners can pull on the rope so that the skipper ends up living in a garbage can, and so on. Other rituals divining a girl’s future may be practiced alone, are less subject to manipulation, and include those in which buttons, cherry stones, flower petals, or specks on the fingernails are counted to the chant: ‘‘He loves me, he loves me not’’ or ‘‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, begger man, thief.’’ For the most part, girls may be unaware of what a tinker or even a begger man might do or be, but the force of tradition behind such games makes their structure quite stable. Another practice involves a long apple peel thrown over the shoulder which, when it lands on the ground, forms the first letter of the future boyfriend’s/husband’s name. In yet another technique, the diviner writes out the full names of a pair. After crossing out the letters they have in common with each other, she subjects the remaining letters to a sequence of ‘‘Love, hate, marry, adore’’ to find out the future prospects of potential partners. Divination can involve other issues. A girl places an eyelash on her fingertip; if it blows off onto the ground, the owner’s wish will come true. Even involuntary sensations such as tingling or red ears can have meaning, indicating to a young girl that her lover is thinking of her. If she does not know who he is, tradition has it that she can ask the next person she meets for a

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number, which, by counting through the alphabet will indicate the initial of her admirer. Pacts between girls involve routines such as swearing eternal friendship by linking fingers of the right hand, shaking them up and down, and chanting, ‘‘Make friends, make friends,/Never, never break friends.’’ Girls will often swear eternal friendship, arrange signs and passwords, exchange clothes or jewelry, and appear inseparable. For reasons often inexplicable to adults, however, they may relatively suddenly not even speak to one another. Once the friendship is over, one or both of the parties may apply the chant, ‘‘Break friends, break friends,/Never, never make friends.’’ Affirmations, or reinforcements of the truth, can also be used by girls to manipulate their social relations with one another, and with adults and boys. They include ritually linking fingers, swearing to God, or making crosses on their body to reinforce the seriousness of the declaration. Recently in the United States, Norway, and the United Kingdom, adolescent girls have used bracelets as a form of coding relating to friendship and sexual activity. These ‘‘sex bracelets’’ (United States) or ‘‘shagging bands’’ (United Kingdom) are made of a jelly-like rubber substance and each color has a special meaning. One code specifies white for friendship, green for a flower, yellow for a hug, pink for a kiss, orange to make out, red to strip, blue for oral sex, and black for sexual intercourse. Someone who manages to break or rip the bracelet off the wearer, in the game known as ‘‘Snap,’’ is entitled to the level of intimacy indicated by the color of the bracelet. For some girls, however, these bracelets serve merely as a fashion accessory; they may be unaware of any alternative meaning. Others suggest that the associations are from contemporary legend rather than actual practice. However, conservative schools in the United States have banned the wearing of these bracelets, reconfirming adult fears about adolescent sexuality. Girls’ secret languages have existed for hundreds of years, passed down through the generations. They allow children to communicate within their groups so that outsiders are unable to understand. They appeal to girls because they promote both commonality and exclusivity. The language may involve slang words, technical terms, codes, and signals. Girls’ languages include sexual references, such as ‘‘love diamond’’ and ‘‘pencil sharpener’’ for vagina; ‘‘paddle the pink canoe’’ for female masturbation; ‘‘hoovering’’ for an abortion; and ‘‘red route’’ and ‘‘Henry’’ for menstruation. Among children, if one does something that others disapprove of, that child may be put through an ordeal as punishment. Historically in Britain and North America, boys tended to use such physical ordeals as running the gauntlet, ‘‘bumps,’’ ‘‘frog marching,’’ and ‘‘piling on.’’ These are now increasingly used by girls also, but most popular among them is ‘‘the silent treatment’’ or isolation tactics. ‘‘Sending to Coventry’’ means that other members of the group will not speak to the offender for a specified length of time. Girls are also the keepers of traditions of playground rhymes and use them in their play activities and social interactions. They are skilled at maintaining traditions of the past and at the same time innovative enough to adapt the rhymes to suit the times. Clever parodies of adult norms and behaviors and issues relating to taboo subjects are explored through the

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medium of these rhymes. Examples can be seen in the popular Miss Susie handclapping rhyme: When Susie was a teenager she went ‘‘Ohh ahh, I left my bra in my boyfriend’s car.’’ When Susie was a mother she went ‘‘1, 2, 3, 4 chuck the baby out the door.’’

See also: Barbie Doll; Best Friend; Coding; Girls’ Games; Handclapping Games; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Rhymes; Riddle; Sexuality; Tradition-Bearer. References: Abrahams, Roger D. Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary. University of Texas Press, 1969; Factor, June. Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children’s Folklore in Australia. Ringwood, NT, Australia: Penguin, 1988; Gaunt, Kyra D. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York: New York University Press, 2006; Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion. Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006; Online Dictionary of Playground Slang (ODPS). 2001– 2003. http://www.odps.org (accessed July 7, 2005); Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. The Lore and Language of School Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959; Oring, Elliott. ‘‘Children’s Folklore.’’ In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, ed. Elliott Oring, 91–120. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1986; Sex Bracelets. 2004. http://www.sex-bracelets.com (accessed August 10, 2008); Sutton-Smith, Brian, ed. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book. Logan: Utah University Press, 1999; Thorne, Barrie. Gender Play: Boys and Girls in School. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993.

Janice Ackerley Girls’ Games The general category of girls’ games covers the period of middle childhood, between the ages of six and twelve years, and includes games that girls play of their own accord, usually out of doors and away from direct supervision by adults. This type of play is owned and controlled by the children themselves—it is spontaneous, unstructured, and mostly unrestricted. Two main categories of girls’ games can be identified as those that use equipment and those that are verbal or activity-based. Ancient grave goods provide evidence that early toys and games—including miniature dishes, furniture, and toy animals—mimicked the activities of adults and date as far back as 5000–4000 BCE. Handclapping games and skipping games using vines are depicted on Egyptian tombs dating to 1600 BCE. A North American game originating in Africa involves girls flicking stones from a pit in the ground, throwing them into the air, and catching them on the backs of their hands; originally played with cattle or sheep bones, this traditional game is today known as ‘‘knuckle bones’’ or ‘‘jacks’’ and is played with a small rubber ball and plastic or metal ‘‘stars’’. A sixteenth-century painting by Pieter Bruegel shows some 200 children playing eighty children’s games, many of which are still played today: in it, girls are playing dolls, knuckle bones, odds and evens, blind man’s bluff, ‘‘shops,’’ dressing up, and follow the leader. In the nineteenth century, folklorist Alice B. Gomme recognized two distinct divisions of children’s traditional games: dramatic games (for girls) and competitive games (for boys). She attributed this gender division to the verbal ability of girls because their games tend to include singing and

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dancing. Divination in the form of line- or circle-singing games is probably related to courtship and marriage rituals, and is described by Sutton-Smith as played by very young girls (McMahon and Sutton-Smith: 294). These static games largely disappeared in the twentieth century, replaced by exercise games including skipping, handclapping, and ball-bouncing. However, remnants of the rhymes of early singing games survive in ‘‘the Susie saga,’’ a clapping rhyme that traces a woman’s life passages from birth to death. Many of the games of African American girls, often performed in lines or circles, also trace female life passages. Their games reflect other aspects of African and African American culture, in which songs, dances, and a number of ceremonies are performed in lines or circles. These formations enable the positioning of a leader separate from—and yet part of—the group for the traditional call-and-response patterns of many African American songs and games. In some girls’ games, there is one leader who gets to be in the spotlight; in other games, especially line games, each of the participants has her turn to be the center of attention as she performs various movements or actions that are dictated by the game or as she chooses to demonstrate her own individuality and creativity. Such games demonstrate flexibility and inclusiveness. If the game is usually performed in two lines, with partners, and someone else wants to join, the girls may change the formation to a circle to accommodate any number of players (Eberein and Hawes). Despite the absence of physical dividers between the sexes today, selfimposed gender segregation remains current in school playgrounds. Gender-play researcher Barrie Thorne notes that even greater sex integration occurs away from the school playground in home and neighborhood environments. Studies by Elizabeth Grugeon, Barrie Thorne, and others have noted discernable differences (similar to those observed by Gomme) in the play of boys and girls. Girls’ play is characterized as more cooperative, with a well-developed communication system and involving physical closeness and intimacy. Girls prefer games in which outcome is less important than process; these are called ‘‘on-zero-sum’’ games (Lindsay and Palmer: 12). This assertion is supported by Norwegian researchers who, having asked children to categorize their own games, report that girls identified marbles as a ball game, whereas the boys classified it as a war game (Roberts and Enerstvedt: 5–28). There is a perception that children today have lost the art of playing the traditional games of the playground and street. The blame for this loss is divided between child-safety issues, which have resulted in a ‘‘bubblewrapped’’ generation, and the ever-increasing lure of technology, which takes children away from the social networks of the past. But has the computer age driven children indoors and into largely solitary pursuits in front of a screen? Carole Carpenter (173) notes that girls have largely resisted the lure of the electronic and are increasingly the keepers of traditional games. Girls’ games such as hopscotch, skipping, handclapping, jacks, and elastic and string games are examples of inherited and adapted, centuries-old, global games. Hopscotch demands complex skills of hopping, aiming, and kicking the marker from square to square, balancing, following a sequence, and playing within defined boundaries. Skipping games involve complicated

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routines and moves for any number of players, often accompanied by chants. Likewise, handclapping games are largely the property of girls and involve complex moves, rhythms, and chants. Jacks or knuckle bones requires skill and dexterity in throwing and catching, as well as perseverance and negotiation skills. String games involve complex finger and hand movements to produce intricate patterns. Elastics are a form of skipping that involves elastic bands being stretched between the ankles and accompanied by intricate feet moves and chants. These games are played almost exclusively by girls, although occasionally boys may step across the gender divide. See also: Girls’ Folklore; Handclapping Games; Jump-Rope Rhymes; Rhymes; Tradition-Bearer. References: Carpenter, Carole H. ‘‘‘Our dreams in action’: Spirituality and Children’s Play Today.’’ In Play Today in the Primary School Playground, eds. Julia C. Bishop and Mavis Curtis, 167–179. National Centre for English Cultural Tradition: University of Sheffield, England, 2001; Eberein, Bob, and Bess Lomax Hawes. Pizza Pizza Daddy-O. Anthropology Department, San Fernando Valley State College, Distributed by Media Generation. 1968. http://www.folkstreams.net/film,73 (accessed December 2, 2007); Gomme, Alice B. The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland. Reprint edition. Spectacular Victorian Scholarship Series. New York: Dover Books, 1964 [1894–98]; Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion (Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006; Grugeon, Elizabeth. ‘‘Gender Implications of Children’s Playground Culture.’’ Gender and Ethnicity in Schools, eds. Peter Woods and Martyn Hammersley, 13–35. London: Routledge, 1993; Lindsay, Peter L., and Denise Palmer. Playground Game Characteristics of Brisbane Primary School Children. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1981; McMahon, Felicia R., and Brian Sutton-Smith. ‘‘The Past in the Present: Theoretical Directions for Children’s Folklore.’’ In Children’s Folklore: A Source Book, 293–308. London: Routledge, 1999; Roberts, J. M., and A. Enerstvedt. ‘‘Categorisations of Play Activities by Norwegian Children.’’ In Cultural Dimensions of Play, Games, and Sport, ed. B. Mergen, 5–28. Association for the Anthropological Study of Play Series, vol. 10. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers, 1986; Sutton-Smith, Brian, ed. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book. Logan: Utah University Press, 1999; Thorne, Barrie. Gender Play: Boys and Girls in School. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1993.

Janice Ackerley Glass Ceiling ‘‘Glass ceiling’’ is a term familiar to women in a variety of professions. It has been used to describe barriers to advancement for scientists, engineers, ministers, politicians, university professors, body builders, and most often, women in corporations, not only in North America but around the world. Coined in 1986, ‘‘glass ceiling’’ refers to the invisible but real barrier to advancement and promotion. Although hundreds of women have described these barriers to a variety of researchers, including members of a bipartisan U.S. commission in 1995, few actual narratives about the phenomenon have been recorded. Most accounts are summarized in books, articles, and blogs on the Internet, in which respondents rarely use the term ‘‘glass ceiling.’’ Adjectives have been added since 1986, such as ‘‘stained glass ceiling’’ to refer to the problems women have advancing as religious leaders; ‘‘bottomless pits’’ in reference

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to the problems that poor women have; and ‘‘marble ceiling’’ to refer to the fact that there has still not been a woman elected president in the United States. The term has also been employed in recent years to describe barriers to people of Color, for men as well as women. Sue Hayward, the author of Women Leading, argues that while the glass ceiling may be a myth for men, for many women it is a source of real pain; it can potentially represent the end of a woman’s career unless she can find a way to break through it. Lisa Belkin, writing for the New York Times in late 2007, offers this advice to professional women if they wish to break through the glass ceiling: ‘‘Don’t get angry. But do take charge. Be nice. But not too nice. Speak up. But don’t seem like you talk too much. Never, ever dress sexy.’’ It is highly unlikely that a business writer will ever offer the same advice to professional men. Some fields have designed training programs to retain women. For example, the Society of Women Engineers created a training video in 1997 to facilitate discussions about gender discrimination against women in engineering. Their work apparently met with some success; Jim Morgan and Denise Martinez’s study of engineers in 1998 found virtually no disparity between the earnings of men and women who had entered the field most recently. A few concerted attempts have been made to address occupational barriers for women in North America, including EMILY’s List (Early Money Is Like Yeast), which focuses on raising campaign money for women running for elective office. The White House Project, initiated in 1998, seeks to advance women’s leadership in all communities and sectors, including the office of the president. Some women have attained high political offices, and many Americans expect to see a woman president in the near future. But for women in corporate North America, results have been slower in coming. Glass-ceiling stories remain to be collected as a genre, perhaps because of a sense that many folklorists and ethnographers have that the ‘‘ceiling’’ is actually a luxury for Euro North American women. Susan Hayward notes that ‘‘Banging your head against the glass ceiling would probably be welcome in some cultures where women have yet to even get a foot on the first rung of the career ladder’’ (151). Nonetheless, professional advancement or lack of it remains an important part of women’s narratives about themselves and about their gender. See also: Gender; Personal-Experience Narrative; Wage Work; Women’s Work. References: Albelda, Randy, and Chris Tilly. Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women’s Work, Women’s Poverty. Leicester, UK: LPC Group Capstone Ltd., 1997; Belkin, Lisa. ‘‘The Feminine Critique.’’ New York Times, November 11, 2007. http://www.nytimes. com/2007/11/01/fashion/01WORK.html?ex¼1194580800&en¼91feaf95fabced83&ei¼5070 (accessed December 30, 2007); Brown, Carolyn M. ‘‘Advancing African American Women in the Workplace: new study finds challenges remain despite push for diversity.’’ Black Enterprise, June 2004. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1365/is_11_34/ ai_n6168973 (accessed December 30, 2007); Hayward, Sue. Women Leading. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Lee, Billi. ‘‘The Glass Ceiling is also a Comfort Ceiling: Discrimination against Women and Minorities in Business.’’ San Diego Business Journal, vol. 15, no. 24 (June 13, 1994): 23; Morgan, Jim, and Denise Martinez. ‘‘Focusing Freshman: Engineering and Design on Women and Technology.’’ Presented at the Women in Engineering Program Advocates Network Annual Conference, Washington, DC, June 2000;

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Society of Women Engineers. http://www.swe.org/stellent/idcplg?IdcService¼SS_GET_ PAGE&nodeId¼5 (accessed December 30, 2007); White House Project, The. http:// www.thewhitehouseproject.org/about/mission (accessed December 30, 2007); Wilson, Marie C. Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World. New York and London: Penguin Group, 2004.

Susan Eleuterio Goddess Worship Goddess worship refers generally to beliefs and rituals associated with female deities, but herein especially to the feminist theologies and practices of various late-twentieth-century Goddess-centered movements and spiritualities. Anthropology and feminist theology contributed significantly to re-visioning worship of the Goddess, sometimes called the Great or Mother Goddess. Alternative, interrelated spiritualities with Goddess dimensions that developed during the late 1960s and the 1970s include Feminist Spirituality, Neo-Paganism, Dianic Wicca, Women’s Spirituality, and Goddess Reverence. Nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists proposed stages for all human societies’ development from ‘‘savagery’’ to ‘‘barbarism’’ to ‘‘civilization,’’ with earlier ‘‘social conditions’’ still evident as ‘‘survivals’’ in later, more complex societies. In Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World (1861), Swiss jurist Johann Jakob Bachofen argued for the primacy of the mother and a matriarchal family in unevolved, ‘‘savage’’ societies and their latter-day ‘‘survivals.’’ Fifty years later, in The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890; 12– volume edition, 1911–1915), British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer explored the roots of patriarchal religions in matriarchy and Goddess worship, giving primacy to fertility rites involving a mother-goddess and her periodically sacrificed ‘‘sacred king’’ son-consort. Contemporary cultural evolutionism in Goddess-worship paradigms views the earlier stages of culture as a universal ‘‘golden age’’ rather than a phase of ‘‘savagery.’’ The establishment of patriarchy and the patriarchal worship of male and female deities spells its downfall, but ‘‘survivals’’ of the earlier culture remain in both historical and contemporary societies. They form the basis for reconstructing and revitalizing a women-centered, original, or ‘‘ur’’ culture (Juliette Wood in Billington and Green 1996). Archaeological evidence for prehistoric Goddess worship comes primarily from the European Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic periods (ca. 40,000 to 5,000 years ago). In works like The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (1989), Lithuanian archaeologist and folklorist Marija Gimbutas delineates ‘‘Women and Culture in Goddess-Oriented Old Europe’’ (Gimbutas in Plaskow and Christ 1989; also in Spretnak 1982). She proposes that before major incursions by male-centered, Indo-European steppe (Kurgan) pastoralists, who were ‘‘mobile, warlike, ideologically sky oriented, and indifferent to art,’’ the female-centered, preIndo-European civilization of Old Europe was ‘‘sedentary, peaceful, art-loving, earth- and sea-bound.’’

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Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic female clay figurines are key to the archaeological evidence interpreted by Gimbutas and others influenced by her work, for example, American feminist scholars Merlin Stone (1976), Riane Eisler (1987), and Elinor W. Gaddon (1989). American feminist archaeologists Ruth E. Tringham and Margaret W. Conkey (in Goodison and Morris 1998) have reassessed these two sets of figures: the former found in archaeological sites from France in southwestern Europe east into Siberia, especially those from 26,000 to 10,000 years ago; the latter in sites from the circum-Mediterranean and southeastern Europe around 7000–3500 BCE. They argue that both androcentric (centered on men) and gynocentric (centered on women) interpretations of these figurines are in error because they are circumscribed by contemporary gender ideologies and a toonarrow association of the female with fertility and reproduction. The archaeological, historical, and social context of all such figurines (female, male, and animal) must be analyzed for variability before assigning the supposedly female ones to a single homogenous group as fertility symbols and/ or representations of the Goddess used in ritual and worship. Ethnographic and ethnohistorical evidence for contemporary and historical matriarchal societies is likewise in need of careful contextual assessment. American feminist women and religion scholar Cynthia Eller (2000) reviews that literature for four areas of variability in ‘‘other societies, early societies’’: ideas about reproduction and systems of kinship; what Goddess worship indicates about women’s social standing; the economic status of women and their work, particularly in agriculture versus hunting; and the presence of interpersonal violence or peacefulness. She concludes that there is no sound evidence for either prehistoric matriarchies or an invasive patriarchal revolution. Eller also observes the ethnocentrism in the notion of Old European origins, noting Latinas’, Native Americans’, and African Americans’ search for non-European matriarchal prehistory and choosing among her examples texts from two important collections on feminist spirituality (Spretnak 1982; Plaskow and Christ 1989). American feminist theologians (or thealogians, as they call themselves) Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow began their collaboration while both were activist students in Yale University’s graduate program in Religious Studies and first edited Womanspirit Rising, a collection of contemporary feminist thinking on revisioning religion and its critique ‘‘to speak to the experiences of women’’ (Christ and Plaskow 1979). Among the founders of the Women and Religion Section of the American Academy of Religion, they dedicate Weaving the Visions, their ‘‘sequel’’ collection of reconstructive feminist approaches to religion in North America (Plaskow and Christ 1989), to that organization’s women members. Contributors to the second collection include Black American feminist theologian Delores S. Williams, who traces the emergence of Womanist Theology among African American Christian ‘‘women in church and society [who] have appropriated it as a way of affirming themselves as Black while simultaneously owning their connection with feminism and with the Afro-American community, male and female.’’ By 1989, Plaskow had ‘‘committed herself to the transformation of Judaism,’’ while Christ had resigned a tenured position and moved to Lesbos,

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Greece, where she now directs the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual and offers Goddess pilgrimages to Crete. Widely known for her keynote address, ‘‘Why Women Need the Goddess’’ (in Christ and Plaskow 1979 and Spretnak 1982), at the spring 1978 University of California at Santa Cruz conference on ‘‘The Great Goddess Re-Emerging,’’ she has since written about her own and others’ transition from Christianity to Goddess and nature spirituality (for example, Christ 1997, 2003). Feminist Spirituality has roots in the second-wave radical feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s that grew out of the civil rights movement and anti-war activism. During these countercultural movements, formal religious traditions came to be viewed as oppressive and dogmatic social structures that hinder primary, expressive, and direct relationships to divinity. Like many other diverse spiritualities, Feminist Spirituality has ‘‘no official sacred texts, no absolute leaders, no required affirmations of faith, no membership dues, and no undisputed agenda of beliefs and rituals . . . [but] encourages and accepts as valid and legitimate the inspirations, dreams, visions, experiences, and interpretations of individual women . . . [with] the theological and ritual focus . . . the celebration of womanhood’’ (Sered 1994). Cynthia Eller (1997; in Griffin 2000) identifies two aspects of secular feminism important to the development of Feminist Spirituality: lesbian feminism and consciousness-raising (CR) groups. The lesbian feminist community, including many separatists, strongly supported WomanSpirit, a quarterly magazine edited by partners Jean and Ruth Mountaingrove and published between 1974 and 1984 by a collective in southern Oregon. Considered the first magazine of feminist spirituality, it provided an international forum for women choosing new spiritual identities for themselves and expressing their understandings of the Goddess. Between 1976 and 1983, the Lady Unique Collective in New Brunswick, New Jersey, published six ‘‘cycles’’ (issues) of Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the-Night, edited by American lesbian folklorist Kay Turner. The autumn 1976 inaugural collective statement announces Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the-Night as an American Moon Goddess with Mayan origins, ‘‘She who is our most powerful projection of feminine consciousness’’: ‘‘Women have been denied their right to images which define and promote female power and independence. To reclaim images of the feminine, to share them with each other, and especially, to bring them to the world (i.e., to discover and release the political potential of the spiritual) is a serious task which will continue to involve many women.’’ Many spiritual feminists evolved what Eller calls an ‘‘origin myth’’ for the movement as having developed from the consciousness-raising groups that were a tactic of second-wave feminism to awaken women to their oppression and recruit for the larger, political women’s movement. Originally called ‘‘rap’’ or ‘‘bitch’’ sessions and pioneered by the New York Radical Feminists, by 1972, CR groups were being used as an organizing tool by the National Organization for Women (NOW). Following the credo that ‘‘the personal is political,’’ group members took turns speaking about the session’s topic without interruption or comment from other members. Shared themes in these personal-experience narratives would then be discussed to illuminate common patterns and suggest collective strategies for feminist

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political action. Such sharing and discussion came to be considered a ritual occasion by those spiritually awakened. The Goddess’s immanence (‘‘here’’-ness) as understood in Feminist Spirituality stands in strong contrast to the transcendence (or ‘‘out there’’-ness ) of the divine in the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Sered (1994) finds its ‘‘clearest declaration’’ in lines from Black American playwrightpoet Ntozake Shange’s 1977 choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf: ‘‘I found God in myself and loved her fiercely’’ (also in Spretnak 1982). The immanence of divinity plays a major role in the various Neo-Pagan spiritualities that developed contemporaneously with Feminist Spirituality. For the most part, polytheistic nature religions almost all have elements of Goddess and/or Goddess worship, and none of them worship only male god(s). Among these is the Church of All Worlds (CAW), which originated in 1961–1962 among Missouri college friends, notably Lance Christie and Tim Zell, and was chartered in March 1968. Taken from Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), whose hero was born to Earthparents on Mars, reared by aliens, and returned to Earth as an alien with an understanding of the universe, he gave this name to the religion of paradisical communities he founded. Zell is credited with evolving the ‘‘central myth’’ of CAW, ‘‘writing about the planet Earth as deity, as a single living organism’’ from an ‘‘eco-religious’’ perspective (Adler 1986). His first article on this, ‘‘Theogenesis [subsequently changed to Theagenesis]: The Birth of the Goddess,’’ was published in the July 1971 issue of Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth, the group’s official publication which served as a primary communication between Neo-Pagan groups. Zell points to Paleo-Pagans ‘‘veneration of an Earth-Mother Goddess’’ and calls the planet ‘‘a real living Being’’ with ‘‘a Soul-Essence which we can perceive.’’ Like every cell in the human body, ‘‘every living plant and creature’’ shares ‘‘the essence of the Whole of Mother Earth [and] to each we can rightly say, ‘Thou Art Goddess.’’’ In re-visioning and celebrating this understanding, CAW members embraced a ‘‘cosmic purpose of Neo-Paganism’’: ‘‘to work for [awareness] by supporting all ecologically oriented movements, establishing alternative communities, demonstrating alternate possibilities for survival on the planet, and, ultimately, awakening Gaea, the Goddess, the planetary mind’’ (Adler 1986). Dianic Wicca was influenced by British Egyptologist and folklorist Margaret A. Murray, whose first book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), identified Witchcraft as ‘‘the ancient religion of Western Europe,’’ a preChristian fertility cult with annual great festivals or sabbats and regular, general meetings of covens or esbats led by Diana, the feminine aspect of a central deity that manifested in female, male, and animal forms. In the United States, where it developed during the 1960s and 1970s, Dianic Wicca has two main groupings. Covens following the Dianic Covenstead of priestess Morgan McFarland in Dallas do not exclude men from their worship of the Goddess, who is seen in three aspects: Maiden-Creatrix, Great Mother, and Old Crone. Covens in the Dianic tradition of high priestess Z. Budapest, who founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One of Los

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Angeles in 1971, generally exclude men from their feminist Craft or ‘‘wimmin’s religion.’’ Hungarian-born, lesbian-feminist Z. (Zsuzsanna Emese) Budapest’s coven’s first manifesto states the belief that ‘‘to fight and win a revolution’’ there must be ‘‘reliable ways to replenish our energies,’’ and ‘‘without a secure grounding in women’s spiritual strength there will be no victory’’ (Adler 1986). In 1974, Budapest and others started The Feminist Wicca: A Matriarchal Spiritual Center selling various Craft-related items in Venice, California. Heir to a Witchcraft tradition through her mother, Masika Szilagyi, Budapest also draws on Hungarian folklore in her feminist Craft books, including The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries: Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting and Other Womanly Arts (1989). In the 1970s, bisexual feminist Witch and political activist Starhawk (Miriam Simos) founded two covens in San Francisco and was a founding member of Reclaiming: A Center for Feminist Spirituality and Counseling there. In The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), Starhawk dates her non-separatist covens’ affiliation to the faery tradition of Stone Age Britain preserved by Goddess peoples uprooted by Warrior God peoples and now adapted to contemporary society. Eller (in Griffin 2000) calls her ‘‘a translator and mediator between feminism and Neo-Paganism’’ who has ‘‘evolved away’’ from gender polarity, ‘‘developed convincing thealogical justifications for conceiving of the Goddess as both monotheistic and polytheistic,’’ and ‘‘carved out a central, indisputable place for women without excluding men.’’ Both Z. Budapest and Starhawk are also associated with Women’s Spirituality and Goddess Reverence. The former is ‘‘a spiritual as well as psychological and political movement emerging in the 1970s and continuing into the 1990s . . . [which], while embracing numerous spiritual traditions, focuses on the role assumed by the Divine Feminine in these traditions . . . [with] special attention . . . to the roles women play within these traditions.’’ Women’s Spiritualists practice healing, divination, and magic, ‘‘all associated in the popular psyche with wisewomen or witches,’’ and are generally inclusive of lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered individuals (Conner et al. 1997). In The Women’s Spirituality Book (1987), Wiccan priestess, healer, and activist Diane Stein calls it ‘‘a celebration of the lives, lifestyles and values of women, women’s participation in the cycles of the Earth and the universe, and women’s working toward a better world.’’ Goddess Reverence acknowledges Budapest, who played a central role in the annual International Goddess Festival sponsored by the organization Goddess 2000, and Starhawk, a licensed minister of the legally recognized church Covenant of the Goddess, as ‘‘mothers’’ of the contemporary movement. In The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine (1990), lesbian ‘‘pantheist and pansexual’’ priestess of Wicca Hallie Iglehart Austen emphasizes Goddess Reverence’s search for and celebration of a ‘‘unity and wholeness’’ which is ‘‘the birthright and potential of every human being. All of us, all of existence, are the Divine. In order to complete this whole by bringing back that which has been denied, I name the Divine the Goddess.’’ According to Gay Spirituality

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writers and teachers Randy Conner and David Sparks and their lesbian actor-writer daughter Mariya Sparks (1997): ‘‘Creativity expressed in visual art, music, literature, and other art forms plays as important a role as— indeed, perhaps more important than—theology in contemporary Goddess Reverence.. . . One of the most beautiful contemporary hymns to the Goddess, in which the deity is identified with the Earth, is lesbian writer Susan Griffin’s . . . ‘This Earth’ [in Griffin 1978], which includes the words: ‘I have known her all my life, yet she reveals stories to me, and these stories are revelations and I am transformed . . . This Earth is my sister . . . how we admire this strength in each other . . . we are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget what she is to me, what I am to her.’’’ See also: Consciousness Raising; Maiden, Mother, and Crone; Matriarchy; Mother Earth; PersonalExperience Narrative; Ritual; Wicca and Neo-Paganism; Witchcraft, Historical. References: Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, GoddessWorshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. Second edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986; Ann, Martha and Dorothy Meyers Imel. Goddesses in World Mythology: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; Baring, Anne, and Jules Cashford. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London and New York: Penguin Arkana Books, 1991; Benard, Elisabeth, and Beverly Moon, eds. Goddesses Who Rule. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Billington, Sandra, and Miranda Green, eds. The Concept of the Goddess. London and New York: Routledge, 1996; Campbell, Joseph, and Charles Muses, eds. In All Her Names: Explanations of the Feminine in Divinity. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991; Christ, Carol P. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997; ———. She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; Christ, Carol P., and Judith Plaskow, eds. Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979; Conner, Randy P., David Hatfield Sparks, and Mariya Sparks, eds. Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Lore. London: Cassell, 1997; Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987; Eller, Cynthia. Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America. New York: Crossroad, 1993; ———. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000; Gadon, Elinor W. The Once and Future Goddess: A Symbol for Our Time. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989; Goodison, Lucy, and Christine Morris, eds. Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998; Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York and San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1978; Griffin, Wendy, ed. Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity, and Empowerment. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2000; Leeming, David, and Jake Page. Goddess: Myths of the Female Divine. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; Marler, Joan, ed. From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas. Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas, & Trends, 1997; Motz, Lotte. The Faces of the Goddess. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; Plaskow, Judith, and Carol P. Christ, eds. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989; Sered, Susan Starr. Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994; Spretnak, Charlene, ed. The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982; Stone, Merlin. When God Was A Woman. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976; Walker, Barbara G. Women’s Rituals: A Sourcebook. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990.

Marta Weigle

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Gossip Originally, gossip referred to the valued, ritually established relationship between godsibbs or godparents, but became a generally derogatory designation for ostensibly confidential, moralistic, and speculative talk about persons not present and those who engage in such talk, often associated with women’s speech. Middle English usage expanded the Old English godsiblingship (a christening was a gossiping) to include friends and acquaintances of either sex, especially women in attendance during childbirth. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the first gendered definition in 1566: ‘‘A person, mostly a woman, of light and trifling character, esp. one who delights in idle talk; a newsmonger, a tattler.’’ Eighteenth-century British lexicographer Samuel Johnson offered three definitions: godparent, a ‘‘tipplingcompanion,’’ and ‘‘one who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in’’ (Spacks 1985). By 1811, gossip as conversation was viewed ambivalently as ‘‘idle talk; trifling or groundless rumour; tittle-tattle. Also, in a more favorable sense: Easy, unrestrained talk or writing, esp. about persons or social incidents’’ (OED). Ethnographic studies focus on gossip’s informal, usually covert but powerful informational, moralistic, and aesthetic meanings for communities and groups. Sociolinguists have considered it an important aspect of women’s talk with each other and a characteristic woman’s speaking style in cross-sex talk. The gossip narrates informal, private, and particular cultures that both challenge and confirm dominant and public group cultures. Many traditional healing systems recognize the gossip as both witch and healer who uses covert and intimate knowledge to disrupt or restore well-being. Into the 1600s, Catholic Church officials denounced women gossips talking together during Mass or ‘‘tattling’’ in all-women groups domestically and at public gathering-places, enjoining them to guard or silence their speech. In Western medicine, midwives and other women gossips attendant during childbirth came to be decried and marginalized by male medical (often surgical) specialists who assumed authority over the birth event. Because gossip as a form of talk is so discreet, personally/situationally specific, and sometimes potentially harmful if publicized, there are few field studies of its strategic and artful performance. For the most part, it is mentioned in passing and in general. Thus, neither the arts and varieties of gossip by whatever participants nor its universality and/or varying roles in group life can yet be assessed. Some sociolinguists studying gender differences in language use have considered gossiping an important aspect of women’s talk with other women who are not strangers, especially those identified as friends. Using empirical and anecdotal evidence primarily from heterosexual, middle-class American whites, influential sociolinguist Deborah Tannen (1990) has proposed gendered conversational styles—women’s ‘‘private speaking’’ rapport-talk (including gossip) and men’s ‘‘public speaking’’ report-talk—that complicate cross-sex communication because ‘‘women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy, while men speak and hear a language of status and independence.’’ Others have looked at women’s and men’s gossip as

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variant genres of speech. All need a greater range of data from people of differing cultures, race, ethnicity, class, age, and sexual identity before venturing more on the significance and art of women’s gossip. See also: Best Friend; Midwifery; Old Wives’ Tales; Personal-Experience Narrative; Rumor; Scandal; Women’s Friendship Groups. References: Bergmann, J€ org R. Discreet Indiscretions: The Social Organization of Gossip. Trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Eva Kafka Barron. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993; Dunbar, Robin. Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996; Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion (Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006; Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Gossip. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985; Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: William Morrow, 1990; Walls, Jeannette. Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip. New York: Avon Books, 2000.

Marta Weigle

Graffiti Writings, drawings, or markings on the walls of buildings are graffiti; a single such mark is a graffito. Graffiti is probably as old as handwriting; there are examples from Pompeii and ancient Rome and from early medieval Russia. Four compilations of graffiti were published in England in the 1730s under the title The Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. The compiler, under the wonderfully contrived pseudonym Hurlo Thrumbo, includes a few items noted as written ‘‘in a Woman’s Hand.’’ One example, dated February 18, 1725, is ‘‘From a Tavern in Fleet-Street’’: Since cruel Fate has robb’d me of the Youth, For whom my Heart had hoarded all its Truth, I’ll never love more, despairing e’er to find, Such Constancy and Truth amongst Mankind [sic]. (Part II, 12)

Graffiti is usually anonymous, although coded names that identify a ‘‘tagger’’ or ‘‘writer’’ (graffiti artist) may actually constitute the art itself in the work of some contemporary spray-painters who decorate subways, buses, and other public places in blighted urban areas. Women, including ‘‘Barbara 62,’’ ‘‘Poonie 1,’’ and ‘‘Suki,’’ were among the most notorious taggers in New York City in the 1970s (@149st). Since then, the controversial art form is practiced predominantly by men. Much of the debate surrounding graffiti asks whether it should be considered art or vandalism, but a more interesting approach looks at graffiti as communication. Jane Gadsby has developed a taxonomy of six different types of graffiti, which perform different functions for the writer, whether male or female. Gadsby’s classification consists of latrinalia, public, folk epigraphy, historical, tags, and humorous (2005: 2). What are ‘‘women who write on walls’’ trying to say? Women write both public and private graffiti, and, most typically, their private communications are written in restrooms (‘‘latrinalia’’), where laments for love lost are especially common. Emma Otto’s 1990 Brazilian study demonstrated that women’s

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main concerns were personal problems, romance, and morality. Gwenda Beed Davey’s study of women’s graffiti in Australia in the 1990s identified cries from the heart, dialogue and debate about religion, politics and sexual preference, philosophical pronouncements, and advice to the lovelorn. The biggest single group of graffiti included ‘‘pronouncements’’ about the writer’s favorite topic, and, like many of the eighteenth-century items published by Hurlo Thrumbo, some are in rhyme. An ode to a mammogram was found attached to this valuable but hated machine in a women’s hospital: This machine was made by a man Of that there is no doubt; I’d like to get his balls in here, For months he’d go without.

Today, women’s informal written public communications are more likely to address public social issues than private romantic ones. British researcher Jill Posener writes that ‘‘the feminist movement, No Nukes campaigners, the anti-smoking lobby and anarchists have all become street writers’’ (1982: 11). Some of their graffiti consists of simple painted slogans such as ‘‘Dead men don’t rape,’’ but other examples ‘‘reclaim’’ billboard advertisements with rewritten corporate slogans, often to humorous effect. Posener includes, for example, a photograph of a billboard advertising a sports car with the message, ‘‘If it were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched.’’ The graffitist has added in spray paint ‘‘If this lady was a car, she’d run you down.’’ See also: Activism; Feminisms; Folk Art; Hip-Hop Culture/Rap; Humor. References: @149st. ‘‘Female Writers.’’ 2001, 2003. http://www.at149st.com/women. html (accessed January 14, 2007); Bushnell, John. Moscow Graffiti: Language and Subculture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990; Cooper, Martha, and Henry Chalfant. Subway Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1984; Davey, Gwenda Beed. Women Who Write on Walls. In paperback from http://www.gwendadavey.com, 2007; Gadsby, Jane. ‘‘Looking at Writing on the Wall: A Critical Review and Taxonomy of Graffiti Texts,’’ 1995. http:// www.graffiti.org/faq/critical.review.html (accessed January 12, 2007); Otto, Emma. ‘‘Graffiti in the 1990s: a study of inscriptions on restroom walls.’’ Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 133, no. 4 (1993): 589–590; Posener, Jill. Spray it Loud. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982; ———. Louder than Words. London: Pandora, 1986; The MerryThought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. London, J. Roberts in Warwick Lane, 1731–?. Facsimile edition. The Augustan Reprint Society Publication Number 221–222, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California Los Angeles, 1983; Young, Karl. ‘‘Names: The Basis of Graffiti Art.’’ Free Graphz. n.d. http:// www.thing.net/grist/lnd/graffiti/tags.htm (accessed January 14, 2007).

Gwenda Beed Davey Grandmother A grandmother is the mother of one’s mother or father. The English language distinguishes a grandmother on the mother’s side as maternal and on the father’s side as paternal. In many North American cultures—particularly in those of First Nations and Pacific Islands peoples and those with origins in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and throughout the Mediterranean region— grandmothers are revered. In Euro American cultures, grandmothers are, for

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the most part, independent of their children and maintain their own households. (Ill or elderly grandmothers dependent upon their children or living in nursing homes or long-term care facilities constitute a significant exception, especially in the United States.) According to the 2000 U.S. Census, an increasing number of grandparents, mostly grandmothers, are living with their grandchildren for five years or longer, the highest proportion of which are among Indigenous Hawaiians and Blacks (Law: 28). In these and other already economically burdened cultural groups, older women have taken it upon themselves to rear another generation of children, many of whom benefit from the experiences of their family’s primary tradition-bearers; however, it also means that these women have little time to pursue their own interests after their children have left home. Cultural evaluations of grandmothers are often found in proverbs. Consider, for example, the German saying, ‘‘Even the Devil’s grandmother was a nice girl when she was young’’ (Hollister). Grandmothers as specific individuals and as a general category of older women suffer from the negative stereotypes associated with their age group. As women age in societies that overvalue youth as a prerequisite for physical attractiveness in women and selects physical attractiveness as the primary measure of women’s value, they are too often seen as no longer worthy of emulation. Popular images of the grandmother generally take one of two forms. She may be a fussy old woman who likes to meddle in the affairs of the family and control its members. This grandmother may be powerful, but is disliked by her grandchildren and ignored by her children and daughters- and sonsin-law. In folklore, she is usually portrayed as a hag or witch who goes to great lengths to harm young children. Alternatively, the grandmother is the person to whom the entire family enthusiastically rushes for the winter holidays, who listens to everything a grandchild has to say, who gives lots of hugs and kisses, and who always serves the best food. She offers no challenge to anyone in the family or outside it. The grandmother in ‘‘Red Riding Hood’’ is a good example; she is liked and regularly visited by her granddaughter, but is a quintessential victim, eaten by a wolf and rescued, if at all, by a young, powerful male. Grandmothers themselves are currently working to rehabilitate their reputation. At a Women’s Institute meeting in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, in the early 1980s, one member read a poem about contemporary grandmothers who no longer ‘‘rock and knit/Tat, crochet, and babysit’’ but instead exercise, tour, take clients to lunch, ski, and curl (Greenhill: 67). In another poem, several versions of which appeared in local Ontario newspapers, ‘‘The Modern Grandmother’’ has vacated the rocking chair, knitting, and tending babies in favor of ceramics, bowling, bingo, dancing, going to college, and writing a book. But grandmothers also act imaginatively upon the world stage. For example, the originally Canadian ‘‘Raging Grannies’’ has chapters in several countries. Their members perform at peace rallies, presenting humorous and serious parodies of popular songs in protest against war. See also: Aging; Croning; Elder Care; Folktale; Red Riding Hood. References: Greenhill, Pauline. True Poetry: Traditional and Popular Verse in Ontario. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989; Hollister, Danielle, ed.

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‘‘Grandparent Quotations.’’ Bella Online: The Voice of Women. http://www.bellaonline. com/articles/art23662.asp (accessed August 10, 2008); Law, Violet. ‘‘No Retirement Home Here.’’ Colorlines (Fall 2005): 27–30; Roy, Carole. ‘‘The Transformative Power of Creative Dissent: The Raging Grannies’ Legacy.’’ Expanding the Boundaries of Transformative Learning: Essays on Theory and Praxis, eds. E. V. O’Sullivan, A. Morrell, and M. A. O’Connor, 257–271. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

Cora M. Bradley Graves and Gravemarkers A grave is the place where a body is interred after death, usually signifying burial; the traditionally solemn nature of such a location contributes to the adjectival use of the term ‘‘grave’’ to mean serious, gloomy, and of great consequence. Etymologically speaking, the adjective actually comes through the Latin word gravis, ‘‘heavy, weighty,’’ and the noun through the Old English verb grafan, ‘‘to dig.’’ Prior to the evolution of the funeral industry in North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women were often in charge of preparing the body of the family’s deceased for burial and/ or for the upkeep of the area assigned to the individual or family gravesite. Women also play key roles in the public display of mourning at graveside. In the Christian Bible, while it was Joseph who prepared the body for burial, it was Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James and Joseph, who sat graveside until the resurrection of Jesus on the third day (Matthew 27–28). In widely diverse cultures—including but not limited to those of Western Asia (the Middle East), the Balkans, Ireland, mainland China, Myanmar (Burma), Sri Lanka, Tibet, Nepal, Micronesia, Muslim Egypt, and in Iran among the Papi tribe—it is traditional for women to demonstrate grief through loud wailing and ululating, self-mutilation by scratching, and/or by taking part in the performance of mourning songs known as laments. In some cases, women hire themselves out as professional mourners to augment their income. On the other hand, in cultures such as those of Muslim Eritrea and Indonesia, women are prohibited from attending burials altogether in acknowledgement of traditional pollution taboos. Beyond the rites conducted immediately after death, care of the burial site in North America is often performed by women. It is unclear if this is due to the longer lifespan of women in North America in general or to the traditional societal roles prescribed for them. The permanent features of the graveside landscape—the layout of the contemporary ‘‘memorial park’’ and the uniform character of its grave markers—were initially envisioned and implemented by men. Rules governing these sites often detail limits on floral tributes and other objects used for decorating graves. In the past, cleaning and decorating gravesites on ‘‘Decoration Day’’ was practiced widely in the United States, particularly in the Ozarks, in the South, and in the Hawaiian Islands. The creation of perpetual care funds by the funeral industry also contributed to the elimination of the need for the individual upkeep of graves. However, the decoration of graves continues, often to an extent that defies attempts to maintain a landscape that is uniformly flat (intended to minimize the gloomy aspect of earlier cemeteries with their standing headstones, baroque monuments, and family mausoleums).

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In the American Southwest, elaborate decorations are commonly brought to gravesides on almost all holidays, both religious and secular. At Christmas in particular, decorating increases significantly; six-foot-tall Christmas trees are not uncommon, calling viewers to notice individual graves and the names of those buried in them. In the Northeast, even the oldest graveyards may contain steel headstones, ornamented with an inset color photograph of the deceased. The increasingly common placement of plastic garden fences and other types of borders around graves serve to further heighten a sense of separation between the anonymity of the collective and specific individuals. Male-authored histories dealing with graves tend to focus on the more permanent arts of designing gravestones and cemetery landscapes, while fewer deal with the ephemeral aesthetics of grave decorating overseen by women, much in the same way that they tend to privilege architecture over interior design. Challenges to this traditional gendering and subsequent valorization of the use of memorial space are dramatically revealed in Washington, DC’s, most visited memorial site, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, which embodies a ‘‘feminine’’ aesthetic in a traditionally ‘‘masculine’’ form. From the beginning, her design sprang from a desire to focus on the emotional experience of visitors as much as on the nation’s war dead. Its highly polished, flat, reflective surface bears witness more to the grief of loved ones—especially after they spend time there—than it does to the more usual glorification of the state and its war efforts in such monuments. While ‘‘The Wall’’ is large and permanent, it is also changeable and unique to each person who sees her or his passing reflection against the deeply etched names on its unyielding black marble surface. The items visitors and mourners have been inspired to leave at the base of the memorial differ in substance and quantity from those at any other American national monument, and are remarkably consistent with the types of items left at individual gravesites—letters, toys, beer cans, Christmas trees, photographs, and other objects imbued with personal meaning. See also: Death; Folk Custom; Lament; Rites of Passage; Roadside Crosses. References: Farrell, James J. Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980; Hass, Kristin Ann. Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998; Matsunami, Kodo. International Handbook of Funeral Customs. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1998; Meyer, Richard E., ed. Cemeteries and Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989; ———. Ethnicity and the American Cemetery. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993; Mitford, Jessica. The American Way of Death Revisited. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998; Mock, Freida Lee, director. Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. Distributed by Tapeworm Video, Valencia, CA. 1994; Montell, Lynwood. ‘‘Cemetery Decoration Customs in the American South.’’ The Old Traditional Way of Life: Essays in Honor of Warren E. Roberts, eds. Robert E. Walls and George H. Shoemaker, 111–29. Bloomington: Trickster Press, 1989; Posey, Sandra Mizumoto. ‘‘Grave & Image: Holiday Grave Decorations in a Southern California Memorial Park.’’ Folklore Forum, vol. 29, no. 1 (1998): 51–63; Rakhsha, Masoomeh. ‘‘Mourning and Weeping Rites Among Papi Tribe, Lorestan.’’ Kayhan: A Cultural, Scientific, and Art Monthly 155 (1999): 26–31; Sloane, David Charles. The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Sandra Mizumoto Posey

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Gullah Women’s Folklore Gullah (also called Geechee) communities can be found on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and the northeastern tip of Florida. These numerous flat barrier islands—including Edisto, St. Helena, and Hilton Head—range from small uninhabitable islands to some as large as fifty square miles. The Gullah are descended from Africans brought to the Atlantic coast of the United States in the 1700s as enslaved laborers to work on rice, indigo, and cotton plantations. They originated from the ricecultivating West African coast, including Liberia, Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Senegal; from Central Africa, including Angola; and from Madagascar, which also provided Americans with rice seed for their plantations. The term ‘‘Gullah’’ is thought to be derived either from ‘‘Angola’’ or from the ‘‘Gola’’ community of Liberia. During the time of slavery, Gullah people farmed the Sea Islands with little interaction with Whites, with the exception of a few overseers. When they were legally freed in 1863, much of the islands’ plantation land was distributed relatively evenly among its formerly enslaved inhabitants. The Gullah continued to live in relative isolation on the barrier islands until the region was developed for resorts beginning in the 1950s, whereupon many—as a result of pressure, deception, or not realizing its true market value—sold their land to mainland developers at relatively low prices. The Gullah community has a distinctive culture and language, and retains more connections with its African roots than any other group of Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved. However, increasingly, members of the Gullah community are moving off the islands or are working at low-wage service jobs in the resort industry. Gullah culture embodies a distinctive Creole language; a rich expressive and material culture; and a body of knowledge encompassing the medicinal value of roots and herbs, childbirth practices, and ideas about the natural world, for example. The Gullah are known for their basketweaving, which is primarily a women’s craft. Baskets using the same spiral designs are found in Senegal and Gambia. Gullah baskets were a ubiquitous part of daily life in coastal South Carolina and Georgia for more than a century (prized, for example, for winnowing rice). Today, Gullah baskets are highly valued home decor and are sold in the resort areas on Route 17. Gullah woman have played an important role in the Gullah economy, partly because of their role in making baskets, which are a significant market commodity. Josephine Beoku-Betts has studied Gullah women’s role in feeding the family. Women share in hunting game and fishing, although to a lesser degree, and women typically fish with a rod and reel and men with net-casting. However, the work associated with preparing meals is done almost exclusively by women. Beoku-Betts argues that while this may be a reflection of women’s subordinate position relative to men within the community, meal preparation becomes an important means through which cultural identity is defined collectively as women work together preparing meals. Women’s cooking practice, then, is a means of empowerment for both women and the community as a whole. This resonates with Black feminist

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thought, which recognizes the home as a site of resistance for African Americans. Gullah culture is not reflected in mainstream society’s institutions, and community members themselves carry and transmit their language and traditions. Women have a critical role in this process. Women teach children Gullah history and folkways through storytelling and example because they are the primary caretakers for children. Gullah women tend to have extensive knowledge of the medicinal uses of Sea Island herbs and roots. Women’s folkways of cooking, basketweaving, and strip-quilting are often done collectively or taught to children, and this provides a context for building communal bonds, storytelling, and socializing the next generation. Such folklife is a significant site for producing both material and expressive culture. Importantly, it is a means whereby communal values, knowledge, and history are articulated, negotiated, and defined in a social context. When women work together and tell stories to children, the Gullah language is expressed freely and remains a living language. The critically acclaimed fictional feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991), written and directed by Julie Dash, tells the story of the women in a Gullah family in 1902 as they are about to leave the Sea Islands and migrate north. Dash is from New York, but her father was raised in the Sea Islands where she has extended family. The film depicts Gullah culture as distinctive and significant, but not monolithic. The women negotiate between Gullah and mainstream American culture; among traditional West African religions, Islam, and Christianity; between Gullah identity and their relationships with their lovers who are non-Gullah; and between the past and the future as they seek to survive racism, cultural assimilation, and violence. In the film—as in real life—women’s identity and Gullah identity are portrayed as complex, diverse, and nuanced. See also: Basketmaking; Ethnicity; Family Folklore; Film; Quiltmaking; Race; Storytelling; TraditionBearer. References: Beoku-Betts, Josephine A. ‘‘We Got Our Way of Cooking Things: Women, Food and Preservation of Cultural Identity among the Gullah.’’ Gender and Society, vol. 9, no. 5 (1995): 535–555; Dash, Julie, with Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks. Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film. New York: The New Press, 1992; Jones-Jackson, Patricia. When Roots Die: Endangered Traditions on the Sea Islands. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

Jessica Senehi

H Hair Hair on the face, head, and body is encoded with cultural and political significance. Every society has traditions about hair’s importance, as well as unique fashions, conventions, and rituals for hair care, display, or elimination. Cross-culturally, as a signifier of identity, the stylization of hair demarcates differences between subjects along lines of race and ethnicity, generation, community or subculture, and gender and sexuality. Hair removal or decoration is also symbolic insofar as it is linked to discourses of health, beauty, sexuality, and social status. Folktales (for example, Rapunzel), legends (such as Lady Godiva), and myths (for example, Medusa) make explicit links between women’s hair and female sexual power. For the ancient Greeks, a woman’s loose hair was a mark of her fertility and sexuality; however, patriarchal marriage requires fertility only. Perceived as a threat to patrilineal bloodlines, her sexuality could be separated, displaced, or even eliminated, as the myth of Medusa makes clear. After being raped by the god Poseidon, the once-mortal, seductively tousled Gorgon sister suffers the replacement of her hair with hissing snakes, and then, at her encounter with the hero Perseus, she loses her head. Religious injunctions about women’s hair are also common. For example, the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians that ‘‘a woman’s hair is her glory,’’ given to her by God as a covering and a veil; the injunction is for her to pin it up or hide it completely, both to dissociate herself from the first-century Christian image of the ecstatic Pagan female and so as not to obscure the glory of men. During the European witch trials, the bodies of women accused of having supernatural powers were publicly shaved and shamed before being tortured and killed by their inquisitors. Today, many patriarchal cultures’ religious conventions require women’s hair to be covered or shorn to signify modesty (for example, Muslim and Orthodox Jewish). Social customs of hair removal (including electrolysis, waxing, bleaching, exfoliation, and shaving) have been practiced globally for millennia. Modern

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regulatory norms in Western culture link feminine beauty to a hairless body. Contemporary North American mass media have normalized the model of the depilated female body and in the process constructed women’s body hair and hairy women’s bodies as abject, taboo, unsightly, and unhygienic. For men, hair is associated with virility and strength—the ancient Hebrew myth of Samson is the most famous example, but the current proliferation of treatments for male baldness is an unambiguous contemporary sign— thus illustrating the political significance of hair as a marker of differential social status and power. As a profession, hairstyling and grooming is predominantly a female activity. Historically, the beauty salon has operated as a key site for female entrepreneurship, an opportunity for paid employment, and a place for community networking—particularly for minority women. In twentiethcentury North America, trends in hair fashion ranged from the bob in the 1920s, to finger waves in the 1930s, followed by wartime pin curls in the 1940s. Mid-century, the highly structured bouffants and beehives of the 1950s were replaced by the natural look of long hair or Afros for both sexes in the 1960s. Trendsetter Vidal Sassoon’s signature chic angular cuts in the 1970s competed with the infamous mullet. In the 1980s, new wave and punk trends in music ushered in gelled, spiky hair; in the 1990s, hip-hop culture popularized shaved, asymmetrical cuts for men and weaves and extensions for women. Hollywood’s influence on hair trends is responsible for the resilient mythos of the ‘‘blonde bombshell,’’ perhaps best represented by the bornbrunette film star Marilyn Monroe. Since children with light complexions are often born with tow-tresses (flax-colored hair), some argue that the male preference for women with blond hair is aligned with heteropatriarchal fantasies of female infantilization and sexual passivity. The cultural fascination with fair hair also carries persistent and troubling connections to doctrines of Aryan supremacy. See also: Aesthetics; Beauty; Cosmetics; Fashion; Feminisms; Folktale; Hip-Hop Culture/Rap; Magazines; Marriage; Mass Media; Popular Culture; Sexism; Sexuality; Women’s Work. References: Banks, Ingrid. Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness. New York: New York University Press, 2000; Black, Paula. The Beauty Industry: Gender, Culture, Pleasure. New York and London: Routledge, 2004; Blackwelder, Julia Kirk. Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training During Segregation. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003; Bryer, Robin. The History of Hair: Fashion and Fantasy Down the Ages. New York: Philip Wilson, 2003; Carter, Nancy A. General Board of Christian Ministries. ‘‘Paul and Corinthian Women’s Hairstyles.’’ 2000. http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/corinthians/hairstyles.stm (accessed May 22, 2005); Corson, Richard. Fashions in Hair: The First Five Thousand Years. New York: Peter Owen, 2001; Herzig, Rebecca. ‘‘Removing Roots.’’ Technology & Culture, vol. 40, no. 4 (1999): 723–746; Ilyin, Natalia. Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture. New York: Touchstone, 2000; Myerowitz Levine, Molly. ‘‘The Gendered Grammar of Ancient Mediterranean Hair.’’ Off With Her Head! The Denial of Women’s Identities in Myth, Religion, and Culture, eds. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Wendy Doniger, 76–130. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Pitman, Joanna. On Blondes. London: Bloomsbury, 2003; Scranton, Philip, ed. Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America. New York: Routledge, 2000; Toerien, Merran, and Sue Wilkinson. ‘‘Gender and Body Hair: Constructing the Feminine Woman.’’ Women’s

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Studies International Forum, vol. 26, no. 4 (2003): 333–344; Weitz, Rose. Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us About Women’s Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Sidney Eve Matrix

Handclapping Games Generally performed by girls, handclapping is a playful activity involving face-to-face interaction. It consists of combinations of complex, formalized rhythms, motions, poetry, and song. Handclapping is usually learned informally during the elementary school years. The activity can be performed on the playground, on the bus, or anywhere girls spend time together. There is little scholarship focusing specifically on handclapping as its own activity. Possibly due to Folklore’s historic emphasis on texts rather than on performances, studies of handclapping have focused mainly on the meaning of the words that accompany the claps. Thus, handclaps often are lumped under the more general category of rhymes or songs and collected or studied alongside children’s jump-rope rhymes, songs, parodies, countingout rhymes, and other formalized verbal expressions. Those seeking handclapping texts may wish to consult the numerous historic and contemporary collections of children’s rhymes that do exist (Grider 1980; Sutton-Smith 1999). However, these works may not distinguish between handclap texts and other kinds of texts. Tune, rhyme, rhythm, clapping patterns, and participants are generally overlooked. Notable exceptions include Beverly Stoeltje’s Children’s Handclaps (1978); Simon Bronner’s American Children’s Folklore (1988); and Carol Merrill-Mirsky’s ‘‘Girls’ Handclapping Games in Three Los Angeles Schools’’ (1986). Written as a guide for teachers, Stoeltje’s brief book provides handclap texts and variations; musical notation for tunes; notations of rhythms and stresses; and diagrams of clapping patterns. Bronner gives a short photographic essay of a clapping pattern. Merrill-Mirsky provides handclapping patterns, tune notations, rhythms, and other items of children’s popular culture as evidence to support her analysis of the roles that creativity and tradition play in children’s folklore. In addition to these textual sources, Bess Lomax Hawes’ 1968 film Pizza Pizza Daddy-O is an excellent portrayal of handclapping games performed by African American girls in Los Angeles and is very useful for instructional purposes. One primary point that has emerged from the study of handclaps, informed by other types of girls’ rhymes, is that handclap texts are generally conservative and highly gendered in nature. Scholars point to overarching concerns about domestic responsibilities, boyfriends, sex and pregnancy, motherhood, and a strong emphasis on traditional roles for and attitudes about women. For example: I wish I had a nickel I wish I had a dime I wish I had a boyfriend To kiss me all the time.

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Marilyn Jorgenson (1980), for example, notes that handclap texts model the various gendered roles which girls might experience over the course of a lifetime: infant, schoolgirl, teenager, wife, mother, and grandmother. Handclapping as a means of shaping gender ideology has been examined from a functional perspective as well. Mary and Herbert Knapp (1976), for example, suggest that handclapping is a way to advertise social relationships, particularly friendships. They also note that the skills required by traditional girls’ games such as handclapping require each player to master patterned motions and responses, emphasizing speed, ability, and skill. They point out that in traditional boys’ games, players learn to calculate, make judgments, respond to developing situations, and evaluate consequences for the group as a whole. Such differences may have consequences for child development and gender roles. On the other hand, recent gaming scholarship suggests that girls’ play is more complex than previously thought. Rosemary Levy Zumwalt (1999 [1995]) points out that an analysis of girls’ activities must always take into account that girls themselves are much more flexible, dynamic, and complex than are the texts or even the intricate rhythmic patterns they perform. An emphasis on the creative and innovative nature of the performers and their handclapping, alongside the more conservative elements, offers a more balanced perspective. Since few well-developed studies on handclapping are available, the field remains open to further study. See also: Coding; Folk Poetry; Gender; Girls’ Folklore; Girls’ Games; Jump-Rope Rhymes; Rhymes. References: Bronner, Simon J. American Children’s Folklore: A Book of Rhymes, Games, Jokes, Stories, Secret Languages, Beliefs and Camp Legends for Parents, Grandparents, Teachers, Counselors, and All Adults Who Were Once Children. Little Rock, AR: August House, Inc., 1988; Grider, Sylvia Ann. ‘‘A Select Bibliography of Childlore.’’ Western Folklore 39 (1980): 248–65; Jorgensen, Marilyn G. ‘‘An Analysis of Boy-Girl Relationships Portrayed in Contemporary Jump Rope and Handclapping Rhymes.’’ Southwest Folklore, vol. 4, nos. 3/4 (1980): 63–71; Knapp, Mary, and Herbert Knapp. One Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of American Children. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976; Lomax-Hawes, Bess, and Bob Eberlein, directors. Pizza Pizza Daddy-O. Black Americana Series. 1968. Distributed on VHS by the Center for Media and Independent Learning at UC Berkeley; Merrill-Mirsky, Carol. ‘‘Girls’ Handclapping Games in Three Los Angeles Schools.’’ Yearbook for Traditional Music 18 (1986): 47–59; Stoeltje, Beverly. Children’s Handclaps: Informal Learning in Play. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 1978; Sutton-Smith, Brian, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon, eds. Children’s Folklore: A Sourcebook. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999 [1995]; Zumwalt, Rosemary Levy. ‘‘The Complexity of Children’s Folklore.’’ In Children’s Folklore: A Sourcebook, eds. Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon, 23–47. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999 [1995].

Lisa Gabbert Helpmate To be a helpmate to the male of the human species is, according to the second creation story in Genesis (2:7–25, King James Version), the apparent divine purpose of the human female. Eve/woman is created to assist

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Adam/man. ‘‘And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him’’ (Gen. 2:18). The inequality inherent in this protorelationship—with the woman in the submissive, subordinate position of helpmate to, indeed an offshoot of, the man—has had a profound effect on gender relations in Western cultures, justifying and rationalizing patriarchal hierarchies, misogynistic ideologies, and the oppression of women and girls. Attempts to reconcile the first and more egalitarian creation story in Genesis 1:26–28 with the second in Genesis 1 have resulted in stories asserting that the woman with equal status to Adam created in Genesis 1 is not a subservient helpmate. The most famous of these stories concerns Lilith, Adam’s vocal and demanding first wife, who, according to some versions, left him in Paradise after refusing to have sexual relations in the missionary position. The word, ‘‘helpmate,’’ itself stems from the Hebrew word, ezer, variously translated as ‘‘help,’’ ‘‘helper,’’ ‘‘helpmate,’’ ‘‘partner,’’ or ‘‘companion.’’ With the rise of second-wave feminism, the term was deconstructed and ultimately reconstructed as empowering by many feminist biblical scholars. Phyllis Trible, among others, asserts that not only does ezer contain no connotations of inferiority, but, to the contrary, since it is a term often used to refer to divine help throughout the Pentatuch/Old Testament, ezer—Eve and women in general—are on par with God, superior beings whose status is tempered only by the clause, ‘‘meet for him,’’ meaning suitable for Adam and fitting for a man. So, at the very least, women, it is argued, are complementary equals and mutual partners. While such a redemptive feminist reinterpretation is admirable, it has not necessarily shaken millennia of misogynistic practices. If being a helpmate is Eve’s raison d’^etre, the question naturally arises, what sort of help does she, as the prototypical woman, provide? Since Eve is the ‘‘mother of all living’’ (Gen. 3:20) and the first couple has been commanded to ‘‘be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth’’ (Gen. 1:28), presumably the key to a woman’s role as helpmate lies in her womb. In the patriarchies of the ancient world and in early Christianity, male writers expressed the belief that the truest companions and best partners are persons of the same sex; in general, heterosexual relations were only necessary to propagate the species. The term ‘‘helpmate’’ may be a reference to the assumption of an inherent male right of access to the ‘‘helpful’’ female body. Of special interest to folklorists is Beverly Stoeltje’s work on the image of frontier women in American society, which identifies three initial roles for women in the West: the ‘‘refined lady,’’ the ‘‘backwoods belle,’’ and the ‘‘bad woman.’’ She discusses these images in relation to their male counterparts: the cowboy, the cattleman-settler, and the bad man. Initially, the refined lady was identified as a model of ideal womanhood. She brought civilization, order, and respectability to a mostly male environment that lacked these qualities. However, she ultimately proved maladaptive to the harsh realities of frontier life. By combining the refined lady’s civilizing, institutionbuilding attributes with the strength, courage, and initiative of the backwoods

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belle, settlers created a new image, the ‘‘helpmate’’ or comrade. Stoeltje’s historical work serves as a ground for understanding the contemporary images available to American women. See also: Eve; Gender; Lilith; Region: United States. References: Clines, David J. A. ‘‘What does Eve do to Help? And Other Readerly Questions to the Old Testament.’’ Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series 94 (1990): 25–48; Collins, John J. The Bible after Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2005; Kvam, Kristen E., Linda S. Schearing, and Valerie H. Ziegler, eds. Eve and Adam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Stoeltje, Beverly J. ‘‘‘A Helpmate for Man Indeed’: The Image of the Frontier Woman.’’ In Women and Folklore: Images and Genres, ed. Claire R. Farrer, 25–41. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1975; Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

Jessica Grant Jørgensen

Henna Art/ Mehndi Henna body art in North America is practiced among Hindu and Muslim immigrants from South Asia, Western Asia (the Middle East), and North Africa, and by fashionable urbanites with no prior cultural association with it. Henna, or mehndi as it is often called, is applied directly to the skin as a paste to create beautiful designs that last for as long as two weeks. The general process includes taking the leaves of the henna plant, which are dried and ground to a fine powder, and then mixed with boiling water and other additives, such as lemon juice, tea, or coffee, and allowing the mixture to sit for several hours. Once sufficiently set, the paste is applied to the skin of the hands and feet with a cone or painted with a toothpick. A mixture of lemon juice and sugar keeps the henna from drying, increasing the potency of the dye. The henna paste’s color ranges from dark green to black when on the skin. However, once it dries completely and is scraped off, it leaves a deep reddish-maroon stain. Henna is used for various ceremonial occasions in many parts of the world, especially among Hindus and Muslims in India, Pakistan, Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, and Senegal. In India, for example, the hands and feet of a bride are painted in elaborate, lacy designs to commemorate the vital transitional period in a young woman’s life. Henna body art marks the woman as a bride, enhancing the beauty of her hands and feet, complementing the gold and silver jewelry on her body, and adding an auspicious quality to the wedding ceremony. The hands and feet are the only parts of the body, other than the face, that are visible; they are decorated with red stain in the shapes of flowers, paisleys, and peacocks, the special bird of lovers. Whereas Indian brides display henna in such pictorial designs, Moroccan women’s designs are cleaner, consisting of a series of dots, and Turkish brides often simply cover the entire palm in dye. Both the bride’s and the groom’s female relatives, as well as the groom himself, may be decorated with henna, although less elaborately. Henna has become increasingly prevalent in the United States, particularly in large cities, such as New York and Los Angeles. One may get henna

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applied at fancy body-art boutiques, or in beauty salons owned by people from the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent. These salons are usually located in ethnic enclaves of big cities. Henna paraphernalia, including the powder itself, can be purchased at stores specializing in South Asian or Middle Eastern groceries. Besides social function and cultural meaning, the other main differences between henna practices in America and henna in the Old World are in the designs, the parts of the body decorated, and the name itself. The designs that appeal to mainstream Americans are similar to tattoo designs, often consisting of a single motif depicting a supposed Celtic or Bornean neotribal element, or a word rendered in a foreign script in Japanese and Chinese characters or in the script of Sanskrit. Due to henna’s temporary nature, it is often used as a ‘‘trial tattoo,’’ an experiment before a permanent commitment has to be made. In the United States, henna is displayed on the hands and feet, but it is also found on the upper arms, backs, and stomachs—body parts not usually revealed by traditional Hindus and Muslims owing to different notions of beauty and modesty. When designs appear on the hands, they often consist of asymmetrical, vine-like flowers, flowing from the index finger across the back of the hand. This popular American diagonal design motif can now be found in India on the hands of Bollywood movie stars and local brides. The application of henna is usually referred to as ‘‘henna tattoo’’ in the United States, a tag that has worked its way back from the diaspora to the motherland. Henna stencil decals, found in the Little India section of New York City, can be bought in a variety of shapes obviously catering to westerners, such as Chinese characters, an ‘‘Om’’ written in Sanskrit, or a whale in mock-Northwest coast Native style. The stencils, produced in New Delhi, bear the following label: ‘‘Henna Body Tattoo, Building Trust, World Wide.’’ See also: Aesthetics; Beauty; Body Modification and Adornment; Folk Art; Muslim Women’s Folklore; Region: Middle East; Rites of Passage; Wedding. References: Genini, Izza, director. For Eye’s Delight. Morocco. Videotape distributed by Ohra: 16 bis, rue Lauriston, 75116, Paris, France, 1997; Kapchan, Deborah. ‘‘Moroccan Women’s Body Signs.’’ In Bodylore, ed. Katharine Young, 3–34. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993; Messina, Maria, ‘‘Henna Party.’’ Natural History Magazine, vol. 97, no. 9 (1988): 40–47; Roome, Loretta. Mehendi: The Timeless Art of Henna Painting. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998; Saksena, Jogendra. Art of Rajasthan: Henna and Floor Decorations. Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan, 1979; Slymovics, Susan, and Amanda Dargan, directors. The Painted Bride. Videotape distributed by Citylore. New York: Queens Council on the Arts, 1990; Untracht, Oppi. Traditional Jewelry of India. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, 1997.

Pravina Shukla Herbs The use of plants to heal the human body is regarded as one of the most ancient forms of health care known to humans. Many scientists consider a 60,000-year-old Neanderthal burial site located in Northern Iraq as evidence of the earliest known use of herbs. Analysis of the site revealed large quantities of plant pollen in the soil near human bones and contained twenty-eight

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species of plants, including yarrow, groundsels, grape hyacinth, and St. Barnaby’s thistle. The plants had most likely been intentionally placed around a Neanderthal man’s grave. From curing colds, to healing minor injuries, to treating more serious illnesses, such as cancer, all human cultures have depended on their native flora to prevent illness and restore health. Although botanists define herbs as non-woody, low-growing plants, herbalists have traditionally relied upon the entire plant kingdom to create herbal remedies. As a result, the ingredients in many herbal remedies have been gathered not only from flowering plants, shrubs, and trees, but have also been collected from mosses, lichens, ferns, algae, and fungi. Various parts of plants may also be used, including the flowers, seeds, fruit, leaves, stems, twigs, bark, root, and rootstock. In Folklore Studies, the medicinal use of herbs falls under the rubric of ‘‘folk medicine.’’ Historically, women often assumed the role of folk healer, wise woman, midwife, and nurse as they maintained the herb garden, dried herbs, and prepared and administered medicinal remedies. Poultices, salves, ointments, tonics, and teas were created, tested, and used to treat a range of ailments. Herbs, however, not only played a significant role for women from the perspective of healer, but were also a crucial and reliable means by which women could facilitate pregnancy, enable abortion, ease childbirth, practice birth control, and, more recently, complement biomedical treatments for breast cancer. According to ancient papyrus, Egyptian women practiced birth control using remedies containing acacia gum, dates, and an unknown plant which were mixed together and formed into a vaginal suppository. The acacia was believed to act as an herbal spermicide. Many First Nations groups continue to use herbs as a primary means for healing and maintaining harmony throughout pregnancy and birth. Until recently, Navajo women gave birth on a dirt floor in the hogan, or traditional dwelling. They burned cedar to cleanse the air, sipped juniper tea to help the uterus contract after delivery, and mother and child were blessed with corn pollen to help restore h ozh o (‘‘beauty and balance’’) following the birth. Among women diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States and Canada, recent studies indicate that the number of women who rely upon Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) to complement their biomedical treatment, including herbal remedies, continues to rise. Many women do so in order to improve their quality of life, reduce tumor size, prevent recurrence, obtain a feeling of control, and decrease the negative side effects of chemotherapy and other cancer treatments. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of the world’s population uses some form of traditional medicine as a primary source of health care, most of which is the reliance upon herbs to treat and prevent illness (Bodeker 1996). In recent years, scientists have become increasingly interested in approaches to health care outside official biomedical practice in the United States. A steady increase in the number of people turning to traditional medicine has motivated the National Institutes of Health to create the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine to record, assess, and analyze these forms of health care in the United States.

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Biomedical health care continues to improve, and new drugs are developed every day, but reliance upon herbs for healing, relief, and comfort persists. See also: Abortion; Childbirth and Childrearing; First Nations of North America; Folk Medicine; Foodways; Gardens; Graves and Gravemarkers; Old Wives’ Tales; Pregnancy. References: Bodeker, Gerard C. ‘‘Global Health Traditions.’’ In Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, ed. Marc S. Micozzi, 279–290. New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1996; Gordon, James S., and Sharon Curtin. Comprehensive Cancer Care: Integrating Alternative, Complementary, and Conventional Therapies. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Press, 2000; Kirkland, James, Holly F. Mathews, and C. W. Sullivan III, eds. Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992; Micozzi, Marc S. Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1996; O’Connor, Bonnie B., and David Hufford. ‘‘Understanding Folk Medicine.’’ In Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems, ed. Erika Brady, 13–35. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001; Riddle, John M. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1997; Solecki, R. S. ‘‘Shanidar IV: A Neanderthal Flower Burial in Northern Iraq.’’ Science, vol. 190, no. 28 (1975): 880–881.

Denise Kozikowski Hip-Hop Culture/Rap Hip-hop, as a culture, encompasses five unique forms of expression: 1) DJing (disc jockeying or mixing; using turntables to ‘‘scratch’’ or combine sounds); 2) b-boying (or breaking; the dance component); 3) graffiti art (‘‘tagging’’ or ‘‘writing’’); 4) ‘‘MCing’’ (master of ceremonies, rapping); and 5) education (knowledge). The fifth element was introduced by Africa Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation in 1973 and serves the important function of reminding both hip-hop artists and the larger society that history, politics, economics, and social-justice concerns are central to the hip-hop ethos. While the terms ‘‘hip-hop’’ and ‘‘rap’’ are often used interchangeably, rap music per se is only one aspect of hip-hop culture. Hip-hop is best viewed as a widespread cultural network of artistic expression, a form of communication that includes rap, DJ practice, digital sampling, break dancing, and graffiti art. Hip-hop culture is deeply rooted in African American, African Caribbean, and Latino cultures and history, while rap music has become a multibillion dollar industry, due primarily to its strong appeal to non-Blacks. Hip-hop purportedly originated in the Bronx, New York, where many of its early MCs (for example, Prince Whipple Whip), graffiti artists (for example, Jean Michel Basquiat), and members of crews that ‘‘battled’’ in break dancing contests (for example, Rock Steady Crew) were Latinos, mostly Puerto Rican. DJs Kool Herc and Clement Coxsone were Jamaican, and Grandmaster Flash came to New York from Barbados. The popularity and globalization of hip-hop culture and rap music has sparked numerous debates concerning the genre’s boundaries, functions, and definitions. In her article, ‘‘Getting Real About Global Hip-Hop,’’ Yvonne Bynoe makes a distinction between being a ‘‘fan’’ of rap music and being someone who is organically part of a larger network of hip-hop culture. She argues that hiphop culture is more than just an entertainment vehicle; it is specific to the

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experiences, values, and stories of African and Caribbean Americans. Quoting Raymond Williams (1962), Bynoe reminds us that culture is ‘‘‘a particular way of life’ that is shared by a community and shaped by its values, traditions, beliefs, material objects, and territory.’’ Bynoe argues that hip-hop culture is primarily informed by a Black perspective and understanding of the world (that is, beliefs, customs, norms, restrictions, and styles). For these reasons, the distinction between hip-hop as a culture and rap music as a global commercial phenomenon is crucial from the perspective of Folklore Studies. A recent issue of Entertainment Weekly Magazine commemorated the ‘‘Biggest Moments in Hip-Hop’s Last 25 years.’’ According to the writers, The rap revolution started at the intersection of serendipity and inspiration. Sylvia Robinson, owner of a failing record label, was just looking for some cake and a good time when she went to a birthday party at the New York City club Harlem World in May 1979. But when she heard something called rap being performed there (by a DJ named Lovebug Starki), she recognized its potential (Anderson et al. 2004: 41)

Other music entrepreneurs followed suit, and by the mid-1980s, the genre had become one of the most vital new popular music forms in the music industry. However, the roots of rap music and hip-hop culture run deeper than twenty-five years of mainstream commodification. Recent hiphop/rap scholarship has begun to document its deeper origins. Anthony B. Pinn (2003), for example, examines its religious influences: At its best, perhaps rap music is a continuation of the creative manner in which meaning is made out of an absurd world by promoting a style of living through which a sense of self and community is forged in a hostile environment. Is there any religious significance in rap music? Long before rap and hip-hop became the global and highly commodified phenomenon that it has become, spirituals were a form of musical expression which represented the beginning of an African American cultural tradition and experience. (Pinn 2003: 3)

Many scholars agree that it was through this cultural expression that enslaved Africans made efforts to express a sense of self in a hostile world. Through spirituals, and later the blues, they incorporated their memories of home with their new existence as a means of humanizing a dehumanizing environment. The music, along with folktales, decorative arts, and visual arts that make up this new Black culture, ‘‘represents a style of interpretation, a stylized wrestling with life’’ (ibid.). The notion that rap music is associated only with Black males is being revised. Public perception of women’s presence in the culture has been largely formed by men; however, Cheryl Keyes, Joan Morgan, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and others challenge the long-held notion that rap/hiphop music was exclusively created by males. By the mid-1980s, the rap industry had expanded to include a growing number of Black women artists. Like their male counterparts, female artists also rap about aspects of central city life and their desire to be ‘‘number one’’; however, their lyrics come from their experiences of being women. In 1989, Queen Latifah

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proclaimed ‘‘We are the ones that give birth / To the new generation of prophets’’ (‘‘Ladies First’’). Barbara 62, Eva 62, Lady Pink (the first to tag the Statue of Liberty), Charmin, Stoney, and Lady Heart were a few of the women who played a role in changing the male-dominated world of tagging. In fact, women have been at the heart of hip-hop’s commercial success. In products made by the music industry for mass consumption, thus far and in the main, women have been, as T. Denean Sharply-Whiting notes, ‘‘either ‘hot pussy for sale’ or they were ‘pussy for the taking’.. . . Overexposed young Black female flesh, ‘pimpin,’ ‘playin,’ ‘sexin,’ ‘checkin’ in videos, television, film, rap lyrics, fashion, and on the Internet, is indispensable to the massmedia-engineered appeal of hip-hop culture that helps to shape a new Black gender politics’’ (44). Yet as Kyra D. Gaunt reminds us, ‘‘women are not incidental to the music . . . African American women are more than objectified, self-degrading, video-dancing, sex-crazed, ‘gold diggers’ or ‘skeezers’’’ (278). Derogatory stereotypes, with which so many Black and Latina hip-hoppers have had to contend, vastly oversimplify their participation in all five elements that constitute hip-hop culture. Tricia Rose notes that female storytellers in hip-hop have three central concerns: heterosexual courtship, the power of the female voice, and physical and sexual freedom. Rather than being relegated to the margins as backup singers and dancers, the past ten years also have seen female rappers gain considerable recognition and respect as artists and lyricists. Citing feminist musicologist Hazel Carby, Anne O’Connell (2002) reminds us of the power and primary function of female rap music: . . . in women’s blues, African-American women used themselves as sexual subjects through song as a means of empowerment. The lyrics of many early female blues songs subverted the fact that female sexuality was only the object of the male desire. Instead, female sexuality was used to serve other females with a positive and empowered image of themselves, lending to the ability of other women to relate. These women sang of the satisfaction that accompanies the rejection of female subordination and sexual exploitation. Female rap groups follow their predecessors with the use of powerful lyrics in order to dispute traditional gender roles prevalent in our society.

Hip-hop and rap are examples of modern oral performances practiced among contemporary youth cultures in the United States, and increasingly, around the world. At the center of hip-hop culture is a critical storytelling component that functions to impart information via music and performance to larger societies by specific groups of people. Hip-hop speaks to the diversity of experiences of men and women, but particularly to those of Black and Latino youth. Shawn A. Ginwright has explored the loss of faith in ‘‘the system’’ experienced and expressed by young Black and Latino women and men in the United States and concluded that studying the ‘‘hip-hop generation’’ from a political perspective is the key to understanding its identity, both as an artistic folk group and as a social force. In keeping with the spirit of its fifth element (education, knowledge), increasingly informed by feminist/womanist perspectives, hip-hop culture provides ‘‘not simply a

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voice for disenfranchised youth, but an identity that challenges racist practices, speaks to economic struggles, and sometimes provides a blueprint for the possibilities of social change’’ for both men and women (Robin Kelly 1996, quoted in Ginwright 2004). See also: Feminisms; Folk Dance; Folk Group; Folk Music and Folksong; Folklore of Subversion; Gender; Graffiti; Politics; Race; Sexism; Sexuality; Spirituals; Storytelling. References: Anderson, Kyle, Bob Cannon, Ryan Dombal, Neil Drumming, Michael Endelman, Raymond Fiore, Leah Greenblatt, Nancy Miller, Whitney Pastorek, Michele Romero, Tom Sinclair, and Eric White. ‘‘Bring the Noise.’’ Entertainment Weekly Magazine, November 19, 2004; Bynoe, Yvonne. ‘‘Getting Real About Global Hip-hop.’’ Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, vol. 3, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2002): 77–84; Cushing, Casey ‘‘Otter.’’ ‘‘A Rough-around-the-edges synopsis of Chuck D on the Five Elements of Hip-Hop: Flatirons Theatre, Boulder, CO, November 2001.’’ Unpublished notes: Naropa College, 2001; Gaunt, Kyra D. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York: New York University Press, 2006; Ginwright, Shawn A. Black in School: Afrocentric Reform, Urban Youth, and the Promise of HipHop Culture. New York and London: Teachers College Press, 2004; Keyes, Cheryl L. ‘‘‘We’re More than a Novelty, Boys’: Strategies of Female Rappers in the Rap Music Tradition.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 203–220. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; ———. ‘‘Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance.’’ Journal of American Folklore 113 (2000): 255–269; Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down. New York: Touchstone Books, 2000 [1999]; O’Connell, Anne. ‘‘A Feminist Approach to Female Rap Music.’’ Castleton Sate College (Vermont): Communication Department student research, 2002. http://www.castleton.edu/communication/research/femalerap.html (accessed May 23, 2005); Oliveras, Pamela. ‘‘Women in Graffiti.’’ Verbalisms Magazine, n.d. http:// www.verbalisms.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/19 (accessed May 24, 2005); Pinn, Anthony B., ed. Noise and Spirit: The Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities of Rap Music. New York and London: New York University Press, 2003; Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994; SharpleyWhiting, T. Denean. ‘‘Pimpin’ ain’t Easy: hip-hop’s relationship to young black women . . .’’ Colorlines (May/June 2007): 43–46; Thompson, Amanda. ‘‘Gender in Hip-hop: A Research Study.’’ 2004. http://www.humboldt.edu/soc/2004Thompson.pdf (accessed May 23, 2005); Williams, Raymond. Communications. London: Penguin UK, 1962.

Maribel Garcia Home Birth Home birth refers to delivery accomplished within the home or in a nonmedicalized setting. In the twentieth century, as doctors increasingly defined birth as a pathological event, and anesthesia during delivery increased in popularity, birth became a restricted topic in polite society, and almost all deliveries moved from home to hospital. However, the widespread commonality of experience resulting from ‘‘the Baby Boom’’ (a surge in childbirth from the mid-1940s until the early 1960s) combined with the mass migration of Americans to the suburbs nurtured increased contact and community among women, creating contexts in which birth was again considered an acceptable conversational subject. As women discussed the details of the delivery process, they questioned the standard medical approach to childbirth. A growing number argued that

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birth injuries and maternal mortality were actually greater in hospitals because of medicalized definitions and interference in the normal birth process. An important contribution to this dialogue was Marjorie Karmel’s 1959 book, Thank You, Dr. Lamaze, detailing the natural approach to childbirth she had experienced in France. Women, bolstered by information about more natural methods of birth like accouchement sans douleur (the Lamaze method), sought to reduce medical intervention in their deliveries and to defeat the prevalent patronizing attitudes of professional medical practitioners toward women. A social movement for alternative birth began in North America, one that emphasized a holistic approach and strove to return childbirth to nature and to women. Portrayed as a return of birth literally to the home and the family bed, birth came to be represented as a time of celebration, and not the crisis of ‘‘coming down to death’s door.’’ The 1976 publication of Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery introduced an entire generation of young women to the possibilities of home birth and midwifery. Interest in home births continued to grow as more parents decided they wanted to deliver without drugs and other unnecessary interventions, using natural approaches in a familiar, emotionally reassuring setting. Today, most home births are attended by direct-entry (‘‘lay’’) midwives. Certified nurse-midwives and certified professional midwives may also attend non-hospital births (including some births at home). American directentry midwives are largely trained through apprenticeship, and their practice is illegal in many states. State authorities and medical associations have made efforts to restrict the activities of direct-entry midwives, in some cases arresting or prosecuting them for practicing medicine without a license. Certified nurse-midwives and professional midwives have also been the target of legal actions and medical associations. Associations such as the Midwives’ Alliance of North America and the American College of Nurse-Midwives work to expand the practice rights of midwives—including developing standards and programs for accreditation and certification of direct-entry midwives—for improved interaction of midwives with the health-care system, and for the legalization of midwifery practice at federal and state levels. These efforts have expanded the occurrence of home birth and the practice of direct-entry and certified midwifery in the United States. Every year, more babies are born into the hands of midwives: the national average in 2004 was 7.4 percent (up from 0.4 percent in 1975); in some states, it is as high as 20 percent. Currently, about 30,000 women each year plan for home births, assisted by approximately 10,000 direct-entry and nurse-midwives. See also: Birth Chair; Childbirth and Childrearing; Doula; Midwifery; Rites of Passage. References: Arms, Suzanne. Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and Childbirth in America. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1975; Breckenridge, Mary. Wide Neighborhoods: A Story of the Frontier Nursing Service. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981; Davis-Floyd, Robbie. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Farm, The. http://www.thefarm.org/midwives/ index.html (accessed August 10, 2008); Gaskin, Ina May. Spiritual Midwifery. Fourth edition. Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Company, 2002; Sullivan, Deborah A., and Rose

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Weitz. Labor Pains: Modern Midwives and Home Birth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Amanda Carson Banks Homeless Women A subject of study investigated through fieldwork in communities of homeless people and via the collection of personal-experience narratives from individual homeless women and men, frequently with the aim of aiding persons who, for one reason or another, have lost their homes, or of uncovering causes for and possible solutions to homelessness. Homeless women, in particular, are the focus of a 1990 study by Marjorie Bard, Shadow Women: Homeless Women’s Survival Stories. Bard writes about the ways in which folklore fieldwork can uncover what homeless women know and believe about family, education, the workplace, their own experiences with domestic violence, and the everyday, ongoing circumstances of homelessness. Bard writes about how just the collection and analysis of such personal-experience narratives can lead some homeless women to discover a greater sense of agency or provoke other kinds of change in their lives; being involved in folklore fieldwork has provided many women the opportunity to articulate and rehearse their self-perceived identities, both within and beyond homelessness. Bard suggests that women’s personalexperience narratives are shaped in such a way as to create ‘‘narrative kernels,’’ or storytelling foundations, for imagining or composing productive new narratives, or as a problem-solving strategy for resolving an individual woman’s state of homelessness. Homeless women, according to Bard, have often experienced domestic violence, which can be the cause of many of the factors that lead to homelessness. Women may also have less earning potential; in some cases, being abandoned by a spouse precipitated homelessness. Perceptions that homeless women are more susceptible to mental impairment may also lead to incidents of abuse, Bard adds. Studies that focus on homeless women as subjects or on the personalexperience narratives of homeless women include Meredith Ralston’s 1996 Nobody Wants to Hear Our Truth: Homeless Women and Theories of the Welfare State; Elliot Liebow’s 1993 Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women; and Karen Warner’s 1996 article about a community of homeless people titled ‘‘Spare Any Change? Power and Discourse in Toronto’s Urban Panhandling Subculture.’’ Most studies of homeless women, however, have been conducted by scholars in social-science fields other than Folklore, or by community activists and public folklorists. Regenia Gagnier, in her important 1999 article ‘‘Practical Aesthetics III: Homelessness as an ‘Aesthetic Issue,’’’ traces how discourse about homelessness functions in the popular imagination; she observes that media representations construct homeless people as undesirable ‘‘sights’’ on the public horizon that must be scourged from public space. Robert Desjarlais, in his book Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless (1997), writes about the ‘‘mythology’’ of homeless people

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constructed in popular media of homeless people as ‘‘beautiful ruins’’ or as ‘‘matter out-of-place.’’ Other important qualitative or cultural studies of homeless people and communities include The Homeless in Contemporary Society (1987) edited by Richard D. Bingham et al.; The Politics of Ending Homelessness by Susan Yeich (1994); and Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes (1997) by Talmadge Wright. Folklorists have yet to pay serious attention to grassroots or faith-based advocacy for homeless people and to the interactions within and among such communities. We would do well to acquaint ourselves better with the writing of Catholic Workers, for example, members of communities of people in the urban United States who live according to the Works of Mercy, who focus on service to homeless men and women. Also, it is time for more scholarly studies of homeless men and women that consider how race, gender, class, sexual identity, and/or region factor into the narrative performances and cultural practices of homeless persons. See also: Class; Divorce; Family Folklore; Fieldwork; Gender; Mass Media; PersonalExperience Narrative; Race; Storytelling; Violence. References: Bard, Marjorie. Shadow Women: Homeless Women’s Survival Stories. Kansas City: Sheen and Ward, 1990; ———. ‘‘Aiding the Homeless: The Uses of Narratives In Diagnoses and Intervention.’’ In Putting Folklore to Use, ed. Michael Owen Jones, 76–93. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994; Bingham, Richard D., Roy E. Green, and Sammis B. White, eds. The Homeless in Contemporary Society. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1987; Desjarlais, Robert. Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997; Gagnier, Regenia. ‘‘Homelessness as ‘An Aesthetic Issue’: Past and Present.’’ In Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, eds. Murray Baumgarten and H. M. Daleski, 167– 186. New York: AMS Press, 1999; Liebow, Elliot. Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women. New York: The Free Press, 1993; Ralston, Meredith. Nobody Wants To Hear Our Truth: Homeless Women and Theories of the Welfare State. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996; Warner, Karen. ‘‘Spare Any Change? Power and Discourse in Toronto’s Urban Panhandling Subculture.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 18, no. 1 (1996): 71–93; Wright, Talmadge. Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997; Yeich, Susan. The Politics of Ending Homelessness. New York: University Press of America, 1994.

Jacqueline L. McGrath Housekeeping The complement of activities that are considered housekeeping may be limited to housecleaning tasks performed within the house (analogous to chores), or may include the multitude of duties related to maintenance of the home in general. It may also be expanded to include paid work that is done in someone else’s home. Thus, the home may be viewed as an economic unit as well as the center of family and domestic life. Because it is relegated to the realm of the domestic, housework, although acknowledged as ‘‘work,’’ is generally recognized as having no monetary value, despite the 1995 UN Human Development Report, which estimated that the economic value of women’s unpaid work worldwide amounted to $11 trillion annually. Rather, housekeeping is seen as reproductive labor; that is, labor that

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maintains people on a daily and generational basis. Gender is often the focal point of housework studies, including—especially with the increase in North America of dual-income families—the changing roles of men and women in domestic labor. The so-called ‘‘traditional’’ division of domestic labor features a man working outside the home, and a woman staying in the home as full-time homemaker. However, reality in the twenty-first century means that many households now have both partners working outside the home. This may be by choice or, more frequently, by financial necessity. There are also single-parent families, both male and female-headed, in which the sole adult is responsible for household tasks. Same-sex couples, male homemakers, and blended families each have their own challenges to negotiate when it comes to housework. However, studies have shown that even with these multiple household structures, the majority of the housework still falls to the primary female figure in the home, regardless of whether or not she has paid employment outside the home. Additionally, the woman of the household seems to carry the burden of household manager more often; that is, even if males take on chores, their female counterparts still assume responsibility for assigning tasks and managing what gets done, how, and when. Scott Coltrane and Randall Collins (2001) outline studies completed in the 1990s in the United States that suggest that a number of factors influence how tasks may or may not be shared in a household. Generally speaking, if a couple deliberately divides up the housework, there will be a more even split. However, if the couple decides to share tasks without a conscious division, the woman will most likely assume the majority of tasks, even if she, too, works outside the home. Bart Landry’s statistics on African American wives (2000) indicate that this trend transcends racial categories. Additional elements such as education, gender attitudes, age, earnings, children, and marital status all affect how the burden of housework may be shared. Housework has become a focus of increased academic study, primarily in the disciplines of Sociology and Women’s Studies. Judith Levin (1993) argues that folkloristics has ignored the study of housework by valorizing the very images it connotes. By contemporary definitions, folklore involves the study of creative, expressive, traditional, and skilled endeavors. By contrast, housework is viewed as mindless, boring, and repetitive. However, in the terms of folkloristics, domestic labor can perhaps most readily be examined under the auspices of occupational folklore, as well as family folklore. Folklorists such as Michael Owen Jones (1980) approached mundane occupations as situations in which the worker found a creative niche in these repetitive jobs, thereby establishing aesthetic components in jobs that, by their very nature, lack any personal artistry or skill. In her film Clotheslines, Roberta Cantow documents the artistry of washing and hanging clothes on outdoor drying lines by women in late twentieth-century New York City as they discuss how they admire (and judge) other women’s clothes-hanging practices, and how they themselves strive to arrange their clotheslines in aesthetically pleasing ways. While housework may not be seen by all as an enjoyable way to spend time, its importance is always recognized, and satisfaction is often derived

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from knowing that the completion of domestic chores directly relates to care for a family. As a result, there may be conflicting feelings and attitudes in women and girls who realize the importance of their domestic labor, but do not enjoy completing the actual tasks. Susan Lanser (1993) analyzed domestic incompetence as a form of coding and resistance among women. Since it is expected that women will be good housekeepers, the woman who deliberately burns dinners or neglects housecleaning may be sending coded messages rejecting not only the tasks themselves, but also the female roles attributed with competence at these chores. Although the study of housework is intrinsically linked to the study of labor, it also does not fit into most models of the economic value of labor. For example, Marxist theory asserts that labor is related to subsistence, which is measured by the market value of the labor required to ensure the wage earner’s survival. However, Marx focused on work that was recognized through monetary payment, thereby automatically excluding housework, which is almost always unpaid labor performed by a member of the household. As a means of social reproduction, housework is seen as providing emotional ties to family and community in addition to basic household maintenance. Feminist Marxists see the gendered division of labor as it pertains to the home as favoring men. Men generally do not significantly contribute to the labor in the home, and therefore enjoy the fruits of the woman’s work at her expense. Men are thereby able to contribute more to the outside labor force than can their female counterparts. Thus, gender divisions that are promulgated in the outside labor market are reinforced and strengthened in the home. Since women who work outside the home also complete the majority of housework, they tend to suffer more conflict over their roles both within and outside the home. The production of housework involves prioritizing, organization, and time allocation. Much academic interest in household labor focuses on how time is used, measuring specific tasks and how they are allocated. Several national surveys conducted in the United States concluded that the following household tasks consumed the most time: cooking, housecleaning, shopping for household-related goods, cleaning up after meals, and laundryrelated tasks. These are seen as required or necessary duties that must be completed on a fairly rigid and regular schedule. Of course, the techniques by which these and other tasks are completed have changed greatly since the advent of industrialization. Women’s diaries have often been the source for sociohistoric studies on housework. Meg Luxton (1986, 2001 with June Corman) completed a number of studies focusing on the division of time and domestic work from both historical and contemporary perspectives. For example, through an examination of women’s diaries in Flin Flon, Manitoba, Canada, in the 1920s and 1930s, Luxton found that not only was there a daily routine that women followed, but a weekly schedule as well. A woman would have regular daily chores, such as cooking, taking care of the children, and basic housecleaning. However, larger tasks such as washing clothes, ironing, and baking would be divided up on a daily basis and take up the better part of each day. ‘‘Leisure’’ time was often spent mending or doing other, less

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physically taxing chores. A similar study, completed by Meg Luxton in 1984, revealed that female homemakers still completed household tasks throughout the day. However, larger tasks were spread out throughout the week and, indeed, throughout the day. Later generations were more flexible, organizing tasks in different ways. For them, there was no need to devote an entire day to one major household task. Chores were done as needed, one could take a day off, or a daily plan could be followed; no generic pattern could be discerned. This change in the distribution of chores can also largely be attributed to industrialization and the resultant mechanization of housework. Where earlier generations had to hand wash all clothes, it is now possible to throw a load of clothes into the washing machine, run out and go grocery shopping, and return later to put them into the dryer. Rather than concentrating on one task throughout the day, housework has now shifted to supervising four or five tasks at any one time. ‘‘Multitasking’’ is the common term for this approach. Therefore, housework can now be fit around other duties: domestic, family, or employment-related. Also, the escalated manufacture of clothing and products outside the home and a family’s increased ability to purchase store-bought clothing and food meant that the nature of household tasks would inevitably change. An important but understudied aspect of housework is the dangers that are encountered in performing household tasks. Especially ignored is the issue of environmental pollutants that are prevalent in cleaning products. While homemakers are targeted by advertisers to buy numerous new products to assist in cleaning the home, the hazards of using these cleansers and cleaners are hidden. We associate chemical odors and artificial scents with a ‘‘clean’’ smell, believing that these sophisticated, expensive products work more efficiently than tried-and-true cleansers such as salt, baking soda, and vinegar. Because the house is a living space for the entire family, the services that household labor provides directly affect the well-being of the household. Also, with the advent and spread of machines and innumerable products to assist with housework, those who complete this work are more and more perceived as marketing targets. Thus, homemakers have a direct relationship with the economy through their consumption practices, which in turn drive the creation of goods that are produced. Because of the overall mundane view of housework, advertising focuses on machines and products that make housework ‘‘easier’’ through increased efficacy and speed. Increased mechanization in housework may also be seen as a factor in reducing the ‘‘craft’’ aspect of household tasks, as there is no longer a clear and direct relationship between the labor and its end result. Conversely, machines have made housework a far less labor-intensive task, as they have taken the place of the human body in the form of washing machines, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, and even bread makers. Most homemakers gladly traded personal labor for machines that alleviated certain household burdens. However, it is interesting to note that homemakers didn’t necessarily have more free time with new appliances and products. This point is made in the film Clotheslines, in which women discuss how the purchase

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of a washing machine affected their cleaning habits. While a washing machine does clean clothes, its efficacy and efficiency mean that clothes can be washed more often. One woman commented that she began changing her child’s clothes three times a day because she was able to wash them much more easily. Laundry remained an endless ordeal. Although housework is associated with unpaid labor within the home, it also includes paid labor in another person’s home. Maids, housekeepers, and other servants were frequently employed in Western countries until their numbers declined in the 1800s. Working-class women then had to labor in the homes of upper- and middle-class citizens, as their husbands did not make enough money on their own to support the family. Middleclass housewives thus took on the role of household managers, directing the activities of the servants. This led to a shift toward viewing the middleclass household as a haven, a place where the role of wife and mother could be emphasized because she was no longer required to perform everyday household tasks. The domestic code was thereby reinforced, as these middle-class women read literature and formed associations, clubs, and charities, while their lower class, often culturally ‘‘other’’ counterparts kept their homes clean and in working order. While the live-in servant is no longer a common household feature in North America, women are still employed to complete household tasks such as housework and childcare. As middle-class women’s participation in the workforce increased, so did the hiring of paid help around the house, most often by minority-status women or other, more recent immigrants. Thus, housework does have a paid-market component. However, domestic workers may experience oppressive conditions, often compounded by immigration issues and/or racial, ethnic, and class stereotyping. As the demand for paid help (whether live-in or daytime) increases, not enough North Americans are willing to take on this job. In a situation similar to that of domestic servants of the nineteenth century, contemporary foreign workers often arrive in Canada and the United States, legally or otherwise, to be employed in those positions that their better-off sisters have eschewed. Thus, the home becomes an economic sphere unto itself, with its own challenges of isolation, commoditization, and opportunity. See also: Class; Farm Women’s Folklore; Immigration; Laundry; Mother’s Day; Occupational Folklore; Sewing; Wage Work; Women’s Work. References: Boydston, Jeanne. ‘‘To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence.’’ In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, third edition, eds. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, 80–92. New York: Routledge, 2000; Cantow, Roberta, director. Clotheslines. Buffalo Rose Productions, 1981; Coltrane, Scott. Family Man: Fatherhood, Housework and Gender Equity. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; Coltrane, Scott., and Randall Collins. Sociology of Marriage and the Family. Fifth edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2001; Davis, Angela Y. ‘‘The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective.’’ In Women, Race and Class, 222–244. New York: Vintage Books, 1983; Eisler, Riane. ‘‘The Feminine Face of Poverty.’’ AlterNet. April 19, 2007. http://www. alternet.org/rights/50727 (accessed June 22, 2007); Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. ‘‘From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.’’ In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, third

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edition, eds. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, 436–65. New York: Routledge, 2000; Jones, Michael Owen. ‘‘A Feeling for Form, as Illustrated by People at Work.’’ In Folklore on Two Continents, eds. Nikolai Burlakoff and Carl Lindahl, 260–69. Bloomington, IN: Trickster Press, 1980; Landry, Bart. Black Working Wives: Pioneers of the American Family Revolution. Berkeley: University California Press, 2000; Lanser, Susan S. ‘‘Burning Dinners: Feminist Subversions of Domesticity.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 36–53. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Levin, Judith. ‘‘Why Folklorists Should Study Housework.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 285–96. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Luxton, Meg. More than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of Women’s Work in the Home. Toronto: Women’s Educational Press, 1986; Luxton, Meg, and June Corman. Getting By in Hard Times: Gendered Labour at Home and on the Job. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Kristin Harris Walsh Humor Humor—an amusing and/or comic quality—encompasses complex sociocultural and physical expressions such as fun, joking, wit, smiling, laughter, and play. Often involving topsy-turvydom or the ability to hold simultaneous yet contradictory realities in suspension, humor may work best when it imposes a comic image on recognizable truths relating to events, ideas, or objects perceived as absurd, incongruous, or ridiculous. Its performance results in a unique kind of social structure which intensifies communication—sometimes positively, so that it is enhanced, and sometimes negatively, so that it is impaired. Yet humor is also ephemeral, changing shape and tone from performance to performance, from culture to culture, and from one historical period to another. It can serve to express and maintain hierarchy or to subvert it, to establish in-groups and out-groups, and to reinforce boundaries and stereotypes or subvert them. It can be found in all folkloric genres, from the material to the verbal to the ritual. Women are extensively implicated in humor—as its subjects, creators, and audiences— especially in its feminist forms. Social stereotypes pervade humor. In its Euro North American manifestations, women are too often labeled as fundamentally incompetent—dumb blondes and bad drivers—or as excessively emotional. But much comic material intended as humor simply displays misogyny. Consider these excerpts from a well-circulated photocopy-lore text, ‘‘25 Good Reasons Why Beer is Better than Women’’: You can enjoy a beer all month long. Your beer will always wait patiently for you in the car while you play baseball. When your beer goes flat, you toss it out. A beer always goes down easy. You always know you’re the first one to pop a beer. Beer doesn’t demand equality. A frigid beer is a good beer. You don’t have to wash a beer before it tastes good. If you change beers, you don’t have to pay alimony (Greenhill et al. 51–52).

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The full text stereotypes women as simultaneously inhabiting both sides of devalued oppositions: oversexed yet sexually unadventurous; slaves to their biological functions yet culturally controlling; possessive yet promiscuous; ever-present yet selectively absent; polluted and polluting; exacting yet unskilled; and valueless yet expensive. Blonde jokes similarly express power dynamics between women and men, illustrating the same patriarchal strategy of inherent contradiction. Specifically, the women who hear blonde jokes are expected to take them seriously, but also to accept them as funny. For example, brunette Angela Brooks reports discussing economics with a male graduate student in the presence of another male student and a blonde woman. During a pause in the conversation, the male student asked: ‘‘What did the brunette between the two blondes say? What brunette?’’ This joke’s purpose was to deny Brooks’ right to speak, as she realized: The joke was used to suggest that I was stepping out of my place, and that no-one was paying any attention to what I was saying in any case. Nothing I said would make anyone notice me, particularly since there was an attractive blonde woman present who was, appropriately, silent. The joke was a successful ploy to silence me (Brooks in Greenhill et al. 1993: 59).

Women faced with such situations have few options. If she had retorted, for example, ‘‘Why are all blonde jokes one-liners? So men can understand them,’’ the first teller could have answered with a blonde joke that was not a one-liner. The repertoire of misogynist jokes is huge; that of feminist jokes is smaller and less accessible. If Brooks had acknowledged the joke as an attack, she would be accused of lacking a sense of humor, and lose the battle. Yet, since the rest of the group laughed, she could not ignore it. Accordingly, she was forced to participate in her own oppression by laughing at a joke explicitly intended to silence and impugn her. Hatred of women and of feminists is often made indistinguishable, as in a graffito that appeared after the murder of fourteen women, most of them engineering students, at the Universite de Montreal on December 6, 1989. Appearing about a month after the massacre on a poster advertising the location of a graduate course in Women’s Studies at an Ontario University, it read: ‘‘What do you call 14 dead feminists in Mtl [Montreal]? A Good Start.—the M. Lepine [the killer] Fan Club’’ (Greenhill 1992: 107). Many of the women killed might not have identified as feminists, though as engineering students they were not following the most traditional social script of stereotypical cultural expectations for women. The threat posed to both women and feminists, however, was quite clear. Women’s humor is in large part a reaction to the images of women presented in humor about them. Because of the absence (until recently) of women’s humorous writing in literary anthologies and critical studies, the idea that women did not have a sense of humor became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Until the late 1980s, women’s rich use of wit was neglected or inaccessible to popular culture because of social theories that privileged the status quo. Some theories argue that women use concepts typical of male humor, such as superiority, incongruity, aggression, and catharsis. Others

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suggest that women’s humor in general, and feminist humor in particular, is qualitatively different from its patriarchal counterpart. Gloria Kaufman argues that ‘‘feminist humor strives to educate both weak and powerful in order to stimulate change in the direction of equity or justice’’ (Kaufman: ix). For example, in ‘‘If Men Could Menstruate: A Political Fantasy,’’ Gloria Steinem imagines how men would coopt menstruation for the benefit of patriarchal culture: Men would brag about how long and how much. Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed-for proof of manhood, with religious ritual and stag parties. Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea to help stamp out monthly discomforts (Steinem: 110).

Kaufman also explains that women’s and feminist humor changes meaning, depending on its location in social power dynamics: Humor and power are related in highly complex ways. One the one hand society has recognized the expression (or creation) of humor as an exercise of power and has reacted negatively to women humorists. (Things are changing.) One the other hand, women and other suppressed groups have privately and regularly used humor to empower themselves in order to survive oppression or subversively to resist it. No one doubts that humor is empowering. It is especially positive in dispelling fear. Laughing at our enemies diminishes them and emboldens us (ix).

Women’s humor is often explicitly compared with men’s. Unsurprisingly, the comparison often follows conventional ideas of women and men as social beings. For example, some theorists have argued that men’s humor uses the symbolism of domination and power, with the intention of selfaggrandizement in hierarchical relationships, whereas women’s humor is linked to the creation of intimacy and caring. Often women’s humor is expressed only between women with similar cultural boundaries, utilizing what Joan Radner calls coded language. Private expressions have been hallmarks of women’s humor, making it less formalized and more personal than its male counterpart. Through humor, women educate an audience by assuming a comic perspective on issues both commonplace and outrageous that may be unrecognizable to the dominant culture. Yet women also use public spaces to create or present comedy. But women’s wit often subverts and undermines the very community that seeks to control it. Because of its dangers to women’s social status and well-being, this type of humor is not often expressed publicly. For example, seventeenth-century American poet Anne Bradstreet kept her writing private. Some of her poetry is now read as a humorous critique of the social conventions of Puritan society, especially when she responds to descriptions of women as silent and incapable of writing serious poetry. Emily Dickinson is another American poet whose work has comic power. Her patterns and positions of words, as well as disproportionate and bold images, surprise the reader, evoking amusement, a smile, a giggle, or outright laughter. Because its creators have been traditionally defined as powerless in male-dominated culture, women’s humor has developed its own edge.

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Experience provides the foundation for humor, and women’s use of it links directly with their inferiorized social position. The performance dynamics operating between participants and their societal roles, subject matter, cultural values, and expectations influence the appropriateness of humor in a particular social setting. Humor connects psychosocial habits, images, values, and norms with the immediate social environment. Knowledge of a culture’s verbal and physical patterns is an essential element of humor—communication requiring abstract thinking and other complex cognitive processes. Humor can serve the status quo by providing those who chafe against it with a safe outlet for their ire. For example, Sigmund Freud argued that aggressive humor—jokes or stories told at an individual’s or group’s expense—is positive because it offers a socially sanctioned outlet for expressing discontent. In other words, humor can be cathartic. Of course, Freud also claimed that women do not need to use such humor because of their inherently non-aggressive place in culture. Making someone laugh means exerting control, even power. To be funny and thus powerful, one must be recognized by an audience. Because women have been historically marginalized both economically and culturally, aggressive humor has not often been an acknowledged part of their discourse. Domestic humor functions as an avenue for confronting cultural institutions that keep power from women or control their behavior, exposing stereotypes in subversive critiques on the dominant culture that perpetuates them. Self-deprecation, or humor at one’s own expense, is most fully developed in domestic humor. Critics argue that self-deprecation supports negative stereotypes about women’s incompetence and perpetuates the status quo. Domestic humorists Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr, for example, do not threaten mainstream patriarchy by encompassing women’s lives inside household space. But their humor contains subversive elements that challenge unrealistic standards for wives, mothers, and daughters, transforming negative experiences into funny ones. Women create and otherwise participate in spoken, drawn, or sung humor, as reflected not only in traditional culture but in comics, television and film comedies, and more recently (and substantially) on the Internet. In the past as well as today, they use comic performance, pantomime, burlesque, impersonation, caricature, parody, clowning, joke-telling, and comedy. In their day, Josephine Baker and Mae West famously called attention to themselves as clowns or caricatures in order to reveal and subvert cultural norms that defined women of Color and feminine women. Lucille Ball and Debra Messing are known for their use of physical humor to achieve similar ends. In the years since Lucille Ball and Phyllis Diller paved the way for women’s entrance into public performative spaces, women’s stand-up comedy repertoires have varied enormously by culture, social background, and theme. Such comics may be outrageous or intellectually subtle. Many have disrupted typical expectations of female behavior and thereby influenced social and cultural attitudes. For example, Mo’Nique, a contemporary Black performer, encourages women to reject physical and emotional expectations that mark traditional female identity. Mo’Nique celebrates her full figure, elegant clothes, and sexuality, insisting on her power without offering further inroads

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to the objectification of Black women. By calling attention to herself as a successful and sexual woman, she inverts racialized paradigms, thus disempowering them. White women comics—Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Poundstone, and Rosie O’Donnell, for example—also use humor about women’s social conditions to challenge the gendered status quo. The comic performances of these women work against the cultural dynamics that frame women’s lives. Twentieth-century writers and performers increasingly used stereotypes about women in humorous ways, turning them back on the culture that perpetuates them. In her 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos created the stereotypical dumb blonde, Lorelei Lee. Loos reinforces and extends stereotypes of femininity, subversively revealing the real humor in how power is so easily coopted from men by a seemingly incompetent woman. Penned during the same period, Dorothy Parker’s writing is satirical and witty, often enlisting stereotypes of men and women to reflect incongruities, for example, between notions of beauty and social behavior. As one of the founders of Vanity Fair, her work fits neatly into dominant North American culture; but by challenging the status quo in humorously stating the obvious, it remains an inspiration for women humorists to this day, especially for those who seek to offer alternative gender models. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, the idea that women lack a sense of humor continues to inform scholarly discussions. Indeed, on some levels, women’s humor may be inaccessible to the mainstream, patriarchal culture because men and women often have contrasting interests and experiences due to the fact that at times they occupy different social spheres. A humorous interaction can succeed only if both parties have the relevant cultural and linguistic knowledge to understand it. Comprehending and laughing at a joke, funny story, cartoon, or stand-up comic’s routine depends on the listener’s ability to decode its message. Men and boys may have difficulty seeing the humor in women’s jokes simply because they lack the cultural context to understand them. Often categorized as culturally subordinate and passive, until the twentieth century, Euro North American women were not expected to tell jokes or even to laugh out loud. While women have access to both domestic and public spheres, in general, men have left the so-called ‘‘private’’ realm to women. Folklorist Carol Mitchell recalls how female informants discussed how they used humor to deal with everyday sexualized intimidation. They particularly identified with a joke about a woman who puts a flasher in his place. They admired her for her calmness and quick wit. One woman said, I could not think of anything to say in a situation like this, so I admire the stewardess who can effectively put the exhibitionist in his place without being flustered. Exhibitionism may be an expression of mental instability, but it is also a means men use to embarrass and frighten women in our society . . . I would rather make fun of these people because I dislike being intimidated (Mitchell: 311).

In academic humor and Folklore Studies, the fact that women share experiences and have common sources of conflict has only recently been recognized.

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Regarding feminist humor, ‘‘for those unsympathetic to feminism, the term feminist humor suggests male-bashing jokes by angry women, a definition that most feminists would reject’’ (Bing: 22). Anti-feminists might view the following as exemplary of feminist humor: ‘‘What’s the difference between a man and a catfish? One is a bottom-feeding scum sucker and the other is a fish.’’ Yet even feminists differ on the definition of feminist humor. To some, it is the humor of the oppressed; to others, it is ‘‘based on visions of change . . . empowering humor that recognizes the value of female experience’’ (ibid.). Generally, feminist humor works strategically to gain empowerment for all marginalized peoples, to challenge social institutions with its multilevel meanings and subtexts. It creates images of cultural norms, often satirizing the violence and control used by hegemonic culture, and empowers by subverting and misdirecting its audience. It can be divisive or inclusive in its effects. Divisive feminist humor accentuates the differences between women and men, rather than working to undermine them. Often, it focuses more upon men’s actions than on women’s. For example: ‘‘How many men does it take to change a roll of toilet paper? We don’t know; it’s never been done’’ and ‘‘The children of Israel wandered around the desert for forty years. Even in biblical times, men wouldn’t ask for directions.’’ Rather than stereotyping women, as do most misogynist jokes, these jokes work because they apply stereotyped Euro North American cultural ideas about men’s behavior, turning men into the Other, while women’s behavior is the reasonable norm against which male actions (or lack of actions) are compared, to men’s detriment. This ploy playfully subverts Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum that women are the Other because they are socioculturally defined in terms of being not-men. Divisive humor may allow women to vent their frustrations, but it does little to change the world in which they live. Inclusive humor works somewhat differently. For example, the 1991 film Thelma and Louise plays on gender stereotypes, incongruity, and the manipulation of cultural images that subordinate women in American society. Debunking the essentialist notion that women are inherently nonviolent, the film’s heroes triumphantly blow up a lascivious truck driver’s rig using a stolen gun. It is shocking and yet comic at the same time that women would resort to violence in this way, particularly because it comes in a form often depicted as masculine. The aggressive and humorous scene functions as a transfer of power from the masculine realm to the feminine; it does not divide women from men. Similarly, Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros reconceives letters written to the saints for intervention in their romantic lives. This passage is from one addressed to San Antonio de Padua, patron saint of lost things: Can you send me a man man. I mean someone who’s not ashamed to be seen cooking or cleaning or looking after himself. In other words, a man who acts like an adult. Not one who’s never lived alone, never bought his own underwear, never ironed his own shirts, never even heated his own tortillas. In other words, don’t send me someone like my brother who my mother ruined with too much chichi, or I’ll throw him back. I’ll turn your statue upside down until you send him to me (Herrera-Sobek: 110).

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The speaker reverses the conventional idea of what a ‘‘man man’’ might be, making it clear that he is one who, like a woman, is capable of taking care of his own domestic needs. The presumption is that men have lost their mature self-sufficiency, and the patron saint of lost things is held responsible and will suffer the consequences of not meeting this petitioner’s request. His statue will be turned upside down—as the world is turned upside down when men do not behave like full human beings—until he persuades her to right it by locating an available and appropriately responsible partner for her. Lesbian feminist performance artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan work extensively with inclusive feminist humor, especially by playing on stereotypes about feminists, as, for example, in their ‘‘Mary Medusa’’: A woman out of control is a frightening thing. She may bite you and choke you and turn you to stone and then—snip! (quoted in Greenhill 1998: 92).

Women’s appetites, as discussed by Dempsey and Millan, are out of control from a patriarchal perspective. But when reinterpreted by women themselves, male fear is transformed into the absurd; it becomes funny. Women’s purported appetite for chocolate, for example, is noted only because of patriarchal hatred of fat women, who are threatening because they remain outside the purview of a society that judges women solely on their sexual attractiveness to men, and female fat is presumed abhorrent to heterosexual males: But bring on the chocolate cake. I want chocolate cake now. Appetite huge inappropriate appetite but she doesn’t give a fuck, and why should she? A woman out of control is a frightening thing (ibid.).

Because lesbian feminist humor focuses on women and women’s cultures, it may be incomprehensible to outsiders simply because hegemonic perspectives do not recognize its content. For example: ‘‘How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Seven. One to change it, three to organize the potluck, and three to film an empowering documentary.’’ This joke plays on lesbian stereotypes about lesbians as invariably communalist and political. Similarly, ‘‘What does a lesbian take to a second date? A U-Haul’’ refers to notions of lesbians as interested more in committed relationships than in sex alone, and thus willing to move in together in what seems to be extreme haste in comparison to heterosexual norms. Feminist humor in Euro North American society may pertain to ‘‘weight loss, mammograms, HMOs, depression, disorganization, family trips, support groups, fashion, the information highway, self-help books, Republicans, the flat tax,

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and the ‘true nature of dogs and cats’’’ (Bing: 30), subjects that don’t apparently, or sufficiently, interest men. Women humorists tend to stand apart from their own realities so they can view them with emotional detachment, a strategy that requires confidence and trust in oneself. Individuality, superiority, and aggressiveness— unfeminine qualities all—are necessary traits in a humorist. But humor can demand a very specific social context and a highly idiosyncratic audience, one that in the case of women’s humor might not include men at all. Many have followed the French critical theorist Helene Cixous’ call to women to shatter ‘‘the framework of institutions, to blow up the law,’’ and to ‘‘break up the ‘truth’ with laughter’’ (Cixous: 258). See also: Coding; Cyberculture; Feminisms; Folklore About Women; Joke; Lesbian Folklore; Sexuality. References: Bing, Janet. ‘‘Is Feminist Humor an Oxymoron?’’ Women and Language, vol. 27, no. 1 (2004): 22–33; Cixous, Helene. ‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’’ In New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 245–264. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980; Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘‘A Good Start’: A Graffiti Interpretation of the Montreal Massacre.’’ Atlantis, vol. 17, no. 2 (1992): 106– 119; ———. ‘‘Lesbian Mess (ages): Decoding Shawna Dempsey’s Cake Squish at the Festival Du Voyeur.’’ Atlantis, vol. 23, no. 1 (1998): 91–99; ———, Kjerstin Baldwin, Michelle Blais, Angela Brooks, and Kristen Rosbak. ‘‘25 Good Reasons Why Beer is Better Than Women and Other Qualities of the Female.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 15, no. 2 (1993): 51–68; Herrera-Sobek, Maria. ‘‘Social Protest, Folklore, and Feminist Ideology in Chicana Prose and Poetry.’’ In Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory: Collected Essays, ed. Cathy Lynn Preston, 102–166. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995; Kaufman, Gloria. ‘‘Introduction: Humor and Power.’’ In Stitches: A Patchwork of Feminist Humor and Satire, ed. Gloria Kaufman, vii–xii. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991; Mitchell, Carol. ‘‘The Sexual Perspective in the Appreciation and Interpretation of Jokes.’’ Western Folklore 36 (1977): 303–329; Radner, Joan N., ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Steinem, Gloria. ‘‘If Men Could Menstruate.’’ Ms. Magazine (October 1978): 110.

Kristin M. McAndrews

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I Immigration Immigration is the experience of leaving one’s home country and culture, whether by choice or by force, to move to and permanently settle in another. However, most newcomers to the United States and Canada distinguish between refugees (driven from their countries by political, religious, or economic persecution) and immigrants (who elected to leave their home countries). Many refugees dream of returning to their homelands, though they rarely do. Immigrants, in contrast, intend to stay in their adopted countries. Immigration affects culture, traditions, language, spiritual well-being, and customs. Although finding jobs and housing and sometimes learning to speak a new language (usually English in the United States and Canada) are critical to newcomer women, issues of childrearing, cultural continuity, food, family health, education, cultural identity, and changing gender roles are also crucial. The challenge of living with a multiple cultural identity shapes most activities and decisions in immigrants’ lives. Folklore genres such as personal-experience narratives, health and healing practices, cuisine preferences and food preparation, and textile traditions reflect immigrant life experiences. Additionally, it has often fallen to women to militate for social action in terms of immigration policies; the cultural capital that they carry based on these genres becomes invaluable in negotiating the new terrain for themselves and their families. Women, mostly Chicanas and other Latinas, were instrumental in the huge marches and rallies of April and May 2006 opposing proposed legislation to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Leaders emerged. The American debate about immigration and immigration reform affects women directly. Much of the work of organizing the protests fell to women whose experience and commitment once again led them to the forefront of the current social movement. The impact of immigration differs greatly for women and men. The expectation that men will seek extra-domestic employment while women establish the home gives men immediate access to language acquisition and development and exposure to new values, resources, and social systems.

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Along the U.S.-Mexico border, however, young women often migrate north to work as nannies or maids or in service-industry jobs. While the effect of moving away from the home culture can be devastating for anyone, for women coming to the United States and Canada from highly traditional societies, the transition can be soul-shattering. Immigrant women often feel isolated, not only by linguistic barriers and lack of social contact, but also because their children, who may be caught up in the fast pace of mainstream life in the United States, often drift away from them. Feminist scholars working with immigrant and refugee women have recognized the need to offer a space for these women’s voices, and much of their work is rooted in or draws upon oral history and personal-experience narratives. Debra Shutika’s (2007) work with immigrant women in Pennsylvania and Mexico and Christian Zlolniski (2006) and others’ work in California attest to the effects of immigration on women and families. Perhaps due to the vacuum left when women have been de-territorialized through forced or chosen migration, immigrant women’s stories often have subversive power to create community, preserve personal dignity, and redefine identity. For example, for some Italian women in North America, bawdy and risque stories and jokes told only in the presence of other women provide a vehicle for criticizing the status quo without belittling the basic tenets of their culture. Novels, poetry, and essays written by Amy Tan, Julia Alvarez, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Sandra Cisneros, and Eva Hoffman, among others, describe the ‘‘double otherness’’ (Zaborowska) of their experiences as immigrants and as women, and suggest ways in which their acculturation narratives challenge male-centered, dominant models of assimilation and integration. Yareli Arizmendi’s work with Sergio Arrau for the film A Day Without a Mexican (2004) reminds viewers of the United States’ economic reliance on immigrant labor. Amy Tan’s novels describe customs, rituals, folktales, recipes, and stories about intergenerational struggles between Chinese American mothers and their daughters. In The Opposite of Fate: Memoirs of a Writing Life, she clarifies that her work should not be construed as emblematic of a ‘‘panAsian American’’ experience, but rather as the experiences of one woman who writes about her Chinese American community as she remembers it. Yet, when she describes her mother’s experiences with stockbrokers and doctors, noting that bad treatment and lack of respect are the penalty for not speaking English in America, she is describing the experiences of most newcomer women. Most women arrive with skills and education, but find themselves in low-income jobs or secluded at home because they don’t speak the language. As a result, lack of respect and misconceptions about their intelligence and abilities tend to permeate their experiences. One of the most prolific areas for the study of immigrant women is that of health and healing. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman’s (1997) poignant account of one Hmong family’s attempt to navigate the allopathic medical system in the United States, draws on personal interviews to reveal not only how language barriers confound a newcomer family’s efforts to understand treatment strategies for their daughter, but, more importantly, how cultural values and beliefs about health and healing

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are so deeply a part of the family’s worldview as to make American medical practices unfathomable. Fadiman’s ethnographic study offers a provocative look at the responsibilities of Euro North American medical practitioners to pay attention to cultural differences if they are to be effective healers. Subsequent studies draw upon life histories to explore the pluralistic health and illness practices of immigrants, who may have deeply held beliefs about the interconnected nature of a person’s mind, body, and soul, a holistic approach relatively absent in medicalized healing practice. Food and the ability to obtain familiar spices, herbs, and staples in order to feed one’s family is a powerful concern for most newcomer women, who seek to maintain continuity, reinforce cultural identity, and ensure the health and well-being of their families. A woman from Ecuador living in Pennsylvania said, ‘‘I try to cook the food from my country, but my kids won’t eat it. Sometimes I end up eating every day for three days the same thing. I do cry sometimes when I have to eat it myself and they request some American things. . . . They are rejecting my culture and that makes me so sad’’ (B. A. Jones). Feminists and other scholars have explored the relationship between foodways and cultural identity, using recipe books as frames for telling stories of arrival and survival in a new country. In recent years, scholars of feminism have begun to look at the relationships between the feminist movement and ethnicity. Some immigrant women, faced with new cultural and behavioral norms, challenge those of their countries of origin in order to achieve and maintain their autonomy in North America; some maintain or return to their original traditions to support political, religious, or cultural beliefs. For example, prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, many immigrant Muslim women had put away their head- and body-scarves (hijab); some did so because veiling symbolized an older, more conservative perspective on women, and some so as to not stand out in their adopted country. After the attacks, however, many women chose to reclaim the hijab as a statement in support of their beliefs and to educate Americans about the depth and breadth of Muslim culture and religion. Perhaps also in response to the 2001 attacks, increases in the number of criminal-justice units along the border have resulted in increased militarization of the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. The cultural capital of female agents— more and more of whom make up the ranks of the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement—is often matched against that of immigrant women. As a result of U.S. military interventions in Central America in the 1980s, there was an increase in immigration from that region; the women who were apprehended or survived without being detained often formed alliances and support groups. In San Antonio, Texas, Laura Sanchez, for example, established a community-based immigrant and refugee center to provide assistance to newcomers. Women immigrants have enriched and preserved their traditional arts by becoming tradition-bearers, continuing their cultural traditions’ practices and making sure that the young do not forget them. Hmong embroidery, Guatemalan weaving, and other material culture artifacts attest to the strength of the women’s commitment to keeping their cultures alive in their new place.

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Scholarly treatments of the experiences of newcomer women do provide insights, but novels, poetry, and collections of essays written by immigrant women themselves in their own voices offer powerful narratives that expose both the personal and universal realities of the immigrant experience and chronicle the impact of migration and immigration on traditional cultural expressions. See also: Activism; Childbirth and Childrearing; Daughter; Ethnicity; Folk Belief; Folk Custom; Folk Medicine; Foodways; Herbs; Muslim Women’s Folklore; Politics; Race; Recipe Books; Storytelling; Tradition-Bearer; Veiling. References: Alvarez, Julia. Something to Declare. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1999; Bardenstein, Carol. ‘‘Transmissions Interrupted: Reconfiguring Food, Memory, and Gender in the Cookbook: Memoirs of Middle Eastern Exiles.’’ Signs: Gender and Memory, vol. 28, no. 1 (2002): 353–387; Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo. New York: Knopf, 2002; Danquah, Meri Nana-Ama, ed. Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women. New York: Hyperion Press, 2000; Del Negro, Giovanna. Looking Through My Mother’s Eyes: Life Stories of Nine Italian Immigrant Women in Canada. Second edition. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2004; Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. The Unknown Errors of Our Lives. New York: Doubleday, 2001; Donnelly, Nancy D. Changing Lives of Refugee Hmong Women. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1994; Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997; Hernandez, Daisy. ‘‘Missing Jose: The day California lost its Latinos, and cried about it.’’ Colorlines (Fall 2004): 6–7; Jones, B. A., excerpt from interview IRWN-2003-AS-4-DT-2. Pennsylvania Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Network Oral History Collection, Pennsylvania Folklife Archives. Harrisburg, PA: Institute for Cultural Partnerships, 2003; Marcus, Laura, ed. In My Country: A Gathering of Refugee and Immigrant Fiber Traditions. Portland, OR: Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO), 2002; Pang, Keum-Young Chung. Korean Elderly Women in America: Everyday Life, Health and Illness. New York: AMS Press, 1991; Shutika, Debra Lattanzi. Beyond the Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; Smith, Susan L. Japanese American Midwives: Culture, Community and Health Politics, 1880–1950. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005; Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate. London: Penguin Books, 2003; Working Women Community. Tasking Diversity: A Celebration of Immigrant Women and Their Cooking. North Vancouver, BC: Whitecap Books, 2003; Zaborowska, Magdelena J. How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1995; Zlolniski, Christian. Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Amy E. Skillman and Norma E. Cantu Indian Maiden The Indian Maiden is one of North America’s most cherished cultural icons. Complex, multifaceted, and adaptable, she has captured the imagination of artists, writers, politicians and now filmmakers, since the sixteenth century. Her popularity never wanes; it merely shifts to fit the milieu of the era. And while her various depictions reveal little about the real lives of American Native women, they speak clearly about the cultures that continue to wield her as a representation of conquest and patriarchal power over Native peoples. The Indian Maiden, like her male counterpart—the noble and ignoble savage—grew out of European colonizers’ need to order, describe, and

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understand the people they met in North and South America. She first appeared in sixteenth-century etchings and imaginings as the American Indian Queen, a feared Indigenous warrior whose exotic beauty and military prowess symbolized the physical threats of the New World and Indigenous resistance to colonialism. As colonial powers dominated North America in the 1700s, the Indian Queen was replaced by the ‘‘dusky woodland’’ goddess, a smaller, gentler, less threatening representation of Native America. This Indian Princess has ‘‘played a powerful role in constructing the identities of both Indians and non-Indians’’ (Valaskakis: 5); the figure’s beauty, innocence, and attraction to European culture created a viable political image that became the ‘‘first symbol of the United States, representing the Western wilderness reclaimed by civilization,’’ and a romantic narrative strategy to assuage cultural guilt over colonialism (Fiedler: 65). Her most famous personifications are Pocahontas and Sacajawea. The Queen and the Princess, however, are only a part of the complexity that is the Indian Maiden. The primary components—Princess and Squaw figures—form what Rayna Green calls the ‘‘Pocahontas Perplex’’—a dichotomy against which Native women of Canada and the United States constantly struggle for recognition (Green 1995). While the Princess represents the goodness and nobility of her people and the possibility of racial assimilation into White North American culture, her darker sister, the Squaw, denotes the negative aspects of Nativeness. She may be beautiful, but she is also crafty and often sexually dangerous—a femme fatale—or she may be unattractive, overworked (symbolizing the supposed drudgery of women’s roles in Native society), and surrounded by many children. Individually or as an amalgamation of both representations, the Indian Maiden’s possible integration through marriage or sexual relations into dominant culture threatens the stability of a White racial hierarchy and religious morality. Both noble and ignoble stereotypes carry iconographic power to exploit the Indian Maiden as a tool for cultural dominance over Native Americans, most effectively illustrated in Hollywood westerns in which her inevitably sacrificial role underscores personal, political, and social attitudes about American Natives and interracial mixing. The Indian Maiden continues to surface in a variety of twenty-firstcentury popular culture forms that trap Native Americans in an idealized and sexualized mythic past. Examples range from advertising, to product marketing, to music, and film. They include the Land-O-Lakes Butter girl, Imperial Sugar Company’s ‘‘Pocahontas Sweet Thing’’ sugar substitute, Indian Princess Halloween costumes, the sexually garbed background dancers for Outkast’s 2004 Grammy performance, Indian Princess Barbie, and Disney’s Pocahontas. See also: Barbie Doll; Ethnicity; Film; First Nations of North America; Gender; Popular Culture; Princess; Race; Women Warriors. References: Bird, S. Elizabeth. ‘‘Gendered Constructions of the American Indian in popular Media.’’ Journal of Communication 49.3 (1999): 61–84; ———. ‘‘Tales of Difference: Representations of American Indian Women in Popular Film and Television.’’ In Mediated Women: Representations in Popular Culture, ed. Marian Meyers, 91–109. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1999; Burgess, Marilyn, and Gail Guthrie Valaskaskis. Indian Princesses and Cowgirls: Stereotypes from the Frontier. Montreal: OBORO, 1995; Fiedler, Leslie A. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day,

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1968; Green, Rayna. ‘‘The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture.’’ Massachusetts Review, vol. 16, no. 4 (1995): 698–714; Jaimes, M. Annette. ‘‘Hollywood’s Native American Women.’’ Turtle Quarterly Magazine (Spring-Summer 1993): 40–45; Marubbio, M. Elise. Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2006; Valaskakis, Gail Guthrie. ‘‘Parallel Voices: Indians and Others: Narratives of Cultural Struggle.’’ Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 18, no. 3 (1993): 3–13. http://www.cjc-online.ca/viewissue.phpid¼22#Guest_Editorial (accessed January 1, 2007).

M. Elise Marubbio

Infertility Infertility is the condition of being unable to become pregnant, or having great difficulty conceiving. Historically, infertility has been viewed as a woman’s problem, and too often, therefore, deemed solely her fault—as the pejorative term ‘‘barren’’ for so long suggested—when, in fact, either partner or both may be responsible. The inability to conceive when pregnancy is desired is frustrating and often deeply painful. Infertility often has grave consequences for women, including loss of respect, marriage, and other forms of social support. However, some women want to control their fertility or look forward to menopause, either because they feel they have enough children or because they do not wish to become mothers. Whether the desire is to achieve or avoid pregnancy, concerns about fertility are common to women worldwide. Cultures have different ways of interpreting infertility, and all have folk beliefs about its causes and cures. In North America, where many oftenexpensive medical treatments exist to address the inability to conceive, folk remedies and beliefs about how women can achieve pregnancy abound. In the United States and Canada, infertility is frequently attributed to stress, or to an inappropriately strong focus on efforts to conceive. Most women have heard that they must just relax, and pregnancy will come when they are not trying too hard. Alternative explanations include religious interpretations, such as that a past bad act makes the woman undeserving of pregnancy, or simply that God did not intend for that woman to conceive. More numerous than beliefs about the causes of infertility are folk remedies for it. All cultures have at least some; they range from rituals, prayer, and visiting sacred sites to exercise and medication. In North America, two distractions/actions that are said to promote pregnancy are taking on responsibilities not compatible with parenthood and adopting a child. Common herbal remedies include vitex (chaste tree berry extract), licorice root, and dong quai. Another common remedy is using cough syrup during ovulation. Some advocate taking baby aspirin, while others insist that douching with egg whites before intercourse helps increase the chance of pregnancy. Many stories circulate about the physical positions to use during and after intercourse. Certain foods are said to increase the likelihood of pregnancy, while others are said to reduce it. A Canadian Web site (http://canada.com) advises women wishing to conceive a girl to eat lots of fish, vegetables, and chocolate, to sleep on the right side of the bed, and to initiate intercourse in a woman-superior position on even days of the month.

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Among some Catholics, prayers to Jesus, Mary, St. Jude, St. Gerome, and St. Elizabeth are thought to be effective in promoting conception. Many Protestants rely on prayer to God or rely on faith healing. Jews traditionally pray to God for an end to infertility. Trips to holy places are associated with fertility in most religions, and some, like the shrine to Our Lady de la Leche in St. Augustine, Florida, have particular reputations for curing infertility. Special days may be associated with fertility. Some Canadians believe that a woman who touches a wild hyacinth flower on March 1 will become more fertile; if she does so on an odd day under a quarter moon, she will conceive a boy. In Taiwan, a summer holiday celebrates the birthday of the Seven Old Maids, daughters of the hearth god. If a woman wishes to become pregnant, she makes a vow during the festival to help her community, gives a banquet for her friends and relatives, and sponsors a puppet show or opera at a local temple. If she conceives, her child will be protected by the Seven Old Maids. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Herbs; Menopause; Mothers’ Folklore; Pregnancy. References: Canada.com. ‘‘Find Out if It’s Pregnancy: Fact or Folklore.’’ July 27, 2005. http://www.canada.com/topics/lifestyle/parenting/story.html?id¼a6a3a320-d189-4195-b88824e034ab50e6&k¼33019 (accessed August 10, 2008); Ginsburg, Faye, and Rayna Rapp. ‘‘The Politics of Reproduction.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 20 (1991): 311–343; McDonald, Margaret Read, ed. The Folklore of World Holidays. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992; McLaren, Angus. Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Theresa A. Vaughan Initiation Initiation is one of the rites of passage, those rituals connected with critical transformational and transitional events in human life—others being pregnancy and birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Women play central roles in initiation rituals, as participants, officiators, and audience members. Religious rites such as baptism and ordination into the priesthood are also important examples of initiation, typically signifying the death of an old way of life and rebirth into a new one. Of course, many instances of initiation are quite a bit less momentous; ~ everything from attending a quincenera’s debutante ball to pledging as a sorority sister to getting one’s first piercing or tattoo can be treated as a form of initiation. Even the degree-granting process of universities, with their many attendant ordeals and trials, is a form of initiatory passage. Practically any activity that marks a new experience, facilitates a significant transition, or celebrates an important life change is material for the creation of an initiation ritual. Historically, investigation of women’s initiation rituals has been hampered by androcentric ethnographic scholarship that largely ignored women’s rites and/or interpreted their meaning through the lens of male ritual patterns and often solely in terms of women’s relationship to men as sexual property. The tendency for scholars to analyze women’s initiation rituals within the context of other ritual activities, in particular marriage or puberty rites, contributed to the understanding of women as solely reproductive

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agents—or more precisely, sexual and reproductive objects. Women’s varied and multivalent ritual experiences were therefore often missing from or distorted by analyses that purported to develop universal models or patterns of initiation. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep set what was to become the paradigm for analysis of initiation rituals in 1909. He coined the phrase ‘‘rites of passage’’ to describe rituals such as initiation that marked territorial passage or movement between one discrete level of social status and the next. Studying mostly male rites of initiation, van Gennep observed both cross-cultural and functional similarities among the rituals and reasoned that they were universal in human life across widely disparate cultures. He further determined that these rituals followed a universally set structure as a linear tripartite model of separation, transition, and reincorporation. While Victor Turner subsequently expanded the liminal (transition) stage of the process, little has challenged its linear and tripartite form until recently. The term ‘‘rites of passage’’ has since entered the Anglo American English lexicon, as well as popular culture, and van Gennep’s tripartite linear model has become the archetype by which initiations are not only evaluated, but even sometimes created—a curious case of life imitating academics, if not quite art. However, careful consideration of women’s rites of initiation reveals that van Gennep’s paradigm falls far short of universality. Several significant challenges to the archetype focus on questions of women’s status and the notion of liminality, the absence of social-status motifs in women’s rites, and the etically derived (that is, coming from the perspective of an outsider), unilinear directional progression of van Gennep’s model. Caroline Walker Bynum gets at the limitations of van Gennep’s structural model of separation, liminality, and reincorporation through an examination of Victor Turner’s theory of dominant symbols, liminality, and social drama within the ritual process. She uses a popular form of medieval narrative, the saint’s life, to demonstrate that women’s experiences are missing from the universal model. Contrary to expectations of the model, Bynum finds that women’s stories are less processual than men’s, less about dramatic turning points and inversions of status, and more about continuity and the ordinary. In terms of the universality of the liminal, ‘‘one either has to see the woman’s religious stance as permanently liminal or as never quite becoming so’’ (1984: 74). The problem with Turner’s theory is not quite one of scarcity of data— he includes many examples of women’s rites—but rather one of a skewed perspective. Turner’s theory is rooted in a particular kind of Christianity characteristic of elites in the Western tradition. He does indeed look at women, but he does not look with them. In other words, he stands with elites within the dominant group (men) and sees women as liminal. While he attempts to stand with the inferior group (women), his analysis arises from an assumed symmetry of status. Comparison with actual experiences from women’s lives reveals the hidden elite and male perspective within the allegedly universal model of initiation or rites of passage. Bynum does not develop a competing universal model, but instead uses women’s narratives to suggest the complexity of human experience.

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Another prominent challenge to van Gennep’s universal model of initiation is in Bruce Lincoln’s work. Taking a sampling of rites from five widely divergent societies, geographical areas, and time periods (the Tiyyar of South India, the Tiv of Nigeria, the Navajo of the southwestern United States, the Tukuna of Brazil, and the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece), Lincoln finds combinations of four major types or creative forms of ritual at play within women’s initiations: body mutation, identification with a mythic heroine or goddess, cosmic journey, and play of opposites. He problematizes the whole notion of status in women’s initiations, noting that because women in many cultures have no status outside of their relationship to male relatives, their status is simplistically reduced in traditional analyses to a matter of sexuality. In contrast, Lincoln finds that women’s initiations are not rituals of change in social status, but rites of cosmic transformation in which the entire community participates. Women’s initiation rites also lack the change in place or residence characteristic of male initiation ceremonies in van Gennep’s model, beginning with a lack of true separation. While still firmly within the tripartite unilinear process, Lincoln offers a very different understanding of spatiality and movement found in women’s initiations, arriving at an alternate pattern of enclosure, metamorphosis, and emergence. The women’s initiation rites in Lincoln’s study yield a number of tantalizing insights and conclusions, among them: 1) the body as the vehicle or means of personal transformation, 2) the lack of status change for women, 3) the goal of cosmic transformation, and 4) a new model of spatiality and movement within the rite. The latest and most extensive challenge to van Gennep’s linear and tripartite model is from Nikki Bado-Fralick. She employs a reflexive methodology to examine religious initiations performed by a group of Witches (Wiccans) in Ohio. She finds that what is traditionally understood as an isolated ritual moment with simple unilinear directional movement is actually embedded in a long and complex multidirectional process of increasingly somatic learning and practice that involves a shift in perceptual orientation as well as the formation of an intimate community. Situating herself as both scholar and practitioner, Bado-Fralick enables us to look with as well as at the participants, revealing the range of possible perspectives and experiences throughout different stages of the process. Familiar themes of separation, liminality, and reincorporation (or enclosure, metamorphosis, and emergence) occur and recur throughout the ritual, but change according to perspective. ‘‘Initiation offers shifting sets of multidimensional, multidirectional, and multispatial experiences to its participants, depending on their role at any particular moment in the performance of the rite’’ (2005: 143) The participants’ understanding of the rite will also change in time, as each takes on different roles and new perspectives that were not experienced before. Capturing these shifting roles and perspectives ‘‘allows us to see there is no single, unilinear movement to the rite, and no single or uniform understanding of initiation’’ (2005: 143–4). Such emic (that is, insider) insights reveal the initiation process as a learning curve in which the initiate becomes attuned to a particular mode of perception necessary for ritual work through the development of what Bado-Fralick

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calls ‘‘the body-in-practice.’’ The body-in-practice is specially trained, achieving a state that represents the mind and body working together to realize the whole person. Initiation is the means through which the natural body is ritually transformed into the body-in-practice. Transformation begins in early stages of the initiation process with increasing amounts of training in what anthropologist Thomas Csordas calls ‘‘somatic modes of attention.’’ These provide special ways of attending to and with one’s body that enable initiates and ‘‘other-than-human persons’’ such as deities and spirits to perceive, mutually interact with, and affect change in one another (1993: 127). The initiation ceremony dramatically performs this transformation by ritually unmaking the natural body and then remaking it as the bodyin-practice. This is accomplished through the ordeals of symbolic death, the ritual performance of the cosmic journey of the Goddess to the underworld, with its attendant purification by the four elements (air, fire, water, and Earth), and, finally, rebirth as a new initiate. These initiation rites participate in at least two ritual themes identified by Lincoln: identification with a mythic heroine or Goddess and a cosmic journey. But in contrast to what might be expected from his analysis of women’s rites, it is identification with the mythic female body that is the transformative catalyst for both female and male initiates in this particular form of Wicca. Extending Lincoln’s conclusions, Bado-Fralick finds that the body—or rather, the particularly trained body—is not merely the vehicle for transformation, but the active agent through which spirit is transformed. The journey of purification—undertaken while the candidate is blindfolded— performs the ritual unmaking of a cultural dependence on what Johannes Fabian (1994) calls ‘‘visualism,’’ a strategy of distancing that removes all the other senses and thereby the body from knowledge production. Blindfolding compels the candidate to rely upon those other senses—to rely upon the body—in grasping the lessons of initiation. Death and rebirth, the unmaking and remaking of the new initiate are made real by engagement with and through the body-in-practice. The transformation of initiation occurs with and through the body—as active subject, never passive object—and is made meaningful by embodied and performed identification with the Goddess’ journey to the underworld (Bado-Fralick 2005: 129–131). The strategy of looking with, rather than at, women’s rituals enables us to glimpse important and sometimes hidden ways in which the body— specifically the gendered body—performs transformation and creates meaning in ritual. As the site of interaction between a person and the structures of political and cultural power, the body is the active field of negotiation for cultural, sexual, and political tensions. Conflicting gender and political realities are sometimes literally inscribed on the body through initiation, as they are in the extensive bridal ‘‘hinna’’ (henna) ceremony described by M. Elaine Combs-Schilling. The bride undergoes a lengthy process of having henna applied to her body in ornate designs while she remains completely immobile and dependent upon others. She ‘‘cannot eat, drink, or use the bathroom by herself’’ during the time it takes for the application to fully set, a period that may extend to more than twenty-four hours (1991: 111).

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Although this occurs in a festive, relaxed, and even ribald context—the bride surrounded by caring women who attend to her every need, praise her beauty, and crack jokes about men—the ceremony is a rite of submission, with the gendered body as its focal point. The female body is required not only to be passive, but also to learn the ‘‘postures and attitudes of submission’’ that she will henceforth practice as a woman in that culture. The henna ceremony strengthens the ‘‘culture’s inventions of what it means to be male and female’’ and makes them real with and through the body (ibid.). Even when the rite is something that is clearly done to the bride, rather than by her, the body plays an active role. ‘‘The ritual gives the bride embodied practice in the body stances, attitudes, and postures that are likely to gain her the most security and status during the early years of marital life. Through multiple senses, through multiple enactments, the bride is rehearsed in being the kind of individual that the society expects her to be and will reward her for being’’ (ibid.). Although restrained and subdued, the gendered body is still the active agent of transformation—teaching and learning, producing and resisting power. Women’s rituals provide critical information about the gendered nature of ritual processes and the importance of the body in the production of knowledge. Looking with women’s bodies, with the multivalent expressions of women’s initiations, we see rich and complex ritual patterns that provide suggestions about how we might reframe scholarly models to more accurately express a full range of lived human experiences. See also: Death; ~ Henna Art/Mehndi; Pregnancy; Quinceanera; Rites of Passage; Sorority Folklore; Wedding; Wicca and Neo-Paganism. References: Bado-Fralick, Nikki. Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual. American Academy of Religion, Academy Series. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; Bynum, Caroline Walker. ‘‘Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality.’’ In Anthropology and the Study of Religion, ed. Robert L. Moore and Frank B. Reynolds, 105–125. Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1984; Combs-Schilling, M. Elaine. ‘‘Etching Patriarchal Rule: Ritual Dye, Erotic Potency, and the Moroccan Monarchy.’’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1991): 658–81; Csordas, Thomas. ‘‘Somatic Modes of Attention.’’ Cultural Anthropology 8 (1993): 135–56; Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. Trans. Willard Trask. New York: Harper & Row, 1958; Fabian, Johannes. ‘‘Ethnographic Objectivity Revisited: From Rigor to Vigor.’’ Rethinking Objectivity, ed. Allan Megill, 81–108. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994; Gennep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960 [1909]; Hufford, David, ed. ‘‘Reflexivity and the Study of Belief.’’ Special Issue of Western Folklore, vol. 54, no. 1 (1995): 1–11; Kasulis, Thomas P. Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002; Lincoln, Bruce. Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women’s Initiation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981; Myerhoff, Barbara, and Jay Rubin. ‘‘Introduction.’’ Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, ed. Jay Rubin, 1–35. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982; Turner, Victor. ‘‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.’’ In Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation, eds. Louise C. Mahdi, Steven Foster, and Meredith Little, 3–19. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987 [1967]; ———. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969.

Nikki Bado-Fralick

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J Jewish Women’s Folklore The story of Jewish women’s folklore in North America is one of adaptation and innovation. Jewish immigrants brought with them the folkways and traditions they had practiced in Europe. As many Jews became assimilated into the larger Christian society, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century when the largest immigration of European Jews occurred, they abandoned more and more of the religious practices and customs they had brought. The descendants of mid-nineteenth-century German Jews also encouraged the further acculturation of early twentieth-century Eastern European Jews. These Jews, who were no longer observant of all of the mitzvot (613 commandments which, according to tradition, God transmitted to the Jewish people on Mount Sinai through the prophet, Moses) wanted to be perceived more as North Americans and less as Jews—a typical reaction of all immigrant groups of that period. After the catastrophe of the Shoah (‘‘Holocaust’’), when European Jewry itself was all but extinguished and firstgeneration immigrants were dying of old age, the majority of Jews who were no longer orthodox (observant of the mitzvot) had a relatively sparse folk tradition to transmit to their children growing up in the latter half of the twentieth century. Music and food traditions tended to be the major exceptions to this phenomenon. The women’s movement of the 1960s—further fueled by New Age spirituality, the havurah movement (small groups of Jews meeting in homes for services without rabbis leading), and the creativity of Jewish lesbians seeking to make their claim on tradition—produced a climate of vitality, questioning, and spiritual searching. ‘‘What does it mean to be a woman and a Jew post-Holocaust?’’ ‘‘How does feminism inform Judaism?’’ ‘‘Can I find spiritual meaning as a woman and a Jew?’’ These questions circulated at the time. Jewish feminism became fertile ground for a women’s folklore to take root and grow. Jewish women began meeting in small study groups. Judaism considers study of the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Torah, ‘‘the teachings’’) to be a sacred act. While study had mainly been the provenance

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of men, women began to engage in study of Jewish texts as feminism spurred them on to find meaning for themselves. The ordination of women as rabbis—first in Reform Judaism (1972), then in Reconstructionist Judaism (1974) and Conservative Judaism (1985)— necessitated their expertise with traditional texts as professionals. In the late twentieth century, women cantors (clergy in charge of chanting the religious service and leading congregational singing of traditional texts) became increasingly numerous in Reform and Conservative Judaism. Women composers, such as Debbie Friedman (influenced by Joan Baez and others associated with the folksong revival of the 1960s), have also taken the lead in putting traditional texts to new tunes, which have been popularized at camps, conclaves, and conferences. The twenty-first century has even begun to see a miniscule number of Modern Orthodox women ordained privately. In addition to their acceptance as rabbis and cantors, Jewish women were admitted to the formerly all-male enclave of Jewish Studies in universities as professors of Bible, Talmud, and Jewish history. Once Jewish women had access to texts that had been almost entirely written and interpreted by men for centuries, they discovered a world of knowledge to which they had been outsiders. This was key to the revitalization of Jewish women’s folklore in recent times. The revival of Rosh Hodesh (‘‘New Moon festival’’) is a case in point. It was discovered as a holiday for women in the 1970s, when a New Yorkbased women’s study group, Ezrat Nashim (Hebrew for ‘‘the women’s section of the Orthodox synagogue,’’ used ironically in this case), came upon a reference to it in the Talmud. It stated that Rosh Hodesh was given as a reward to women for not contributing their gold and jewelry to the making of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:1 ff.). A group member, Arlene Agus, wrote an article (‘‘This Month is for You’’ in The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives) and Rosh Hodesh groups for Jewish women started appearing in private homes in the United States and Canada. It is significant that the groups did not, for the most part, meet in synagogues. In the early days, women sensed that they were doing something outside the norm. In fact, they were creating a Jewish experience without a rabbi and outside the synagogue. This paralleled the havurah movement, contemporaneous with Rosh Hodesh, led by knowledgeable men and women in their twenties and thirties who were alienated by the predominance of cathedral-like synagogues where the rabbi stood at a distance from the congregation. Spiritual intimacy was not possible in such environments, they felt, and so they began meeting in homes to conduct services. Jewish women recognized that Rosh Hodesh gave them an authentic ritual context, one rooted in tradition. Linked to their ancestors all the way back to the biblical mothers Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, Rosh Hodesh provided them with the sacred time and space to pursue their personal and collective journeys as Jewish women. Today, there are women’s and girls’ Rosh Hodesh groups all over the world. Other Jewish women’s groups also formed. Small consciousness-raising groups of feminist/lesbian women made Jewish feminists realize that they had needs and viewpoints that could not be addressed in a secular, non-Jewish setting. Out of these groups came an

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outpouring of creativity: writing, poetry, and journaling that often connected with the line of Yiddish-speaking women writers in Europe and North America. The types of revitalized Jewish women’s folklore are varied. New lifecycle rituals include those for pregnancy, pregnancy loss, infertility, the birth of a girl, naming of a girl, weaning, menarche, pre-bat mitzvah, commitment ceremonies for lesbian couples, separation, alternative divorce rites, menopause, and the wisdom of aging. The development of new ritual objects includes Kos Miriam (‘‘Miriam’s cup,’’ used alongside the cup reserved for Elijah at the Passover seder, or ceremonial dinner), birth and pregnancy amulets, Miriam’s tambourines, bat mitzvah quilts, and baby quilts. Holding a women’s seder (frequently on the third night of Passover) and injecting woman-centered texts into the traditional ritual meal have also become popular, and are directly related to a feminist sensibility. In addition, innovations on traditional ritual objects emphasize the full participation of women in every aspect of Jewish life, including their use of tallit (‘‘prayer shawl’’) and kippah (‘‘skullcap’’), and handling the bein gavra (‘‘Torah cover’’). The development of new verbal lore includes the revival of traditional tekhinot (‘‘prayers for occasions of a woman’s life’’); the writing of midrash (a traditional verbal form where a story is created to fill in a gap in the Bible); and the composition of music such as niggunim (wordless chants), songs and chants based on biblical verses, and ballads about biblical and historical Jewish women. A result of Jewish women’s study that has had a mixed impact on women’s folklore was the popularization of the mystical concept, Shekhinah (‘‘Indwelling Presence’’). According to the Zohar, a classical thirteenthcentury text on Jewish mysticism, the Shekhinah is the feminine aspect of God. The Shekhinah is immanent, residing in all beings, responsive to their pain and suffering, receptive, and concerned with worldly matters. Women have written songs, poetry, prayers, and stories about and addressed to the Shekhinah. However, sometimes these creative expressions impart qualities to the Shekhinah that elevate the concept to Goddess-like stature. The contemporary spirituality movements of Neo-Paganism, witchcraft, and goddessworship have brought a distinctly non-Jewish element to the meaning of Shekhinah as an aspect of God. However, many Jewish women who have felt disenfranchised by antiquated notions of God as father, king, and lord, as well as by remnants of tradition which still denigrate women, have been relieved to discover that the Jewish God has a feminine side which has been present yet covert until recently. Jewish women’s folklore today exemplifies the fullest meaning of ‘‘tradition’’ as an innovative response to contemporary life that remains rooted in the ways of the ancestors. See also: Folk Music and Folksong; Foodways; Politics, Popular Culture; Rites of Passage. References: Adelman, Penina. Miriam’s Well: Rituals for Jewish Women Around the Year. New York: Biblio Press, 1990 [1986]; Agus, Arlene. ‘‘This Month is for You.’’ In The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, ed. Liz Koltun, 84–93. New York: Schocken Books, 1976; Broner, E. M., and Naomi Nimrod. A Weave of Women. Reprint edition.

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Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985 [1978]; ———. The Telling: Including the Women’s Haggadah. Reprint edition. New York: HarperCollins, 1994; Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie, and Irena Klepfisz. The Tribe of Dinah. Revised, expanded edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989; Koltun, Liz, ed. The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives. New York: Schocken, 1976; Nadell, Pamela, ed. American Jewish Women: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2003; Plaskow, Judith. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. New York: HarperCollins, 1990; RitualWell.org: Ceremonies for Jewish Living. http://www.ritualwell.org (accessed August 10, 2008); Rotkovitz, Miryam. ‘‘Kashering the Melting Pot: Oreos, Sushi Restaurants, ‘Kosher Treif,’ and the Observant American Jew.’’ In Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy Long, 157–85. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2003; Saltzman, Rachelle H. ‘‘Shalom Ya’ll: The Jews of Memphis.’’ Southern Exposure, vol. XI, no. 5 (1983): 28–36; Umansky, Ellen, and Ashton, Dianne. Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Penina Adelman Jingle Dress Jingle dresses are garments decorated with objects that make tinkling sounds, most often used as clothing for dancing. The adornment of women’s dresses with metal pendants has been noted in ethnographic literature since the early eighteenth century. Tinkling cones, replacing the dewclaws of deer, have long been used as ornamental decoration on clothing, bags, and drums, but the first actual depiction of a jingle dress is found in Karl Bodmer’s portrait of a Sioux woman at Fort Pierre in 1833. She is clearly wearing a dress trimmed with metal pieces at the bottom. It is generally agreed that the jingle dress dance originated among the Ojibwe: some claim its use began in the Whitefish Bay community in southwestern Ontario, while others point to Mille Lacs, Minnesota. In almost all versions of the story, the dress and the dance were revealed to an old man in a dream. The man has an ill daughter or granddaughter, and the dress and dance are given to him so that she might be healed. The jingle dress itself is usually constructed of brightly colored cloth made even more dazzling by the placement of the cones—often constructed from snuff-can lids shaped into triangular bells and attached to the dress with ribbons—and the movement of the dancer. The garment’s form is generally straight and multilayered in order to accommodate the greatest number of cones, which might number 200 to 500 or more. There can be no doubt that the rhythm and movement of the dance are healing, with the soothing sounds of the cones striking each other in perfect assonance. The basic footwork, which can be straight or side step, keeps the dancer’s feet on the ground as her body and the cones move with the unique tempo of the drum. Her body is straight and erect, her steps smooth and flowing, even when a more intricate cross step is used. For many, the dance itself is seen as a prayer, and it is not at all unusual to ask a jingle dress dancer to pray for an ill friend or family member during the performance. See also: First Nations of North America; Folk Dance; Folk Medicine; Ritual. References: Axtmann, Ann. ‘‘Performative Power in Native American Powwow Dancing.’’ Dance Research Journal, vol. 33, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 7–22; Browner, Tara.

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Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-wow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Goetzmann, William H., David C. Hunt, Marsha V. Gallagher, and William J. Orr. Karl Bodmer’s America. Lincoln: Jocelyn Art Museum and University of Nebraska Press, 1984; Pearson, Tom. ‘‘In the Spirit.’’ Dance Research Journal, vol. 79, no. 10 (October 2005): 70–74.

Theresa Schenck Joke A joke is a form of artistic communication that, within its performance frame, is meant to be humorous. Jokes are, therefore, theorized as culturally ‘‘marked’’ forms of communication. Not only does the telling of a joke require the performer to negotiate a space in conversation to perform the joke, but once negotiated, that space (or play frame) becomes a licensed domain in which the breaking of rules, whether linguistic or sociocultural, is situated as being not serious or not in earnest. Within this play frame, performers address a wide range of topics (gender, sex, sexuality, marriage, race, ethnicity, class, occupation, region, nationality, religion, politics, health, and technology, as well as ephemeral, contemporary events), sometimes affirming the dominant norms of a cultural group and sometimes contesting and seeking to revise them. Thus, by telling a joke or by listening to and deciding whether or not to laugh at a joke, people not only entertain themselves but also participate in a social dialogue about the nature of their world and their relationships in it. This is as true for women as it is for men, but for women, who, historically, have, at times, lived under a cultural injunction of silence, the telling of a joke and the decision whether or not to laugh at a joke has been fraught with ambivalence—the pleasure of claiming agency by asserting the right to speak and the ability to be funny must be weighed against the danger of being chastised for doing so. Nonetheless, women have an active sense of humor, exhibiting adroitness with wordplay through witty one-liners and a strong preference for humorous personal-experience narratives, a form of conversational humor that has as its primary goal the construction of intimacy. But women also perform a range of more formally constructed jokes. They tell photocopy, fax, and e-mail verbal jokes ranging in length and style from the riddle or questionand-answer joke. Do you know what would have happened if it had been Three Wise Women instead of Three Wise Men? They would have asked for directions, arrived on time, helped to deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, and brought practical gifts.

to the longer narrative joke which may take the form of a tall tale, a shaggy-dog story, a comic anecdote, a humorous folktale, or a catch tale (a hoax story): Three guys are out having a relaxing day out fishing. Out of the blue, they catch a mermaid who begs to be set free in return for granting each of them a wish. Now one of the guys just doesn’t believe it and says, ‘‘Okay, if you can really grant wishes, then double my IQ.’’

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The mermaid says, ‘‘Done.’’ Suddenly the guy starts reciting Shakespeare flawlessly and analyzing it with extreme insight. The second guy is so amazed, he says to the mermaid, ‘‘Triple my IQ.’’ The mermaid says, ‘‘Done.’’ The guy starts to spout all the mathematical solutions to problems that have been stumping all the scientists in various fields: physics, chemistry, etc. The last guy is so enthralled with the changes in his friends that he says to the mermaid, ‘‘Quintuple my IQ.’’ The mermaid looks at him and says, ‘‘You know, I don’t usually try to change people’s minds when they make a wish, but I really wish that you would reconsider.’’ The guy says, ‘‘No, I want you to increase my IQ times five, and if you don’t do it, I won’t set you free.’’ ‘‘Please,’’ says the mermaid, ‘‘You don’t understand what you’re asking. It will change your entire view on the universe. Won’t you ask for something else . . . a million dollars, anything?’’ But no matter what the mermaid says, the guy insists on having his IQ increased by five times its usual power. So the mermaid sighs and says, ‘‘Done.’’ And he becomes a woman.

Yet other forms of jokes rely on pictorial representation, on gesture, or on such forms of play behavior as the tricking of someone through the performance of a practical joke; for example, high-school-age girls have been known to ‘‘t-pee’’ a boy’s car using toilet paper and tampons that have been dipped in ketchup. Interpretations of jokes and joke performances generally fall within three broad categories of humor theory: cognitive-perceptual theory, socialbehavioral theory, and psychoanalytic theory. Cognitive-perceptual theory seeks to explain why jokes are funny by focusing on linguistic and semantic incongruity or seeming inappropriateness. When a southern American grandmother comments to a group of girls, ‘‘Before you marry any ol’ hairylegged boy, be sure to look carefully into his genes (jeans),’’ her comment is humorous, in part, because of the pun, ‘‘genes/jeans’’ (a homonym juxtaposing two words that sound alike but that have different meanings). The pun incongruously links frames of reference (biology and costume) that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, although that which is more broadly signified (family genealogy and sexual competence) may have much to do with each other. The grandmother’s and the girl’s laughter acknowledges and celebrates their respective intellectual acuity in using and understanding the pun as well as their mutual enjoyment at having broken a taboo against women and girls speaking openly, though by means of the ambiguity of a pun about sex. Social-behavioral theory focuses in part on who can joke with whom and under what conditions as well as what social functions joking serves. Also referred to as disparagement or superiority theory, the social-behavioral approach analyzes joking relationships as a means of identifying social structure. For example, research suggests that women prefer to tell jokes in

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small intimate groups or in their homes while men enjoy telling jokes to small and large audiences and are more willing than are women to tell jokes to casual acquaintances and in public places. Women also prefer to tell their jokes to other women whereas men willingly tell their jokes to other men, to women, and to audiences consisting of both men and women. And women’s joking tends to be more conciliatory than does that of men, who frequently participate in aggressive, competitive joking. Psychoanalytic theory, also called suppression-repression or release theory, explores jokes and performances of jokes in relation to the human psyche and the ways in which laughter functions as a relief mechanism in stressful situations. Jokes are understood as a means of freeing oneself from social conventions, those of perception, logic, language, and morality. As Sigmund Freud explains, jokes, except when innocent, are either hostile (aggressive, satiric, or defensive) or obscene (functioning as a means of exposure). In general, research suggests that men tell more openly aggressive, hostile jokes and more obscene jokes than do women, particularly in crossgendered situations and in mixed-gendered audiences. Women’s humor when hostile is frequently coded, thereby expressing hostility in a disguised form, and it is used tactically rather than strategically. While women may at times tell many of the same jokes as men, women’s humor frequently addresses the details of women’s lived experience in ways that seek to validate that experience rather than to denigrate it. Women’s jokes are often revisionary in their attempt to disclose past misrepresentations, contest gender boundaries, rethink textual and cultural scripts, speak the unspeakable, and thereby claim agency for the self. Women’s laughter celebrates that claim. See also: Class; Coding; Ethnicity; Feminisms; Folklore About Women; Gender; Girls’ Folklore; Grandmother; Humor; PersonalExperience Narrative; Photocopylore; Sexuality. References: Apte, Mahadev L. Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985; Barreca, Regina. They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor. New York: Penguin Books, 1991; Crawford, Mary. ‘‘Just Kidding: Gender and Conversational Humor.’’ In New Perspectives on Women and Comedy, ed. Regina Barreca, 23–37. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992; Green, Rayna. ‘‘‘Magnolias Grow in Dirt’: The Bawdy Lore of Southern Women.’’ In Calling Home: Working-Class Women’s Writings: An Anthology, ed. Janet Zandy, 189–198. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990 [1977]; Mitchell, Carol. ‘‘Some Differences in Male and Female Joke-Telling.’’ In Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, eds. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik, 163–186. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Preston, Cathy Lynn. ‘‘Cinderella as a Dirty Joke: Gender, Multivocality, and the Polysemic Text.’’ Western Folklore 53 (1994): 27–49; Roemer, Danielle M. ‘‘Photocopy Lore and the Naturalization of the Corporate Body.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 107 no. 423 (1994): 121–138; Ryan, Cynthia A. ‘‘Reclaiming the Body: The Subversive Possibilities of Breast Cancer Humor.’’ Humor, vol. 10, no. 2 (1997): 187–205; Thomas, Jeannie B. ‘‘Dumb Blondes, Dan Quayle, and Hillary Clinton: Gender, Sexuality, and Stupidity in Jokes.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 110, no. 437 (1997): 277–313; ———. Featherless Chickens, Laughing Women, and Serious Stories. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

Cathy Lynn Preston

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Jump-Rope Rhymes Skipping—individual or group rope-jumping play—is often accompanied by traditional verses sung or chanted by the players. Although originally enjoyed by boys, when social changes in the 1900s gave girls greater freedom of movement and released them from the confines of the home, girls became the preservers and developers of jumping rope and of jump-rope rhymes in particular. Girls developed a variety of different games and accompanying rhymes. Examples can be found in collections by folklorists Dorothy Howard, Iona and Peter Opie, Roger D. Abrahams, Simon Bronner, Brian Sutton-Smith, June Factor, Edith Fowke, and Ian Turner. The main forms of jump rope are termed ‘‘single rope,’’ ‘‘long rope,’’ and ‘‘double Dutch.’’ The last—two long ropes turning in unison—was first developed in the United States after World War II, when young girls used clotheslines for ropes on New York City pavements. However, it was in the school playground that jump rope became a highly prized social activity. Single rope involves both individual and pair-skipping, but the long rope offers apparently endless possibilities. Girls developed rhymes to emphasize the rhythm of the turning rope and to help the turners keep time. Early examples were simple repetitions of syllables in a rhythmically intoned pattern, for example: ‘‘Blue-bells-cockleshells,’’ ‘‘Lip-stick-lip-stick,’’ or ‘‘Mickey-Mouse-Donald-Duck.’’ Rhymes also mark the rope’s speed. The words ‘‘red hot peppers,’’ ‘‘hot peppers,’’ or simply ‘‘pepper’’ cue the rope-turners to speed up, as recorded in 1909: ‘‘Lay the cloth, knife and fork / Don’t forget the salt, mustard, vinegar, PEPPER.’’ Folklorists Elizabeth Grugeon and Alan Dundes noted that jump-rope rhymes often deal with universal issues of growing up—sexuality, parenthood, aging, and death—and sometimes parody adult norms and behavior. They may also address social issues such as racism, sexism, and teen pregnancy. Several categories of jump-rope rhymes can be identified. The most popular are action chants, in which the jumpers perform the movements dictated by the rhyme: ‘‘Teddy bear, Teddy bear, touch the ground / Teddy bear Teddy bear turn around . . .’’ and ‘‘One, one eat a plum / Two, two touch your shoe / Three, three bend your knee.. . .’’ Many rhymes have connections with the past, but change to suit the times. Hence, in the rhyme, ‘‘We are the Girl Guides dressed in blue,’’ the girls who used to ‘‘Bow to the king and salute the queen’’ now ‘‘show their knickers to the rugby team!’’ Other categories involve divination: when a jumper trips on the rope, the girls negotiate a decision together about her supposed future. Traditional ‘‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor’’ rhymes may relate to the name of the skipper’s future husband, the style of her wedding, the clothing she will wear, and the number of children she will have. Other kinds of rhymes involve a large number of jumpers moving in and out of the ropes on a particular cue, which might be the jumper’s birth month, as in ‘‘All in together, girls / never mind the weather, girls / When it’s your birthday, please jump in / January, February’’ or character-based rhymes, such as ‘‘In came the doctor / In came the nurse / In came the lady with the alligator purse.’’ Rhyme texts in all categories reveal girls as preservers of tradition as well as

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innovators of change. See also: Divination Practices; Girls’ Games; Race; Rhymes; Text; Tradition-Bearer. References: Abrahams, Roger D. Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969; Factor, June. Far Out, Brussel Sprout! A First Collection of Children’s Chants and Rhymes. Melbourne: Brolly Books, 2004 [1983]; Fowke, Edith. Sally Go Round the Sun: 300 Children’s Songs, Rhymes, and Games. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969; Gaunt, Kyra D. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New Yrok: New York University Press, 2006; Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion (Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006; Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Yo’ Mama! New Raps, Dozens, Jokes, & Children’s Rhymes from Urban Black America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003; Opie, Iona and Peter Opie. Children’s Games in the Street and Playground. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969; Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Folkgames of Children. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972; Turner, Ian, June Lowenstein, and Wendy Lowenstein, eds. Cinderella Dressed in Yella. Melbourne: Heinemann, 1982.

Janice Ackerley

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K Knitting Knitting is a craft technique used to create stretchy fabrics or garments. Knitters make fabric using long pointed sticks or ‘‘needles’’ typically made of metal, plastic, wood, or bamboo, and ‘‘yarn’’ made of various spun fibers. By creating loops of yarn on the needles and then interlocking the loops using the sticks, knitted work grows to create finished pieces that range from blankets and sweaters to booties, socks, and scarves. Ingenious techniques for shaping and patterning the fabric are based on variants of two stitches: ‘‘knit’’ and ‘‘purl.’’ By changing the colors and textures of yarn, knitters create satisfying aesthetic challenges. Women usually learn the art directly from other women, so knitting is often a social activity. Knitters may also work while traveling, watching television, or listening to music. Knitting is not intrinsically a women’s activity, but women have dominated craft knitting and carry most of its folk traditions. Research on industrial and craft traditions traces knitting back more than 500 years, with probable origins earlier in North Africa and the Middle East. A widespread handcraft by the Middle Ages, it spread into North America with European settlement. Some north Atlantic communities with a traditional economic basis in fishing and wool production—the British Channel Islands, the west coast of Ireland, the coast and islands of Scotland, Scandinavia, the Baltics, Iceland, the eastern coasts of Canada, and Maine—are particularly known for their stitch and color patterns in distinctive sweaters, hats, and mittens. Other countries, such as Greece, Australia, and Peru, where local wool is produced from sheep, goats, llamas, and alpacas, also have distinctive traditions. During the twentieth century, the popularity of knitting fluctuated for social, fashion, and economic reasons. Associated with the early women’s suffrage movement in the United States, the image of knitting shifted, and by the 1960s, it was criticized by many feminists as an oppressive domestic pastime. Knitting, however, continued to be valued locally as an adjunct to fashion, a gesture of friendship or family connection, a charity activity, or a practical civilian contribution in wartime.

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The recent development of knitting information on the Internet such as blogs, podcasts, and e-zines has supported a renaissance of knitting. Online knitting communities offer opportunities for folklorists to explore the transmission of knowledge about techniques and patterns, as well as superstitions (for example, to knit a sweater for a boyfriend is to lose him when you finish the sweater). Folklorists Robin Hansen (2005) and Jill Breit (2005) have produced scholarly studies as well as popular instruction books on hand knitting. There is also now a growing interest in the social, therapeutic, and communitarian potential of craft knitting. These aspects of the craft have always been important, but recently many young knitters have linked their practice to an ideological position—‘‘craftivism’’—which valorizes reclaiming traditional skills as a counter to the processes of globalization and commercialization. Popular ‘‘public knitting’’ or ‘‘stitch ’n bitch’’ sessions where women gather to knit and chat together on a regular basis makes more visible what were once largely domestic craft and subsistence activities. Fashion designers interested in handcrafted and ethnic ‘‘looks’’ have also encouraged interest in knitting since the 1990s. Nevertheless, most craft knitters now work with commercially prepared and mass-distributed yarns. Labor costs and the availability of mass-produced machine-knit clothing have gradually transformed the economics and meanings of knitting. While hand-knitted articles cannot compete with mass-produced machine-knitted items on cost, hand knitting has other qualities that increase its value for knitters and recipients alike. See also: Folk Art; Needlework; Suffrage Movement; Superstition; Women’s Friendship Groups; Women’s Work. References: Breit, Jill. ‘‘Knitting it Together: The Case Study of a Sweater.’’ Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, vol. 31 (Winter 2005): 37–45; Greer, Betsy, Taking Back the Knit: Creating Communities through Needlecraft. Master’s thesis, Goldsmith College, London, 2004; Hansen, Robin. Favorite Mittens: Best Traditional Patterns from Fox & Geese & Fences and Flying Geese & Partridge Feet. Portland, ME: Down East Books, 2005; MacDonald, Anne L. No Idle Hands: The Social History of Knitting. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988; Morgan, Gwyn. Traditional Knitting in the British Isles. London: Batsford Books, 1981; Rutt, Richard. A History of Hand Knitting. London: Batsford Books, 1987; Stoller, Debbie. Stitch ’n Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook. New York: Workman Publishing, 2003.

Teri Brewer

L La Llorona La Llorona, ‘‘The Woman Who Cries’’ or the ‘‘Wailing Woman,’’ is a spirit dressed in white, often seen haunting bodies of water, or, in more modern versions of the legend, standing by the side of the road in the rain. She is usually said to be looking for her lost or murdered children. Recently, Chicana writers have reclaimed La Llorona as a figure of female empowerment. Folklorists agree that La Llorona is descended from Aztec mythology. There one finds a primary Mother Earth goddess, Tonantzin, expressed in several personalities, including Coatlicue and Cihuacoatl. Coatlicue is the mother of the sun god and moon goddess. Cihuacoatl is the ‘‘weeping goddess’’ of childbirth, newborns, and women who die in childbirth. La Llorona was originally a character who simultaneously represented both of Tonantzin’s aspects: life-giving power (childbirth) and life-taking power (death of children through carelessness or an evil nature). Over time, she lost her lifegiving qualities and became known only for her own children’s deaths. In some stories, the figure of La Malinche is conflated with La Llorona. La Malinche was an Aztec princess who was given to the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cort es, and who served him as translator and sexual partner; she is said to have borne the first mestizo (a person of mixed European and Native American ancestry) and that she cries for her ‘‘lost’’ children. However, the archetype of the mother/woman torn between her own needs and those of her children is universal and much older, appearing as early as Euripides’ Medea. Yet the story of La Llorona also includes many other universal themes, such as two lovers kept apart by race or socioeconomic class. In some Chicano stories, La Llorona is named Maria, evoking associations with the Virgin Mary’s motherhood. There are two main versions of her story. In some variants, she cries because she has lost her children through her own carelessness, frequently by deserting them when she commits suicide. In another, more sinister version, she has killed her children out of vengeance by drowning them in a river, often because her upper-class lover has rejected her and married a woman of his own social standing. Other

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versions entail that her husband, provoked by her stretch marks, has left her for a younger and/or prettier woman, or has extramarital affairs. She kills their children, the cause of her ‘‘imperfection’’ as a wife. The most unusual variation on the revenge narrative casts Maria as a young woman married to an older man. She is the one having affairs; she drowns her lover’s children to protect her marriage and reputation. In any case, whether the children’s deaths are caused by self-hatred, carelessness, or spite, she is the spirit of a woman who has killed herself. Frequently, when she reaches heaven, she is sent back to Earth to collect the souls of her children before she can enter. Chicana writers such as Helena Maria Viramontes (‘‘The Cariboo Cafe ’’), Sandra Cisneros (‘‘Woman Hollering Creek’’), and Alicia Gaspar de Alba (‘‘La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge’’) have reclaimed La Llorona, rejuvenating her life-giving power and reinscribing her story to show how it is the failures and weaknesses of men that may cause women to kill their own children as acts of resistance against patriarchy’s abuses of women, and especially of mothers. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Class; Death; Ethnicity; Folk Belief; Lament; Legend, Supernatural; Mothers’ Folklore; Violence; Virgin, Cult of the. References: Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1992; Cole, SuzAnne C., and Jeff W. Lindemann. ‘‘The Legend of La Llorona: Its Origins and Purposes.’’ Southwestern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 2, no. 1 (1994): 3–8; Ramirez, Arturo. ‘‘La Llorona: Structure and Archetype.’’ In Chicano Border: Culture and Folklore, eds. Jose Villarino and Arturo Ramirez, 19–26. San Diego, CA: Marin, 1992; Viramontes, Helena Maria. ‘‘The Cariboo Cafe.’’ In The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Publico, 1985.

Sarah Catlin-Dupuy Lacemaking Lace is an ornamental network of openwork fabric formed by interwoven threads without any supporting material as a foundation. There are two main types of lace: point, also called needle lace, and bobbin lace. Though it was considered a luxury item, lace’s value transcended its place in fashion—it was important on an economic level; almost every European country had a lace industry at some point. During the early centuries of its manufacture, it was primarily women and children who were involved in lace production, though sometimes men were involved in its creation and distribution. Most scholars agree that needle lace began in Venice in the early 1500s. Intricate laces were made using just a single needle and thread. It developed from Italian reticella (a technique derived from embroidery) which was drawn threadwork on a support—the threads were taken or ‘‘drawn’’ out of the cloth, and the empty space was filled in with other thread to create a design. Unlike needle lace, the origins of bobbin lace are disputed. Though it was established in both Flanders and Venice by the mid-1500s, it is Flanders that became the preeminent center of lace production. Some think the antecedents of bobbin lace may have developed from a technique called passamenterie, ‘‘the weaving of braids.’’ Passaments were ornamental

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braids, ribbons, and precious metals used to decorate garments. The techniques of bobbin lace and passamenterie were similar: looms or long cushion pins held the threads in place; to keep the threads from tangling, they were wound on weights or bobbins made of lead, bone, or wood. Flanders became a major producer of bobbin lace because it was a center of the arts and had an intact infrastructure for trade, access to cheap labor from convents and poorhouses, and was a source of thread—flax was a major regional crop and of excellent quality. Since it was made by hand and very time-consuming, lace was quite expensive. The Catholic Church— which could afford it—was a principal consumer of lace, especially for the robes adorning statues of saints. Between 1600 and 1650, as many European countries grew in economic strength, lacemaking spread throughout Europe and the British Isles. During this time and into the seventeenth century, clothes with lace decoration became fashionable for both men and women of nobility. This coincided with the golden age of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, famous for its opulence and extravagance. A raised collar and large ruff, requiring yards of lace, were very stylish; Renaissance fashions helped spur the development of new lace styles and techniques. Pattern books that came into circulation after the development of the printing press were usually geared toward women and, along with new techniques, made lace production more accessible, allowing cottage industries to emerge in many places. In 1818, the first bobbin lace net was produced by machine. Though at first machine lace was looked down upon, it was faster to produce and less expensive than handmade lace. As the Industrial Revolution expanded throughout the 1800s, it became more difficult for the handmade lace industry to thrive. By the late 1800s, with less demand for lace in clothing, both the handmade and machine-produced lace industries dwindled. Lacemaking was first introduced to the United States during the colonial period. The colonists brought skills necessary for their new life, including lacemaking. The earliest (and only) records of large-scale U.S. lace production are from seventeenth-century Ipswich, Massachusetts, where, according to a 1797 copy of the American Gazetteer, women and children made lace to supplement their families’ earnings. The advent of machine-made lace affected the lace-making workforce, which was periodically replenished with the arrival of new immigrants who carried the skill with them. Other techniques for making lace-like material include crochet and tatting. Crochet, like lace, is an open fabric without a cloth ground or any other supporting material. It developed from the Asian craft of tambour embroidery (so-called because the work frame looked like a drum or tambourine). A hooked needle is used to make a chain of loops of thread and to link the stitches. Crochet became popular in France in the seventeenth century; by the mid-nineteenth century, it was taught throughout Ireland and became a common technique for making lace there. Tatting originated in the mid-1800s, remained a favorite pastime through the late nineteenth century, and has recently reemerged as a popular craft. Sometimes called ‘‘knotting,’’ it is made using a tatting shuttle, a metal or plastic oval-shaped instrument that has a hook on one end. The technique involves joining small tatted rings employing decorative loops of thread,

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called picots, by using the hook on the end of the shuttle to join the thread. See also: Embroidery; Needlework; Sewing; Women’s Work. References: Allgeier, Gretchen. ‘‘A History of American Lace and Lacemakers.’’ Fiberarts 17 (January/February 1991): 11–12; Cotterell, Marta M. ‘‘Lacemaking in Colonial Ipswich, Massachusetts.’’ Antiques (December 1997): 854–863; Harang, Marni. ‘‘The Flowers of Flanders: Seventeenth-Century Flemish Bobbin Tape Lace.’’ Piecework (May/ June 1994): 61–63; Kraatz, Anne. Lace: History and Fashion. New York: Rizzoli, 1998; Lauriks, Wim. ‘‘The Birthplace of Lace Making.’’ LACE Magazine International 49 (Spring 1999); Levey, Santina. Lace: A History. London: W. S. Maney & Son Ltd., 1984.

Elena Martınez

Lament A lament is a non-narrative poem or song expressing deep sorrow, grief, or regret; it is a dirge about loss. Goddesses wail for their lost cities in the oldest Sumerian and Asian Indian documents, and the weeping goddess emerges. The great classic female blues singers complain about their lovers’ infidelities, their bosses’ harassment, and other troubles. In the Baltics, such songs are called raudas (‘‘weeping-songs’’); in Ireland, caoineadhs. In many patriarchal societies, a specialist class of mourners (moirologistres)—the weeping women—develops, whose laments offset typically male warlike, heroic, or epical songs. Like folk healers, lamenters are in an ambiguous alliance with the institutional religion which both needs and cannot totally control these channelers of dangerous expression. Their presence is tolerated, if not encouraged, at many ritual events, such as weddings and funerals. Laments draw from the lyrical tradition often associated with women, as opposed to the more narrative or epic male musical traditions. As in other genres of music or chant, lament draws from a ritual core of formulas whose symbolism is connected with the local language. The lamenter improvises for the event and the individual. Heavy use of repetition, embellishment of the deceased’s name, endearments, and diminutive names are traditional means of expressing and channeling strong emotions. A loss occurs when a member of a group leaves on a journey into the unknown, probably never to return. Another loss happens during a rite of passage, a unidirectional change into another state. Laments may be sung when recruits leave to join the army or during weddings when a woman in a patrilocal marriage leaves her natal home. In Finnish wedding laments, the bride and her birth family are spoken of in terms of endearment. In contrast, those who come to take her away—the family into which she is marrying—are portrayed as beasts or savage, cruel strangers. These laments underscore the death of the bride’s girlhood, the loss of her former self. The mother-in-law is called a stepmother—a stranger who displaces the bride’s own dear mother. In matrilocal weddings, there is no need for leavetaking laments for the bride; she stays within her natal family. Nor are they needed in societies which do not put maximum value on virginity (loss of sexual innocence), nor in more egalitarian societies in which a bride does not acquire the status of servant.

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The most extreme loss, as well as the final passage, is death. Funeral songs are thus most readily recognized as laments. In such, the deceased is commonly addressed directly, though often with a substitute name. Laments may also address other mourners and/or a deity. The ritual guides and strengthens the dead with praise of her/his worth as shown by the inestimable grief of those left behind. It implores those already ‘‘on the other side’’ to receive the dead as welcome guests and to help them in their new location. Often a special class or caste of women specializes in the art of weeping as a way of bridging the world left behind and the world beyond. It is felt as a calling. Weeping women are usually older, and thus experienced in the suffering of life. They take up the emotions of the community by offering themselves and their own lives with projected anguish. Theirs is a shamanlike summoning and unleashing of frightening emotional powers, eliciting and channeling as ‘‘women who made the long and dangerous journeys to the domains of the dead . . . explored the distant realms of the interior world . . . souls traveled to frightening realms beyond the borders of common experience’’ (Currier 1991: 50). Female exploration of interior hells projected as journeys to the strange and unknown can be understood in opposition to male exploration of exterior dangers consistent with physical forays in real life. The wailing woman learns to control, ride, and channel the powers unleashed and the tension felt, instead of being so overcome as to be destroyed. At funerals, the lamenters lead the departed spirit safely to the other side. The emotions in recognizing one’s mortality are given expression to flow, to cleanse the grievers from being poisoned by anguish. It is also perhaps the ultimate expression of the commonality of women as a shared cycle of birth, loss, grief, suffering, and death through orphanhood, widowhood, abandonment, deaths of loved ones, and their own mortality. Women’s common roles as lamenters may result from their greater experiences of grief ensuing from stronger emotional bonds. Their expression may also be a cry for help by the weak. Further, the near-universal lower status of women tends to make acceptable their expression of extreme emotions—self-mutilation, rending clothes, and the like—which would not be tolerated in men. Professional lamenting is an occupation that affords creative expression, status, and social power in the realm of the supernatural or magical. In societies in which women’s status is otherwise low and/ or their social position harsh, female lamenters stand on the bridge between life and death, where even the most powerful warrior is helpless. See also: Death; Folk Belief; Folk Custom; Folk Music and Folksong; Gender; La Llorona; Magic; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Wedding; Women’s Work. References: Alexiou, Margaret. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Second English edition revised by Dimitrios Yatromanolakis and Panagiotis Roilos. Baltimore: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002 [1974]; Bourke, Angela. ‘‘More in Anger Than In Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 160–182. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Currier, Alvin C. Karelia: The Songsingers’ Land and the Land of Mary’s Sons (An Introduction to and Meditation on Karelian Orthodox Culture). Madison: self-published, 1991; Feld, Steven. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression.

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Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982 [1978]; Jones, LeRoi [Amiri Baraka]. Blues People. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963; Kramer, Samuel. Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1940; Nenola-Kallio, Aili. Studies in Ingrian Laments. Folklore Fellows Communications. Volume C1 (No. 234). Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1982; Rosenblatt, Paul, R. Patricia Walsh, and Douglas Jackson. Grief and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New Haven, CT: HRAF (Human Relations Area Files) Press, 1976; Weinbaum, Batya. ‘‘Lament ritual transformed into literature: Positing women’s prayer as cornerstone in western classical literature.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 114, no. 451 (Winter 2001): 20–39.

Aija Veldre Beldavs Laundry Without the aid of electricity, gas, or running water, stand-alone automatic washing machines and dryers, washing clothes was an arduous task for earlier generations of women. For those who needed to carry well water or melt ice, heat water, and then dry heavy cotton and woolen clothing, the chore could stretch out for days, especially during winter weather. Even when contained to one day, laundry helped organize the rest of the week’s work. In North America, Monday was traditionally washday, in part because women could be freed from meal preparation by serving leftovers from a large weekend meal. Ironing, mending, and other household responsibilities followed for the rest of the week. Understandably, laundry was often disliked. In 1869, Catharine Beecher called it ‘‘the American housekeeper’s hardest problem’’ (Beecher 1869) and advocated removing laundry from the household. She had in mind forming cooperative laundries, a concept that never gained popularity. However, available evidence—how-to manuals, diaries, and household budgets— all suggest that many nineteenth-century women shared Beecher’s negative view of laundry, and, whenever they had any discretionary money, would jettison the task. For women of Color and those otherwise economically disadvantaged, laundry therefore provided necessary wage-labor performed for more affluent White households. Before being eclipsed by the widespread availability of washing machines, commercial laundries were a major employer of female industrial labor. Women continued to be burdened by laundry throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and in some neighborhoods were judged by their clotheslines; the cleanliness and brightness of the clothes, as well as the order and timeliness with which they were hung, were considered reliable marks of good housekeeping, hence good character. While today laundry is nothing like the work faced by earlier generations, and far fewer women have their self-worth assessed by a clothesline, it can be a demanding chore for contemporary women because of changing practices that, for example, might demand that a pair of jeans be worn only once before being thrown into the wash. Despite its burdens, laundry has positive associations for some women. In the past, washday sometimes allowed women to get out of the house and socialize while hanging clothes out to dry. Enjoyment can be found in the transformation of dirty clothes to clean ones, and in the hanging out of

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clothes in an aesthetically pleasing pattern. Laundry can offer women an opportunity to perfect a form and to gain a sense of control rarely found in lives of domestic labor. Finally, some women consider doing laundry an expression of their ethic of care; when hanging out clothes, for example, they may feel symbolically connected to their families and even to other women across generations and cultures who have performed the same task. Roberta Canton’s superb documentary film Clothesline (1981) uncovers both the artistry and drudgery of doing laundry. See also: Folklore About Women; Gender; Gossip; Housekeeping; Occupational Folklore; Region: United States; Wage Work; Women’s Work. References: Beecher, Catharine E., and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The American Woman’s Home. New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1869; Cantow, Roberta. Clotheslines. Video. Buffalo Rose Productions, 1981; Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.

Diane Tye Legend, Local Local legends are stories that are associated with particular locations: a striking feature of the natural landscape (a rock, hill, or swamp) or of the built environment (a house, a bridge, or a monument in a cemetery), a site of historical significance (a battle, a devastating accident, or a murder) or of an unusual and/or supernatural phenomenon (a UFO sighting, a ‘‘monster’s’’ habitation, or an apparition of the Virgin Mary). Local legends have an etiological function when used to explain the origin and nature of place names, striking geomorphologic features, and other local phenomena. Such stories may reinforce historical memory and/or be part of a community’s larger mythological system. ‘‘Gallows Hill’’ in Salem, Massachusetts, for example, is designated in legends as the place where those convicted of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials were hanged in 1692. The formation known as Devil’s Tower (a monolith rising 1,267 feet above the surrounding landscape in northeastern Wyoming) is explained by Kiowa legends as the product of the Great Spirit’s intervention to save a group of children who were threatened by a bear. Etiological stories may also give narrative form to particular belief practices, such as the relationship between cursing and the birth of something unnatural; for example, in New Jersey, ‘‘Mother Leeds’’ is said to have cursed her thirteenth child and given birth to the Jersey Devil. Local legends frequently memorialize historical events of local significance. Women often figure prominently in such legends, which, in turn, encode local norms of proper and improper gender behavior. For example, local legends foreground women’s civilizing roles in saving particular towns in Georgia from the destruction of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s notorious march through that area during the Civil War. Other local legends may attest to a woman’s innocence or guilt in a local murder; good examples are the stories about Lizzie Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, and Belle Gunness in La Porte, Indiana. Local legends may describe the extraordinary deeds of local personages of historical significance, such as Lady

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Godiva, who rode naked on her horse through Coventry, England, in a gesture to free the town from its servitude to her husband. Folklorists use the term ‘‘migratory legends’’ for stories that share traits or motifs with legends found elsewhere but have been localized through associations with local landmarks and/or the attributions of names of local personalities (a process known as ‘‘oicotypification’’ or ‘‘ecotypification’’). These legends include stories about lover’s leaps, tales of La Llorona, and such classic adolescent legends as ‘‘The Vanishing Hitchhiker,’’ ‘‘The Hook,’’ and ‘‘The Boyfriend’s Death.’’ Sites associated with murders and other gruesome or tragic events may be said to be haunted and become the source of adolescent legend-trips, which typically involve a ritual visit. Such sites range widely from haunted statuary in cemeteries to haunted railroad crossings to university buildings and dormitory rooms said to be haunted by students who have committed suicide or who have been murdered. Often, such visits involve ostensive action, the acting out of local supernatural legends. See also: Borden, Lizzie; La Llorona; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Local Characters; Ritual; Witchcraft, Historical. References: Ashton, John. ‘‘Ecotypes, Etiology and Contemporary Legend: The ‘Webber’ Cycle in Western Newfoundland.’’ Contemporary Legend, New Series 4 (2001): 48–60; Bird, S. Elizabeth. ‘‘Playing with Fear: Interpreting the Adolescent Legend Trip.’’ Western Folklore 53 (1994): 191–209; Bronner, Simon J. Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Student Life. Little Rock, AR: August House Publishers, 1995; Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: Norton, 1981; Davidson, H. R. Ellis. ‘‘The Legend of Lady Godiva.’’ Folklore, vol. 80, no. 2 (1969): 107–121; Henken, Elissa R. ‘‘Taming the Enemy: Georgian Narratives about the Civil War.’’ Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 40, no. 3 (2003): 289–307; Langlois, Janet. L. ‘‘Belle Gunness, the Lady Bluebeard: Narrative Use of a Deviant Woman.’’ In Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, eds. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik, 109–124. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Lindahl, Carl. ‘‘Ostensive Healing: Pilgrimage to the San Antonio Ghost Tracts.’’ Journal of American Folklore 118 (2005): 164–185; McCloy, James F., and Ray Miller. Phantom of the Pines. Moorestown, NJ: Middle Atlantic Press, 1998; Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969.

Linda J. Lee and Cathy Lynn Preston Legend, Religious All legends are expressions of belief systems, but some deal specifically with religious themes, doctrines, or denominations. In the case of religious legends, the subject matter will often encompass supernatural or miraculous occurrences that correspond to and reinforce a religious belief. Both relating to and related with everyday life, religious legends represent a productive avenue for the exploration of issues of belief. They often occur on the margins of religious systems, at the cultural level, or better yet, as part of what is known as folk or vernacular religion, which has been described as ‘‘religion as it is lived’’ (Primiano 1995). As such, religious legends circulate outside of the sponsorship of institutionalized denominational hierarchies, arising instead from individual needs

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and syncretic belief systems. For example, Lydia Fish has explored Christian legend cycles of a coming apocalypse predicted by the Vanishing Hitchhiker, a common character in secular urban legends. In the versions she collected, a motorist picks up a hitchhiker who asks a question about her or his belief in or preparation for Jesus’ second coming. Soon after, the passenger disappears from the backseat of the car, and the storyteller variously identifies the passenger as Jesus, a nun, a Nephite, St. Joseph, or John the Baptist. Passed on by word of mouth and outside the official structure of any Christian denomination, such tales serve as expressions of belief about the state of the world and its eschatological future while providing dramatic narratives for their listeners. Because they act as a widespread means of communication, legends can be found in almost all faiths and belief traditions. Michiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken have detailed a variety of ghost legends that center on mothers and their children, and their functions within modern Japanese culture with its mixture of Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, and Christian elements. Catholic legend cycles are discussed in Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa’s study of Italian American folklore and in Deborah Anders Silverman’s study of Polish American folklore. Various contemporary Jewish legends about the coming Messiah have been collected by Mordechai Staiman; Linda Degh has discussed ‘‘testimonial miracle legends’’ among Pentecostals; and Bill Ellis has studied contemporary legends concerning satanism and the occult, which both oppose and are informed by mainstream American Christianity. While legend cycles are often informed by the cultural context of specific faith traditions or denominations, legend cycles also circulate across boundaries, as the similarities of Wandering Jew legends to the Vanishing Hitchhiker stories above attest. William A. Wilson provides another example of this conflation in his discussion of a legend involving two Mormon women missionaries who, when knocking on the door of a rapist, were protected because the man saw three male figures with swords standing behind them, a reference to the Mormon legend tradition of the Three Nephites. Wilson then points to a very similar legend told within a Methodist tradition wherein a rapist declines to molest a young girl because a ‘‘huge person’’ (identified as the Holy Comforter) is standing beside her. From this example, it is apparent that legend motifs are dynamically shaped to fit the belief system in a new context. Often legends involve, proclaim, or mediate gender, and the treatment of gender in religious legends can reinforce patriarchal values inscribed in traditional gender roles. However, because legends exist outside of official religious discourse, they are also an avenue of resistance and an expression of the experiences of women. For example, Margaret K. Brady has studied the narratives by Mormon women who, as a result of their visions of unborn children, decide to have another child. Brady argues that these personalexperience narratives, which become legendary as they are passed on, represent a way for women to claim power in their reproductive choices within patriarchal societies. Depending on how broadly one defines religion—for example, Jill Dubisch has noted religious aspects related to health-food movements—religious

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legends are ubiquitous, but even using a more strict definition of religion, religious legends are extremely widespread within all of the various denominations and faith traditions. See also: Folk Belief; Legend, Supernatural; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Personal-Experience Narrative; Pregnancy. References: Brady, Margaret K. ‘‘Transformations of Power: Mormon Women’s Visionary Narratives’’ Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 461–68; Degh, Linda. Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001; Dubisch, Jill. ‘‘You Are What You Eat: Religious Aspects of the Health Food Movement.’’ In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, ed. Elliott Oring, 124–35. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989; Ellis, Bill. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000; Fish, Lydia. M. ‘‘Jesus on the Thruway: The Vanishing Hitchhiker Strikes Again.’’ Indiana Folklore, vol. 9 no.1 (1976): 5–13; Hand, Wayland D., ed. American Folk Legend: A Symposium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971; Iwasaka, Michiko, and Barre Toelken. Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994; Mathias, Elizabeth, and Richard Raspa. Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985; Primiano, Leonard Norman. ‘‘Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife.’’ Western Folklore 54 (1995): 37–56; Silverman, Deborah Anders. Polish-American Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000; Staiman, Mordechai. Waiting for the Messiah: Stories to Inspire Jews with Hope. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997; Wilson, William A. ‘‘Mormon Folklore: Faith or Folly?’’ Brigham Young Magazine, vol. 49, no. 2 (1995): 47–54; Wojcik, Daniel. ‘‘‘Polaroids from Heaven’: Photography, Folk Religion, and the Miraculous Image Tradition at a Marian Apparition Site.’’ Journal of American Folklore 109 (1996): 129–148.

David A. Allred

Legend, Supernatural Supernatural legends are narratives that describe human encounters with the supernatural world, a realm that, in legend, as in experience-centered belief narratives, is ‘‘objectively real’’ although ‘‘qualitatively different from the everyday material world’’ but ‘‘that interacts with’’ the material world in certain ways that are inclusive of ‘‘beings that do not require a physical body in order to live’’ (Hufford: 11). Supernatural legends address a wide variety of topics, including witchcraft and magic, fairies and other supernatural beings, ghosts and revenants, encounters with UFOs, aliens, the ‘‘Men in Black,’’ and religious and/or celebrity apparitions. When told as a first-hand account of a supernatural experience, the supernatural legend is called a ‘‘memorate.’’ Traditional witchcraft legends often present a decidedly unfavorable view of women as threatening to their community. The witch in legend is almost always devious: the child-stealing witch may indiscriminately take milk or butter from her neighbor’s cow, sell her soul to the Devil to acquire knowledge of witchcraft, and/or manipulate household objects and servants to facilitate getting herself to a witches’ Sabbath. Venetia Newall’s The Witch Figure (1973) offers perspectives from a variety of cultures, while, perhaps, the oldest compilation of witchcraft beliefs and legends is Malleus Maleficarum, a fifteenth-century witch-hunter’s guide. Many types of supernatural beings appear in traditional legends, including fairies, household spirits, the ‘‘hidden people,’’ trolls, jinns (or djinns),

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demons, and nature spirits. Such beings are often presented as ambiguous figures, alternately capable of helpful and harmful actions toward human beings. Katherine Briggs’ The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (1967) and Diane Purkiss’ At the Bottom of the Garden (2001) are excellent studies of supernatural beings, as is Peter Narvaez’s The Good People (1991), a collection of contemporary fairy-lore essays. Recent accounts of UFO sightings, abductions, and encounters with ‘‘Men in Black’’ bear a striking resemblance to traditional fairy-abduction stories, suggesting that these parallel narrative traditions address similar psychological concerns. Ghosts that haunt various locations and objects are popular topics of both contemporary and historical supernatural legends that frequently appear in regional collections such as Ruth Ann Musick’s The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales (1965). Craig Dominy’s popular Web site, ‘‘The Moonlit Road,’’ is a valuable textual and audio repository of ghost stories from the American South, augmented by analyses of their cultural and historical contexts. Yet other studies, like Gillian Bennett’s Alas, Poor Ghost! (1999), address gender in relation to traditions of supernatural belief. Frightening or uncanny locations often serve as the destination for adolescent legend-trips, which typically involve a ritual visit to a supposedly haunted house, cemetery, bridge, road, or railroad crossing that has been singled out by local tradition. Such visits frequently involve ostensive action, or the literal acting out of supernatural legends, as in the legend-game ‘‘Bloody Mary’’ (or ‘‘Mary Whales’’), performed by adolescent girls. Similarly, religious figures such as the Virgin Mary and popular-culture celebrity figures such as Elvis Presley are said to have appeared supernaturally to people in various geographic locations and on various objects (including on a grilled-cheese sandwich in 2004), and a Martian visitation began occurring in a park in Queens, New York City, in 1968. Such sites become objects of pilgrimage for the faithful and/or the curious. Supernatural legends became increasingly subject to commoditization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through sales of vanity books, onsite tourism, television shows that offer vicarious legend-trips for their viewers, and Internet auctions of haunted objects. See also: Bloody Mary; Cyberculture; La Llorona; Legend, Local; Legend, Religious; Memorate; Virgin, Cult of the; Witchcraft, Historical. References: Bird, S. Elizabeth. ‘‘Playing with Fear: Interpreting the Adolescent Legend Trip.’’ Western Folklore 53 (1994): 191–209; Bullard, Thomas E. ‘‘UFO Abduction Reports: The Supernatural Kidnap Narrative Returns in Technological Guise.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 102, no. 404 (1989): 147–170; Ellis, Bill. ‘‘Legend-Trips and Satanism: Adolescents’ Ostensive Traditions as ‘Cult’ Activity.’’ In Contemporary Legend: A Reader, eds. G. Bennett and P. Smith, 167–186. New York: Garland Publications, 1996; Hufford, David J. ‘‘Beings Without Bodies: An Experience-Centered Theory of the Belief in Spirits.’’ In Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural, ed. Barbara Walker, 11–45. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1995; Langlois, Janet. ‘‘Mary Whales, I Believe in You.’’ Indiana Folklore, A Reader, ed. Linda Degh, 186–224. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980; ‘‘The Moonlit Road.’’ n.d. http://www.themoonlitroad.com/welco me001.html (accessed June 30, 2007); Tucker, Elizabeth. ‘‘Ghosts in Mirrors: Reflections of the Self.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 118, no. 468 (2005): 186203; Wojcik,

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Daniel. ‘‘‘Polaroids from Heaven’: Photography, Folk Religion, and Miraculous Image Tradition at a Marian Apparition Site.’’ Journal of American Folklore 109 (1996): 129–148.

Linda J. Lee and Cathy Lynn Preston Legend, Urban/Contemporary Urban legends are short narratives that are situated in contemporary life and that may or may not be literally true but that often ‘‘ring’’ true for their performers and their performers’ audiences. Usually, secular in nature, set in the real world, and performed in the midst of everyday conversations, urban legends describe frightening, threatening, comic, embarrassing, or simply bizarre situations that are said to have occurred to people in the recent past, that might be happening in the present, and that could occur again in the future. Among academic folklorists, urban legends are alternatively referred to as modern legends, contemporary legends, rumor legends, and belief legends. In the popular press, urban legends are frequently identified by the misnomer ‘‘urban myths,’’ while those who tell urban legends often refer to them simply as scary tales, watercooler stories, e-mails, and friend-of-a-friend stories (as in ‘‘A friend of a friend told me that . . .’’ or, ‘‘I heard this from a friend of a friend’’). Each of the descriptive terms associated with the urban legend suggests something about the nature of this type of story. The adjectives ‘‘urban’’ and ‘‘modern’’ are the products of initial attempts on the part of scholars to associate this kind of legend with city environments as opposed to rural areas and to differentiate it from the supernatural legends frequently associated with an agrarian lifestyle. In fact, however, urban legends circulate in both urban and rural environments, and some urban legends (such as the ‘‘blood libel’’ legend) predate modernity, while yet others (such as ‘‘The Vanishing Hitchhiker’’) have supernatural motifs; thus, many scholars’ use of the term ‘‘contemporary’’ in relation to such legends indicates that they emerge and reemerge in different places at various times as a means of providing symbolic conduits for the negotiation of belief (hence the term ‘‘belief legend’’) in relation to issues that are contemporaneous with that place and time. That such stories are associated with rumor, watercoolers, e-mail, and friends of friends suggests both their ties to everyday conversation and their function as an informal conduit of information shared, for example, among adolescents at slumber parties and in school locker rooms, among adults during breaks at work or while socializing at a grocery store, in a pub, or at church. And while urban legends are frequently transmitted from one individual to another as a type of ‘‘folk news,’’ they may also be performed purely for their entertainment value. Additionally, urban legends are frequently disseminated through e-mail and such formal channels of communication as the news (print and broadcast), informational fliers distributed by churches and schools, and television programs, movies, novels, short stories, and comic books. The topics of urban legends range widely from the misuse of technology to mistrust of corporate culture, from food contamination to body contamination, from sex to murder, and from threatening chain letters to satanic

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panics. Common among adolescent and teenage girls as well as adult women are legends concerning female sexuality. Adolescent girls, for example, tell of teenage couples out on a date who find themselves at a favorite local parking place, either engaged in or presumably about to engage in some level of sexual behavior. In one legend, ‘‘The Hook,’’ the car’s radio announces that a maniac, who has a hook for a hand, has escaped from the mental hospital and is in the area. This frightens the girl, and she asks the boy to take her home. Angry, he slams his foot down on the gas pedal and quickly drives away from the parking spot. When the couple arrives at the girl’s home, they discover a hook hanging from the car door on the girl’s side of the car. Similarly, adult women tell stories such as ‘‘The Nude Surprise Party,’’ a ‘‘most embarrassing moment’’ story in which a woman and her fiance find themselves alone at her home and decide to have sex. Shortly after undressing, she receives a phone call requesting that she perform an errand in the basement; the two of them, still naked, run down to the basement, only to be surprised (much to the woman’s embarrassment) by their extended families and friends, who have gathered to throw them an engagement party. In other versions of the legend (which displace the engagement party with a birthday party and in which there is no male sexual partner mentioned, but instead a woman who comes downstairs calling for her dog after having spread peanut butter on her crotch), the woman’s embarrassment has less to do with her willingness to engage in premarital sex than with the type of sex in which she is willing to engage. Each legend and its variants situates sex as a domain of both personal pleasure and danger to the physical and/or the social self, and functions as a cautionary tale that, by foregrounding danger, seeks to curtail female sexuality. Women are not always the victims in such stories; sometimes they are the victimizers. Furthermore, the roles of victim and victimizer may switch depending upon when the legend is told and by whom. For example, in early versions of a legend commonly known as ‘‘The Kidney Heist,’’ a man, while out of town, drops by a bar where he is seduced by a beautiful woman and lured to her hotel room. In her room, he is drugged and passes out only to wake up the next morning in a bathtub of ice and with a freshly stitched incision on his back. The woman is gone and, as he discovers later at the hospital, so is his kidney; she removed it in the hotel room in order to sell it on the illegal organ-transplant market. Not only does the legend articulate contemporary worries concerning modern medical practices such as organ transplants, but it articulates male fears of the femme fatale and functions as a cautionary morality tale about casual sex. Later versions of the story, appearing around the time ‘‘roofies’’ (Rohypnol) and other daterape drugs hit the formal news, switch the gender of the victim and victimizer. Interestingly, in these versions, frequently circulated among women, the woman is drugged in the bar while having a drink with friends, suggesting, as Elissa Henken (1994) argues, that women incur penalties for lesser cultural transgressions (out drinking with friends) than do men (drinking and actively seeking illicit sexual engagement). Insomuch as heterosexual sex might lead to pregnancy, it is not surprising that another set of commonly told legends concern motherhood. ‘‘The

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Babysitter and the Man Upstairs’’ and ‘‘The Hippie Babysitter’’ call into question adolescent and teenaged girls’ childcare skills (and thus, by extension, their potential as mothers) through narratives in which the children in the girl’s care are killed by either an intruder or accidentally by the babysitter herself. Similarly, ‘‘The Inept Mother’’ articulates the fears of adult women: A mother with three small children was giving her six-month-old baby a bath in the tub when her two-year-old cut himself very badly. She couldn’t leave her baby in the water, so she told her six-year-old to run across the street to the neighbors and get help. It took so long that she left the baby to help the two-year-old, who was unconscious by now. She hears sirens, thinking help was there, but they were there because her six-year-old had been hit by a car. In the meantime, the baby in the tub drowned and the two-year-old bled to death. So she lost all three of her children in twenty minutes through no fault of her own.

Although this version of ‘‘The Inept Mother,’’ recorded by Janet Langlois, ends with the disclaimer of ‘‘through no fault of her own,’’ foregrounding the burdens faced by mothers who have too much to do and no help, the legend simultaneously maps society’s fears of incompetent and/or ‘‘unnatural’’ mothers, including the possibility that encoded in the woman’s incompetence is a psychological rejection of motherhood itself as a culturally required gendered performance. While in urban legend, women are occasionally the perpetrators of violence against others, more often they are the victims of violence: female college students have their throats slit by male maniacs while alone in their dormitories (‘‘The Roommate’s Death’’); women are threatened with death by men hiding in the backseats of their cars (‘‘The Killer in the Backseat’’) or by men hiding under their cars that have been parked in shopping mall parking lots (‘‘The Slasher Under the Car’’). While such legends articulate the very real social problem of violence perpetrated against women and may function informationally as cautionary tales to keep women safe, such legends also work to constrict female mobility. As Lara Maynard has explained in relation to legends about violence done to women, women are told, ‘‘on the one hand, ‘be liberated, be confident, be adventurous and brave’ and, on the other, ‘be careful, be afraid.’ Both messages, in their own ways, say ‘don’t be a victim,’ and women are left to negotiate through them by living with the attitudes of the first, but within the boundaries of the second.’’ In urban legends, violence may also take the form of body contamination. Fears concerning the body are encoded in narratives that speak of black widow spiders laying eggs that hatch and infest women’s beehive and dreadlock hairdos, and of a woman who, while on vacation (in Africa, South America, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, or the American South), is bitten on her cheek by a spider that lays its eggs under her skin, forming a boil, which either bursts or is lanced, releasing its contents—scads of baby spiders— much to the woman’s horror and frequently causing her to go insane from the shock. Or the body may be compromised by contaminated food or drink (‘‘The Kentucky Fried Rat’’ and ‘‘The Mouse in the Coke’’), or by

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disease (people are punctured by hidden HIV-contaminated needles left in the coin-return slots of public telephones or soda machines, in theater seats, or on the underside of gas pump handles). In some stories, the body’s boundaries become a symbol of geographical and cultural boundaries (as in the versions of ‘‘Welcome to the World of AIDS’’ collected by Diane Goldstein [1992] in Newfoundland), while in others, the body’s boundaries are displaced by the boundaries of the nation (as in stories collected in the United States about poisonous snakes or spiders found in imported items ranging from bananas to blankets). A wide array of urban legends have been collected by Jan Harold Brunvand and published in a series of anthologies from The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981) to The Baby Train (1993). Analytical and theoretical studies of urban legends (both as a broad cultural phenomenon and as the object of specific case studies) have been published as book-length collections of essays (Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith’s Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, Volumes I–V, 1984–1990), as articles in academic Folklore journals, including Contemporary Legend: The Journal of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, as book-length studies of a particular legend (Alan Dundes, Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics, 2002), and as studies of related legends (Gary Alan Fine, Manufacturing Tales: Sex and Money in Contemporary Legends, 1992; Bill Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live, 2001; and Diane E. Goldstein, Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception, 2004). Yet other studies focus on urban legends as told within specific groups (for example, Patricia A. Turner’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture, 1993; Mariamne H. Whatley and Elissa R. Henken’s Did You Hear About the Girl Who . . . ?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, & Human Sexuality, 2000) and as related to the broad topic of folk belief (Linda Degh, Legend and Belief, 2001). See also: Babysitting; Cyberculture; Folk Belief; Legend, Local; Legend, Religious; Legend, Supernatural; Mothers’ Folklore; Pregnancy; Rumor; Sexuality; Storytelling; Violence. References: Goldstein, Diane E. ‘‘Welcome to the Mainland, Welcome to the World of AIDS: Cultural Viability, Localization, and Contemporary Legend.’’ Contemporary Legend 2 (1992): 23–40; Henken, Elissa R. ‘‘Gender Shifts in Contemporary Legend.’’ Western Folklore 63 (2004): 237–256; Langlois, Janet L. ‘‘Mother’s Double Talk.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed., Joan Newlon Radner, 80–97. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Maynard, Lara. ‘‘Locked Doors: Bearer-Centered Interpretation of ‘The Roommate’s Death’ and Other Contemporary Legends of Special Relevance to Females.’’ Contemporary Legend 4 (1998): 97–115.

Cathy Lynn Preston Lesbian and Queer Studies Lesbian/Queer Studies features scholarship and teaching focused on the historical and contemporary experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender populations. Its inquiry documents past experiences, but also promotes diversity, dialogue, and new knowledge formation among

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students, teachers, librarians, researchers, independent scholars, and other interested citizens. Lesbian/Queer Studies is a countercultural movement in the sense that it actively contests heterosexism and homophobia. It also advances a climate of rigorous teaching and research into the interdependent phenomena of society, gender, sexuality, and culture. As with other academic fields tracing their origins to social movements, Lesbian/Queer Studies does not confine its mission to the classroom. Events, services, mentoring, and academic support are all important cocurricular features of an inclusive learning environment. Further, scholars in Lesbian/Queer Studies frequently engage in advocacy beyond the campus and its immediate environs. It is difficult to delineate Lesbian/Queer Studies as a discretely bounded set of scholarly practices or pursuits. Just as Women’s Studies is not defined solely by topic, practitioner, or method, Lesbian/Queer Studies is too complex to categorize. The field involves scholars from every academic discipline. The humanities, social studies, sciences, and professions all figure within an integrated study of sexual pluralism. Far from a uniform set of questions, sources, or theories, the field nonetheless patterns itself on issueoriented inquiry, typically pursued through interdisciplinary scholarship. While there neither is, nor can be, a standard or official account of this field’s formation, it has its origins in late-twentieth-century political movement culture. Two key influences on Lesbian/Queer Studies were the civil rights and women’s movements. Both took strength from participation by college students, staff, and faculty. These academic activists directed their energy to social change, both on the campus and in the wider community. While community actions contested discriminatory practice, policy, and legislation at the local, state, and national levels, campus actions tended to target the university’s silence and complicity in the face of inequality. One lasting outcome of academic activism was the emergence of college courses, organizations, certificate programs, minors, and majors dedicated to the study of historically underrepresented and/or disenfranchised populations. Programs in African American Studies and Women’s Studies, for example, became common by the 1980s. By the end of the 1990s, the same had begun to happen for Lesbian/Queer Studies. The institutionalization of such bodies of knowledge and the agendas associated with social movements represent a mixed blessing. At the same time that progressive innovations to the curriculum prove transformative, their absorption within the conservative context of the academy carries with it a serious risk: cooptation of the movement’s originating principles and the undermining of autonomy for its social and institutional critiques. At their best, such programs and centers function as agents for continued change by challenging universities to become, and remain, inclusive, equitable, and welcoming places in which people’s differences are regarded as neither divisive nor definitive. The development of Lesbian/Queer Studies is a story of generations, with each addressing the challenges and opportunities of a particular historical moment. With every decade, the perspective changes, paradigms shift, and events unfold in ways no one could forecast. Still, the movement persists.

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Most timelines for the gay and lesbian movement, and along with it the emergence of Lesbian/Queer Studies, highlight the 1969 Stonewall uprising, during which gay men at the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village fought back for the first time en masse against police harassment, as a landmark in political organizing. Responses to this galvanizing incident in the United States resulted in a newly vibrant effort to uphold the human rights of sexual minorities, among whom were many increasingly committed to exercising their own civic rights and responsibilities. In similar fashion, the late 1960s and early 1970s marked a time of grassroots action to revise university curricula to include Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/ Transsexual/Transgender (GLBT) Studies. In 1966, for instance, Columbia University in New York City hosted the nation’s first documented gay student organization, the Student Homophile League. During the 1980s, the GLBT/Queer Studies movement gained membership and momentum as the community mobilized to meet the HIV/AIDS crisis. 1983 witnessed the opening of Greenwich Village’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center, which would later give rise to a number of nationally visible direct action groups working to affirm the dignity of all persons, including the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Queer Nation, the Lesbian Avengers, and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). These groups use tactics from lobbying to guerrilla theater to raise consciousness about, and forward resistance to, sexual oppression. The late 1980s and 1990s witnessed emerging institutional recognition for Lesbian/Queer Studies. In 1986, the Lesbian/Gay Studies Center was established at Yale University. In 1988, the City College of San Francisco set in place America’s first Gay and Lesbian Studies Department. It was also in 1990 that the City University of New York opened its Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. Additionally, centers for sexuality studies at campuses such as Duke University and the City University of New York afford students of Lesbian/Queer Studies the opportunity to study and integrate related issues and content. Although Lesbian/Queer Studies most often takes the form of freestanding academic courses, or units within courses, at colleges and universities in the past decade there has been a gradual shift toward formalizing courses of undergraduate study in such a way as to make possible a sustained and shared exploration of sexuality as a category of analysis. At this writing, schools offering undergraduate majors in GLBT/Queer Studies include Brown University, the University of Chicago, and Wesleyan University. Still more campuses make minors available, including University of California, Berkeley, the University of Iowa, and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Programs in gay and lesbian studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, and sexual orientation and gender identity studies all contribute to such an ongoing intellectual project. Sexuality and gender, examined in terms of their importance to the structure of social relations, form the core enterprise of Lesbian/Queer Studies. Within the discipline, the study and advancement of the rights and conditions of sexual minorities also figure prominently. Scholars in this field

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contribute to new knowledge production by complicating our understanding of gender and sexual identities. Leaders in the field position themselves as public intellectuals, addressing audiences unbounded by academic politics. See also: Coding; Gender; Lesbian Folklore; Sexuality; Transgender Folklore. References: Abelove, Henry, Michele Aira Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds. The Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993; Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990; Cruikshank, Margaret, ed. Lesbian Studies: Present and Future. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982; Duberman, Martin, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., eds. ?Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: New American Library, 1989; Foster, Thomas, Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry, eds. The Gay ’90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies. New York: NYU Press, 1997; Minton, Henry L., ed. Gay and Lesbian Studies. New York: Haworth Press, 1992; Ristock, Janice L., and Catherine G. Taylor, eds. Inside the Academy and Out: Lesbian/ Gay/Queer Studies and Social Action. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Linda S. Watts Lesbian Folklore Folklorists may mean one of two things by the term ‘‘lesbian folklore.’’ The first is that lesbians, like any group that shares attributes, have folklore that is endemic to them as a community. But the term can also mean folklore about lesbians, shared by members of another group or other groups. The former characterization is the focus here. Like any large group that has breadth across cultures, speaking of a coherent whole in lesbian folklore is somewhat problematic. Many scholars rely on Joseph Goodwin’s (1989) notion that gay men (and, by extension, lesbians) form a subculture, in which certain beliefs, traditions, and creative processes are held in common. Goodwin’s notion of subculture enables folklorists to acknowledge that there are shared forms of creative expression that are commonly known within a folk group, but also allows that some individuals may not know them or engage in them. The subcultural designation also enables folklorists to avoid the more problematic term ‘‘community,’’ which suggests a coherent whole where none exists. While these subcultural folkloric forms vary widely from region to region and from country to country, they do have generic coherence and continuity in respect to the experiences that many (though not all) lesbians share. Narrative (personal-experience narratives and jokes), material (personal aesthetics), and ritual and festival genres (Pride festivals, music festivals, and weddings/commitment ceremonies) are widely found across the United States and Canada and have been extensively documented by folklorists. However, folklorists have paid almost no attention to Mexican lesbian experiences, and for the rest of North America, large urban centers rather than rural locations have been their focus. One aspect of lesbian folklore, often overemphasized in scholarship, is the coming-out experience. The process of realizing and ultimately revealing that one’s sexual identity is not normatively heterosexual—the process of acknowledging both internally and externally a lesbian identity (or a gay,

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bisexual, queer, transgendered, or transsexual one)—is termed ‘‘coming out’’ (of ‘‘the closet’’). The process of coming out, though arguably less hazardous in Canada and the United States now than it was in the past, often still involves shame and exclusion, if not fear of actual reprisals. In the United States in 2004, 16 percent of all hate crimes were motivated by sexual-orientation bias (Gay Life). However, the increasing visibility of gay men and lesbians in the public eye and the growing visibility of GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, queer) organization are allowing for more widespread acceptance of lesbian identity, especially in urban areas in the United States and Canada. Coming out, while not as problematic as it once was, can cause people to become alienated from friends, family, or coworkers. It often causes a backlash, especially in socially conservative contexts. The process of coming out can be gradual and evolves over time. The basic cultural assumption of heterosexuality requires lesbians to come out as a continual process that may take many years or even an entire lifetime. Every new situation a lesbian finds herself in may require coming out. Many lesbians, as a result of this marked experience in their lives, develop a coming-out story. These are personal-experience narratives told by individuals who have undergone the experience of acknowledging their sexual identities to persons they knew or suspected may have assumed them to be heterosexual. Such stories usually involve a sequence of events: internal rehearsals of what one will say about one’s sexuality, why one will say it and to whom, and descriptions of how the actual narrative was received and acted upon by others. They often focus, as do many personalexperience narratives, on both humorous situations in the coming-out process and on the more painful experiences that result from encounters with unreceptive parents or coworkers, for example. Coming-out stories are also shared among lesbians and can serve to provide coherence among groups of women as they look for commonalities in their experiences. Because coming-out stories are so pervasive among lesbians, and because their structural narrative patterns persist through retellings and from story to story, the coming-out narrative serves as an exemplar of the personal-experience narrative as a traditional genre of folklore. It has motifs and persistence across time and space. A woman will sometimes tell parts of someone else’s story because they resonate with her experience or because they otherwise carry meaning for her. In this sense, the coming-out story may function as much as legend as it does as personal-experience narrative. Most people have multiple or differential identities from which their narratives flow. When speaking of lesbian stories, we generally mean stories that are expressly about coming out, lesbian encounters, or other issues endemic to the lesbian experience. Thus, narrative genres associated with the lesbian experience include tales of encounters with famous lesbians (‘‘celebrity sightings’’) such as Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers (of the Indigo Girls), Melissa Etheridge, or Leisha Hailey. Other oral traditions also flourish in the lesbian context. The well-known joke cycle about how quickly romantically involved lesbians move in together persists and is often elaborated upon by lesbians in joking contexts. It is so familiar, in fact, that the Big Gay Sketch Show, when it premiered

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on the gay-and-lesbian-themed Logo cable channel in 2007, featured a sketch built around the premise. In it, two women are engaged in a speeddating exercise. In the one minute in which they interact, they go from getting to know each other to agreeing to move in together, and then to having a fight about their feelings. Ironically, the other persistent lesbian joke cycle focuses on the perceived lack of a sense of humor in lesbians. Joseph Goodwin writes about the phenomenon in his discussion of gay male folklore, arguing that it provides a contrast between cultural perceptions of gay men (who are thought to be funny) and lesbians (who are not). Even Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls pokes fun at herself in a song lyric, singing, ‘‘You know me/I take everything so seriously.’’ Lesbian comic Suzanne Westenhofer recounts on the Web site http://www.AfterEllen.com a story in which some producers were looking for a funny lesbian to cast in a television series. The producers were so sure that there aren’t any funny lesbians that their casting call implied that heterosexual women who are funny and could pretend to be lesbians would be considered. Westenhofer—both very funny and a lesbian—got the job. Personal aesthetics are critical to understanding lesbian non-narrative folklore. A lesbian’s use of personal aesthetic can help communicate her sexual identity while also providing her with a means of creative expression. Lesbians use a variety of personal aesthetic choices to indicate identity and to communicate coded ‘‘lesbian messages’’ (see the entry on Coding). Perhaps the most clearly delineated lesbian aesthetic is that of the ‘‘butch,’’ a term used in the past to describe a woman who dresses in a masculine style. The classic butch, as described by Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, had a clearly defined look. Butches . . . did not simply wear masculine clothes, but rather developed a definite style for dressing up. A distinctive part of their attire was heavily starched shirts.. . . They wore big cuff links in their shirts and jackets over them. . . . To go with their pants, butches got the most masculine-style shoes you could find, flat shoes like oxfords. . . . Their short haircuts were consciously created for the image (154–155).

If ‘‘the butch-femme aesthetic’’ (masculine women in men’s suits with their very feminine partners dressed in the most womanly styles of the day) was all the rage in the 1940s and 1950s, it gave way to a different lesbian look in the 1970s. The women’s movement was especially influential in and around New York City, where the butch-femme aesthetic changed to one that reflected the anti-heterosexist politics of the time. In one of her early novels, Rita Mae Brown describes ‘‘a large space mobbed with women. There were women in workshirts . . . women in old band uniforms, and women in no shirts at all’’ (49). What Brown is describing is women who have rejected cultural hegemony in dress choices, and instead making clothing selections based on their own personal aesthetics and its appeal to other women. Much has been made in the media of the so-called ‘‘lipstick lesbian’’ of the 1990s and the various fashion choices touted on the Showtime series The L Word. However, since the 1940s, there has been no unifying fashion that says ‘‘lesbian.’’

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However, it is fair to say that there are continuities across lesbian personal aesthetics beyond the stereotypes that persisted from the 1950s and 1970s. A mullet haircut, body piercings, tattoos, short hair, leather, and other clothing taken from men’s fashions, from marginalized groups (like bikers), and from other countercultures can be seen as embodying a lesbian aesthetic, especially when presented in an expected context (such as at a Pride festival or lesbian bar) or as complicit coding (provided there is a high probability that others are aware of the signs). Festival has received more attention than most of the non-narrative genres in the scholarship on lesbian folklore. The two main foci of lesbian festival scholarship have been urban Pride parades and festivals in the United States and Canada (see Hagen Smith 1997) and the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, held annually since 1976. Pride festivals started in 1970 to commemorate the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall revolt in New York City. The first such events were held in New York and Los Angeles and quickly spread to other U.S. cities with large gay and lesbian populations, including San Francisco, Chicago, and Atlanta. Most cities in the United States and Canada now hold Pride festivals and parades every summer. As with all large festivals, what happens in these contexts is multifaceted, incorporating a wide variety of folkloric genres. On the parade or festival grounds, the visitor finds vendors from whom she can buy alcoholic drinks, kabobs, frozen lemonade, pizza, caramel apples, funnel cakes, vegetarian chili, or even the large dill pickles that come with the requisite sexual innuendo, borrowed in part from Renaissance fairs, where buying a pickle or any other phallus-shaped food will inevitably produce bawdy talk about what to do with it. Beyond food vendors, the visitor finds vendors selling consumer goods with gay and/or lesbian themes. Since the adoption of the rainbow flag and pink and black triangles as symbols of the GLBTQ community, the proliferation of items decorated with one or both symbols has increased exponentially. Pride space usually features community groups ranging from, for example, the Protestant gay- and lesbian-oriented Metropolitan Community Church and Beth Simchat Torah in New York, to gay and lesbian square dancers and contra dancers in Boston, to labor unions in Toronto, to Zapatista movement supporters in Mexico City. Groups include social and affinal organizations, religious adherents, members of a profession (such as police officers or librarians), HIV and AIDS service organizations, and other nonprofit groups. Performers play on stages throughout the days or week that the festival is open. Joseph Goodwin argues that gay men (and, by extension, lesbians) must operate in two cultures at once. Because in the larger cultural context, heterosexuality is assumed, lesbians know these rules as well as heterosexual women do, and therefore often hide their identity in non-queer contexts. Within the Pride festival context, however, festival rules mean that there is no need to behave in a covert or coded way. Victor Turner describes the key ingredient in festival as ‘‘communitas,’’ a feeling of connection to the other participants. Once the threshold is established, communitas reigns, and lesbians (and gay men) do on the festival grounds what they might not

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otherwise do in public space. Women may go topless, often wearing just a sticker over their nipples; it is not uncommon to see explicit sexual behavior between two women in the context of Pride space. Most large cities in North America host a parade as part of their Pride celebrations, usually on a Sunday. The modern American parade (like smalltown Independence Day parades) is an official event, sanctioned by civic organizations and by the government; its meaning lies in bringing a community together to focus on shared values and experiences. Pride parades, on the other hand, hearken back to preindustrial ideas of festival while simultaneously maintaining the modern notion of the civic parade. Parts of a Pride parade look like any other such event: politicians and celebrities wave at the crowds from the backseats of convertibles, and people ride down the street on horses with fancy saddles. But closer observation of a Pride parade reveals its differences. ‘‘Dykes on Bikes,’’ a folk group that originated in San Francisco, generally starts it off, often having decorated their motorcycles to express lesbian pride. Lesbians parade with groups ranging from PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), to veterans groups, to groups dressed in leather expressing their interests in alternative sex play. Drag queens, leather dykes, and floats of naked (or almost naked) people dance by, interspersed with gay and lesbian veterans’ groups and human rights activists. Pride is a complicated and often subversive context. The Michigan Womyn’s Festival is one of a number of lesbian-oriented (though not exclusively so) festivals held throughout the United States annually or periodically. ‘‘Michigan’’ (as it is often known) is the largest of these and is a multiple-day festival with music, workshops, and time for bonding. Michigan is perhaps most notorious in recent years for excluding male-to-female and female-to-male transgender and transsexuals and others whose gender identities defy traditional categories. The festival resembles other large-scale camping festivals of the Woodstock variety where people come together to listen to music and camp for a number of days, forming a temporary space of festival and community. These events usually have consumer goods available and performances at certain times of the day. The Michigan Womyn’s Festival also has a Neo-Pagan element, revealing continuities with the Burning Man Festival (an anti-consumerist participatory event usually held in Nevada) and other countercultural events. Participants often hold rituals and ceremonies, ranging from commitment ceremonies in lieu of marriage to rituals honoring the Goddess or Mother Earth. Since the mid-1990s, the issue of weddings has been at the center of the political debate over gay men and lesbians in the media in North America. Mexico legalized civil unions, but not lesbian and gay marriages, in 2006. In Canada, gay and lesbian marriage is legal and exactly equivalent to heterosexual marriage. As of this writing, Massachusetts and California are the only states in the United States that allow same-sex marriage, though many others allow for variously described legal, same-sex domestic partnerships. Lesbian weddings and commitment ceremonies vary in form from the very traditional (that is, much like those found in heterosexual communities) to rituals that bear almost no connection to the larger tradition.

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As with any multifaceted form of folklore, it is impossible to generalize, but lesbian weddings often play with notions of normative gendered behavior. For example, one wedding documented in Los Angeles in 1998 followed both normative and playful patterns in its execution. Each self-described ‘‘bride’’ had multiple attendants and each carried a matching bouquet. One wore a white pantsuit and the other a bridal gown. A minister administered the vows and each woman spoke briefly of her commitment to the other. They drank wine from a common cup and exchanged rings. The minister pronounced them life partners, after which they kissed passionately. In addition to her bouquet, each woman worn a garter. At the reception, they divided their guests into four groups: lesbians, gay men, straight women, and straight men. In an inversion of the tradition of throwing a bouquet to the next woman to be married and a garter to the next groom, each group was given the opportunity to catch one of the bouquets or one of the garters. One of the brides described the garter/bouquet ritual to Elizabeth Adams as ‘‘the most subversive thing at the wedding.’’ By dividing the guests, she was requiring each to identify (or come out) as part of one group or another, and by allowing men to catch bouquets and women to catch garters, she and her partner were marking both their compliance with heterosexual traditions and their subversion of them. Ellen Lewin argues that lesbian weddings constitute a complicated symbolic act: In that ritual stands outside the routine of normal events, it can more readily dispel contradictions and embrace incongruities. Just as heterosexual weddings convey to the couples their place in the history of their families and remind them of the contribution that they will make to the continuation of tradition, so lesbian weddings claim that lesbian couples are not estranged from the value of the wider community, and that they are, in fact, part of that community. Even as they also celebrate their involvement in lesbian subculture, each of these weddings, then, makes the claim that the marrying couple are members of the wider community (128).

Lewin’s point is that weddings draw a distinction to the subcultural group of lesbians but also ask that the larger culture acknowledge their partnerships. As the debate over lesbian marriages continues, the changing nature of their forms and varieties will be interesting to track. While public argument has focused on the legal and religious ramifications of gay and lesbian marriage, folklorists would do well to watch the nature of the ceremonies themselves. As a marker of culture tradition and change, the wedding is perhaps the richest tradition for meaning and subversion in lesbian folklore in the early part of the twenty-first century. And there are undoubtedly other rich lesbian traditions still to be explored by folklorists and allied scholars. See also: Body Modification and Adornment; Coding; Festival; Hair; Lesbian and Queer Studies; Personal Experience Narrative; Popular Culture; Processional Performance; Ritual; Sexuality; Wedding; Wicca and Neo-Paganism; Women’s Music Festivals. References: Adams, Elizabeth T. Folklore and the Search for Community in the Modern Urban West. Diss., UCLA, 1999; Advocate, The. n.d. http://www.advocate.com (accessed June 26, 2007); AfterEllen.com. n.d. http://www.afterellen.com (accessed June 26, 2007); Blincoe, Deborah, and John Forrest. ‘‘The Dangers of Authenticity.’’ Special

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Issue on Prejudice and Pride: Lesbian and Gay Traditions in America, New York Folklore, vol. 19, nos. 1–2 (1993): 1–14; Brown, Rita Mae. In Her Day. New York: Bantam, 1976; Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in the Twentieth Century. New York: Penguin, 1992; Gay Life. ‘‘Gay, Lesbian, Transgender Hate Crimes Statistics.’’ n.d. http://gaylife.about.com/od/hatecrimes/a/statistics.htm (accessed June 26, 2007); Goodwin, Joseph P. More Man Than You’ll Ever Be: Gay Folklore and Acculturation in Middle America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; Gross, Larry. Up From Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002; Hagen-Smith, Lisa. ‘‘Politics and Celebration: Manifesting the Rainbow Flag.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 19, no. 2 (1997): 113–122; Hollis, Susan Tower, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, eds. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Jolly, Margaretta. ‘‘Coming Out of the Coming Out Story: Writing Queer Lives.’’ Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society 4, no. 4 (2001): 474–496; Kennedy, Elizabeth, and Madeline Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Penguin, 1993; Kugelmass, Jack. Masked Culture: Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; Lawless, Elaine J. ‘‘Claiming Inversion: Lesbian Constructions of Female Identity as Claims for Authority.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 111 (1998): 3–22; Lewin, Ellen. Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996; Lewin, Ellen, and William Leap. Out in the Field: Reflections of Gay and Lesbian Anthropologists. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996; Matrix, Sidney, and Pauline Greenhill, eds. Special Issue on Wedding Realities/Les Noces en Vrai, Ethnologies, vol. 28, no. 2 (2006); Radner, Joan Newlon, ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Elizabeth T. Adams Lilith Lilith is a she-demon or evil spirit of Hebraic tradition with origins in several Mesopotamian mythologies. In the Babylonian-Assyrian culture, Lilith is Lil, a storm-demon, and in Hebrew her name derives from layil, night. She is often associated with wild, unpeopled places and is thought to reside in the desert. The earliest written mention of a similar she-demon is in the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh struck down the serpent that could not be charmed, The Anzu-bird flew with his young to the mountains, And Lilith smashed her home and flew to the wild, uninhabited places.

The only mention of Lilith in the Hebrew Bible is found in Isaiah. God declares vengeance on the world and states that it will become a desolate place wherein Lilith will reside. The wild cat shall meet with the jackals, And the satyr shall cry to his fellow, Yea, Lilith shall repose there, And find her a place of rest (Isaiah 34:14).

Lilith’s birth and life history were elaborated during the postbiblical period in the Talmud (‘‘teaching,’’ discussions by generations of rabbis, mainly the Palestinian sages) and the Midrash (‘‘interpretation,’’ ever-evolving commentaries on Jewish scriptures). There it is said that Lilith was Adam’s

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first wife, created in similar fashion from the dust (adama). However, instead of using clean dust to create Lilith, God used filth and unclean sediment. Adam and Lilith were never happy. One day after an argument over who should have the dominant position during sexual intercourse (Lilith thought they were equals), Lilith flew away to the Red Sea, a place where lascivious demons lived. There she began bearing more than 100 demons a day. God sent forth three angels, named Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, to bring her back to Adam. But Lilith did not want to leave; she claimed that God had given her the right of power over newborn children (boys until their circumcision ten days after birth, and girls until their twentieth day). The angels persisted in their attempt to get her to return, so to persuade them to leave, Lilith promised that she would not harm any child with an amulet bearing the names of the angels, and that she would kill 100 of her own children each day. This is the basis for the tradition of Jewish infants wearing amulets and being protected inside a circle in which the angelic names Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof have been written. Children born of unholy unions, however, were not protected; Lilith could claim their lives at any time. If a child smiled in its sleep, it was a sign that Lilith was playing with it; one should awaken the child quickly to drive her away. Lilith was not only a child-killer, but also a succubus, a female demon who has sexual intercourse with a man while he sleeps. When Adam left Eve to fast in the desert for 130 years in penance for the sin and death they had brought into the world, Lilith visited him there in the form of a succubus, later giving birth to all the plagues of humankind. This story is the foundation for the belief that Lilith is nocturnal, and even vampiric. In the Zohar (a text of the mystical tradition of Kabbalah which first appeared in thirteenth-century Spain), Lilith seduces married and single men during the night by coming to them as a mature woman or as a young virgin. Men were told not to sleep in a house alone for fear that Lilith would attack them as they slept and use their semen to breed demons. Stories regarding Lilith multiplied throughout the medieval period in Europe and have continued to do so. According to oral tradition, she was believed to be of the women who asked King Solomon to decide which of them was the true mother of a child each claimed to be hers. It was also said that she was the Queen of Sheba. Lilith is still a popular figure today. She is a vampire figure in a series of Marvel comic books in which she is represented as the daughter of Dracula. But Lilith is part of a larger mythological tradition which blends feminine strength with sexuality—and frequently with evil—in supernatural female figures. See also: Assault, Supernatural; Eve; Jewish Women’s Folklore; Legend, Religious; Legend, Supernatural; Nature/Culture; Vampire. References: Baring, Anne, and Jules Cashford. The Myth of the Goddess. New York: Penguin Books, 1991; Graves, Robert, and Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964; Melton, J. Gordon. The Vampire Book: An Encyclopedia of the Undead. Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1994; Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. New York: Avon Books, 1978.

Tamara Robbins-Anderson

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Lilith Fair Lilith Fair was a highly successful annual music tour developed by Canadian performer Sarah McLachlan in the late 1990s to showcase women artists in the commercial pop/rock/folk industry. McLachlan, tour promoter and lead performer, created Lilith Fair in the wake of the success of Lollapalooza (1991), whose founder Perry Farrell significantly revised the format of summer rock tours and spurred a number of emulators, including HORDE (Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere, 1992). Like Farrell, McLachlan selected a roster of headlining artists to perform at daylong festivals stopping at venues across North America. These traveling concerts also featured side stages to showcase emerging or local artists and concession areas for food and performers’ merchandise. Lilith Fair, produced for three consecutive years (1997–1999), booked more than 100 artists at a total of 139 venues, and became one of the most successful summer tours of the 1990s. While McLachlan generally avoided calling Lilith Fair a feminist event, she maintained her commitment to promote and showcase female performers, who were significantly underrepresented at Lollapalooza and other popular traveling music festivals. McLachlan chose an evocative name for her event. In religious and feminist scholarship, Lilith is widely represented as a transgressive mythological figure. Some versions of her story assert that Lilith chose to leave Eden rather than be subservient to Adam. In other variants, she is purely demonic, described as the wife of Satan, a threat to adult males, new mothers, and infant children. In short, McLachlan’s choice juxtaposed transgressive, powerful, angry feminine with fair, which signifies a gentler, more bucolic event than does festival. Further, Lilith Fair, like the medieval and renaissance fairs of Europe and today’s county fairs in the United States, is a site of commerce—of buying, selling, and economic competition. Lilith Fair was most notable for forever shifting corporate thinking about the marketability of female performers. The event’s eclectic, rotating roster of headliners included the Indigo Girls (folk-roots), Queen Latifah (rap), the Dixie Chicks (country and western), and the Pretenders (rock). While Lilith Fair was not specifically designed as a woman-only event, its producers did try to include women on the technical side as well. Through a percentage of ticket sales and corporate sponsorships, Lilith Fair raised millions of dollars for nonprofit organizations that benefit women; created a community arts project showcasing local arts in each venue; and sponsored Literary Lilith, a project that promoted reading, independent bookstores, and women writers. Three volumes of Lilith Fair live recordings chronicling the first and second tours are available on CD and video/DVD. McLachlan collaborated with director Lynne Stopkewich during the final tour in 1999 to create a documentary film, Lilith on Top, featured at the Toronto and Berlin International Film Festivals in 2002. See also: Feminisms; Festival; Film; Folklore of Subversion; Lilith; Women’s Music Festivals. References: Cantor Zuckoff, Aviva. ‘‘The Lilith Question.’’ Lilith: The Independent Jewish Women’s Magazine, vol. 1 (Fall 1976): 5–38; Childerhose, Buffy, and Sarah

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McLachlan. From Lilith to Lilith Fair: The Authorized Story. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998; Heck, Angela. ‘‘Behind the Scenes at Lilith on Top.’’ Herizons Magazine, Summer 2002. http://www.herizons.ca/node/141 (accessed August 4, 2008).

Lisa L. Higgins Local Characters A local character is an individual whose minor nonconformity consistently challenges social norms within a particular context. A local character is regarded as nonthreatening, and often humorous, by most, if not all, other group members. Often individuals recognize benefits, such as increased attention, that motivate them to become local characters. As part of this role, they may be tradition-bearers, such as musicians or storytellers, or may inject an element of play into routine daily interactions. Often seen in the same place and in the same way, characters may become so closely associated with a location or a group that they represent continuity for others around them. Stories of local characters that focus on antisocial traits or behaviors help to clarify expectations for others. They offer vivid illustrations of group or community rules, and of what happens to those who break them. Women may be designated as local characters when they defy social convention or when their presence in a male-dominated space becomes a lightning rod for critical narratives. As a result, local character stories told about women often highlight group expectations of appropriate female behavior and can be powerful attempts to control women who dare to challenge social norms. On the other hand, narrative—anecdotes and legends—can facilitate a marginal person’s acceptance into a group or community. For example, a legend that explains how a haggard street person was once a beautiful and accomplished professional before tragedy hit and her entire family was killed in a fire reminds listeners that misfortune can strike anyone and encourages their generous treatment of someone less fortunate. Or, conversely, legends reassure listeners that things are not as unfair as they seem; a bag lady is not destitute but really an heiress who chooses to hoard her money. Humorous anecdotes focusing on local characters’ behaviors often hinge on status reversal: the tables are turned on an authority figure. In one example, Emma, an African Canadian who works as a cleaner for a demanding White homemaker, is asked for advice by the woman’s husband. How should he deal with his wife’s demands? ‘‘What would you do if you were me?’’ he appeals. Emma’s retort is immediate: ‘‘I’d make my peace with God and take chloroform’’ (Tye 1987: 107). Such comic stories expose the flaws of those in authority, but admittedly any reversal is temporary. At the close of the exchange between Emma and her middle-class employer, nothing has really changed. The cleaner/character still wields little power. However, taking on a local character role or telling local character narratives may at least briefly offer voice to an individual who is positioned on a group’s margins. And, importantly for the local character as well as for other community members, accounts such as this one introduce the idea of change through

372 LULLABY

their suggestion of a more equitable moral order. See also: Borden, Lizzie; Coding; Class, Legend, Local; Tradition-Bearer. References: Tye, Diane. ‘‘Aspects of the Local Character Phenomenon in a Nova Scotian Community.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 9, nos. 1–2 (1987): 99–111; ———. ‘‘Narrative, Gender and Marginality: The Case Study of Ella Lauchner Smith,’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 13, no. 2 (1991): 25–36.

Diane Tye Lullaby A lullaby is a genre of song usually sung to children as they fall to sleep. However, while memories and examples of lullabies are common, explaining what distinguishes these songs as lullabies is more complex. Great differences emerge even when limiting comparison to American examples. Lullaby text may contain comforting or cautionary lyrics. A famous example of the latter is the ending of ‘‘Rock-a-Bye Baby,’’ in which the bough breaks, causing the cradle to fall. Words of lullabies may focus on the present, or detail what the child has to look forward to upon waking, as is the case in ‘‘Hush, Little Baby’’ or ‘‘All the Pretty Little Horses.’’ Some lullabies recount sad stories, such as ‘‘The Lady Bothwell’s Lament’’ (or ‘‘Baloo, My Boy’’), which tells of the babe’s father being killed in battle. The striking diversity in lullabies’ lyric content leads to debate about whether content or context of use actually defines the genre. Lullabies are one of many genres that have developed to fulfill a specific purpose. Along with their counterparts the cradle song, berceuse, and Wiegenlied, lullabies are most commonly used to soothe children to sleep. Therefore, these songs are associated most closely with the activities of rocking and feeding, traditionally carried out by mothers. Thus, this genre, at least in North America, has been feminized and linked with women’s culture. Lullabies also reflect the values of the background from which they emerge and give insight into the lives of the adults, by tradition primarily women, who sing them. Many lullabies, for example, tell of the father being away; perhaps he is hunting or sailing, but in any case the mother remains at home to care for the children and reassure them. In Western tradition, lullabies are nearly always in 3/4 or 4/4 time. They may be brief or rather long and involved, but the tunes, whether in major or minor mode, are typically soothing and repetitive. The tune seems to be of paramount importance, since words often are abandoned in favor of humming. Many lullabies, particularly from countries other than the United States, feature repeated patterns of nonsense syllables, highlighting the secondary importance of the words. Although customarily considered part of oral tradition, lullabies have long been found in classical music and have also made their way into art song repertoire, musicals, and commercial popular music. Additionally, the stated audience of lullaby lyrics has expanded beyond infants to include other groups needing assurance and rest, such as hobos and Broadway babies. Lullabies appear in operas such as Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and in vocal performance repertoire with pieces such

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as ‘‘American Lullaby’’ by Gladys Rich. Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Igor Stravinsky all composed famous instrumental versions of berceuses, and examples in popular music include well-known lullabies composed and recorded by musicians such as the Beatles and Billy Joel. While typically associated with the bond between mothers and babies, these examples provide instances of male composers and performers contributing to the genre and underscore the lullaby’s broad appeal. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Folk Music and Folksong; Mothers’ Folklore. References: Boyd, Malcolm. ‘‘Wiegenlied.’’ Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, n.d. http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed May 29, 2005); Hamilton, Kenneth L. ‘‘Berceuse.’’ Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, n.d. http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed May 29, 2005); Hawes, Bess Lomax. ‘‘Folksongs and Function: Some Thoughts on the American Lullaby.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 87, no. 433 (April–June 1974): 140–148; Porter, James. ‘‘Lullaby.’’ Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, n.d. http://www.grovemusic. com (subscribers only, accessed May 29, 2005).

Suzanne Godby Ingalsbe

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WOMEN’S FOLKLORE AND FOLKLIFE

Advisory Board Norma E. Cant u Professor of English and U.S. Latina/o Literatures University of Texas-San Antonio Rosan A. Jordan Independent Scholar New Orleans, LA Cathy Lynn Preston Senior Instructor of English University of Colorado at Boulder Joan Newlon Radner Professor Emerita, American University Independent Scholar Lovell, ME Rachelle H. Saltzman Folklife Coordinator, Iowa Arts Council Des Moines, IA Marilyn M. White Professor of Anthropology Kean University Union, NJ

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WOMEN’S FOLKLORE AND FOLKLIFE Volume 2: M–Z Edited by Liz Locke Theresa A. Vaughan Pauline Greenhill

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut  London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of women’s folklore and folklife / edited by Liz Locke, Theresa A. Vaughan, and Pauline Greenhill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-34050-5 ((set) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-34051-2 ((vol. 1) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-34052-9 ((vol. 2) : alk. paper) 1. Women—Folklore—Encyclopedias. I. Locke, Liz. II. Vaughan, Theresa A., 1966– III. Greenhill, Pauline, 1955– GR470.E63 2009 3980 .352—dc22 2008032981 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright  C 2009 by Liz Locke, Theresa A. Vaughan, and Pauline Greenhill All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008032981 ISBN: 978-0-313-34050-5 (set) 978-0-313-34051-2 (vol. 1) 978-0-313-34052-9 (vol. 2) First published in 2009 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10

9 8

7 6

5

4 3

2

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To All Women Folklorists and their Allies—Past, Present, and Future

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CONTENTS List of Entries

ix

Guide to Related Topics

xiii

Preface

xvii

Acknowledgments

xxi

Overview Essays

xxiii

Women’s Folklore

xxiii

Folklore About Women

xxxv

Folklore of Subversion

xlvii

Women Folklorists The Encyclopedia

lix 1

Selected Bibliography/Web Sites

731

Index

733

About the Editors and Contributors

761

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LIST OF ENTRIES Abortion Activism Adoption Aesthetics Aging Altar, Home American Folklore Society— Women’s Section Androgyny Aphrodisiac Assault, Supernatural Autograph Book Babysitting Ballad Banshee Barbie Doll Barker, Ma Basketmaking Bat Mitzvah Beadwork Beauty Beauty Contest Beauty Queen Belly Dance Best Friend Birth Chair Birthdays Blind Folklore Bloody Mary Body Modification and Adornment Borden, Lizzie Breastfeeding Brideprice

Calamity Jane Camplore Charivari/Shivaree Chastity Cheerleading Childbirth and Childrearing Cinderella Class Clique Coding Consciousness Raising Cosmetics Courtship Couvade Cowgirl Crafting Crime-Victim Stories Croning Cross-Dressing Curandera Cursing Cyberculture Daughter Deaf Folklore Death Diet Culture Divination Practices Divorce Dolls Doula Dowry Elder Care Embroidery Engagement

Erotic Folklore Ethnicity Eve Evil Eye Family Folklore Fans, Language of Farm Women’s Folklore Fashion Female Genital Cutting Feminisms Festival Fieldwork Film First Nations of North America Flowers, Language of Folk Art Folk Belief Folk Costume Folk Custom Folk Dance Folk Drama Folk Group Folk Medicine Folk Music and Folksong Folk Photography Folk Poetry Folklife Folklore Feminists Communication Folklore Studies Association of Canada Folktale Foodways Fortune-Teller

x LIST OF ENTRIES

Gardens Gender Girl Scouts/Girl Guides Girls’ Folklore Girls’ Games Glass Ceiling Goddess Worship Gossip Graffiti Grandmother Graves and Gravemarkers Gullah Women’s Folklore Hair Handclapping Games Helpmate Henna Art/Mehndi Herbs Hip-Hop Culture/Rap Home Birth Homeless Women Housekeeping Humor Immigration Indian Maiden Infertility Initiation Jewish Women’s Folklore Jingle Dress Joke Jump-Rope Rhymes Knitting La Llorona Lacemaking Lament Laundry Legend, Local Legend, Religious Legend, Supernatural Legend, Urban/Contemporary Lesbian and Queer Studies Lesbian Folklore Lilith Lilith Fair Local Characters Lullaby

Magazines, Women’s and Girls’ Magic Maiden, Mother, Crone Marriage Mass Media Material Culture Matriarchy Memorate Menarche Stories Menopause Menstruation Midwifery Military Women’s Folklore Miscarriage Mother Earth Mother Goose Mother-in-law Mother’s Day Mothers’ Folklore Muslim Women’s Folklore Myth Studies Naming Practices Nature/Culture Needlework Nursing Occupational Folklore Old Wives’ Tales Oral History Paperfolding and Papercutting Personal-Experience Narrative Photocopylore Piecework Politics Popular Culture Pottery Pregnancy Princess Processional Performance Prostitution/Sex Work Proverb Public Folklore Purdah Quiltmaking ~ Quinceanera

Race Rape Recipe Books Recitation Red Riding Hood Region: Australia and New Zealand Region: Canada Region: Caribbean Region: Central America Region: Central Asia Region: East Asia Region: Eastern Europe Region: Mexico Region: Middle East Region: Pacific Islands Region: South America Region: Southeast Asia Region: Sub-Saharan Africa Region: United States Region: Western Europe Rhymes Riddle Rites of Passage Ritual Roadside Crosses Rugmaking Rumor Saints Sampler Scandal Scrapbooks Self-Help Sewing Sex Determination Sexism Sexuality Sister Sleeping Beauty Sorority Folklore Spa Culture Spinning Spirituals Stepmother Storytelling Suffrage Movement Sunbonnet Sue Superstition

LIST OF ENTRIES xi

Text Tradition Tradition-Bearer Transgender Folklore Vagina Dentata Vaginal Serpent Valentine’s Day Vampire Veiling Violence

Virgin, Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe Virginity Wage Work Walled-Up Wife Weaving Wedding Wedding, Mock Wicca and Neo-Paganism Wife Sales

Witchcraft, Historical Women Religious Women Warriors Women’s Clubs Women’s Friendship Groups Women’s Movement Women’s Music Festivals Women’s Work Yellow Woman/Irriaku Stories

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GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS Domestic Life

Feminism

Altar, Home Babysitting Childbirth and Childrearing Crafting Embroidery Family Folklore Farm Women’s Folklore Folk Custom Folk Medicine Folklife Foodways Gardens Helpmate Herbs Home Birth Housekeeping Knitting Laundry Lullaby Material Culture Mothers’ Folklore Needlework Old Wives’ Tales Quiltmaking Recipe Books Rugmaking Sampler Scrapbooks Sewing Women’s Folklore Women’s Work

Abortion Activism Class Coding Consciousness Raising Croning Feminisms Folklore About Women Folklore Feminists Communication Glass Ceiling Humor Lesbian and Queer Studies Lesbian Folklore Lilith Fair Matriarchy Nature/Culture Politics Race Rape Sexism Suffrage Movement Sunbonnet Sue Women Folklorists Women’s Folklore Women’s Movement Women’s Music Festivals Folklore as a Profession American Folklore Society— Women’s Section

Fieldwork Folklore About Women Folklore Feminists Communication Folklore Studies Association of Canada Lesbian and Queer Studies Myth Studies Public Folklore Women Folklorists Women’s Folklore Life Cycle Adoption Aging Bat Mitzvah Birth Chair Birthdays Breastfeeding Brideprice Charivari/Shivaree Childbirth and Childrearing Courtship Couvade Croning Daughter Death Divorce Doula Dowry Elder Care Engagement Family Folklore

xiv

GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS

Female Genital Cutting Girls’ Folklore Girls’ Games Grandmother Graves and Gravemarkers Henna Art/Mehndi Home Birth Initiation Maiden, Mother, and Crone Marriage Menarche Stories Menopause Menstruation Midwifery Mother’s Day Mothers’ Folklore Naming Practices Pregnancy ~ Quinceanera Rites of Passage Sexuality Sister Sorority Folklore Stepmother Tradition Veiling Virginity Wedding Wedding, Mock Wife Sales Material Culture Aesthetics Altar, Home Barbie Doll Basketmaking Beadwork Birth Chair Body Modification and Adornment Crafting Dolls Dowry Embroidery Fans, Language of Fashion Flowers, Language of Folk Art Folk Costume Folk Photography Folklife

Gardens Graffiti Graves and Gravemarkers Hair Henna Art/Mehndi Jingle Dress Knitting Lacemaking Material Culture Needlework Paperfolding and Papercutting Piecework Pottery Quiltmaking Recipe Books Roadside Crosses Sampler Scrapbooks Sewing Spinning Sunbonnet Sue Weaving Women’s Work Regions of the World Region: Australia and New Zealand Region: Canada Region: Caribbean Region: Central America Region: Central Asia Region: East Asia Region: Eastern Europe Region: Mexico Region: Middle East Region: Pacific Islands Region: South America Region: Southeast Asia Region: Sub-Saharan Africa Region: United States Region: Western Europe Religion/Ethnicity Altar, Home Bat Mitzvah Belly Dance Curandera Ethnicity Eve Evil Eye Female Genital Cutting

First Nations of North America Folk Belief Goddess Worship Gullah Women’s Folklore Henna Art/Mehndi Hip-Hop Culture/Rap Immigration Indian Maiden Jewish Women’s Folklore Jingle Dress La Llorona Legend, Religious Legend, Supernatural Lilith Muslim Women’s Folklore Naming Practices Purdah ~ Quinceanera Race Saints Spirituals Superstition Veiling Virgin, Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe Wicca and Neopaganism Women Religious Yellow Woman/Irriaku Stories Sexuality Abortion Androgyny Aphrodisiac Assault, Supernatural Beauty Beauty Contest Beauty Queen Body Modification and Adornment Chastity Cosmetics Cross-Dressing Diet Culture Erotic Folklore Fashion Gender Hair Humor Infertility Lesbian and Queer Studies Lesbian Folklore

GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS xv

Menarche Stories Menopause Menstruation Miscarriage Prostitution/Sex Work Purdah Rape Rites of Passage Scandal Sex Determination Sexuality Transgender Folklore Vagina Dentata Vaginal Serpent Veiling Virginity Verbal Lore Ballad Barker, Ma

Bloody Mary Borden, Lizzie Calamity Jane Cinderella Cursing Family Folklore Folk Music and Folksong Folk Poetry Folktale Girls’ Folklore Gossip Joke Jump-Rope Rhymes La Llorona Lament Legend, Local Legend, Religious Legend, Supernatural Legend, Urban/Contemporary Lilith

Local Characters Lullaby Memorate Menarche Stories Mother Goose Mothers’ Folklore Myth Studies Old Wives’ Tales Oral History Proverb Recitation Red Riding Hood Rhymes Riddle Rumor Sleeping Beauty Spirituals Storytelling Yellow Woman/Irriaku Stories

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M Magazines, Women’s and Girls’ These magazines are mass-circulated paperback serials featuring advertisements that initiate and reflect trends in girls’ and women’s fashions and lifestyles, directed to a predominantly female audience of general readers. Produced monthly, colorful high-gloss fashion magazines for girls and women such as Vogue, Elle, InStyle, Essence, and Cosmopolitan are primarily visual texts, each page containing photographs of models selling beauty products and services, clothing, and housewares. The textual elements of magazines blur the line between editorializing and advertising due to the powerful influence of corporations’ advertising revenue over all content between the covers. Women’s popular lifestyle magazines such as O The Oprah Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, and Ladies Home Journal are marketed as a form of self-help literature; they contain articles and ads encouraging selfimprovement and self-empowerment, usually via consumerism. They offer news of interest to women, including fashion and trend reports, articles on marriage, motherhood, domestic living, and family life, and, somewhat less often, on issues such as domestic violence, women’s health, and the feminization of poverty. Select magazines such as Ms. (which has refused corporate advertising since 2002), Glamour, Chatelaine (Canada), and Jane are marketed as explicitly pro-feminist serials which routinely publicize and politicize women’s causes. Girls’ and women’s magazines receive much attention from researchers because of their representational power and enormous circulation. Work in the cultural studies of girlhood has focused on the content of young-adult publications like Seventeen and Young Miss (YM), viewed for several generations as key sources for mass-media representations of young womanhood. Versions of mature women’s magazines for young-adult audiences, such as Teen Vogue, Teen People, Elle Girl, and Cosmo Girl, deliver highly sexualized images of pop-culture girl celebrities, ads for cosmetics and fashion, and information about (hetero)sexuality, health, and developing identity. Publishers of these serials employ strategies of ‘‘hip consumerism’’ and

376 MAGAZINES, WOMEN’S AND GIRLS’

rhetorics of rebellion and coolness to appropriate teen cynicism and resistance vis-a-vis adult authorities and the status quo, and sell it back to girls as trend marketing. Critical discussion of fashion magazine advertisers’ near-exclusive use of very thin female models is ongoing across academic disciplines, focusing on its impact on girls’ and women’s self-esteem, as well as on the implicit message this representational trend communicates, equating beauty and success with extreme thinness. Even in magazines that are marketed as women’s health and fitness publications, such as Shape, Oxygen, and Self, advertisers and publishers opt to feature predominantly young and thin (and scantily clad) models as icons of ideal womanhood. The cumulative effect of this visual economy in magazines erases other female identities from view and homogenizes differences between women (such as economic distinctions). The implicit message transmitted by the overrepresentation of one image of femaleness is that membership in this fictional, exclusive sorority (virtual community) requires girls and women to diet excessively, pursue hyperfemininity, and emulate middle-classness (and often Whiteness) through conspicuous consumption. Although the models featured in mainstream women’s magazines are similar in terms of age (young) and physique (thin), and to a lessening extent ethnicity (White/light-skinned), there is nonetheless a kind of diversity. In fashion, beauty, and lifestyle serials such as Marie Claire and Mademoiselle, a range of versions of femininity may be featured; from the tough-chic of a femme fatale to the romantic innocence of girlishness, from the androgyne to the sexy vamp to the tomboy, magazines showcase a range of heterosexual female personas/performances designed to appeal to a varied readership. Taken together, the information communicated in any one issue of a magazine about how to be beautiful, successful, and happy as a woman will be self-contradictory and self-conflicting, as images of passivity and activity, sexy singles and smug marrieds, boy-craziness and self-reliance coexist uneasily between its glossy covers. Seasoned readers of women’s magazines expect to encounter a (albeit limited) smorgasbord of narratives (visual and textual) about gender and sexuality, such that they can sample, imagine, experiment, identify, and explore types of femaleness—all with corresponding consumer profiles attached—with minimal risk. Regardless of which version of femininity readers identify with, through advertising, editorials, and feature-story content, magazines communicate a commodified set of rituals for women to follow, including behavioral modifications, attitudes, and posturing. In this sense, magazines for women and girls can be viewed as instruction manuals for socialization and enculturation, not unlike nineteenth-century guidebooks of etiquette, customs for the refinement of proper (White, affluent, urban) Victorian ladies of European heritage. In a limited range of representations of women’s and girls’ lives, mainstream magazines offer models for readers to emulate that are marketed as new and modern, but are often stereotypical, and that reinforce traditional roles for women and patriarchal ideologies of gender. Commercial fashion, beauty, and lifestyle magazines advertise commodities through the rhetoric of individuality and empowerment while popularizing messages about

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gender and sexuality that encourage passivity and celebrate the ornamentality of women. Magazines promote and normalize the cultural connections between happiness, beauty, and consumerism while each selection of monthly features sells commodities designed to enhance and increase heterosexual appeal—all of which encourages readers to accept that their sexuality and desirability is something to be purchased. Rather than self-empowerment, women and girls find messages connecting shopping and the use of beauty products to an improved quality of life, often symbolized through strategic placements of wedding gowns, diamond rings, and/or attractive male models gazing admiringly at them from the pages of magazines. As mainstream cultural productions, magazines are powerful vehicles for initiating trends and commodifying all aspects of women’s everyday lives. As with other forms of women’s mass culture, such as romance novels and soap operas, female consumers may browse through them with pleasure, for leisure, or seeking inspiration. Readers may engage with them to enjoy their visual presentation of information, and to experience the pleasures of evaluating, interpreting, and selectively screening ideas and commercial ideologies. In these publications, readers are exposed to a range of data documenting cultural developments, including links to other forms of emergent popular culture such as television programs, films, novels, studies, and Web sites of interest to women. And by consuming them, readers are informed and connected to the discourses of women’s roles in the massmedia marketplace. Women and girls can and do read and enjoy popular magazines for these reasons, and in doing so develop increasingly savvy media literacy without suspending critical judgment or becoming cultural dupes. However, sometimes women’s magazines are read very closely, and their messages have a more serious impact on women’s self-image and choices. This is the case when specialty publications represent to girls and women how to mark female rites of passage such as prom and weddings in the contemporary North American cultural context. Serials such as Brides and Your Prom exist for these occasions, to sell dresses and accessories and encourage women and girls to associate consumption with maturity. These serials offer themselves as didactic texts, explicitly instructing and educating readers about how to celebrate life’s key moments, emphasizing the products and services required to ensure their success. In bridal and prom magazines, readers are encouraged to make connections between love, beauty, romance, and success, and securing the perfect dress, flowers, and makeup. The overt message of each issue of women’s fashion and lifestyle glossies advises the audience that happiness comes from making the correct consumer choices. Although this is undoubtedly the preferred reading, it is likely that women use magazines as guides (as models or even anti-models) to the marketplace, subversively using them to focus their imaginations rather than as templates for personal attitudes, expectations, and behaviors. Taking the place of a generation of older women who might impart traditional wisdom to young women, magazines offer up ‘‘modern’’ female experts to advise readers on all things domestic and feminine. In doing so, magazines gain their audience’s trust and identification through adopting

378 MAGAZINES, WOMEN’S AND GIRLS’

a mode of address that could be described as ‘‘woman to woman’’ but is more accurately ‘‘advertisers to women.’’ As a consequence, magazines cooperate with other forms of popular cultural discourse to create and maintain a generation gap between women, denigrating older females whose usefulness as consumers is limited, and using scare tactics to sell high-tech and expensive anti-aging cosmetics to younger women. As a result, the dominant narratives about female lives, sexuality, and identity circulating throughout North American mass culture are authored by marketers rather than emanating from the experiences of mature women themselves. At the same time, however, there lie stories within the history of women’s magazine production in the twentieth century of many gate-crashing female journalists and their quest for professional legitimacy, status, and entry to the all-male world of news production. Often, writing advertising copy and reporting news of exclusive interest to women were the only options available to a female journalist; thus, the historical role and rise of the female expert in women’s magazines is worth considering in light of these publications’ power in mainstreaming visions of women’s lives. Because women’s magazines encode textual and visual narratives about female identity and lifestyle that proscribe and promote Western ideologies and cultural values, mining them for their data about the nature of everyday life, ideologies of capitalism and nationalism, gender and sexuality, it is possible to identify the network of codes that form the battlefield on which struggles for hegemony take place in North American culture. This was the aim of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963)—which critically analyzed mass-media magazines’ misrepresentation of women’s lives and the stereotype of the happy housewife—a book widely regarded as the catalyst for the second wave of the women’s liberation movement that swept through the United States and Canada in the 1970s. Women’s and girls’ magazines, like most popular-culture artifacts aligned with the feminine, are viewed as forms of low or trash culture, as disposable texts full of trivial information, assumed to serve only as modes of escapist entertainment. For the folklorist or cultural anthropologist, however, women’s magazines are valuable documents that trace social movements, rituals, fables, and discourses. A close examination of women’s magazines reveals that they are repositories of mass-marketed women’s history, reflecting the shifting status of women and girls through the lens of and vis-a-vis the dominant culture in each generation. See also: Aesthetics; Aging; Beauty; Cosmetics; Diet Culture; Fashion; Feminisms; Gender; Hair; Marriage; Mass Media; Popular Culture; Race; Rites of Passage; Self-Help; Sexism; Sexuality; Wedding; Women’s Movement; Women’s Work. References: Douglas, Susan J. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. New York: Times Books, 1995 [1994]; Farrell, Amy Erdman. Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998; Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001 [1963]; Gavenas, Mary Lisa. Color Stories: Behind the Scenes of America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002; Gough-Yates, Anna. Understanding Women’s Magazines. New York: Routledge, 2002; Hermes, Joke. Reading Women’s Magazines: An Analysis of Everyday Media Use. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press; Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1995; Kilbourne, Jean. Can’t

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Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. New York: Free Press, 2000 [1999]; Kitch, Carolyn. The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001; Korinek, Valerie J. Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000; Lang, Marjory Louise. Women Who Made the News: Female Journalists in Canada, 1880–1945. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999; McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1991; Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984; Scanlon, Jennifer. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995; Winship, Janice. Inside Women’s Magazines. London, New York: Pandora Press, 1988; Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. New York: Perennial, 2002 [1991].

Sidney Eve Matrix Magic Occasionally spelled ‘‘magick’’ to differentiate it from sleight of hand, card tricks, or theatrical stage illusions, magic’s definitions have been influenced by occultist Aleister Crowley’s ‘‘The Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will’’ (xii). As this notion could include many intentional acts, many have worked to clarify it. Magician Donald Michael Kraig called magic the ‘‘science and art of causing change (in consciousness) to occur in conformity with the will, using means not currently understood by Western science’’ (9). Slightly more group-oriented is Joyce and River Higginbotham’s definition, ‘‘The actions of many consciousnesses voluntarily working together within an aware and interconnected universe to bring about one or more desired results’’ (164). Magic has captured the imagination of contemporary culture, from the ‘‘magick’’ of the ceremonial magician to fantasy fiction, card games, computer programming, science and mathematics, and even the naming of radio stations. Indeed, few subjects have so enthralled anthropologists and folklorists alike. Magic lurks beneath such headings as superstitions, folk beliefs, old wives’ tales, popular beliefs, folk medicine, the occult, and—more recently—urban legends. Often discounted as irrational and untrue, magic nevertheless sneaks into scholarly discussions of religions (often in contradistinction), shamanism (as survivals of an archaic world and time), and nonmedical or alternative forms of healing (as merely placebo effects and wishful thinking). Early works on magic reflect the intellectual biases of nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship. In a heady mix of the Age of Reason, the Protestant Reformation, and Darwin’s theory of evolution, folklorists and anthropologists during this period defined magic and religion as distinct entities, constructed a unilinear evolution of societal progress, and relegated magical practices to the primitive past and marginalized, uneducated, and unsophisticated groups. They rushed to collect what they regarded as ‘‘cultural leftovers’’ or ‘‘survivals’’ from those at civilization’s periphery: peasants and country folk, the lower classes, rough laborers and street people,

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savages and barbarians—and, of course, women—before they and their outdated ideas were swallowed up by reason. One of the earliest and most extensive collections of magic is Sir James G. Frazer’s (1854–1941) The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. He defined magic as primitive humans’ earliest attempt to systematically understand and manipulate the natural world. Things influence and are connected to one another because of either similarity or sympathy. Sympathetic magic includes two subprinciples: imitative magic (like attracts or affects like) and contagious magic (part affects part). Frazer theorized that the principles of imitation and contact function as a kind of primitive science, as constant and universal as modern scientific laws of cause and effect. To prove his theory, he collected evidence in the form of de-contextualized examples judiciously selected from cultures around the world. Identifying women as part of the uneducated, unsophisticated, and simpler folk, folklorists and anthropologists considered them fertile sources of quaint and curious lore. It should not be surprising that women’s associations with magic reflect in part their status and roles in society at large. Women were seldom considered part of the rarefied sphere of ceremonial magicians, alchemists, and other hermetic practitioners who encompassed classical Western esotericism. Women’s magic, like their lives, often disappeared into the realm of domesticity, attending to the practical matters of sex and love, fertility and birth, and healing and death. Women were excellent sources for love charms and potions, charms, herbs for an easy birth, healing poultices, and herbal teas, in other words, ‘‘roots magic’’ of all sorts. They were the definitive guardians of old wives’ tales, those (sometimes false but often at least partially true) pearls of wisdom passed from mothers to children to enforce desired behaviors. Scholars considered women’s magic—like all magic—as basically harmless if misguided survivals of the primitive past. At most, magic was a weapon of the weak, a poor defense for those who had no real power in daily life. Although scholars considered women’s magic harmless, those who used it reasoned that if magic could heal, it could also harm, and the wielder of such power often held a place of social ambiguity if not persecution. This was especially true for those who were thought to practice evil magic— what English-speaking anthropologists translated from languages throughout the world as ‘‘witchcraft.’’ Accusations of harmful magic had serious consequences for the accused, including torture and death at the hands of church inquisitors and demonologists. Of course, the problem with characterizing magic as irrational folk belief is what to do when magic occurs among civilized and highly educated groups of people—as it does today with the emergence of magically based religions in the modern world. Recent works have opened promising lines of inquiry, ways of thinking and writing about magic without simply dismissing, ridiculing, or explaining it away as scholars have traditionally done. Magic emerges as a ‘‘particular way of training the imagination’’ (Magliocco 2004), a way of ‘‘developing and training the body-in-practice’’ (Bado-Fralick 2005), a ‘‘de-centered perception, a natural aspect of mind, that enables an awareness of participation with other phenomena in the cosmos’’

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(Greenwood 2005), and a technique of ‘‘opening doorways to other realities through the senses’’ (Hume 2007). Contemporary folklorists and anthropologists explore the world of magic as a stream of possibilities, a multiplicity of consciousnesses that leaves behind the limitations of Cartesian dualism and opens up possibilities for ‘‘consciousness as a process that is inclusive of body,’’ as well as other beings in nature, and even perhaps an ‘‘intrinsic quality of a wider universe’’ (Greenwood 2005: 5–6). Magic reenchants the world and reveals the direct experience of the interconnectedness of all things. See also: Folk Belief; Folk Medicine; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Old Wives’ Tales; Popular Culture; Ritual; Superstition; Wicca and Neo-Paganism; Witchcraft, Historical. References: Bado-Fralick, Nikki. Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual. American Academy of Religion, Academy Series. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, circa 1960 [1929]; Fraser, Sir. James G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan and Company, Limited, 1,913–20; Greenwood, Susan. Magic, Witchcraft, and the Otherworld: An Anthropology. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000; ———. The Nature of Magic: An Anthropology of Consciousness. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005; Higginbotham, Joyce, and River Higginbotham. Paganism: An Introduction to Earth-Centered Religions. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2002; Hume, Lynne. Portals: Opening Doorways to Other Realities Through the Senses. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007; Kraig, Donald Michael. Modern Magick: Eleven Lessons in the High Magickal Arts. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1988; Magliocco, Sabina. Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004; Online Archive of American Folk Medicine. http://www.folkmed.ucla.edu (accessed August 13, 2008); Pals, Daniel. Seven Theories of Religion. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; Tambiah, Stanley J. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Nikki Bado-Fralick Maiden, Mother, Crone Maiden, Mother, and Crone are the names of the three aspects of the divine force known as the Goddess in earth-based religions such as NeoPaganism and Wicca. Together, they comprise the sacred triangle or Trinity of the Goddess, which corresponds to one of her many names, Trivia. The number three is considered sacred to the Goddess as it represents the flow of the life cycle, its beginning, middle, and end. The following chart represents each aspect of the Triple Goddess and its corresponding connection to the phases of the moon, magical colors, age, the life cycle, and corresponding ideas in patriarchal Catholicism. In this ‘‘thealogy,’’ it is believed that the female, by virtue of being able to create life from her body, naturally embodies the principles and divinity of the Goddess. The Maiden is the first aspect of the Goddess, into which human females are born, and which, like the Mother and Crone, is known in non-monotheistic mythologies by many names. Among them are Kore and Kali. The waxing moon represents new growth; it is the beginning and considered the best time to start new projects. Old wives’ tales tell us that the new moon is the best time to trim one’s hair, if one wants the hair to grow longer or more

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Moon Cycle Color World Life Cycle Catholic Trinity Age

Maiden

Mother

Crone

Waxing White Heaven Creator Beginning Son Premenarche

Full Red Earth Preserver Middle Father Menstruation

Waning Black Underworld Destroyer End Holy Spirit Menopause

rapidly. Here, the color white, associated with the Maiden, is indicative of innocence, childhood, and na€vete. In her Maiden aspect, the Goddess is playful and open to discoveries. Contrary to the Anglo European symbolism of the color white meaning purity and sexual abstinence, or its Asian connotation of death, in this tradition, white is a symbol of spirituality. The idea of heaven associated with the Maiden represents thoughts, concepts, or dreams that have yet to manifest on the physical plane, the source and birthplace of what we call genius or brilliance. The Maiden is the Goddess’ gestational aspect, the stage of her nurturance of ideas before they are articulated or put into practice, the step before anything is born. As correlated with the female body, the Maiden represents the time in a woman’s life before menarche (first menstruation). It is said in this tradition that the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam replaced the Maiden/Daughter with male figures, the Son (Jesus Christ), or God’s closest envoy (Moses and/or Mohammed). The Mother is the second aspect of the Goddess. At menarche, a girl/woman begins her initiation into this aspect, the stage at which she is able to express herself most fully and effectively on the physical/Earth level, regardless of her actual reproductive decisions. The Mother aspect of the Goddess corresponds with nurturance and care for other human beings, as well as for energies expended in the creation of ‘‘spiritual children,’’ manifestations in the form of art, literature, philosophy, business, etc. It also encompasses elements more usually associated with protector figures, warriors, and hunters. The Mother’s color is red, the color of blood, and is associated with menstruation as the outward sign of the Goddess’ creative power. This middle phase of a woman’s life is symbolically connected with the full moon, a time of power and intimate connection with the Goddess. The Mother is the middle; we all pass through her. The second aspect of the Goddess both preserves and creates as she confers on and sustains physical human existence. In ancient Greek myth, she is identified as the Earth itself in the figures of Gaia, Rhea, and Demeter, understood as the source of grains and other foodstuffs. Her power to bring forth life from her body is reversed in the myth of the birth of Athena, in which Zeus is credited with giving birth to his daughter from his head (the source of the word ‘‘brainchild’’). In terms of cultural practice, this thealogy sees male-oriented cultures as having frequently (and often brutally) attempted to reassign the creative power of the Mother to males, most

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notably in the historical shift in normative birthing practice from midwifery to the realm of male-dominated institutional medicine. Rape, perceived as a violation of the sacredness of a woman’s body, is a crime against the Goddess in her Mother aspect. The Mother as an aspect of the Goddess does not necessarily carry with it any connotations of self-sacrificing asexuality. It is her active sexuality that makes her the Mother, just as it is sex that makes women mothers. Traditions in which the Triple Goddess is revered do not make distinctions like those reflected in the madonna/whore split, which is particularly emergent in historical Judaism and Christianity, wherein her role was taken over by the Father/Yaweh, but dichotomously preserved in the figures of Eve/Lilith and the Virgin Mary/Mary Magdelene. The Mother is identified as nurturing and protective, but is also characterized by her robust sacred sexuality, identified in the world’s mythologies with Isis, Diana, Yemaja, Astarte, Venus, and Oshun, among others. The Crone is the third aspect of the Goddess. She is often depicted as a hag, the brittle, dried-up old witch of many cultures’ folktales, jealous of the youth and vibrant sexual energy of younger women, an idea that stems from the patriarchal attitude that postmenopausal woman are no longer ‘‘useful’’ because they no longer sexually attract young men. In Triple Goddess traditions, however, the Crone is the aspect of the Goddess that is fully mature in power, wisdom, patience, and ambition. The idea here is that with the cessation of menstruation, the female body begins to retain its wisdom (blood) rather than releasing it into the world of manifestations. With the onset of menopause, a woman enters the third and final phase of her life. The color associated with the Crone is black, representing unshakable wisdom and power. In cultures that revere elders, grandmothers and other postmenopausal women may take on roles as teachers, guides, and healers to help people in the earlier stages of their lives. The Crone listens to our pain and tells us bedtime stories. It is the prerogative of the Crone to turn away from public life to a more private life if she so chooses, much like the sannyasin (mendicant ascetics) of East Asia. This aspect of the Goddess corresponds to the waning moon: she turns her attention away from bright lights of the world, destroying their capacity to overwhelm her perceptions and understanding. As a Crone, a woman is free to turn inward, and there to find closer connections with ‘‘under’’ or ‘‘other’’ worlds. Earth-based religions view all human women as manifestations of the Goddess. During the stages of her life, a woman reflects the three aspects of the Goddess: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. In the first, she is the Maiden, innocent and na€ve, associated with the waxing moon. In the second, she is the Mother, fruitful in her capacity to conceive and give birth to children, art, ideas, and other physical manifestations of her energy. She is the full moon, and any attempts to bifurcate her into chaste mother/lusty whore are antithetical to Goddess thealogy. Finally, she is the Crone. With age comes wisdom, and with the onset of old age, a women embarks on a life of deeper reflection; associated with the waning moon, she becomes a mentor, especially for other women. See also: Aging; Croning; Eve; Goddess

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Worship; Lilith; Menarche Stories; Menopause; Menstruation; Midwifery; Mother Earth; Sexuality; Wicca and Neo-Paganism. References: Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, GoddessWorshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. New York: Penguin Group (USA), 1997 [1986]; Ardinger, Barbara. A Woman’s Book of Rituals and Celebrations. San Rafael, CA: New World Library, 1992; Budapest, Z. The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Berkeley CA: Wingbow Press, 1989; Gadon, Elinor. The Once and Future Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989; Grahn, Judy. Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993; James, E. O. The Cult of the Mother Goddess. Reprint edition. New York: Barnes & Noble Press, 1994 [1959]; Noble, Vicki. 1991. Shakti Woman. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco; Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989 [1979]; Walker, Barbara. The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988; ———. The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Symbols. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.

Miri Hunter Haruach Marriage Worldwide and cross-culturally, marriage is a legal and/or religious relationship between two or more individuals, usually but not always of different sexes and/or genders, to facilitate the exchange of economic, reproductive, and/or sexual services. In most societies, marriages form a basic unit that provides for procreation and childrearing, the gendered division of labor (including production and consumption), and the potential or actual fulfillment of sexual and emotional needs. In many societies, romantic love is not considered a necessary prerequisite for marriage; a marriage may be instead arranged in advance—sometimes far in advance—by the bride’s and groom’s families for social and/or economic reasons. However, in North America, romantic love is generally considered the most important factor in choosing a marriage partner. Despite strong social expectations in contemporary North America that marriage should lead to lifelong happiness and security, it is not a necessary prerequisite for reproduction, economic stability, or personal satisfaction. In European and North American society, legal marriage particularly has provided a rationale for sexist, heterosexist, and racist ideas and policies. Marriage comprises a congeries of events, negotiations, and passages— some ritualized, some individual—marking the transition from childhood to adulthood for women and men. For formally recognized legal and/or religious marriages, these stages include some or all of the following: the initial formation and development of a couple’s relationship, ideally involving the generation of strong feelings of affection and respect; the engagement (public declaration of an intent or promise to marry); the planning and organization of the wedding itself (including the casting of major roles such as ‘‘maid or matron of honor’’ and/or ‘‘best man’’ to support the main participants); prenuptial festivities such as bridal showers, bachelor parties, and wedding rehearsals; the wedding ceremony itself; the reception; the honeymoon (a trip taken by the newlyweds); and the return and commencement of married cohabitation (sometimes marked in heterosexual marriages in

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North America by the groom carrying the bride over the threshold of their house). Each of these stages of the development and establishment of a marriage is accompanied by folklore. Girls play games designed to offer insight into who they will marry. For example, when a girl eats an apple, she may twist the stem numerous times, reciting each successive letter of the alphabet at each turn. The stem detaches at the letter that begins the first name of the person she will marry. Courtship rituals, although they are constantly changing, generally include the custom of meeting the intended’s family; the man may be expected to ask for the blessing of his finacee’s parents to marry their daughter. There are many traditions surrounding the wedding itself, such as the proverbial dictum that brides should wear ‘‘something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.’’ At bridal showers, a bride-to-be may collect the bows from the gifts she has received to create a bouquet that she will carry during her wedding rehearsal. It is interesting to note that the white wedding dress, considered traditional in North America, is actually a recent development; popularized during the Victorian era (beginning in 1840) among the upper classes in England, white slowly became the predominant color for wedding dresses in Euro American societies. After the wedding, tradition prescribes anniversary gifts for each year of marriage, increasing in value as the couple’s married life progresses. For example, gifts celebrating a first wedding anniversary are traditionally made of paper; for the second wedding anniversary, cotton; for the third, leather, and so on. A married couple’s twenty-fifth anniversary calls for presents made of silver, and for their fiftieth, gifts made of gold. As North American social conventions change, however; roles once strictly regulated by gender are now more malleable. Rowdy bachelorette parties—often involving visits to bars where male strippers perform—have replaced more sedate bridal showers. And as the impossibility of heterosociality—nonsexual friendships between women and men—comes increasingly into question, a ‘‘man of honor’’ may be called upon to support the bride and the ‘‘best woman’’ may support the groom. Similarly, in same-sex marriages, gendered role distinctions between persons of honor—usually female—and best persons—usually male—become less important. Marriage, cross-culturally, is a changing institution (see, for example, N. Williams). Though marriages in the economic North are commonly understood in terms of love and personal relationships, individual bonds of affection do not require the institutional verification of the church and/or state that marriages provide. Ultimately, then, marriages function to regulate sex and property. That is, they provide the socioreligious approval of sex and reproduction, and the socioeconomic distribution of property. One popular notion is that marriage is primarily enjoined and enacted by and for women. Contending that women are naturally monogamous and men naturally polygamous, and that women trick men into marriage so that their children can be supported and protected, this argument justifies male promiscuity both inside and outside of marriage. The idea that marriage is in Euro North American women’s best interests, rather than in men’s, belies the fact that

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many men upon marriage gain access to women’s unpaid sexual and domestic services while too often, as the primary wage earners, also retain extensive social and economic control over them. Historically, North American First Nations cultures followed different patterns, in which mature married women controlled the community distribution not only of the food they gathered but also over what their husbands brought home. Cross-culturally, the traditional family economy, which is centered upon the wife/mother, makes women occupational generalists; they must be proficient at preparing food, performing or arranging childcare, mending and repairing, laundering, and general household maintenance. Yet the ideology of marriage suggests that wife and husband collaborate as equal partners. In fact, however, work is usually divided along gender lines, with women primarily responsible for unpaid domestic labor—even when they also do paid work outside the home—and men as the main breadwinners. Yet some marriage partners do cooperate; for example, Chicana santeras (Santeria priestesses) sometimes produce their religious art with their husbands, and both sign the resulting work. And even in societies where gender roles are polarized, the role of wife can be economically pivotal because she most often takes responsibility for and/or controls reproduction, production, and consumption within the household. Upon marriage, many North American couples take up residence away from their parental homes. Others locate with or near one or the other side of the family. These differences have considerable effects upon women’s experiences in marriage. For women who work primarily in the home, especially when they reside away from relatives, marriage can be isolating and difficult. In societies—both within and outside of North America—where residence with the bride’s side of the family is the norm, women’s socioeconomic position is generally better than when residing with the groom’s family is expected. Women surrounded by their own relatives, especially their own female relatives, can usually count on personal support from them, as well as for help with household and childrearing tasks. In societies in which newlyweds reside with the groom’s family, the expectation that there will be rivalry between the wife and her husband’s mother—known in Euro North American society as her ‘‘mother-in-law’’—can foster resentment, open hostility, and sometimes violent conflict between the two women. Polygynous marriages (one husband plus two or more wives), though they are not legally recognized, exist in some religious traditions in North America. For example, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons or the LDS church), a religion that originated in the United States in the early 1800s, endorsed polygyny in the early days of the church. This policy has been officially rescinded; new polygynous marriages were banned in 1890. Some offshoots of the LDS church, however, such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, still endorse polygynous marriages as essential to achieving the greatest rewards in the afterlife. Sometimes these marriages are presumed to inevitably produce conflict between wives for the husband’s attention, but they can be experienced by women as positively supportive. Rather than having lone responsibility for domestic work and childcare as in male-dominated and male-centered

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households, co-wives can often count on each other for support, company, and labor. Many North Americans presume that a wife’s household labor will be solitary. However, some women benefit from cooperation in preparing family meals, for example, as when Tejana migrant farmworkers work together to prepare tamales for their husbands. In marriage, ‘‘women find both husbands and many more kin who will share their lives’’ (B. Williams: 123). Marriage has always implicated the transfer of individuals (usually women) from one kinship line to another—usually between men. The Anglo North American tradition of women’s surnames changing from their father’s to their husband’s upon marriage reflects this shift. The result is the continuation of a patrilineal kinship line (in which children receive their father’s family name) and the creation or strengthening of ties between male community members. In the French Canadian province of Quebec, women’s names do not change upon marriage, and the advent of feminism elsewhere in North America has led to many women keeping their birth names or hyphenating their own and their husband’s names. But in many cultures, marriage has also involved the transfer of actual property—money and gifts—between families and individuals. It may be only upon divorce that many of today’s middle-class Euro North American couples pay attention to the link between their wedded state and the sharing of their goods and property, but it is present from the moment they are married. Although monogamous heterosexual unions—those between one female and one male—form the majority of legally recognized marriages in North America, other combinations are possible. When individuals have lived together for a sufficient period of time, especially if they have children, their relationship forms a ‘‘common-law’’ marriage. Some jurisdictions allow couples to register as cohabiting and/or provide for same-sex couples to legally formalize their unions, usually stopping short of declaring the relationship a ‘‘marriage.’’ In Canada, however, the distinction between same-sex marriages and different-sex marriages has been erased; they have equal status under the law. Some variations remain, though, between legally recognized and common-law relationships. In the United States, Massachusetts was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage; despite strong opposition from antiqueer rights groups, legislation in other states is pending. In 2008, the California Supreme Court struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriages. For many years, the legal definition of marriage in Anglo common-law states came from the British case of Hyde vs. Hyde (1866), which calls it the ‘‘voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others.’’ Stemming from the canon law of the medieval Christian (Catholic) church in Europe, marriages, then, must not be involuntary or forced; they cannot be ended by any circumstances other than the death of a spouse, and they must be monogamous. This definition has been appropriated by political conservatives in North America as an argument against same-sex marriage. However, the voluntary, lifelong, and exclusive properties of Hyde vs. Hyde are generally forgotten in contemporary debates in favor of its prescription concerning marriage as ‘‘the union of one man and one woman.’’ Yet some religions accept and celebrate same-sex marriage; even some of the most socially conservative allow divorce and admit that

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sexual liaisons out of wedlock are part of their lives (see Smith). Trends indicate that in contemporary Euro North American society, serial monogamy (a sequence of monogamous relationships with different primary partners) will soon become more common than one marriage for life (Haley). In many European societies, the legal bonds of marriage are not undertaken until after the birth of a child or children, and, increasingly, not even then. Traditional notions of marriage are often sexist and homophobic; they are also frequently race-driven and racist, as evidenced by controversies about African American marriage in the United States. Structural violence and disproportionate rates of incarceration of Black men, among many other sociocultural considerations, have led to low marriage rates and a predominance of women-headed households in some African American communities. Racist social scientists and policymakers have, in turn, blamed this demographic effect for the marginalized social and economic position of many Blacks (see Lane et al.). The stereotypical Black, single, welfare mother is often vilified, while the White businesswoman who decides to adopt or give birth to a child outside of wedlock is celebrated, for example, in television shows like Murphy Brown. Cultural, national, and political contexts also make a difference in what can and cannot be found acceptable in marriages. In Canada, legal moves toward legitimizing gay and lesbian parenthood, including adoption, preceded the legalization of gay and lesbian marriage in several provinces. However, in other locations (France and Germany, for instance), moves to legalize gay and lesbian marriage have gone forward only with strict regulation of matters relating to parenthood. This structure results because reproduction holds a central place in the institution of marriage. However, for example, among Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicana women, a wide variety of kin, including relatives by blood, marriage, and compadrazgo— fictive kinship—support a wife throughout her experience of pregnancy, birth, and childrearing. Though women’s fertility within marriage is generally seen as a good thing, not all children are welcomed. The offspring of interracial, interreligious, and interethnic couples, for example, can be rejected by either or both parents’ communities. Children conceived outside of wedlock may still be stigmatized as ‘‘bastards.’’ Traditional cultures develop ways—the charivari/shivaree, for example—to express dissatisfaction with individual couplings, with sexual behaviors within and outside of marriage, and with actions within marriage that are seen as inappropriate to a person’s gender. For women, marriage can be a source of personal fulfillment and satisfaction, of violence and virtual slavery, or of some combination thereof. Marital satisfaction may be expected or longed for, but cannot be presumed. A folk custom known as the Dunmow Flitch Trials dates to the early twelfth century in England and is still enacted every four years in Essex: the Dunmow Flitch (a side of bacon) is ‘‘awarded . . . to claimants stating upon oath that, having been married for at least a year and a day, they have never once, ‘sleeping or waking,’ regretted their marriage or wished themselves single again’’ (Hole: 85). Evidently, those who can honestly make such an oath are few and far between. See also: Adoption; Brideprice; Charivari/Shivaree;

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Childbirth and Childrearing; Courtship; Divorce; Dowry; Engagement; Ethnicity; Foodways; Gender; Infertility; Mother-in-Law; Race; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Violence; Wedding. References: Butler, Judith. ‘‘Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?’’ differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2002): 14–44; Charsley, Simon R. Rites of Marrying: The Wedding Industry in Scotland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991; Haley, Shawn. ‘‘The Future of the Family in North America.’’ Futures 32 (2000): 777–782; Hole, Christina. A Dictionary of British Folk Customs. London: Granada, 1978; Kay, Margarita A. ‘‘Mexican, Mexican-American, and Chicana Childbirth.’’ In Twice a Minority: Mexican American Women, ed. Margarita B. Melville, 52–65. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1980; Lane, Sandra D., Robert H. Keefe, Robert A. Rubenstein, Brook A. Levandowski, Michael Freedman, Alan Rosenthal, Donald A. Cibula, and Maria Czerwinski. ‘‘Marriage Promotion and Missing Men: African American Women in a Demographic Double Bind.’’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly 18, no. 4 (2004): 405–428; Lucero, Helen R. ‘‘Art of the Santera.’’ In Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, eds. Norma E. Cant u and Olga Najera-Ramirez, 35–55. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Matrix, Sidney, and Pauline Greenhill, eds. ‘‘Special Issue: Wedding Realities.’’ Ethnologies 28, no. 2 (2006); Rubin, Gayle. ‘‘The Traffic of Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex.’’ In Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975; Smith, Christian. Christian America: What Evangelicals Really Want. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Ward, Martha, and Monica Edelstein. A World Full of Women. Fourth edition. Boston: Pearson, 2006; Williams, Brett. ‘‘Why Migrant Women Feed Their Husbands Tamales: Foodways as a Basis for a Revisionist View of Tejano Family Life.’’ In Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, eds. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, 113–126. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984; Williams, Norma. The Mexican American Family: Tradition and Change. Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1990.

Pauline Greenhill and Theresa A. Vaughan Mass Media All forms of cultural communication that are transmitted on a large scale via technology comprise the mass media. These include film, television, newspapers, magazines, popular fiction and non-fiction, radio, music and music videos, video games, and the Internet. The term ‘‘mass,’’ like its counterpart ‘‘folk,’’ indicates that these products and practices are of and for the people (the masses). Indeed, the proliferation of media in the last 150 years has exponentially increased the transmission of cultural bodies of stories, practices, and beliefs. The social effects of media are a source of constant popular debate, and the response of scholars in the fields of women’s and media studies specifically has likewise been mixed. While a significant portion of critical work has focused on the media’s presentation of damaging stereotypes of women, a growing number of critical analyses have shown its potential for change and feminist empowerment. More recently, media scholars have pointed to complex relationships of negotiation between regressive and progressive representations of women, suggesting that some mass-media texts are neither wholly conservative nor radical in their presentation of gender, but instead can be flexible, varied, and responsive to viewer demands. It is nonetheless true that media control continues to rest overwhelmingly in the hands of

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American, middle-, and upper-class White males. Thus, a key question for feminist media scholars and activists has been the relationship between media production and consumption. Early work on women and media centered on images of women. The media, in its role as producer, was criticized by feminists for one-dimensional, negative representations of women. Audiences, particularly women consuming these images, were assumed to be passive receivers, absorbing and imitating the roles mapped out for them by these media. In this view, the media does not simply reinscribe the real-life oppression of women but in fact perpetuates and exacerbates it by providing repetitive portrayals of women’s primary roles as domestic servants, sexual objects, and inferior professionals. Nor is this view of the media entirely outdated: women are still insistently presented in the context of their function as wives, mothers, housekeepers, models, prostitutes, pinup girls, nurses, secretaries, and shoppers. Little has changed, for example, from the 1960s television fare featuring bevies of ‘‘dumb blondes’’ (The Dating Game), female models as commodities (Bob Barker’s Beauties from The Price is Right), and bumbling-but-attractive employees (the office girls from The Mary Tyler Moore Show) to today’s prime-time hits, The Bachelorette, Wheel of Fortune, and The Nanny. In reaction to this view, a number of feminist scholars and activists began in the 1980s to shift their focus from the power of the producer over the image to the potential power of the consumer and her reception of the image. Case studies showed women audiences as resistant to some of the perceptions offered by mainstream media, and theoretical analyses suggested strategies of women as resisting readers and viewers. Even those forms most consistently trivialized for their feminine appeal afford space for insurgence against patriarchal standards. Tania Modleski (1982) argues that while daytime soap operas are concerned with traditional female issues—such as children, husbands, and lovers—they nonetheless posit women’s experiences as socially central rather than as secondary, and often promote female characters’ ability to be simultaneously wives, mothers, and glamorous career women. Similarly, Janice Radway (1987) argues that female readers of Harlequin romance novels should not be dismissed as hopelessly unfeminist; like soap operas, romance novels place women’s desires as central, and serial-romance reading is symptomatic of a dissatisfaction with women’s devaluation in actual heterosexual relations. Women also began to resist negative media images not only by exercising their power as consumers, but also by becoming more involved as producers. Alternative media products and practices, such as women’s radio programming and networks, alternative women’s magazines, women’s television networks, women’s music festivals, independent film by women directors, and women’s media distribution companies mushroomed in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Women’s magazines such as Ms. began to talk more openly about controversial issues such as abortion and female sexuality, as well as to voice their discontent with women’s status in society. Experimental women’s films like Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) promoted women’s equality and

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sought to avoid conventional cinematic practices which situate women as objects for implicitly male spectators. Festivals such as Lilith Fair were organized to promote women’s musical expression in an atmosphere free from the commercial demands of the male-dominated music industry. Building on the experience of earlier women’s networks reaching smaller audiences, Canada’s Women’s Television Network (now ‘‘W’’) has achieved major distribution success. These independent alternatives provide important examples of media usage for the creation of women’s community and feminist activism. At the same time, more women have sought and gained entrance to mainstream media production. However, it has also been suggested that women’s independent media has had no widespread impact on North American culture in general. Some have pointed out that women in mainstream media have not improved the media presentation of women. Instead, they have necessarily had to duplicate the successful formulae of conventional and regressive portrayals as a condition of their participation in the industry. Domestic, romantic, and shopping-related themes continue to dominate with female authorship and production supervision, even when these themes are presented as having a feminist context, as with the hit 1990s series Designing Women, and more recently, Sex and the City. Nonetheless, comedies like Murphy Brown have interrogated norms of age, career, and visual appearance for media images of women, and some, like the sitcom Ellen, have broached controversial issues such as homosexuality in a prime-time venue. Both women’s production and consumption of media, then, are inevitably complex and often contradictory processes. More recently, work in Media Studies has espoused neither side of the debate. Rather, it has posited women’s relationships with the mass media as marked by processes of negotiation. Women accept some stereotypes and not others, exercise some degree of power as consumers but not always, make some changes by virtue of their roles at the production level but not enough to alienate audiences, while the contexts of class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age additionally affect how women produce and consume media. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein (1996) argues, for instance, that the popular singer Madonna functions in radically different ways for different audiences. Where teenage girls may view the ‘‘Material Girl’’ video as progressive in its suggestion that money, not romance, should be a woman’s prime concern, the same girls’ mothers may see a regressive and/or nostalgic glamour based on their own memories of the image of Marilyn Monroe. Additionally, White female and Latina audiences have responded differently to Madonna’s video portrayals of Latin culture. As do the more established media, relatively recent mass forms and practices provide significant indicators of audience negotiation. Reality television, music video, videogaming, and Internet practices, particularly the online communities created by e-zines, shopping channels, and chat networks, may offer patently traditionalist formulae for women, but can also act as sites of resistance. Consumer desire is a powerful component in these extremely competitive new media markets and increasingly, audience gender steers production and design.

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Music videos have been criticized as aggressively masculinist in production and design. Sut Jhally argues that the overwhelming majority of music videos present a male-oriented narrative due to a combination of industry conditions and audience demographics; a small group of men are in control of the North American production of music and music videos, and the video world they create caters to male adolescent fantasy. At their least extreme, the videos encourage a view of women as decorative objects arranged for the pleasure of the male gaze and denude the women in the videos of any power as creative/artistic subjects in their own right. At their most extreme, Jhally suggests, these videos portray violence against women and help to effect a ‘‘normalization of rape culture’’ (1994). Others have noted that female artists’ music videos often do not reflect the songwriter’s lyrics or vision. While the lyrics may advocate strong, positive messages about women’s roles, the visual material of the videos tells a different story, subjecting the female artist to the same objectifying, violent visual practices found in videos for male artists. This disjunction between the music and the accompanying video narratives is driven by the conditions of distribution. Videos that conform to male fantasy receive heavy airplay, while those which do not fail to make it on the charts. Salt-N-Pepa, for example, exchanged their androgynous gansta rap style after limited airplay for a feminine and highly sexualized image, subsequently achieving greater commercial success. However, other female artists, like punk rocker Gwen Stefani and the country music trio the Dixie Chicks, have worked within their genres to produce both visually and lyrically subversive work. Videogaming, too, has been criticized for catering to the male adolescent. Industry designers have long bemoaned an inability to capture the girl market, while continuing to produce predominantly flight and driving simulators and combat-style games. Critics have been concerned with the presentation of women as visual objects for male pleasure and with the graphic presentation of violence against women. Women often perform the role of wallpaper in these games, becoming part of the background graphics as prostitutes, strippers, or bikini-clad flag-wavers. Moreover, male characters can gain extra points by committing acts of violence against the wallpaper images; one of the most popular 1990s games, Duke Nukem, rewarded male playable characters for shooting bound prostitutes. Attempts to win over women gamers have led to the inclusion of female playable characters, a development that has created a good deal of debate. Some insist that these characters, in their visual appearance, still present women in demeaning ways and, in fact, are aimed at male rather than female players. Others suggest that these characters offer women gamers agency within the confines of the game and a positive, non-traditionalist model of women’s roles. The debate has polarized particularly around Lara Croft, the busty heroine of the phenomenally successful Tomb Raider, and spread outward to the similarly sexy but strong female playable characters of the massive multi-player online role-playing games (MMORGs) available for Internet users. The Internet, like music video and videogaming, has been perceived as a primarily masculinist space. Scholars have argued that in its early days, the

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Internet was unfriendly toward women, a kind of lawless frontier realm, produced and populated by tech-savvy males. Issues of online safety and Internet pornography continue to make online practice a different experience for women than for men. However, feminist critics have argued that as the Internet has grown, women have moved to exploit its activist potential and ability to reach a large audience without the formal strictures of expensive production and distribution venues. Women’s lack of access to formal production and distribution channels is, feminists argue, one of the fundamental reasons why the Internet is so crucial as an alternative access and information base that empowers women. A number of e-zines (some with print correlatives), such as Bitch and Bust, distribute strong feminist material to large readerships. Additionally, online communities offer information and support to disparate and physically nonproximate women, a role that had traditionally been filled by women’s local networking and activist group work. Some suggest, though, that these online communities still cluster around women’s stereotypical roles: domestic functions as parent, wife, girlfriend, and cultural/commercial roles as shoppers. Representation is powerful; media representation is critical to the way that we, as social subjects in the twenty-first century, understand gender. Who controls the production of images of women, who controls their distribution, and how much control the consumer exerts are all key issues for debate. Further, globalization and the media mergers of the 1990s have had a profound impact on these questions. Major television, newspaper, magazine, and music companies have decreased in number, with the largest of these swallowing competing, smaller companies. As the means of mainstream media production have come to rest in far fewer hands, some fear that the roles allotted to women in the mass media have correspondingly narrowed. At the same time, the globalization of the media has worked in opposition to regional specificity, increasing the dominance of White, middle-class American culture and its associated lore, including its paradigms of gender. See also: Class; Cyberculture; Ethnicity; Feminisms; Film; Gender; Hip-Hop Culture/Rap; Lilith Fair; Magazines, Girls’ and Women’s; Popular Culture; Race; Sexism; Sexuality; Women’s Music Festivals. References: Baehr, Helen, and Gillian Dyer. Boxed In: Women and Television. New York: Pandora, 1987; Baehr, Helen, and Ann Gray. Turning It On: A Reader in Women and Media. London: Arnold, 1996; Balsamo, Anne. ‘‘The Virtual Body in Cyberspace.’’ In The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara Kennedy, 489–503. London: Routledge, 2000; Douglas, Susan. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994; Hallstein, D. and Lynn O’Brien. ‘‘Feminist Assessment of Emancipatory Potential and Madonna’s Contradictory Gender Practices.’’ The Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 125–41; Hollows, Joanne. ‘‘Youth Cultures and Popular Music.’’ In Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture, 161–189. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000; Hundley, Heather. ‘‘The Evolution of Gendercasting: The Lifetime Television Network—‘television for women’ ?’’. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 29, no. 4 (2002): 174–81; Huntemann, Nina. Game Over: Gender, Race and Violence in Video Games. Media Education Foundation, 2000; Jhally, Sut. Dreamworlds II: Desire, Sex, and Power in Music Video. Media Education Foundation, 1994; Kilbourne, Jean. Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women. Cambridge

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Documentary Films, 1979; ———. Killing Us Softly 3. Media Education Foundation, 2000; Modleski, Tania. Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982; Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991 [1987]; Wakeford, Nina. ‘‘Gender and the Landscapes of Computing in an Internet Cafe.’’ In The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, eds. Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kath Woodward, and Fiona Hovenden, 291–304. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Andrea Austin Material Culture From its inception within American folkloristics in the nineteenth century, material culture referred to both the field and the artifacts studied within that field. In Archaeology, Anthropology, Folklore, History, and Art History, scholars focused on objects made by human hands. Twentieth- and twenty-first century folklore scholarship, however, understands the study of material culture in terms of how humans create, use, and/or manipulate objects, whether handmade or mass-produced. Be they textiles, buildings, pottery, or bottles of fruit preserves, objects’ inherent patterns and meanings are examined by folklorists to further understand the beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions of a particular community, society, or group. Women’s material culture encompasses objects both personally created and mass-produced. Objects made and/or used by women and their families often stem from a need for warmth, shelter, nourishment, and love. Many objects created and manipulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in North America recall women’s connections with indoor space and outside spaces surrounding the home. From gardens to quilts, women’s creations have lasting impacts on the lives of women themselves and on the people around them; buildings and landscapes have been manipulated and controlled by women to make such spaces efficient and pleasant places to work and live. Mass-produced objects and/or manipulated objects can serve as collectables, mementos, or souvenirs. Whether on display or used from day to day, women’s material culture continues to represent current lives and to recall past experiences. Material-culture studies have been especially attentive to context; the locations in which objects are made and used are central to understanding them holistically. Women make and use objects in and for the home, the garden, and the domestic realm in general. But objects produced outside of the home, many of which relate to women’s paid work and recreations, also serve significant purposes for women. Whether inside or outside the home, the objects that women create and use are laden with meaning inherent to those spaces. Historically, women’s everyday lives were rarely documented through written texts, with only a few scholarly exceptions resulting from researchers’ diligent searches of court and probate records and diaries. Thus, objects made, used, and manipulated by women within the contexts of their daily lives are often the only surviving sources with which to understand the interrelationships of generations of women, their families, and the communities in which

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they lived. Material culture is an invaluable documentary form as well as an aesthetic one. The subgenres of material culture include folk art (decorative and aesthetic objects), folk craft (textiles, pottery, and toys), costume (clothing and knitting), vernacular architecture (homes, outbuildings, and landscapes), and foodways (cookery, preserving, and recipe books). They have been studied using theories and methodologies including structuralism, functionalism, the historic-geographic method, oral history, semiotics, psychoanalytic and behavioral psychologies, and, more recently, feminism. Much early material-culture scholarship was fraught with the tension between literary folklorists’ data interpretations and those of anthropological folklorists. Particularly contentious for material culture was the term ‘‘folklore’’ itself, because its specification of ‘‘lore’’—apparently referencing only traditional knowledge and verbal culture—seemed to exclude the material. In the early twentieth century, the anthropologists who took over the publication of the Journal of American Folklore considered that folklore consisted of oral traditions only. But by the 1930s, material culture was included again in folklore scholarship. In 1931, Martha Warren Beckwith, America’s first chair of Folklore at Vassar College, made a case in Folklore in America for an American folkloristic contribution that explores the ‘‘material arts’’ because the ‘‘American situation’’ possesses ‘‘a varied mixture of regional, ethnic, and occupational groups (in addition to the aboriginal tribes favored by anthropologists) that have related oral as well as material traditions’’ (Beckwith in Bronner 1996: 464). Similarly, Alfred L. Shoemaker, founder of the Pennsylvania Folklife Society in 1924, stressed the importance of including ‘‘folk culture’’ and ‘‘material culture’’ which drew on the German Volkskunde, or ‘‘folklife’’ movement, to interpret ‘‘total culture’’ (Bronner 1996: 464). Directly following in the steps of Shoemaker was the eminent and influential folklorist Don Yoder, who preferred the term ‘‘folklife’’ to folklore, as the former could include both oral and material traditions. Early Canadian material-culture studies were marred by museum personnel’s skepticism about academic material-culture research. In collecting objects for exhibitions, they often neglected to document contextual information. In addition, most museum collections, exhibitions, and heritage sites were limited to portrayals of pioneer life with little reference to places beyond the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, the hegemonic centers of Canada. In the 1980s, folklorists began to advocate for the investigation of current as well as past artifact trends, and later, for more studies of Aboriginal women and ethnic minority groups, including their material culture. North American folklorists have until recently paid less attention to women’s material culture than to collecting and recording women’s repertoires in folksong, ballad, and folk narrative, as is evident in the work of Helen Creighton, Elizabeth Greenleaf, Maud Karpeles, and Edith Fowke, among others. In the late twentieth century, research on material culture by and/or about women in North America considered activities that took place inside and outside of the home. Navajo women were noted for their woven blankets, Innu women painted intricate symbols on caribou skins for everyday and ceremonial use, and women’s handwoven wool coverlets warmed the beds of

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pioneer homesteads across Canada, while the Pennsylvania Amish expressed themselves through colorful quilts that were simple, yet beautiful. Daily life inside the home in rural farming and fishing communities included the creation of textiles from everyday sewing, knitting, and quilting, to fancy needlework. Samplers were early forms of education for girls, and outlets for displaying their skills with a needle and embroidery thread. With intricately rendered examples of the alphabet, numerals, and the botanical and animal kingdoms, samplers acted as a schoolgirl’s first efforts in becoming an accomplished lady. For everyday use, women created mats, braided rugs, woven coverlets, and quilts. In these pursuits, women were prodigious recyclers; they never missed an opportunity to use scraps of old clothing for quilts or hooked mats. Apart from their obvious function of warming the body, objects such as quilts moved beyond practicalities. Their creation expressed meaning to both makers and users. Quilts that contained pieces of cloth from wellworn party dresses or work uniforms became symbolic of ceremonies, christenings, weddings, and deaths, all of which told the story of a family and community. Quilts and quiltmaking have played a prominent role within women’s material-culture scholarship. Many researchers have recognized the influence of ladies’ periodicals, quilt competitions held by state and county fairs, as well as the many changes in technology and available cloth and fabric throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although many women made pieced or appliqued quilts individually, quiltmaking was also traditionally performed by groups of women in community quilting bees. Quilt design often expressed the ideas, skills, and interests of the maker. While patterns such as ‘‘Log Cabin,’’ ‘‘Flying Geese,’’ and ‘‘Lover’s Knot’’ were commonly employed by Euro North Americans, African American quiltmakers traditionally merged biblical and historical themes of slavery and emancipation. Some enslaved women made such highly prized work that they were able to accumulate enough money by selling their quilts to buy their freedom. The process of making objects, in which techniques and skills are used, shared, and passed along, forms an intangible aspect of material culture. Women’s material culture often expresses their creativity, but also reflects necessity. Women often stifled their creativity and restricted their ideas to conform to social norms, as, for example, with their use and transmission of textile designs and concepts dictated by their communities. For example, along the Southern Shore of the Avalon region of Newfoundland, the designs of hooked mats often dictated in what interior spaces they might be placed. Innovative designs were usually created for the parlor or the front room where clergy, merchants, and other special guests to the home were normally entertained. Mats implementing new asymmetrical designs were thus away from everyday view and on display primarily for honored guests. Neighbors and family—everyday visitors—stayed in the kitchen. In this common space, hooked-mat designs conformed to those shared and copied by women throughout the community. Though the women themselves would explain this differential placement in terms of plain work in the kitchen as opposed to fancywork in the parlor, the traditional ways in

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which designs of hooked mats were placed in different spaces in the home reflected ‘‘the simultaneous existence of both an egalitarian and hierarchical society’’ (Pocius 1979: 282). During the twentieth century, women hooked mats both from their own designs and from predesigned stamped burlap patterns manufactured for the cottage industry throughout New England and in the southern states, as well as in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Labrador. Handwork produced by women in the home was sometimes sold for badly needed cash. Income earned from mat-making was often essential to these women and their families for food, clothing, and supplies. On the northern peninsula of the island of Newfoundland and within coastal areas of Labrador, women hooked mats for the Grenfell Industries of the Grenfell Mission. Food, medicine, and clothing were purchased with ‘‘mat money’’ as well as extras, like linoleum and paint, with which women could beautify their homes. Despite having to conform to certain standards, mat-makers gained pride and economic independence from hooking mats for the Grenfell Industries. Vernacular architecture is the branch of material culture that focuses on buildings and landscapes made for everyday use. Buildings, for example, can be studied not only for their form and structure but also for their contents: room divisions, furnishings, and decoration. In an attempt to understand what architecture means to its owners—women and men and their families—scholars inquire into the uses as well as the alterations of spaces. Women were often responsible for the overall layout of furnishings throughout the home; they took care to replace aging wallpaper and/or repaint walls and individual rooms. Women’s—as opposed to men’s or children’s—spaces inside and outside the home were defined by the activities that went on there. Responsibility for those locations included not only the use and arrangement of objects therein, but also their care and maintenance. Thus, for example, garages in Euro North American households are most often the domain of men. Not only cars, but also tools are kept and arranged there. Women do not clean the garage, as they do other parts of the house. Nor do they usually do the actual work of rearranging and cleaning children’s bedrooms; the limitations on children’s actual control of what are often named their spaces is symbolized by parents’ frequent admonishments to ‘‘clean your room.’’ The quintessential female space within the household is the kitchen. It often serves as a meeting place for family and neighbors as well as a space to give and receive nourishment, warmth, and care. Kitchens served different purposes according to the season. For example, in rural homes in autumn, women and their families were found in the kitchen preserving the harvested food they had grown on the land. In the winter, the kitchen was frequently used to hook mats, stitch quilts, and sew clothing. Because the kitchen holds the stove, it was often the warmest place in the house on a cold day, and thus the most physically appealing. However, the kitchen was also symbolically associated with welcoming community members for work as well as sociability. In the majority of rural homes in midtwentieth-century Canada, if a woman was sick, another woman, usually a close neighbor or relative, could come into the home and take care of

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everything because the layout of the house, particularly the kitchen, would be identical to that of her own home. Unlike males, who comprehend the surrounding woods and waterways from which they take necessary natural resources but over which they have limited control, women ‘‘are constantly adding to their domestic space, constantly reasserting order on extremely focused spaces of the house, interior and exterior’’ (Pocius 1991: 100). Whether applying a fresh coat of paint, buying matching curtains, or putting on a new layer of wallpaper, women continually manipulate spaces inside the home. However, women were by no means ignorant of the woods and water beyond their domestic spaces and communities. For example, many ventured into the woods not only to gather fuel and foodstuffs, but also for sociability. The Newfoundland boil up—a brew of tea and sometimes also food in the woods or on deck as a break from work—is a tradition for women and children as well as for men. Women may be berry-picking or trout-fishing as part of the seasonal round of food-gathering, but they almost invariably domesticate the wild space by stopping for tea. Also during spring and summer months, North American women have commonly maintained kitchen and flower gardens. Kitchen gardens are easily tended because of their placement next to the house; snatching a moment here and there between sock-darning and feeding the baby, women could weed the herb garden. Vernacular architectural elements like porches—extensions to the house that were open to the air—allowed a connection between inside and outside spaces. For women in the American South in the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the front porch was a central space in which they could shell peas, peel apples and peaches, and swap stories. Indeed, between sewing, knitting, and food preparation, the front porch played a pivotal role in women’s social lives. Because the social norms that dictated that middle- and upper-class White women and men should be separate in public were weakened on front porches, courting between potential couples could occur. But even more revealing is the ease with which ‘‘blacks could maintain relationships with whites’’ on the front porch (Beckham: 76). Because the porch was neither strictly inside the house nor strictly outside it, the social-cultural divisions of women from men and Blacks from Whites were also less strict. As capitalism flourished in the twentieth century, goods became cheaper and more readily available, and the need to create them was thus not so pressing. While women still made objects, they increasingly became consumers. Recent scholarship concerning the manipulation of mass-produced objects from Barbie dolls to yard art indicates that although these items originate from factories, they can be springboards for women’s creativity. Folklorist Jeannie Banks Thomas provides a fascinating analysis of massproduced items with strong gender associations. Her discussion of ‘‘Bernice’s’’ yard art reflects one woman’s need to nurture and interact through the (re)creation of mass-produced objects. For example, she decorates and dresses wooden geese for display in assemblages in her front yard. For Bernice, her interaction with these objects represents a form of therapy. The geese provide her the chance to create and control her world in the face of personal

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problems and stress from work. Though mass-produced, such objects can provide the same level of interaction and involvement that creating a quilt might enable, notably a feeling of pride and fulfillment for its makers. Quiltmaking is experiencing a mass revival; quilting clubs are found across North America. But other forms of traditional crafts have also regained popularity, notably knitting. As evidenced by a new craft movement known as ‘‘Stitch ’n Bitch,’’ young women have taken up knitting with a passion. Knitting classes are springing up wherever there are craft centers; university students knit on campus between courses. Vogue magazine has a branch publication devoted to teen knitters and large chain bookstores have begun to offer prescriptive literature on subjects as diverse as decorating your house in ‘‘junk style’’ or ‘‘shabby chic’’ to gardening tips, all of which are primarily and aggressively aimed at urban women. In some instances, these books are not just preaching to the converted, they are giving advice to women whose mothers never knitted nor gardened but might want to learn along with their daughters. One area of material culture that has not been largely explored is the ways in which people have saved, collected, and arranged possessions over a period of time to establish meaningful associations. This informal museology and/or archiving is particularly relevant to women. Whether objects are used or placed on display frequently influences their levels of meaning. Folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1989) notes that ‘‘domestic interiors are often filled with things that have aged with their owners’’ (332). ‘‘Material companions’’ are those objects that people value ‘‘because of their continuity’’ (despite not being as useful as they once were) (ibid.). Souvenirs and mementos are kept as they ‘‘serve as a reminder of an ephemeral experience or absent person’’ (333). Perhaps the most interesting among these objects of memory are the collectables and ensembles, especially revealing in the ways they are purchased and/or acquired as well as how they are arranged and displayed. For example, some women collect romance novels that they number and read in exact order despite the fact that one differs completely from another. Some women are known for their collections of antiquarian garden literature; their elaborately embellished front covers are often prized above the book’s contents when purchased. And many women have personal recipe notebooks and/or worn cookbooks handed down from their mothers and grandmothers, their contents often exploding with extra bits of paper containing more recipes, snapshots, ribbons, and past-expiry-date coupons. These may be cherished less for their cookery instruction than for the emotional connections they provide to past lives and their capacity to generate reminiscences. See also: Aesthetics; Ballad; Barbie Doll; Class; Courtship; Embroidery; Folk Art; Folk Group; Folklife; Foodways; Gardens; Herbs; Housekeeping; Knitting; Magazines, Girls’ and Women’s; Needlework; Pottery; Quiltmaking; Race; Recipe Books; Region: Canada; Rugmaking; Sampler; Sewing; Spinning; Weaving. References: Beckham, Sue Bridwell. ‘‘The American Front Porch: Women’s Liminal Space.’’ In Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Material Culture, eds. Marilyn Ferris Motz and Pat Browne, 69–89. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988; Bronner, Simon. ‘‘Material Culture.’’ American

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Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand, 463–466. New York: Routledge, 1996; Dale, Linda. ‘‘A Woman’s Touch: Domestic Arrangements in the Rural Newfoundland Home.’’ Special Issue on Interiors: Cultural Patterns, Material History Bulletin 15 (Summer 1982):19–22; Greenhill, Pauline, and Diane Tye. ‘‘Women and Traditional Culture.’’ In Changing Patterns: Women in Canada, eds. Sandra Burt, Lorraine Code, and Lindsay Dorney, 309–336. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993; Ferrero, Pat. Hearts and Hands: The Influence of Women and Quilts on American Society. San Francisco: Quilt Digest Press, 1987; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. ‘‘Objects of Memory: Material Culture as Life Review.’’ In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, ed. Elliott Oring, 329–336. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989; Kopp, Joel, and Kate Kopp. American Hooked Rugs: Folk Art Underfoot. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995; Laferty, Paula. Silk Stocking Mats: Hooked Mats of the Grenfell Mission. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005; Minahan, Stella, and Julie Wolfram Cox. ‘‘Stitch ’n Bitch’’: Cyberfeminism, a Third Place and the New Materiality.’’ Journal of Material Culture, vol. 12, no. 1 (March 2007): 5–21; O’Brien, Andrea. ‘‘‘There’s Nothing Like a Cup of Tea in the Woods:’ Continuity, Community and Cultural Validation in Rural Newfoundland.’’ Ethnologies, vol. 21, no. 1 (1999): 65–84; Pocius, Gerald L. ‘‘Hooked Rugs in Newfoundland: The Representation of Social Structure in Design.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 92, no. 365 (1979): 273–284; ———. ‘‘Material Folk Culture Research in English Canada: Antiques, Aficionados, and Beyond.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 4, nos. 1/2 (1984): 27–41; ———. A Place to Belong: Community Order and Everyday Space in Calvert, Newfoundland. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991; Prown, Jules David. ‘‘Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.’’ Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 1–19; Ramsey, Bets. ‘‘The Land of Cotton: Quiltmaking by African-American Women in Three Southern States.’’ Uncoverings 9 (1989): 9–28; Ring, Betty. Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1650–1850. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993; Thomas, Jeannie Banks. Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003; Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982; Zumwalt, Rosemary. American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Cynthia Boyd Matriarchy The term ‘‘matriarchy’’ (‘‘rule by mothers/women’’) refers to a social structure popularly understood as the opposite of ‘‘patriarchy’’ (‘‘rule by fathers/men’’). However, this definition, which suggests that matriarchies are (or were) societies in which both power and authority are held primarily by women, is widely contested; many scholars dismiss such a construct as purely hypothetical. The presence of Goddess worship, female rulers, or exceptional women occupying traditionally masculine roles does not create sufficient conditions for a society to be called ‘‘matriarchal’’; there is inadequate evidence to show that societies oriented to feminine symbols necessarily offer women equivalent political, economic, or sexual rights with men. The overall status of women and girls, including their freedom from male social control and potential access to decision-making power, must be taken into consideration in any definition of matriarchy. Matrilineal descent (reckoning lineage through mothers) is a feature of many archaic societies, and, when combined with matrilocality (a residential

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pattern in which a husband lives with his wife’s clan and/or a wife owns their dwelling) has significant correlations with the relatively high status of women. However, decision-making powers do not necessarily derive from these patterns; in matrilineal societies, power may be shared with or held entirely by a woman’s brother. Sherry Ortner and Robert Brown are strong proponents of patriarchy as a universal feature of human social organization. Joan Bamberger, Lotte Motz, and Cynthia Eller, among others, have pointed out that myths, legends, and other forms of folklore concerning female creators, culture heroes, warrior queens, and redeemer figures, rather than reflecting actual attitudes about women, have traditionally functioned to solidify male dominance over women and girls by honoring an idealized, disembodied notion of femininity to which no flesh-and-blood woman or girl could ever possibly measure up. However, contrary to the view that patriarchy is a human universal are anthropological studies that suggest the presence of an egalitarian social structure among archaic forager band-style societies like the !Kung (a southern African ethnic group), who do not maintain economic surpluses, lack centralized authority, and have no sharp divisions of status or rank. In this model, for which there is also evidence in Southeast Asia and preindustrial northern Eurasia, there developed parallel and complementary male and female divisions of labor; male dominance is not characteristic of these groups, and women’s roles may apportion them significant social status and spiritual authority. In popular usage, the term ‘‘matriarchy’’ harkens back to the nineteenthcentury work of a Swiss historian of Roman law, Johann Jakob Bachofen, especially to his 1861 book Das Mutterrecht (Myth, Religion, and Mother Right). Here, and in Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1877 Ancient Society, which described ‘‘savagery,’’ ‘‘barbarism,’’ and ‘‘civilization’’ as the three stages of human social evolution, ‘‘matriarchy’’ is viewed as a necessary evolutionary step toward enlightened social organization, and refers less to rule by women over men (female domination of men) than to a social structure that is female-centered and socially egalitarian. According to Bachofen, [Matriarchy] is most deeply rooted in woman’s vocation for the religious life. Who will continue to ask why devotion, justice, and all the qualities that embellish man’s life are known by feminine names, why initiation is personified by a woman? This choice is no free invention or accident, but it is an expression of historical truth. We find the matriarchal peoples distinguished by rectitude, piety, and culture; we see women serving as conscientious guardians of the mystery, of justice and peace, and the accord between the historical facts and the linguistic phenomenon is evident. Seen in this light, matriarchy becomes a sign of cultural progress, a source and guarantee of its benefits, a necessary period in the education of mankind [sic], and hence the fulfillment of a natural law which governs peoples as well as individuals. (Bachofen 1992: 91)

Influential late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century adherents to this view from widely varying theoretical orientations include Karl Marx, Carl G. Jung, Erich Neumann, E. O. James, and Erich Fromm. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe may be considered antecedent to matriarchal theory in so far as his

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Faust enters ‘‘the realm of the Mothers,’’ a place deep within the Earth, yet outside of space and time (Faust Part II). Contemporary proponents of this view (see Thompson; Eisler; Sanday) argue that it cannot be proven that patriarchy is a universal social pattern, and that matriarchy (‘‘mother right’’) is actually a form of rule that is ethically grounded in the basic requirements for human survival, a form of social organization not reducible to the primacy of coercive force, but one which recognizes the primacy of birthing, bonding, and the ties of kinship. According to William Irwin Thompson, where patriarchy establishes laws, matriarchy establishes customs; where patriarchy establishes military power, matriarchy establishes religious authority; and where patriarchy encourages the development of individualistic warrior virtues, matriarchy encourages the tradition-bound cohesion of the collective (140). These theorists also express the belief that, given the environmental predations of the last century in particular, a return to matriarchal societies constitutes the best hope for the future of humankind. The matriarchy debate is loaded with political, religious, emotional, and intellectual investments. Many scholars have found that even approaching the subject of the possibility of female-centered, egalitarian societies is to invite charges of New-Age utopianism, and suggestions that matriarchy researchers are unconcerned with either human biopsychology or with providing the requisite evidence for making truth claims about human history. Alternatively, matriarchy researchers may be subject to accusations of a kind of simplistic reverse sexism if they accept the notion that women are universally oppressed by men. In either case, it must be recognized that theories put forth without reference to careful, localized ethnographic fieldwork tend to demonize some cultural patterns while romanticizing others. One approach recognizes female contributions to early human subsistence economies, which are in turn related to the evolution of the cultural conditions of different societies (for example, Barry and Yoder; Korotayev and Cardinale). Another is to go still further back in human prehistory to explore primate sexual selection. In this vein, the non-violent and sexually relaxed bonobo (or ‘‘pygmy chimpanzee’’), our most closely related primate ancestor, is a favorite subject for comparison with archaic human societies (see De Waal et al.). Another approach examines archaeology, folklore, early written sources, and other material and narrative clues about stable gendered patterns in early societies. Also valuable are in-depth studies of spiritually female-centered, materially egalitarian societies in regions where influence by the great international patriarchal religions was late or marginal, including pre-Christian Baltic groups; pre-Buddhist groups in Japan, Korea, and parts of China; and pre-Islamic Afro Asian groups. George P. Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, a database of 1,167 societies published in successive installments in the journal Ethnology from 1962 through 1980, states that approximately 15 percent of human societies have matrilineal kinship systems or matrilocal dwelling patterns in which women have considerable freedom of movement and choice, including the right to disallow husbands from entering their homes. Some societies labeled matriarchal by early researchers actually display a balance of parallel power. The

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Iroquois, for example, vested in women much of the power wielded within their camps and villages; in this historically matrilineal society, women were responsible for the distribution of food, they owned and inherited land, and clan mothers had the authority to elect and remove male clan chiefs. Some groups of Indonesian and other Southeast Asian Muslims have long-term Indigenous egalitarian traditions, including matrilineal or bilateral kinship (reckoned through both the mother’s and the father’s descent line), matrilocality, and high levels of female economic power. In spite of the cross-culturally patriarchal pressures of Islam, colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism, many of these groups have resisted the tendency to view women and girls as inferior members of their societies. At the center of the matriarchy controversy is the pioneering work of archaeologist and folklorist Marija Gimbutas, although she herself rejected the word ‘‘matriarchal’’ in favor of ‘‘matrifocal’’ or ‘‘matristic.’’ She theorized that egalitarian, female-centered social organization was the preponderant pattern of the mixed horticultural pre-Indo European settlements of ‘‘Old Europe’’ between the seventh and fifth millennia BCE. This period was followed by different hybrid cultures when strongly patriarchal proto-Indo Europeans became dominant in the area (1991). Pioneering a method she called ‘‘archaeomythology,’’ she drew from her extensive knowledge of many languages, Baltic folklore, and her experience as project director for five major excavations in southern Europe from 1967 to 1980 to decode the iconography and social structure of the first European civilizations (Dexter 1997; Marler 1997). Her work suggests that Indo European culture did not evolve from Old European traditions, but that traditional European cultures were the result of ‘‘complex processes of external and internal transformation occurring over two millennia’’ (Marler). Some areas retained egalitarianism, strong public female roles, and feminine symbols more than did others into modern times. Gimbutas finds no evidence in Old Europe for the patriarchal organization patterns characteristic of Indo European civilizations, no markedly male royal tombs, no residences on fortressed hills, and hunting tools rather than military weapons. She interpreted burial rites, settlement patterns, and grave goods as evidence for ‘‘economic egalitarianism’’ (Gimbutas 1991: 423) and peaceful matrilineal, endogamous social structures. For example, males were not buried with more wealth than females, as was the case with Indo Europeans. From the overwhelming preponderance of female figurines and symbols she found, and her knowledge of goddess belief systems, including living traditions in the Baltic, she concluded that the core concept of spirituality in Old Europe was marked by the power of creation and transformation represented by a female principle (1989). Gimbutas’ critics claim that she overgeneralizes from the archaeological evidence—most famously, those concerning the statuettes she called ‘‘fertility figures,’’ which ultimately function to reduce women to their roles as reproducers (Roundtree 2001). However, in her work on Old European iconography, namely the water-bird goddesses and snake-bird goddesses of preagricultural peoples of north Eurasia, Gimbutas asserts that such symbolism suggests much more than domestic fertility. In the Baltic, nature

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spirits are still seen as dominantly female. Her labeling as matrifocal a spiritual respect for the female principle together with an egalitarian socioeconomic system is less controversial than are the claims about female political dominance. Popularizations of Gimbutas’ work, however, have left the impression of an Old Europe run peaceably by women in accordance with egalitarian values, as a kind of social Eden that was destroyed only by the arrival of mounted patriarchal marauders from the steppes. But such a view is too simplistic. She noted the importance of keeping in mind that in human history, there have been long periods without war; in less crowded areas, as in the prehistory of her own native region, peaceful mergers of different cultures (rather than violent conquest) was the more common pattern. Folklore that reflects uneasy relationships between aggressive raiders and peaceful farmers is not distributed evenly in Eurasia. Ifi Amadiume took another, if not less controversial, direction in Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion, Culture. Upon examination of the contemporary organization styles of ordinary African women, rather than the social structures occupied by its tribal queens, Amadiume concludes that matriarchy is Africa’s greatest contribution to humankind. She notes that queens are actually participants in a male-dominated power structure, their roles defined in terms of their relationships with powerful males (as mother, sister, wife, or daughter) rather than by virtue of their own personhood. She describes decentralized, diffused systems of power-sharing as necessary to the formation of civic cultures. She sees fatherhood as an abstract social construct supported by law, rule, ritual, regulation, enforcement, and authoritative symbol, the inheritance of goods and privileges, and the usurpation of creative power. Motherhood, on the other hand, is concrete, material, and grounded in and centered on what women share with their children around the campfire. Nigerian anthropologist Nkiru Nzegwu’s critique of her work, ‘‘Chasing Shadows: the Misplaced Search for Matriarchy’’ counters that Amadiume is a misguided feminist who fails to appreciate the complexities of African kinship. He argues that Amadiume, in her attempt to describe correlations among centralized power, hierarchy, and female status, selectively ignores African models (such as Western Sudan) that are non-violent and nonexploitative of neighbors (current ideological conflicts notwithstanding). However, the two scholars agree that Western patriarchal models should not be the standard by which other societies are measured. Peggy Sanday, after having spent twenty-one summers among the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, one of the largest ethnic groups in Indonesia, discovered that ‘‘their society . . . is founded on the coexistence of matrilineal custom and a nature-based philosophy called adat,’’ [best] ‘‘expressed in the proverb ‘growth in nature must be a teacher.’’’ In Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy, she proposes a new definition of matriarchy: a social system in which ‘‘males and females relate more like partners for the common good than like competitors ruled by egocentric self-interest. Social prestige accrues to those who promote good relations by following the dictates of custom and religion’’:

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‘‘Neither male nor female rule is possible because of the Minangkabau belief that decision-making should be by consensus.. . . In answer to my persistent questions about ‘who rules,’ I was often told that I was asking the wrong question. Neither sex rules, it was explained to me, because males and females complement one another.’’’ (Kosty 2002)

Sanday’s definition and others approximating it are beginning to diffuse some of the strong emotions associated with the matriarchy debate. The notion that contemporary human matriarchies are alternatives to social organizations based on competition and militarism takes us beyond currently prevalent North American ideas of what matriarchy is. See also: Feminisms; Goddess Worship; Wicca and Neo-Paganism. References: Amadiume, Ifi. Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture. London and New York: Zed Press, 1998; Bachofen, J. J. Myth, Religion, and Mother Right. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Reissue edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992 [1861]; Bamberger, Joan. ‘‘The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society.’’ In Women, Culture, and Society, eds. Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 263–280. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974; Barry, Herbert III, and Brian Yoder. ‘‘Multiple Predictors of Contribution by Women to Agriculture.’’ Cross-Cultural Research, vol. 36, no. 3 (August 2002): 286–297; Beldavs, Aija Veldre. ‘‘Goddesses in a Man’s World: Latvian Matricentricity in Culture and Spheres of Influence in Society.’’ Journal of Baltic Studies, VIII/2 (1981): 105–129; Brown, Robert. Human Universals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991; De Waal, F. B. M., Frans DeWaal, and Frans Lanting. Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Edgar C. Polome, eds. Varia on the Indo-European Past: Papers in Memory of Marija Gimbutas. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph 19. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 1997; Eller, Cynthia. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000; Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988; Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989; ———. The Civilization of the Goddess. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991; Korotayev, Andrey, and Joseph Cardinale. ‘‘Status of Women, Female Contribution to Subsistence, and Monopolization of Information: Further Cross-Cultural Comparisons.’’ Cross-Cultural Research, vol. 37, no. 1 (February 2003): 87–104; Kosty, Pam. ‘‘Indonesia’s matriarchal Minangkabau offer an alternative social system.’’ American Anthropological Association press release, May 9, 2002. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ 2002-05/uop-imm050902.php (accessed January 24, 2007); Marler, Joan, ed. From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas. Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas and Trends, 1997; Motz, Lotte. The Faces of the Goddess. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; Murdock, George P., and Douglas R. White. Ethnographic Atlas. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1967; Nzegwu, Nkiru. ‘‘Chasing Shadows: The Misplaced Search for Matriarchy.’’ Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 32, no. 3 (1998): 594–622; Ortner, Sherry B. ‘‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’’ In Women, Culture, and Society, eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 67–87. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974; Roundtree, Kathryn. ‘‘The past is a foreigners’ country: Goddess feminists, archaeologists, and the appropriation of prehistory.’’ Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 16, no. 1 (2002): 5–27; Sanday, Peggy. Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002; Thompson, William Irwin. The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.

Aija Veldre Beldavs and Liz Locke

406 MEMORATE

Memorate A memorate is a firsthand account of an incident experienced as supernatural. These personal experience narratives are typically short, monoepisodic, loosely structured, informally told, and set in the recent past. The content of a memorate is usually traditional, while its text is personal and idiosyncratic, and often includes sensory details. Sometimes referred to as ‘‘belief stories,’’ these narratives may concern various topics, including encounters with ghosts and revenants, mystical experiences, omens of death and other tragic events, precognitive dreams, supernatural night assaults, and UFO sightings. Memorates may also be retold within a folk group; for instance, a woman may narrate second-hand her mother’s deathbed visit from the narrator’s dead grandmother. These narrators identify the chain of transmission from the original, trusted source. Accounts of witchcraft, encounters with fairies, and communications from the dead are among the types of memorates that have traditionally been associated with or told by or about women. Presented as allegedly true accounts of actual events, memorates frequently contain assertions about the reality of the experience, emphasizing that supernatural belief is often based on personal experience and sensory perception rather than on speculation. Memorates may emerge from discussions about cultural beliefs. These narratives explore those belief complexes, and their tellers may use them to validate their own or their community’s traditions. Such stories may be included in a larger examination of the folklore or worldview of an individual or group, or a single firsthand account may provide the basis for an in-depth study of an individual’s beliefs and experiences. Some scholars do not consider belief to be central to memorates; for example, Carol Burke (1992) interprets the vision narratives told by women in prison as coping strategies and symbolic reenactments of their circumstances. This genre has become increasingly important in recent decades because it presents an opportunity for scholars to understand how folk beliefs manifest as living traditions. First-hand accounts of individuals’ experiences with the supernatural provide reliable information about both the social context and experiential aspects of these traditions. David J. Hufford’s experiencecentered approach to supernatural assault traditions (1982) has had a tremendous influence on scholars of belief traditions. Gillian Bennett’s research on contact with the dead among women in England is concerned with the intersection of narrative, belief, and the structure of women’s storytelling (1989, 1999). Her examination of patterns of discourse suggests that supernatural beliefs are much more widespread than might be expected, but that informants often do not respond to the seemingly neutral language used in academic discourse. Instead, first-person accounts of supernatural experiences are often carefully phrased with ‘‘face-saving ambiguity’’ (1999: 14). The relationship between and terminology of folk belief, memorates, and legends is contested. Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1878– 1952), who introduced the term ‘‘memorate’’ in 1934 (1948), argued that

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memorates are not a form of legend because they are not traditional and lack the poetic features of legends. Memorates that become popular may become part of the oral tradition of a particular group. As narrators retell memorates, their stories may become increasingly standardized through the addition of motifs and plot elements from traditional legends, and may eventually become codified as legends in their own right. Folklorists Linda Degh (2001) and Andrew Vazsonyi (Degh and Vazsonyi 1974) suggest that as specific memorates are retold within a transmission chain, they become communal fabulates when narrators recast first-person narratives as third-person narratives. Similarly, a narrator who retells a thirdperson fabulate in the first person generates a ‘‘pseudo-memorate’’ or a ‘‘quasi-memorate.’’ They argue that such fabulates presuppose a memorate, which they designate a ‘‘proto-memorate.’’ Degh (1996, 2001) argues for the use of legend as an overarching term that includes memorate and belief story or legend. Some folklorists do not distinguish between memorate and legend in their analyses. For example, Elizabeth Tucker (2007) makes no distinction between the memorates, fabulates, and legends in her study of ghostlore on American college campuses, and type and motif indices tend not to distinguish between these genres. See also: Assault, Supernatural; Death; Folk Belief; Legend, Local; Legend, Supernatural; Personal Experience Narrative; Superstition; Witchcraft, Historical. References: Bennett, Gillian. ‘‘‘And I Turned Round to Her and Said . . . ’ A Preliminary Analysis of Shape and Structure in Women’s Storytelling.’’ Folklore 100 (1989): 167–183; ———. ‘‘Alas, Poor Ghost!’’: Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999; Burke, Carol. Vision Narratives of Women in Prison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992; Degh, Linda. ‘‘What Is a Belief Legend?’’ Folklore 107 (1996): 33–46; ———. Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001; Degh, Linda, and Andrew Vazsonyi. ‘‘The Memorate and the Proto-Memorate.’’ Journal of American Folklore 87 (1974): 225–239; Foster, Genevieve W., and David Hufford. The World Was Flooded with Light: A Mystical Experience Remembered. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985; Garcia, Nasario. Brujerias: Stories of Witchcraft and the Supernatural in the American Southwest and Beyond. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007; Greaves, Helen. Testimony of Light. Essex: C. W. Daniel, 1969; Gwyndaf, Robin. ‘‘Fairylore: Memorates and Legends from Welsh Oral Tradition.’’ In The Good People: New Fairylore Essays, ed. Peter Narvaez, 155–95. New York: Garland Publishers, 1991; Honko, Lauri. ‘‘Memorates and the Study of Folk Belief.’’ Journal of the Folklore Institute 1 (1964): 5–19; Hufford, David J. The Terror that Comes in the Night: An Experience-centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982; Jauhiainen, Marjatta, and Lauri Simonsuuri. The Type and Motif Index of Finnish Belief Legends and Memorates. Revised and enlarged edition. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1998; Jordan, Rosan A. ‘‘Ethnic Identity and the Lore of the Supernatural.’’ Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975): 370–82; Milspaw, Yvonne J. ‘‘Witchcraft in Appalachia: Protection for the Poor.’’ Indiana Folklore 11 (1978): 71–86; Pentik€ainen, Juha. Oral Repertoire and World View: An Anthropological Study of Marina Takalo’s Life History. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1978; Tucker, Elizabeth. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007; von Sydow, Carl Wilhelm. ‘‘The Categories of Prose Tradition.’’ In Selected Papers on Folklore, 86–88. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1948.

Linda J. Lee

408 MENARCHE STORIES

Menarche Stories Menarche, a girl’s first menstrual period, seldom arrives as a complete surprise. This represents a significant change in menstrual education and communication over the last several decades in the United States: researchers say that as many as 50 percent of girls surveyed in the 1950s received no advance information about menstruation, but by the 1970s, only 5 to 10 percent of girls had no advance information. Sources of information about menstruation include mothers, sex education classes and films at school, female friends, and mass media. The average age at first menstruation among North American girls has dropped to twelve, having decreased by four months each decade since 1850. It is estimated that about half the world’s cultures celebrate menarche with rituals and ceremonies as part of a religious, community, or economic event. In many societies, such customs announce a young woman’s eligibility for marriage. In the United States, rituals or celebrations of menarche are rare and usually private, yet menarche is an important event in most women’s lives; many recall their first period in vivid detail in what Joan Chrisler and Carolyn Zittel call ‘‘flashbulb memories.’’ Most women can present these memories with startling clarity when asked to tell their own menarche story. Chrisler and Zittel asked 96 women from four countries (Lithuania, Sudan, Malaysia, and the United States) to do just that, and discovered a range of emotional responses to menarche, from happy, proud, curious, relieved, and ambivalent, to shocked, worried, embarrassed, angry, disgusted, and unhappy. Only 29 percent reported any type of celebration at menarche, and all were private; most involved some kind of gesture from a parent, usually the mother to the daughter. Several American women reported being congratulated or hugged; several from the Sudan were congratulated, and told of their mothers’ happiness. One woman reported how her mother took her right hand and immersed it in kissra—fermented flour. According to this informant, legend says that this gesture makes the girl want to become involved in housekeeping. According to Carel AppelSlingbaum, prior to the 1960s, it was customary for a Jewish or Slavic mother to slap her daughter’s face while saying ‘‘Today, you are a woman’’ or ‘‘May the blood run back to your face’’; the celebratory slap may have served to awaken her newly fertile daughter to her role as a tradition-bearer and/or as an admonition to avoid disgracing the family by becoming pregnant. Women in Western cultures are seldom asked to tell menarche stories, in part because public display of menstruation and menarche are regulated by rules of secrecy and concealment, and in part because menstruation and menarche are seen as something that happens to women, not as something women do. However, some North American scholars have begun to collect women’s menarche stories, either for social and political analysis, as in Chrisler and Zittel’s study or in Lee and Sasser-Coen’s more in-depth analysis, or for pedagogical purposes, as in Kathleen O’Grady and Paula Wansbrough’s recent book, Sweet Secrets: Stories of Menstruation. Menarche has also emerged as a narrative plotline in American television

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sitcoms: Blossom, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Something So Right, Seventh Heaven, and King of the Hill have all aired menarche episodes. In these programs, menarche becomes the problem in the conventional problem-solution narrative structure of television comedies. See also: Folk Custom; Housekeeping; Jewish Women’s Folklore; Menstruation; Personal-Experience Narrative; Popular Culture; Rites of Passage; Storytelling; Tradition-Bearer. References: Appel-Slingbaum, Caren. ‘‘The Tradition of Slapping Our Daughters.’’ 2000. http://www.mum.org/slap.htm. (accessed January 2, 2007); Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, and Diane N. Ruble. ‘‘Menarche: The Interaction of Physiological, Cultural, and Social Factors.’’ In The Menstrual Cycle: A Synthesis of Interdisciplinary Research, Volume 1, eds. Alice J. Dan, Effie A. Graham, and Carol P. Beecher, 141–59. New York: Springer, 1980; ———. ‘‘The Experience of Menarche from a Developmental Perspective.’’ In Girls at Puberty: Biological and Psychosocial Perspectives, eds. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Anne C. Petersen, 155–77. New York: Plenum, 1983; Chrisler, Joan C., and, Carolyn B. Zittel. ‘‘Menarche Stories: Reminiscences of College Students from Lithuania, Malaysia, Sudan, and the United States.’’ Health Care for Women International, vol. 19, no. 4 (1998): 303– 312; Kieren, Dianne K. ‘‘Redesigning Menstrual Education Programs Using Attitudes Toward Menstruation.’’ Canadian Home Economics Journal, vol. 42, no. 2 (1992): 57–63; Kissling, Elizabeth Arveda. ‘‘On the Rag on Screen: Menarche in Film and Television.’’ Sex Roles, vol. 46, nos. 1/2 (January 2002): 5–12; Lee, Janet, and Jennifer Sasser-Coen. Blood Stories: Menarche and the Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary U.S. Society. New York: Routledge, 1996; O’Grady, Kathleen, and Paula Wansbrough. Sweet Secrets: Stories of Menstruation. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1997.

Elizabeth Arveda Kissling Menopause Menopause, also called ‘‘the change’’ or ‘‘change of life,’’ is the cessation of menstruation, typically occurring between the ages of forty-five and fiftyfive. During menopause, the ovaries stop producing estrogen. Menopause is a cultural concept as much as a biological one. Thus, it is a complex event and can be a contentious topic, so central to women’s lives that most second-wave feminist authors have at least touched upon it; some have written extensively about it, including Germaine Greer, Gail Sheehy, and Emily Martin. Like menstruation, menopause highlights the debate on what women are for and how they are positioned in society. Unlike menstruation, it suffers from ambiguous beginning and ending points, and conflicting definitions—after all, no one has questioned whether or not menstruation exists. Despite and because of such ambiguities and conflicts, menopause is powerful physically, symbolically, emotionally, and culturally. This significant life event generates the development of formal and informal groups who share advice, personal-experience narratives, humor, descriptions of physical indicators—all types of expression that can separate insiders from outsiders in terms of experience. Reactions to menopause have resulted in a plethora of informal information, ritual action, and even material culture. Above all, the folklore of menopause is based in expressed attitudes and beliefs, ranging from ideas about femininity and reproduction to debates on women’s authority and social status, to reflections on aging, to arguments about the nature of menopause as a disease or as a natural process.

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The biomedical model of menopause explains it as a disease of deficiency, focusing on the symptoms—hot flashes, weight gain, migraines, moodiness— that supposedly result from estrogen loss. The pharmaceutical solution to such problems is hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Most famously promoted by physician Robert Wilson in the 1960s (especially in his 1966 book, Feminine Forever), estrogen replacement was touted to treat symptoms and postmenopausal afflictions such as hypertension, high cholesterol, and osteoporosis, and, in fact, to make menopause unnecessary. Yet, the variety of symptoms (currently, more than forty symptoms are listed as part of the menopausal syndrome) and the fact that such conditions also occur in situations other than menopause—and can be shared by men— makes clear the complexities and uncertainties involved in medical treatments for menopause. Scholars have suggested that menopausal symptoms may be more a function of cultural attitudes than of biology. Certainly, menopause displays the interaction of biology and culture. Historically, menopause, like menstruation, has been associated with shame and embarrassment. In The Silent Passage, Gail Sheehy states that when she became menopausal, women were still reluctant to talk about it, even with sisters and daughters. Other scholars confirm that many women they have interviewed exhibit embarrassment, seeing menopause as a purely private experience. In a study of southern Appalachian women, Emily Dale found that the women she interviewed didn’t discuss menopause with their mothers. Rather, they learned about it through books, magazines, and television shows such as The Golden Girls. Eve Agee, in her comparison of African American and Euro American women, learned that while both groups obtained their knowledge about menopause from books and articles, health care providers, and other women, African American women relied to a much greater extent than did Euro American women on information from their mothers and other female relatives. Feminists and anthropologists have argued that menopause is not a disease but a natural phase that is part of the aging process. In the 1970s, feminists pointed out that misogynous depictions of women presented by Western biomedicine led to negative portrayals of menopause, focused as they were on the onset of old age and the loss of vigorous sexuality and youth. Feminist scholars (and numerous menopausal women), on the other hand, have emphasized that menopause has advantages, such as the end of worries about birth control and pregnancy, the monthly inconvenience of menstruation, and more freedom in sexual attitudes and behavior. Women who have been through the change of life often become more assertive and less likely to put up with gender discrimination. Bawdy verses from Ann Rabson, Gaye Adegbolola, and Andra Faye, collectively known as Saffire: The Uppity Blues Women, express this point with humor and conviction: ‘‘That young man makes me tango at the horizontal disco’’ (‘‘Middle Age Blues Boogie’’). Menopause has been seen by some as a modern condition, a luxury that affects women of higher economic status. Early ethnographic studies of menopause in non-Western societies suggested that in cultures where aging women are rewarded with increased social standing, women suffer fewer

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symptoms during menopause. Subsequent studies have complicated this overly simplified theory. Evidence does suggest, however, that the experience of menopause differs cross-culturally. For example, anthropologist Margaret Lock (1993) compares the menopause experience for American and Japanese women, finding that their symptoms differed significantly. The hot flash, a defining menopausal experience in the United States, was not experienced by Japanese women—to the extent that the Japanese language does not even have a term for it. In 1977, Dona Davis conducted an ethnographic study of Euro Canadian women undergoing menopause in a fishing village in Newfoundland and found that the biomedical model of menopause did not adequately record their experiences. She found that their knowledge about menopause was based in their day-to-day social interaction and in their own lived experiences, and that their attitudes and beliefs about menopause were the result of the collective nature of their life in a small community. To gain knowledge about ‘‘the change of life’’—the term commonly employed in this community—women in the village queried older women who had undergone the change and who were seen as experts. Davis found that the change of life was welcomed by these women in the 1970s because it signaled the end of childbirth and childrearing. However, in a follow-up study (1997), Davis found that increased contact with the outside world had caused women to rely less on the advice of their elders and more on medical authority, turning menopause from a communal to a private experience. The conditions and symptoms of menopause vary not only from culture to culture but also from group to group. Scholars have found that race, ethnicity, and class significantly shape women’s attitudes and experiences of reproductive health. In a striking study, Eve Agee analyzed interviews with seventy Black and Euro American women, finding that while both groups were influenced by their mothers’ attitudes toward menopause, the Black women displayed a much more positive and empowered approach to the change of life. Their communications with their mothers were much more open than those of Euro American women, many of whom were angry that their mothers hadn’t told them about difficulties they might expect with menopause (such as hot flashes, insomnia, and vaginal dryness). A number of middle-class Euro American women were also disappointed that their mothers had not prepared them for ageism. But working-class Euro American women and both working-class and middle-class African American women were not dissatisfied with their mothers; in fact, the Black women in Agee’s study said that their mothers had prepared them for menopausal challenges through lessons while they were growing up. Working-class Euro American women said their mothers had told them to seek advice from doctors. Agee also found that Euro American women were more likely to be concerned not only with the relief of symptoms, but also with the ability of HRT to slow the effects of aging. They relied more on biomedical recommendations, at the same time that many worried about the long-term effects of estrogen. Many Euro American women felt that their experiences differed greatly from their mothers’ and thus they had no examples to use as a frame of reference. Women who had demanding careers during menopause

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especially felt dependent on biomedicine. Agee suggests that the middleclass Euro American women she interviewed who felt that their mothers discouraged talk about menopause were taught to privilege biomedical authority and knowledge over women’s experiential knowledge. On the other hand, the African American women in Agee’s study, although they experienced menopause in very different social circumstances from their mothers, felt that their mothers and other elders offered guidance and support through the change, often via storytelling and reflection on the collective history that Black women in North America share. They learned not only from their mothers but also from other older women—several mentioned that they first learned of menopause from women fanning themselves in church. Many mentioned older women transmitting knowledge about menopause in public spaces, signaling community interest in the maturing of these women. Agee theorizes that because Black women have been reared to be self-reliant problem-solvers, and to regard their own knowledge as valuable as that from outside sources, they are less invested in biomedical recommendations. African American women are aware that their families were not well-served by biomedical science in the past, and thus give it less control over their lives. Women also have differing beliefs and attitudes toward symptoms associated with menopause. Vieda Skultans, in her interviews with spiritualist women in Wales, found that they thought menopause could occur at any time in a woman’s life, and was more related to feelings of uncertainty than to the end of childbearing. The women she interviewed saw the change as a time when actual structural or anatomical changes were occurring in their bodies. Davis found that the women she interviewed in the 1970s considered hot flashes good because they burned away impurities. Likewise, the spiritualist women in Skultans’ study believed that having frequent hot flashes was actually healthier than not experiencing them because their absence might mean dangerous complications were developing. In her study of Appalachian women, Dale cites one who attributed her hot flashes to a fight between Jesus and lust. Articulating common popular concerns, some of those Dale interviewed expressed the idea that women in menopause temporarily ‘‘go crazy’’ or lose control of their nerves. Some felt that HRT itself caused insanity. A number expressed the idea that after menopause, women were no longer women. Some didn’t believe that menopause existed because they didn’t remember having any symptoms or problems themselves. Skultans found evidence of the blending of medical and magical information. Some women were advised not to touch red meat in case they made it ‘‘go off’’ (become rotten); nor should they try to make bread because the dough would not rise; nor should they touch salt. The Cavender Folk Medical collection at East Tennessee State University documents some Appalachian women’s solutions for menopause symptoms, ranging from actions such as tying a string around the waist or sitting in a cool breeze, to home remedies such as bitters, rabbit tobacco tea, or ginseng tea, to more commercial preparations such as Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound or Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription.

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Folklorist Diane Goldstein has found, through her study of women participating in an online menopause support group, that many feel trapped between the biomedical model, which treats them as diseased, and the feminist model, which, by claiming menopause as a natural process, fails to acknowledge the very real symptoms and suffering that some women experience. Members of the group believe that the peri- (or pre-) menopausal and menopausal fluctuation of hormones cause a fluctuation of symptoms; thus, symptoms are constantly changing. Support-group participants exchanged personal experiences, problems, and information as a way to resist medical authority and exert some control over their own understanding and selfgenerated treatment of menopause. Group members do not think that menopausal distress is linked only to cultural attitudes toward aging, despite various cross-cultural studies. To overemphasize the cultural specificity of menopause dismisses the experiences shared by group members. One response to the complexities and uncertainties of menopause has been the creation of rituals to mark it. In 1970, Skultans suggested that one reason why the period of menopause is so stressful is because of a lack of rites of incorporation into a new folk group postmenopausally. Joan Radner has pointed out that before the 1980s, there weren’t any traditional rites of passage to mark menopause for White American women. Since that time, however, such rites have multiplied—perhaps reflecting the inadequacy of churches, mosques, and synagogues to address the spiritual needs of aging women. Women’s groups have been creating and celebrating healing rituals for miscarriage, hysterectomy, rape, abuse, divorce, and bereavement, and rites of passage for the weaning of babies, the onset of menstruation, departure from one’s parents’ home, lesbian coming-out, lesbian marriage, and grave illness. And they have provided leadership in creating rituals, often called ‘‘cronings,’’ to mark and transform the transition into old age (Radner: 116).

At least one handbook on croning celebrations has been published (Morrison 1993), and a number of women’s groups, including the Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society, have held croning ceremonies, highlighting privileged knowledge and often using humor and rituals to share information and camaraderie. And Latinas have begun celebrating a ~ woman’s fiftieth birthday with cincuentaneras, which are structurally simi~ lar to the coming-of-age quinceanera celebration. Along with the creation and reinterpretation of ritual, more women are using art and including it within rituals to comment on and deal with transitional events in their lives, such as menopause and hysterectomies. Star Coulbrooke documents the creation of the Goddess of Hysterectomy by one woman, an object she created to prepare herself psychologically for her upcoming surgery. Women from different spheres of her life contributed to the creation of this Goddess, adding decorations, messages, and even interacting with the object in her workplace and the operating room. The patient, as well as her nurses and doctor, attributed her quick recovery to the effects of the Goddess of Hysterectomy. The patient reported that many women subsequently asked to borrow the Goddess, but that she

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explained they needed to create their own—an indication of the continuingly personal nature of this transitional event. As the post-World War II generation ages, its experiences of menopause are being more openly shared than at any time in the past. Women are comparing symptoms and stories not only through support groups but also more informally in grocery lines, workplaces, and in brief encounters in restrooms. Many see hot flashes and other menopausal discomforts as occasions for humor. Cartoons, jokes, T-shirts, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and similar products abound, playing with the most recognizable elements of menopause, from hot flashes to memory loss and weight gain. Jeanie Linders’ Menopause: The Musical, first performed in 2001, continues to successfully tour the United States, Canada, England, and Australia. As more and more women share and reflect on their experiences of aging, the change offers a chance to reassess their lives and perhaps to reshape themselves. See also: Aging; Altar, Home; American Folklore Society—Women’s Section; Childbirth and Childrearing; Class; Croning; Ethnicity; Folk Belief; Folk Custom; Folk Group; Goddess Worship; Herbs; Humor; Joke; Material ~ Culture; Menstruation; Personal-Experience Narrative; Quinceanera; Race; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Storytelling. References: Agee, Eve. ‘‘Menopause and the Transmission of Women’s Knowledge: African American and White Women’s Perspectives.’’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 1 (2000): 73–95; Cant u, Norma E. ‘‘Chicana Life Cycle Rituals.’’ Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Norma E. Cant u and Olga Najera-Ramirez, eds. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Coulbrooke, Star. ‘‘Women’s Mid-life Rites of Passage and ‘The Goddess of Hysterectomy.’’’ Western Folklore, vol. 61, no. 2 (2002): 153–172; Dale, Emily Lucinda. ‘‘Folk Medical Beliefs and Practices Concerning Women’s Health and the Female Body in Southern Appalachia.’’ Master’s thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2006; Davis, Dona L. ‘‘Blood and Nerves Revisited: Menopause and the Privatization of the Body in a Newfoundland Postindustrial Fishery.’’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 1 (1997): 3–20; ———. Blood and Nerves: An Ethnographic Focus on Menopause. St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1983; Goldstein, Diane E. ‘‘‘When Ovaries Retire’: Contrasting Women’s Experiences with Feminist and Medical Models of Menopause.’’ Health (London), vol. 4, no. 3 (2000): 309–323; Houck, Judith A. Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006; Komesaroff, Paul, Philipa Rothfield, and Jeanne Daley, eds. Reinterpreting Menopause: Cultural and Philosophical Issues. New York: Routledge, 1997; Linders, Jeanie, writer/producer. Menopause: The Musical. http://www.menopausethe musical.com/indexmtm.php (accessed July 6, 2007); Lock, Margaret. Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; Lock, Margaret, and Patricia Kaufert. ‘‘Menopause, Local Biologies, and Cultures of Aging.’’ American Journal of Human Biology, vol. 13, no. 4 (2001): 494–504; Morrison, Eleanor Shelton. Honoring the Gifts of Wisdom and Age: The Croning Celebration for Older Women. Kansas City, MO: Leaven, 1993; Radner, Joan N. ‘‘Coming of Age: The Creative Rituals of Older Women.’’ Southern Folklore, vol. 50, no. 2 (1993): 113–125; Saffire: The Uppity Blues Women. Alligator Records (ALCD4780), 1990; Sheehy, Gail. The Silent Passage: Menopause. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995; Skultans, Vieda. ‘‘The Symbolic Significance of Menstruation and the Menopause.’’ Man, New Series, vol. 5, no. 4 (1970): 639–651; Weideger, Paula. Menstruation and Menopause. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.

Ruth Olson

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Menstruation Menstruation, the approximately monthly shedding of the uterine lining in most women of reproductive age, is a cultural as well as a biological event. Biology cannot be separated from culture, and neither is a predetermined category with consistent effect on individual women’s lives. Menstruation, often surrounded with secrecy and shame, is a rich site of folklore and tradition. In ancient Greece, menstruation was believed to be beneficial to women’s health. Hippocrates, known as the father of Western medicine, observed that women felt relief at menses, and concluded that menstruation released ‘‘bad humors.’’ This was the basis of therapeutic bloodletting, which was practiced well into the twentieth century. By the rise of the Roman Empire, however, menstrual blood was regarded by many as a deadly toxin. Pliny the Elder wrote that menstrual blood would render seeds infertile, blunt knives, wither crops, kill flowers, and rot fruit. Ethnographers and anthropologists of the modern era have repeatedly reported that menstrual blood and menstruating women are seen as dangerous or contaminated among the peoples they have observed. Although menstrual taboos (restrictions on the behavior of menstruating women and on others in relation to menstruating women) may have arisen from such beliefs, menstrual taboos may be implemented to protect menstruating women’s creative spirituality from pollution by others, rather than the reverse. Menstrual taboos and rules are frequently justified on religious grounds rather than for practical reasons. Psychoanalytic theorists trace menstrual taboos to fear of castration among men, or to ‘‘vagina envy’’ (more accurately, envy of women’s reproductive abilities). Others have suggested that menstruation is seen as dangerous or polluting because it is ‘‘matter out of place’’: if a society believes that a fetus is actually constituted by blood, the release of blood at menstruation will likely be associated with pollution and waste because the proper purpose of blood is the creation of life. Menstrual blood may also have been seen as symbolically out-of-place because it was understood by men as biologically anomalous. Based on her empirical studies of a natural fertility population (the Dogon of Mali), Beverly Strassmann speculates that in prehistory, menstruation was not necessarily a once-a-month event for women; given differences in life span, nutrition, and time spent pregnant or lactating, women of centuries past probably had only about one-third the number of menstrual cycles of modern Western women. Strassmann attributes the change to the availability of birth control, although some others have noted that expectation of regular, monthly menstruation coincides with the rise of Christianity in the third century CE, and is thus perhaps influenced by the church’s restrictions on sex. While many writers have claimed that taboos concerning menstruating women are universal, anthropologists Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottleib (1988) explain that such an analysis is only partially true and overly simplistic: The ‘‘menstrual taboo’’ as such does not exist. Rather, what is found in close cross-cultural study is a wide range of distinct rules for conduct regarding

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menstruation that bespeak quite different, even opposite, purposes and meanings.. . . ‘‘The menstrual taboo,’’ in short, is at once nearly universal and has meanings that are ambiguous and often multivalent.

Buckley and Gottleib emphasize that practices and beliefs centered on menstruation must be interpreted within the cultural context of their enactment. For example, contemporary Westerners often assume that menstrual seclusion (the isolation of menstruating women from nonmenstruating members of society) is repressive, while, in fact, in some cultures that practice it, women value the time away from their regular duties, spent exclusively in the company of other women. This appears to be the case among the Simbu people of Papua New Guinea. Among the Lakota Sioux of North America, menstruating women were considered so powerful and dangerous that they were believed to be a threat to themselves and others. Religious specialists showed special concern because the supernatural power of menstruating women was believed to render their medicine impotent against sickness. Lakota beliefs about the power of menstruating women persisted into the twentieth century; some contemporary Lakota women say that women should not attend the Sun Dance while menstruating. Rural Portuguese women are known to practice specific avoidance rules, such as refraining from participating in communal butchering events for fear the meat will spoil. Orthodox Jewish women immerse themselves in the mikvah (a ritual bath for purification) after each menstrual period. Native American Yurok women traditionally understood menstruation partly in terms of pollution, but also as a potential source of spiritual potency.  marking a girl’s The traditional Navajo (Dine) ceremony of the Kinaalda, first period, or menarche, was considered among the most important of their religious rites; the onset of menstruation was regarded as an occasion for celebration and rejoicing. The Kinaalda includes brief seclusion of the girl, instruction in menstrual management and beliefs, and a long foot race followed by a large, inclusive celebration featuring songs and a special corn cake. Forms of the Kinaalda are still celebrated in the United States. The idea that menstruation must be hidden is the basis of most social practices and meanings regarding menstruation in Western industrial societies. Almost universally, the discourse of menstrual socialization primarily portrays menstruation as a hygienic crisis, and thus as a potential source of shame and embarrassment. Girls learn to see their periods, and their bodies, as dirty and shameful. In North America, recent efforts to reevaluate and rename menstruation include writings that attempt to counter the negativity women and girls experience at menarche. Women write of discovering ways to celebrate and honor their periods, such as the Bleed-In staged by Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth in 1988 or the party marking the thirteenth anniversary of one woman’s menarche, or the creative ‘‘Menstrual Monday’’ annual celebrations promoted by Geneva Kachman, which involve storytelling and reminiscing about menstrual experiences and feature menstrual paraphernalia for decor.

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Other women prefer to honor their periods by spending time alone meditating or by taking advantage of the added creativity many may feel at this time. Some make their own reusable cloth sanitary pads, and enjoy the ritualistic aspects of using and taking care of them. Some women keep special lunar calendars to record their menstrual cycle. Others simply try to adjust their work schedules to minimize discomfort. Customarily, daughters in some Jewish traditions received a slap in the face upon announcing their first period to their mothers; explanations for its meaning vary from punishment for pride at menstruation, to a means for bringing color back to the cheeks, to ‘‘I don’t know, but my mother did it to me.’’ However, women have started developing special rituals to welcome the menarche of their daughters. Some are honored with special, women-only celebrations featuring songs and prayers; others are celebrated by the whole family with a special dinner and a grown-up glass of red wine. Gifts for the menarcheal girl frequently include calendars and clocks. A leader in the celebratory trend was Tamara Slayton, director of the Menstrual Health Foundation and former president of Womankind Products, a now-defunct company that marketed cloth menstrual pads, cups, and related products. (Among the companies that promote positive attitudes toward menstruation, along with cloth menstrual pads, are Glad Rags of Oregon and Many Moons of British Columbia.) Slayton has been conducting menstrual health and education workshops with women and girls for more than twenty years, and founded the Menstrual Health Foundation in 1985. In her sessions on premenstrual syndrome (PMS), she found that women often would want to discuss their initial experiences with menstruation: what they wished they had known, and what kind of support they wished they had received from parents and other family members. Inspired by such discussions, Slayton developed Coming-of-Age parties for adolescent girls to provide practical, positive information about fertility and menstruation in supportive, nurturing environments. Slayton’s program combines historical, spiritual, and creative approaches to menstruation, minimizing conventional scientific analysis. She recognizes, however, that the Menstrual Health Foundation’s Coming-of-Age parties are a cloistered experience for girls, who must learn to negotiate conflicts arising from celebratory attitudes to their menstrual cycle and conventional social norms that engender concealment, embarrassment, and shame. In addition to celebrating the menstrual cycle, women are defying negative characterizations of menstruation in their written and spoken communications. In talking openly and sharing printed materials with other women, the taboo about even mentioning menstruation is under challenge. Emily Culpepper conducts workshops for women on menstrual consciousness raising, often beginning by having the participants list all of the words they know and use for menstruation. Dena Taylor’s Red Flower: Rethinking Menstruation (1988) includes poems and stories about menstruation, menarche, and menopause. The National Black Women’s Health Project, an African American self-help group based in Atlanta, has produced an educational video for girls, featuring group discussions among mothers and daughters about the experiential and physiological aspects of menstruation and growing up.

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Geneva Kachman, Molly Strange, Janis Hunter-Paulk, Maryel Backstrom, and Daisy Decapite sent out posters urging women to ‘‘Celebrate Menstrual Monday!’’ on May 8, 2000. They selected the date as ‘‘the Monday before Mother’s Day, because menstruation comes before motherhood, and usually long after it, too.’’ The women hoped to ‘‘create a sense of fun around menstruation; to encourage women to take charge of their menstrual and reproductive health care; to create greater visibility of menstruation in film, print, music, and other media; and to enhance honesty about menstruation in our relationships.’’ Suggestions for celebrations and menstrually oriented party favors were also available. The event was repeated in 2001 and 2002. However, while Kachman, Slayton, and others are inspiring, especially given the powerful concealment taboos governing speech and behaviors about menstruation, the widespread success of such movements seems far in the future. One issue that may bring menstruation out of the water closet, so to speak, and into the light of day, is ongoing political activism to reduce tampon use and compel manufacturers to adopt methods of production that stem environmental degradation and/or eliminate dioxin (a carcinogen linked to endometriosis and other health dangers) in their products. Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York first introduced ‘‘The Tampon Safety and Research Act’’ in the 104th U.S. Congress requiring research into the exact nature and level of health risks posed by use of disposable feminine hygiene products. The issue has also been taken up by campus activists such as the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC). These actions are not celebrations of menstruation, but efforts to improve women’s daily lives through political activism; they compel public discussion of tampons, menstruation, and women’s reproductive health, thus challenging the traditional secrecy of menstruation. See also: Activism; Childbirth and Childrearing; Ethnicity; Folk Belief; Folk Custom; Menarche Stories; Menopause; Mother’s Day; Mothers’ Folklore; Pregnancy; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Storytelling. References: Appel-Slingbaum, Caren. ‘‘The Tradition of Slapping Our Daughters.’’ 2000. http://www.mum.org/slap.htm (accessed January 2, 2007); Bol, Marsha C., and Nellie Z. Star Boy Menard. ‘‘‘I Saw All That’: A Lakota Girl’s Puberty Ceremony.’’ American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 24, no. 1 (2000): 25–42; Buckley, Thomas, and Gottlieb, Alma, eds. Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988; Culpepper, Emily. ‘‘Menstruation Consciousness Raising: A Personal and Pedagogical Process.’’ In Menstrual Health in Women’s Lives, eds. Alice J. Dan and Linda Lewis, 274–284. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991; Delaney, Janice, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth. The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation. Second edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988;  A Study of the Navaho Girl’s Puberty Ceremony. Frisbie, Charlotte Johnson. Kinaalda: Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967; Kachman, Geneva. ‘‘Menstrual Mondays.’’ n.d. http://www.moltx.org/mmindex1.html (accessed January 2, 2007); Laws, Sophie. Issues Of Blood: The Politics Of Menstruation. London: Macmillan, 1990; Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body. Boston: Beacon, 1987; Owen, Lara. Her Blood Is Gold. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993; Pearlman, Bari, and Phyllis Heller. A Period Piece. BTG Productions, forthcoming. http://www.aperiodpiece.com/index.html (accessed August 11, 2008); Slayton, Tamara. Telephone interview with author, 1992; Strassmann, Beverly. ‘‘The Biology of Menstruation in Homo sapiens: Total Lifetime Menses, Fecundity, and Nonsynchrony in a Natural-Fertility Population.’’ Current Anthropology, vol. 38,

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no. 1 (1997): 123–129; Taylor, Dena. Red Flower: Rethinking Menstruation. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1988; Weideger, Paula. Female Cycles. London: The Women’s Press, 1975; Worth, Robert. ‘‘A New Jewish Home for an Ancient Practice.’’ New York Times, July 2, 2000.

Elizabeth Arveda Kissling Midwifery The word ‘‘midwife’’ derives from the old Anglo-Saxon words mid (‘‘with’’) and wife (‘‘woman’’). A midwife is a woman who aids another woman during the childbearing period, most especially during the birth itself. In North America as in most of the world, the vast majority of midwives are female. A midwife can be a family member, a community specialist, or a formally trained professional. In the past, community midwives usually bartered for their services or accepted as payment whatever the family gave; in today’s cash economy, they increasingly find it necessary to charge. Many traditional or community midwives in the developing world also serve as folk healers, often learning their considerable skills through generations of apprenticeship. Other traditional midwives are simply called to attend births in cases of need, and have learned from experience. When the midwife is a specialist, she may ask other women to assist her during the birthing process. When family and friends participate in helping the birthing mother, midwifery can be defined as a kind of family folklore—an adaptive tradition that developed all over the world to help women cope with the pain of labor and to deal with the occasional complications of childbirth. Traditional midwives in many cultures have developed techniques for, among many other things, turning breech babies in utero (external version), stimulating labor with herbs, stopping postpartum hemorrhage, and manipulating stuck babies so they can be successfully born. Qualifications for the practice of midwifery have varied extensively over time, reflecting changes in the status of women in society and the evolution of women’s cultural roles. Professional schools of midwifery existed in Europe and Japan centuries before they were created in the United States and Canada. In 1965, the ‘‘international definition of a midwife’’ was adopted by World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the International Confederation of Midwives, and the International Federation of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. That definition tied naming to training, specifying that to be called a midwife (in English), one had to graduate from a government-recognized training program and become properly certified or licensed, and that midwife training had to include supervision and care of women and their babies during pregnancy, labor, and the postpartum period, along with health counseling and education for the family and the community. The international adoption of this definition generated differential and stratified treatment of ‘‘professional’’ midwives who meet its requirements, and traditional midwives, renamed ‘‘traditional birth attendants’’ (TBAs) who do not. Around the world, TBAs are being phased out and replaced with professional midwives and doctors.

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In the southern United States, Black women who assisted other women in birth were called ‘‘granny midwives,’’ and were highly valued in their communities. Poor Black women were often refused admission into hospitals; the grannies, who were trained through apprenticeship and sometimes given government-sponsored courses, were their only attendants until they were largely phased out by physicians by the early 1960s. Some granny midwives had large stores of folk knowledge about birth, and achieved remarkable records in successfully caring for women, even in complicated births. A few of them, including Gladys Milton, Onnie Lee Logan, Claudine Curry Smith, and Margaret Charles Smith, have documented their own stories (assisted by professional writers), providing rich and fascinating insights into how they accumulated knowledge and coped with emergencies with little or no access to medical services. In the Ozark Mountains of northwestern Arkansas and Missouri, granny midwives were called ‘‘granny women.’’ Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph reported that many hill men would not allow their wives to be attended by regular physicians before and during childbirth; they felt granny women were better suited for taking care of women in their homes (Randolph 1947: 192). Granny women in traditional Ozark culture were trained through the passing down of remedies, folk medicines, and folk beliefs by women before them; they believed in certain superstitions of pregnancy and childbirth, and used these beliefs in their practice. These women are not found in American culture today; contemporary midwives honor them and their legacy with the appellation ‘‘Grand Midwife,’’ a term which applies to all midwives who practiced without regulation before 1965. Along the border and in much of the southwest Latino communities, comadronas or parteras function as midwives. While traditionally, many of these midwives also served as healers in the community, in contemporary Latino communities, there are birthing clinics staffed by women, and sometimes men, who were practicing doctors in Mexico and have immigrated to the United States and have not taken or not passed the required examinations to practice here. In the early twentieth century, with the rise of professional medicine, midwifery became unpopular. Physicians and obstetricians believed that women were too weak or too uneducated to attend births, and did not want competition from midwives for their lucrative obstetrical practices. Thousands of immigrant midwives in the Northeast (many of whom had been professionally trained in European schools), along with many of the grannies of the South, the Hispanic midwives (parteras) of the Southwest, and Native American midwives around the country, were phased or forced out of service as pregnant women were increasingly urged into hospitals to give birth. At this point, childbirth was not seen as a natural process, but as a pathological condition. Medical interventions to assist in childbirth use forceps, episiotomies, and anesthetics, and only trained physicians could provide such practices. Women were given less control in childbirth, and could not be attended by any relatives. By the 1960s, 99 percent of American women gave birth in hospitals and still do so today; 90 percent of women are attended by physicians.

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In 1925, an American woman, Mary Breckenridge, who had studied midwifery in Europe, brought professionally trained British nurse-midwives to the United States and opened the first American nurse-midwifery service in Hyden, Kentucky. Breckenridge had made a careful survey of the needs of Appalachian women and concluded that the British combination of public health nursing and midwifery was ideal to meet their needs. Nursemidwives soon began working in New York as well, serving the urban poor. By 1955, nurse-midwives had created a professional organization, the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM). One of its divisions accredits all U.S. nurse-midwifery educational programs (which must be based in or affiliated with a university), while another administers a national examination and certification as a certified nurse-midwife (CNM). While early American nurse-midwives had practiced almost entirely outside hospitals, CNMs managed to gain admission into some central-city hospitals during the 1950s, where they were welcomed by exhausted obstetricians feeling the full effects of the baby boom. Today, the vast majority of the county’s 6,000 practicing CNMs attend births in hospitals; a few attend births in homes and birth centers. Although they are increasingly sought out by middle-class women for the humanistic quality of their care, CNMs’ primary motivations have always included serving the urban and rural poor. Physician resistance to the economic competition they present has slowed their growth. In 2005, as the ACNM celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, CNMs attended only 8 percent of American births. During the 1970s, the growth of North American counterculture was accompanied by an increased interest in home birth. A new breed of White, middle-class lay midwives arose to serve the middle-class women who were rejecting the hospital and its often-harmful interventions. In 1982, American lay midwives created their own organization, the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA), outlining voluntary standards of practice, core competencies, and a code of ethics. Membership in MANA requires nothing more than the statement that one is a midwife, a fact that subjected lay midwives to a great deal of criticism from physicians and nurse-midwives who believe deeply in the need for formal, accredited educational programs and nationally recognized credentials. During the 1980s, lay midwives achieved legal status and licensure in a number of states—a process of professionalization that became a primary catalyst for their rejection of the term ‘‘lay’’ in favor of the more professional term ‘‘direct-entry’’ (meaning that one enters directly into midwifery education without passing through nursing first). By the early 1990s, most MANA members agreed on the need for a voluntary national certification, which was developed in 1994 by the North American Registry of Midwives (NARM, a daughter organization of MANA), and was called the ‘‘certified professional midwife’’ (CPM). CPMs can train as midwives through selfstudy, apprenticeship, formal schools, or university programs. Today, they are licensed and regulated in twenty states, illegal in nine states, and a-legal (not mentioned or regulated in the legal system) in the rest; in almost all states where they are not yet licensed, their state organizations are working to achieve legalization, licensure, and regulation. Because regulation does

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impose some limitations on their practices, some direct-entry home-birth midwives prefer to practice outside the law. But the arrests and prosecutions of dozens of unlicensed home-birth midwives around the United States from the 1970s to the present have convinced most direct-entry midwives of the need for the professional recognition that legalization and licensure bring. In 1996, the ACNM developed its own direct-entry credential, the certified midwife (CM). As of early 2005, there were 1,005 CPMs in the United States, and forty-eight CMs (legally recognized in only three states to date). These two new direct-entry certifications signify the desire of many American midwives to avoid the subordinated identity of the nursing role and to practice autonomously as midwives, as well as their inability to agree on a unified set of criteria for midwifery education and practice. In contrast to the American situation, Canadian midwives made a choice for unification: the lay midwives of Ontario, who could not practice legally, began this process in 1984, when they united with nurse-midwives (trained in other countries but living in Canada) who were also legally prohibited from practicing midwifery. Unification involved compromises by both groups: nurse-midwives agreed not to advocate requiring nursing or postgraduate training for midwives, and lay midwives, most of whom were apprenticeship-trained, agreed to accept the requirement of a four-year university degree. By 1993, Ontario midwives had achieved licensure, legalization, and full integration into the health care system. Their salaries, unlike those of American midwives, are government-paid; their university programs are now well-established (as is a one-year challenge process for midwives trained in other countries); and various studies have demonstrated their safety and efficacy. Most Canadian provinces have subsequently legalized midwifery and adopted the university undergraduate educational model, with clinical experience and practice required both in and out of hospitals, according to the mother’s choice. American and Canadian direct-entry midwives ground themselves ideologically in the ‘‘midwifery model of care,’’ which focuses on the normalcy of pregnancy and birth and emphasizes caring for the emotional and physical well-being of the expectant mother, providing her with all relevant information, minimizing medical interventions, and detecting any abnormalities that should lead the mother to consult a physician. Presently, increasing numbers of North American women express interest in enlisting midwives instead of a physician during childbirth; cumulatively, midwives now attend around 10 percent of American births (up from 2 percent in 1979). Many women who choose hospital birth want the compassionate and respectful care that midwives provide. Some (less than 1 percent) want to give birth in the comfort of their own home away from what they perceive as the horrors of hospital intervention. These women believe—and scientific evidence shows—that home is a safe place for birth, that natural childbirth results in fewer injuries to mother and child, and that midwives are the best attendants for birth. Contemporary midwives of all types are skilled in anatomy and physiology, nutrition during pregnancy, and many other aspects of the care of normal pregnancy and birth. Direct-entry

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midwives in particular are also often specialists in herbalism, homeopathy, and other folk or alternative modalities. Home-birth midwives and midwives who work in freestanding birth centers are highly skilled at identifying risk factors that might preclude an out-of-hospital birth or require a hospital transport during labor. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Doula; Folk Belief; Folk Medicine; Herbs; Home Birth; Nurse; Pregnancy; Tradition-Bearer. References: Ashliman, D.L., editor/translator. ‘‘Midwife (or Godparent or Nurse) for the Elves’’ (Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts) http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/midwife. html (accessed August 11, 2008); Bourgeault, Ivy, Cecilia Benoit, and Robbie Davis-Floyd. Reconceiving Midwifery: The New Canadian Model of Care. Toronto: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004; Davis-Floyd, Robbie, and Christina Johnson. Mainstreaming Midwives: Politics and Professionalization. New York: Routledge, 2005; Delano, Jack, photographer. ‘‘Midwife wrapping her kit to go on a call in Greene County, Georgia.’’ Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF35-1326, 1941; Midwives Model of Care. http://cfmidwifery.org/mmoc/index.aspx (accessed August 11, 2008); Randolph, Vance. Ozark Magic and Folklore. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1947; Rooks, Judith Pence. Midwifery & Childbirth in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997.

A. E. Edwards and Robbie Davis-Floyd Military Women’s Folklore American women have always come to the aid of their country in times of war. As camp followers helping to clothe and feed the forces during the Revolutionary War, as ‘‘doughnut dollies’’ in World War I serving coffee and doughnuts to combat soldiers, and as Curtis Wright cadets trained to draft the plans for new aircraft in World War II, civilian women have supported America’s military. Throughout history and across the world, women have also disguised themselves as men to go to war (for example, Joan of Arc), a motif that also occurs in folksongs and folktales. In the twentieth century, women served overtly as soldiers, sailors, marines, and officers. In World War I alone, more than 35,000 women held clerical and nursing positions in all branches of the U.S. military. In 1942, women began enlisting as WAAC’s (Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps), WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), SPARS (women in the Coast Guard; the acronym was taken from the Coast Guard’s motto, Semper Paratus—Always Ready), WAFS (Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron), and Lady Leathernecks (Marine Corps). By the end of World War II, more than 400,000 women had served as active-duty members of the armed services. Although the military continued to define female personnel as noncombatants, keeping those whose job it was to tend the wounded safely out of harm’s way was not always possible. In fact, the Japanese captured eighty-three military nurses and held them for up to three years as prisoners of war (http://www.womensmemorial.org). Trained in gender-segregated units, military women in World War II developed their own folk traditions. They celebrated birthdays, staged skits, played practical jokes, and sang their way through basic training. For example, at training camps in Des Moines, Iowa, as well as at the Coast Guard Academy, Hunter College, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College,

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women parodied popular songs with verses that defined them as military women, proclaimed their enthusiasm and eagerness to serve, and voiced their frustrations about the rigors of training. Their verses were improvised on such familiar tunes as ‘‘The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,’’ ‘‘Roll out the Barrel,’’ ‘‘Pack Up Your Troubles,’’ and ‘‘Thanks for the Memories.’’ The enlistees sang of ‘‘WAAC days, WAAC days, dear old break-your-back days’’; they adapted ‘‘Glow Worm’’ to detail the drudgery of life in the barracks: At crack of dawn, we mop the porches, Shine our shoes by the light of torches, Shave our necks for two-inch clearance Still we’re gigged for personal appearance. Turn our sheets with a six-inch ruler, Send our rings back to the jeweler, We don’t care we’ll show them how, We’re in the Army now (Song Book 1944: 25)

Like male soldiers in training, women vented their disillusionment with military life. Women in training often tempered their grumbling with enthusiastic choruses that rationalized immediate discomforts as inevitable sacrifices. They sang songs that humorously depicted the female soldier as incompetent. ‘‘Ginny the Ninny of the Goon Platoon/forever dreaming of the captain she would marry/moved in one direction while her company moved in the other’’ (Gotsky; sung to the tune of ‘‘The Strip Polka’’). The caricature of the ‘‘Wacky WAAC’’ in these marching chants is hard to reconcile with the fact that most female recruits were between the ages of twenty-five and forty; 99 percent had held jobs before enlisting, and 90 percent had some college training (Holm: 28), a far different profile from the average male soldier. The gender segregation out of which such lore emerged eroded during the 1980s and 1990s, decades that saw integrated training in all but the Marine Corps. Jobs in the Navy and the Air Force that had been off-limits to women opened gradually. By 2006, one in every seven or 14 percent of soldiers serving in the U.S.-Iraq War was female. Although women’s official exclusion from combat units continues in 2008, fully armed female soldiers drive supply trucks that are fired upon and accompany male units on urban-warfare missions. Servicewomen, like their male counterparts, come home as amputees; some will never return. Unlike their World War II predecessors, today’s women soldiers must adapt to a culture that remains deeply masculine and that bears the trace of the attitude that female is synonymous with civilian. Although the military’s most misogynistic rituals and chants are disappearing from the training of gender-integrated units, many of the more benign traditions remain. In a typical contemporary marching chant, for example, both female and male recruits sing of exchanging their sweetheart at home for the rifle that will see them through all adversity, of exchanging a civilian identity for a new squared-away military identity: ‘‘Cindy, Cindy Lou/Love my rifle more than you./You used to be my beauty queen./Now I love my M-16.’’ It is one thing for a woman to sing of loving her rifle in training, quite another for her to

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mourn the loss of her Cindy Lou. See also: Birthdays; Folk Drama; Folk Music and Folksong; Joke; Violence; Women’s Work. References: Burke, Carol. Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture. Boston: Beacon, 2004; Goldstein, Joshua. War and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Gotsky, Victoria. From Gotsky’s personal papers, held by the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN; ‘‘Highlights in the History of Military Women.’’ Women’s Memorial.org. n.d. http:// www.womensmemorial.org/Education/timeline.html; Holm, Jeanne. Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution. Navato, CA: Presidio, 1993; Katzenstein, Mary, and Judith Reppy, eds. Beyond Zero Tolerance: Discrimination in Military Culture. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999; Song Book. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1944; Stiehm, Judith. It’s Our Military, Too: Women and the U.S. Military. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996; Women in the U.S. Army. ‘‘Today’s Soldier.’’ Posted September 2006. http://www.army.mil/women/today.html (accessed August 11, 2008).

Carol Burke Miscarriage A miscarriage is the demise and expulsion of an in utero embryo prior to twenty weeks’ gestation, the earliest point at which a fetus is considered capable of surviving outside of its mother’s uterus. Such a loss at later than twenty weeks is termed a ‘‘stillbirth.’’ The medical term for miscarriage is ‘‘spontaneous abortion,’’ but this term is not popular in society at large, as ‘‘abortion’’ is reserved for the elective termination of pregnancy. ‘‘Miscarriage’’ denotes the involuntary loss of a pregnancy. Like ‘‘spontaneous abortion,’’ many of the terms surrounding pregnancy loss are problematic. Such terms as ‘‘blighted ovum,’’ ‘‘incompetent cervix,’’ ‘‘habitual aborter,’’ and the term ‘‘miscarriage’’ itself, are often seen as implying blame or fault on the part of the woman. Women suffering miscarriage often feel that they have done something to bring it on, and much of the folk belief surrounding miscarriage responds to this. Folk beliefs regarding the causes of miscarriage have included overwork, witchcraft, exercising, bathing, lifting the arms over the head, and breathing paint fumes. Some groups hold that a fetus can sense ambivalence or hostility on the part of its mother or another family member, which can cause miscarriage or lead to a difficult birth. As the loss of a pregnancy prior to viability and usually before the mother is noticeably pregnant or has felt fetal movements, miscarriage presents a difficult cultural paradox: the death of a life that has not yet become a social person. In North America and elsewhere in the industrialized world, sophisticated and early medical tests and the widespread use of ultrasound technologies have encouraged women and their intimates to experience embryos and fetuses as separate individuals at ever-earlier stages of development, changing the way that early pregnancy and miscarriage are perceived. In the economic North, approximately one in every five recognized pregnancies is spontaneously aborted, most in the first trimester. Women who miscarry may experience the event as anything from a minor disappointment to a catastrophic loss; but most feel more grief than they or those around them expect them to feel, often leading to feelings of isolation, anger, and unreality. Although miscarriage is a common experience and

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frequent source of psychological trauma, it is seldom discussed publicly, and may even be considered taboo. Beginning in the 1970s, North American women who had experienced miscarriage began to form support groups as part of a trend toward the creation of self-help and mutual-aid organizations. UNITE, SHARE, Resolve through Sharing, and other groups grew into large organizations that serve women and their partners in the United States, Canada, and beyond. A growing body of self-help literature parallels this development. Women experiencing miscarriage can also turn to the Internet, where they will find an international network of Web sites providing information and support. See also: Abortion; Childbirth and Childrearing; Death; Folk Belief; Pregnancy; Self-Help; Women’s Friendship Groups. References: Allen, Marie, and Shelley Marks. Miscarriage: Women Sharing from the Heart. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993; Hand, Wayland D., and Jeannine E. Talley, eds. Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from Utah, Collected by Anthon S. Cannon. Salt Lake City: Utah University Press, 1984; Ilse, Sherokee, and Linda Hammer Burns. Miscarriage: A Shattered Dream. Long Lake, MN: Wintergreen Press, 1985; Layne, Linda. Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America. New York: Routledge, 2003; Snow, Loudell F. Walkin’ Over Medicine. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993.

Jennifer E. Livesay Mother Earth Mother Earth refers to the personification of nature, and specifically of this planet, as a feminine being. References to the feminine Earth abound in contemporary American popular and commercial culture. In the franchised stage hit, Menopause: The Musical, the bawdy ‘‘Earth Mother’’ comments endlessly on sex and childbirth; a popular Canadian rock band calls itself IME (‘‘I Mother Earth’’) and encourages environmentalism among fans; dozens of companies sell cosmetics, organic food, and packaged tours under variations of the name; and the venerable Mother Earth News still promotes a back-to-the-land ethic after nearly four decades of publication. Annually, news reporters in every medium invoke Mother Earth on April 22, Earth Day. And feminist Witches celebrate the seasonal round with songs that remind us that ‘‘the Earth is our mother, we must take care of her.’’ But the notion of a feminine Earth goes far beyond contemporary North America in time and space. Such usages recall ancient cosmologies in which, with few exceptions, the Earth was gendered as a divine woman. The names this Earth goddess bore were myriad: Al-Lat in Arabia, Ala among Ibo-speaking Africans, Asase Yaa among the Ashanti people of Ghana, Dzivaguru among the Zimbabwean Korekore, Prakriti among Asian Indians, and Ja-Neba among the Samoyeds of Siberia. She was Kadi (the snake-goddess of justice) in Assyria; Mamapacha (a mountain dragon) among the Peruvian Incas; in Siberia, the Earth was Mou-Njami, a greenfurred woman in whose womb all the eyes of every creature gestated; and in Mali, the Bambara people called the Earth Muso Koroni, ‘‘pure woman of ancient soul,’’ and described her as a dark leopard. Symbolism varied between agricultural and hunting peoples, the former tending to depict the

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Earth goddess as the dark fertile soil, the latter tending to emphasize her control over wildlife. In all cases, however, the maternal aspect of the Earth was emphasized, for she was depicted as the source of human nourishment, as a mother is the source of milk for her infants. Contemporary American usage likely derives from European sources, despite the fact that there were many First Nation Earth goddesses already on this continent: Atira of the Pawnee, Awitellin Tsita of the Zuni, and Changing Woman of the Apache. Europeans brought other images and stories of Mother Earth from their lands of origin. In Slavic Paganism, she was Mokosh, ‘‘moist Mother Earth,’’ a black-faced woman whose image survives in Eastern European icons of the Christian virgin mother Mary. Among the Germans, she was Nerthus, carried in a wagon through the fields each spring. Folk traditions, often hidden under Christian festivals that blessed the agricultural year, were as significant in the continued interpretation of the Earth as feminine, as were literary allusions to such classical divinities as Gaia, the Greek Earth Mother, or the Roman Tellus Mater (Earth Mother). Both popular and high cultures in English-speaking North America assume the Earth’s femininity. Although the women’s spirituality movement has embraced Mother Earth as a powerful and familiar religious image, feminist thinkers from environmentalists to economists to thealogians have questioned the potential for destructive essentialism in this perspective. In a culture that devalues both motherhood and the feminine, the Earth Mother image can be limiting for individual women who might, for example, choose to follow non-nurturing professions or choose not to give birth. As feminist economist Mechthild Hart has pointed out, motherhood is glamorized, yet actual motherwork is undervalued, thus placing women in the position of bearing cultural approval without economic sufficiency. Feminist geographer Joni Seager similarly asserts that ‘‘the Earth is not your mother’’ (1994: 219), citing not only the potential ecological consequences of the gendering of Earth as feminine in a society in which women are continually subjected to rape and discrimination, but also the unreasonable expectation that the Earth, like a mom, will clean up after those whose environmental practices threaten her very existence. See also: Feminisms; First Nations of North America; Gender; Goddess Worship; Mothers’ Folklore; Myth Studies; Nature/Culture; Region: Eastern Europe; Virgin, Cult of the; Wicca and Neo-Paganism. References: Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. San Francisco: Harper, 1978; Hart, Mechthild. The Poverty of Life-Affirming Work: Motherwork, Education, and Social Change. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002; Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Woman, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper, 1989; Monaghan, Patricia. The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines. St. Paul, MN: Lewellyn Worldwide, 1999; Plant, Judith, ed. Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 1989; Seager, Joni. Earth Follies. London: Routledge, 1994.

Patricia Monaghan Mother Goose Mother Goose refers to a centuries-old collection of nursery rhymes, tales, tongue twisters, jingles, ditties, and lullabies. The material originated in several European countries; much of it was passed down orally and only

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subsequently recorded in print. Since the European medieval period, Mother Goose rhymes have been recited by mothers, grandmothers, and nurses for generations to children at an age when they are first acquiring language skills. Whether Mother Goose herself existed as an actual person or only as a legendary figure is unknown, although there are numerous theories about her real-world identity. Today, she is most often depicted as an old woman with an angular face and large nose, wearing a pointed hat, surrounded by children as she reads or tells a story, or flying through the sky on the back of a goose. Her great age, sharp nose, and conical hat are in keeping with Euro American stereotyped images of the postmenopausal witch; when conflated with Mother Goose, the image serves to simultaneously demean, condemn, romanticize, and avow the potentially subversive power of storytelling. The term ‘‘Mother Goose’’ was noted in print in France as far back as the fifteenth century to denote a teller of tales. In 1697, Charles Perrault published Contes de ma m ere l’oie, which, unlike the Mother Goose rhyme collections of today, contained fairy tales. But her reputation and printed history began in London in 1650, when Rhymes of the Nursery, or LullaByes for Children was published, containing much of the material we now associate with the name, despite that fact that ‘‘Mother Goose’’ is not mentioned in it. In 1729, J. Pote published a book of fairy tales in England which used the words ‘‘Mother Goose.’’ And in the 1700s, London publisher of children’s books John Newbury first used the name ‘‘Mother Goose’’ in association with nursery rhymes. Some say the name ‘‘Mother Goose’’ was used in reference to Queen Bertha, the mother of French king Charlemagne; she might have been so named because of the size and shape of one of her feet: Goose-footed Bertha, as she was called, is often depicted surrounded by numerous children who listen as she tells tales and spins. Others claim that Mother Goose was an early eighteenth-century woman named Elizabeth Goose, whose son-in-law Thomas Fleet, a Boston printer, is said to have heard her rhymes and published them. Downtown Boston hosts a Mother Goose grave site. The contents of the rhymes collections attributed to Mother Goose have changed over time. Some rhymes have been deleted from newer publications because of violent content or race and class derisiveness, and other selections have been added. While some were, indeed, created for children, such as the common rhyme ‘‘A, B, C, D’’ that schoolchildren sing to learn the English alphabet, others have historical or satirical significance. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Girls’ Games; Lullaby; Region: Western Europe; Rhymes; Witchcraft, Historical. References: Baring-Gould, William S., and Ceil Baring-Gould. The Annotated Mother Goose: Nursery Rhymes Old and New, Arranged and Explained. New York: Bramhall House, 1962; Baum, L. Frank. Mother Goose in Prose. New York: Bounty Books, 1986 [1897]; ‘‘Charlemagne.’’ World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book, Inc, 2002; ‘‘Find a Grave.’’ n.d. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page¼gr&GRid¼1498 (accessed April 9, 2005); Grover, Eulalie Osgood, ed. Mother Goose: Special Limited Edition. Bolton, ON: Dalmatian Press, 2000; Thomas, Katherine Elwes. The Real Personages of Mother Goose. Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., 1930.

Melanie Zimmer

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Mother-in-Law A mother-in-law is the mother of one’s spouse. The English language does not distinguish between a woman’s and a man’s mother, whereas other languages give them different names. In many cultures, there is social expectation that the mother-in-law will not get along with her child’s spouse. In North American culture, this idea holds true for both mothers, while in other cultures, such as China, the mother of a son is particularly stigmatized as being tyrannical to a daughter-in-law. The reputation for tension between a woman and her mother-in-law stems from two primary conflicts. First, mothers have a reputation for holding their sons in particularly high regard, and for not finding any potential wife worthy of them. Second, in the traditional domestic sphere of homekeeping and childrearing, a woman’s views of how best to achieve her responsibilities may often directly conflict with those of her mother-in-law. As women have historically tended to have and exert more power in the domestic sphere, having two women compete for limited power in a household has the reputation of leading to conflict. Aggressively derogatory mother-in-law jokes, however, a longtime staple of standup comedy routines, are told almost exclusively by men. Fathers-in-law do not often have the same personal stake in the domestic sphere, therefore, it is not surprising that they are not stigmatized in the same way as are mothers-in-law. Many proverbs worldwide point out the potential for conflict between a woman and her mother-in-law. For example, a Spanish proverb states: ‘‘As long as I was a daughter-in-law, I never had a good mother-in-law, and as long as I was a mother-in-law, I never had a good daughter-in-law.’’ A Yiddish proverb says: ‘‘A mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law in one house are like two cats in a bag.’’ Finally, and most succinctly, an Italian proverb simply comments: ‘‘Mother-in-law and daughter-in-law—storm and hail.’’ Mothers of wives also do not escape a reputation for being difficult. The stereotype of the overbearing mother-in-law can be seen in television shows such as The Flintstones. This mother-in-law is cast as a bully who is never satisfied. One familiar saying, originating in 1961 but now commonplace in popular culture, is the following statement by Brooks Hays: ‘‘Back of every achievement is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law.’’ Folk belief in the United States advises men, before marrying, to consider their potential mother-in-law, as she is thought to be a preview of the wife in twenty or thirty years time, in both looks and demeanor. In fact, this belief goes at least back to ancient Rome. Two common proverbs from that time are: ‘‘Judge of the daughter by the mother,’’ and ‘‘Like mother, like daughter.’’ Finally, Sir James G. Frazer, a nineteenth-century British folklorist, asserted that, ‘‘The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.’’ While we may disagree with his choice of words, the sentiment remains one that is very familiar to contemporary North American culture. See also: Daughter; Family Folklore; Folk Belief; Housekeeping; Joke; Marriage; Mothers’ Folklore; Proverb.

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References: Bartleby.com. n.d. http://www.bartleby.com (accessed June 2, 2005); ‘‘Mother-in-Law Stories, MIL Jokes Page.’’ n.d. http://www.motherinlawstories.com/ mother-in-law_jokes_page.htm (accessed January 3, 2007); Quotations Page, The. n.d. http://www.quotationspage.com (accessed June 2, 2005); World of Quotes.com: Historic Quotes and Proverbs Archive. n.d. http://www.worldofquotes.com (accessed June 2, 2005).

Theresa A. Vaughan Mother’s Day The second Sunday in May is dedicated to honoring mothers. Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia conceived of Mother’s Day in 1908. Her idea was apparently rooted in the church memorials she arranged to commemorate her own mother, who had been a devout Methodist. Inspired by special days in the Protestant sunday school calendar—Temperance Sunday, Roll Call Day, and Children’s Day, among others—Jarvis promoted the idea of a day to honor all mothers. While it is unclear what exactly inspired Jarvis, she might have been aware of earlier antecedents that included Mothering Sunday, observed in England during Lent; the designation of May as the month that Roman Catholics pay special tribute to Mary, the mother of Jesus; or the history of even earlier devotions to an ancient Earth Mother goddess. In addition, Jarvis might have seen connections between Mother’s Day and Memorial Day, in that she believed the sacrifices of mothers, living and dead, should be remembered in the same way as those of military personnel. From 1908, Jarvis dedicated her energy to the creation of Mother’s Day, organizing a Mother’s Day International Association, a committee devoted to promoting the new holiday. The first official Mother’s Day services were held in various American cities on the second Sunday of May 1908. The observance of Mother’s Day grew with the support of organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and the World Sunday School Association. With Woodrow Wilson’s presidential proclamation in 1914, the holiday gained national recognition. Leigh Eric Schmidt, who has researched the evolution of Mother’s Day, suggests that the holiday was embraced in the 1910s and 1920s because of its early association with the traditional values of mothering and piety that many found reassuring in the face of ‘‘the new womanhood’’ (Schmidt 1995). However, the real success of Mother’s Day was dependant on its promotion by florists and other merchants. Jarvis had urged people to wear a white carnation to honor their mothers on the first Mother’s Day. Although she suggested this because carnations were one of her mother’s favorite flowers, florists jumped on the idea. They advertised flowers as a gift to be given to mothers, and by 1912, Mother’s Day bouquets were available for sale. Through the 1910s, florists were the primary commercial promoters of the holiday, but by the early 1920s, they were joined by confectioners, department stores, stationers, and jewelers. Although Jarvis first cooperated with merchants, after 1920, she objected to the commercialization of Mother’s Day, resenting florists for transforming a day she had intended to be associated with Christian piety into

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a commercial opportunity. One can only imagine Jarvis’s objection to the ever-expanding list of special days sparked by Mother’s Day’s success: in addition to Father’s Day, first celebrated in 1910, there are now a myriad of special days, including Grandparents Day, Nurses Day, and Secretaries Week. See also: Folk Custom; Mother Earth; Mothers’ Folklore. References: Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Diane Tye Mothers’ Folklore Cultural materials about female parents—biological and adoptive—and/or traditions used by women in their parental roles comprise mothers’ folklore. The role of mother has been alternately romanticized and devalued in cultures around the world. According to one North American saying, a woman should be ‘‘barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.’’ Thus, in order to be kept happy or under control, mothers are supposed to be unceasing reproducers, selfless nurturers, and continual food producers. According to Victorian-era values, mothers should protect and educate their children, and provide a safe haven for them and for their husbands. Traditionally, society wants all women to desire motherhood, and girls are taught this role expectation from a young age through techniques as diverse as traditional games wherein they must ask ‘‘Mother, may I?’’ and formal education in sewing, cleaning, and cooking in courses on ‘‘home economics’’ or ‘‘human ecology.’’ A mother is supposed to provide unconditional love and support, putting her children’s needs above all else. According to one Irish proverb, ‘‘A man loves his sweetheart best, his wife most, but his mother the longest.’’ In European folktales found in North America, the antithesis of the ‘‘real’’ (usually biological) mother is found in the figure of the wicked stepmother, who treats stepchildren cruelly and/or usurps the role of the real mother. The Grimms’ folktale ‘‘The Juniper Tree,’’ for example, depicts a stepmother who murders her stepson and serves him in a stew to her husband (though the child is later resuscitated by his stepsister). In contrast, the sentimentality of Mother’s Day—promoted by florists and other commercial interests—offers an image of a soft, loving, and selfless woman, wanting only visits and flowers from her children to make her happy. On the other hand, there is abundant folklore about the negative aspects of mothering and mothers. According to popular ideas, the Irish, Jewish, or Italian mother rules the home with an iron fist and controls her children through guilt. The ‘‘apron strings’’ of a mother tie her children to her so that even as adults, they are incapable of functioning as independent men and women. A mother’s excessive attention to her son makes him a weak, emasculated adult; excessive attention to her daughter makes her spoiled and unprepared for the rigors of marriage. A mother’s failure to provide the proper love and devotion turns her children into criminals, depressives, or other non-functional adults.

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The ability to become a good mother is supposed to develop naturally. Modern explanations may involve surges of hormones during pregnancy, or genetic predispositions toward nurturing by women. In the Judeo-Christian view, a mother’s love and ability to nurture are preordained by God. In Catholic Christianity, Mary, the mother of Jesus, has long been held as a model for mothers and women. Mary’s unquestioning devotion to God and to her son, and her acceptance of a difficult role and of her son’s inevitable death, provide an example of selfless motherhood. Women themselves may feel that the role of nurturing mother comes naturally to them. Many, however, may think something is wrong with them if they feel ambivalent about motherhood, or don’t have an immediate surge of maternal love for their child when it is born. Anxieties about not being a good enough mother surface in many contemporary legends about women whose careless words or wrong responses to domestic crises result in the dismemberment and/or deaths of their children. Rural Mexican girls may express in their games the ambivalence that their mothers feel about having many children and not having a choice about motherhood. Bad mothers as well as good are found in abundance in folklore and popular culture. For example, in the legends of northern Virginia, stories tell of ghosts of women who killed their children or allowed them to die, who are then doomed to wander as spirits after they die, looking always for their lost children. In the ballad ‘‘The Cruel Mother,’’ a woman murders her illegitimate children, who later appear to her and curse her forever. The film Mommie Dearest (1981) horrifically portrays Joan Crawford as a bad adoptive mother, focused only on her own needs and twisted in her desire to control her children. In contrast, I Remember Mama (1948), another biographical tale, portrays a selfless, strong, and dedicated immigrant woman from Scandinavia from the point of view of her sometimes ungrateful daughter. Women sometimes use mother’s folklore to justify and attain positions of power both within the family and in the public sphere. For example, Pentecostal women work within the conservative constraints of their religion by using symbols of the virtuous and loving mother to justify their ability and desire to preach—that is, to be mothers of their congregations. In Mexico, rural women may use the popular images and folklore about motherhood to redefine the position of women in the political sphere—portraying the ideal relationship of local government and the people as that of mother and child—thus justifying their unique qualifications to participate in the political process. Women may also use folklore in order to command and protect parts of the domestic sphere. They are traditionally considered the daily cooks in North American culture. This role can feel confining for some women, but others use it to make the kitchen a space of power and prestige, sometimes going so far as to forbid men from entering or straying into the domestic realm. ‘‘Old wives’ tales,’’ proverbs, and practical advice handed down to women through the generations can help them raise children and care for the household. While this traditional knowledge may be looked down upon by society in general, it represents generations of women training other

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women to become effective mothers. As an old Roman proverb says, ‘‘Like mother, like daughter.’’ See also: Ballad; Childbirth and Childrearing; Ethnicity; Film; Folktale; Foodways; Gender; Girls’ Games; Grandmother; Housekeeping; Legend, Supernatural; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Mother Earth; Mother’s Day; Old Wives’ Tales; Pregnancy; Proverb; Stepmother; TraditionBearer; Virgin, Cult of the. References: Beauchemin, Cindy. ‘‘How Not to Be a Bad Mother: Understanding the Reasoning Behind the Telling of My Grandmother’s Motherhood-Related Ghost Legend Through Similar Versions from Around the Globe.’’ Northern Virginia Folklife Archives #1999–106 (December 7, 1999). http://www.gmu.edu/folklore/nvfa/papers/1999-106beauchemin.htm (accessed June 28, 2007); Cardoza-Freeman, Inez. ‘‘Games Mexican Girls Play.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 88, no. 347 (January 1975): 12–24; Inness, Sherrie A. Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001; Langlois, Janet L. ‘‘Mothers’ Double Talk.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 80–97. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Lawless, Elaine J. ‘‘Piety and Motherhood: Reproductive Images and Maternal Strategies of the Woman Preacher.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 100, no. 398 (October 1987): 469–478; Martin, Joann. ‘‘Motherhood and Power: The Production of a Women’s Culture of Politics in a Mexican Community.’’ American Ethnologist, vol. 17, no. 3 (August 1990): 470–490.

Theresa A. Vaughan Muslim Women’s Folklore Although ‘‘Muslim,’’ ‘‘Arab,’’ and ‘‘Turk’’ are frequently mixed categories in the Western historical imagination, the Islamic world includes significant numbers of adherents in Asia, Africa, and Eastern and Western Europe. Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in North America, where it took on a variety of new meanings in the aftermath of the violence of September 11, 2001. Given the complexity of the subject, then, the related concepts of ‘‘Muslim women’’ and ‘‘Muslim folklore’’ must be approached carefully. Historically, Muslim women have been objects of curiosity for Westerners. European travelers, fascinated with the status of women in Islam, portrayed Muslim women as the ‘‘exotic others.’’ More recently, stereotypical images of Muslim women have been based on their widely perceived oppressed status. Western debates largely center on the symbolic meanings of costumes, especially on the traditional Iranian chador and Afghan burqah (full-body ‘‘veils’’), and the modern hijab (‘‘head scarf’’). However, Muslim women’s folklore includes many other folk genres as well, including lullabies, folktales, folksongs, folk art, and proverbs. Some of these women’s genres are shared throughout broad regions, as in the Middle East and North Africa. Islamic practices are diverse; hence, so are the folkways of Muslim women. The blessing ceremony called mevlut, for example, is common among Turkish women, while Tunisian women commonly believe in the protective power of the Khoumsa, an amulet widely known as Fatima’s Hand. Despite general consensus on the Qur’an and the two main Islamic holidays, Ramadan and Aid Al-Adha, local practices are historically and geographically constructed so that folk religion is as influential in people’s daily lives as are orthodox beliefs and observances. The ritual use of henna,

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pottery making, and carpet weaving are constituents of women’s folkloric repertoire throughout the traditional Islamic world, and have many local versions, each displaying its own geographic-historical cultural specificity. Verbal genres are performed in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, and their dialects, but some linguistic forms (for example, the terms, maashallah, inshaallah, and sihha, all of which ask for the blessing of Allah) are cross-culturally shared in women’s discourses. Muslim women’s folklore varies markedly in North America, where migration, revival, and conversion have been major factors. Most early migration to North America was not voluntary, but part of the slave trade. Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, a movement known as the Nation of Islam rapidly developed among people of African descent in the United States. Its leader, Elijah Mohammed, taught that Islam was the original, and therefore the correct, faith of African Americans. Initially centralizing the importance of race and framing Christianity as the White man’s religion or as a slave religion, the movement eventually grew toward a more Orthodox version of Islam. The status of women within the Nation of Islam arose from Orthodox traditions wherein strict moral codes regulate clothing, food consumption, and the interaction of the sexes. Since the political violence of September 11, 2001, Islam and its varied communities in North America have been radically recontextualized. Women are frequently targeted by anti-Islamic violence due largely to the high visibility of traditional dress. One response among Muslim families has been to enroll their daughters in Girl Scout/Girl Guide troops, thereby presenting an especially unthreatening style of dress. Personal-experience narratives about being Muslim in North America are emerging as a primary women’s folklore genre. Contemporary folklore studies remind us that women in modern Muslim communities, like their North American sisters who adhere to non-Christian belief systems, will continue to produce new cultural forms, invent new traditions, and find new means of self-expression within their contexts of social and political oppression, while paradoxically remaining the revered tradition-bearers of their societies. See also: Folk Costume; Girl Scouts/Girl Guides; Henna Art/Mehndi; Lullaby; PersonalExperience Narrative; Politics; Pottery; Proverb; Race; Weaving. References: Hamdy, Sherine. ‘‘North American Muslim Women Voice Their Concerns.’’ Feminist Collections, vol. 22, no. 3–4 (Spring/Summer 2001). http://www.library. wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/fc/fchamdy.htm (accessed February 6, 2007); Marsh, Clifton E. From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Resurrection, Transformation, and Change of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in America, 1930–1995. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1996 [1961]; MacFarquhar, Neil. ‘‘To Muslim Girls, Scouts Offer a Chance to Fit In.’’ New York Times, November 28, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/ 11/28/us/28girlscout.html?_r¼2&adxnnl¼1&oref¼slogin&adxnnlx¼1216479426-pQFub7I5z ?QXEwENnm5xhpQ (accessed November 28, 2007); Mills, Margaret. ‘‘Gender and Performance Style in Afghanistan.’’ In Gender, Genre and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions, eds. Arjun Appadurai, Frank Korom, and Margaret Mills, 56–77. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991; ———. ‘‘The Aesthetics of Exchange: Women’s Work and Embroidery Designs in the Karakorum.’’ In God Is Beautiful and He Loves Beauty: A Festschrift for Annemarie Schimmel, 331–343. New York: Peter Lang, 1994; ———. ‘‘Women’s Tricks: Subordination and Subversion in Afghan Folktales.’’

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In Thick Corpus, Organic Variation and Textuality in Oral Tradition, ed. Lauri Honko, 453–487. Studia Fennica Folkloristica 7, Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2001; Spencer, Robert, and David Pryce-Jones. Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003.

€ urkmen € Arzu Ozt Myth Studies Myth, from the Greek mythos, meaning word, speech, tale, or story, is today commonly used to designate fallacious beliefs and accounts. Mythology, the study of myth, is more properly both the study of sacred narratives, icons, symbols, and rites; it is also the collective term for such verbal, visual, and ritual expressions. Myths have been studied as cultural reflections and distortions, as social charters, as related to ritual, and as narratives. For the most part, myth studies are based on texts, field data, and interpretations by male scribes, scholars, creative artists and writers, fieldworkers, and storytellers. Thus, far more is known about women in mythology, about ‘‘the feminine’’ and female figures who people men’s narratives, rituals, theologies, and analyses, than is known about women and mythology or women’s mythologies: the powerful narratives they recount among themselves, the rituals they perform, and the elaboration, exegesis, and evaluation of their own and men’s sacred symbolic expressions. The Greek philosopher Plato questioned the veracity of myth in the fourth century BCE, claiming that the words of poets like Homer and Hesiod and the ‘‘old stories’’ told to breastfeeding infants by mothers and wet nurses were all fabrications (Laws 10.887). He opposed such mythoi (stories), arguing that they distort the truth and keep people from the good life; he urged people instead to heed the far more desirable logos of reason in service of the examined life. Plato went so far as to banish poets (singers of tales) from his ideal state (Republic). In the early twentieth century, ethnographic study of myth came to the fore in fieldwork by German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas and his students, among them American anthropologists Martha Warren Beckwith, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead, and Gladys Reichard. Boas (in Georges 1968) uses myths and other traits of social life and material culture to find historic-geographic evidence for migration, trade, and other intercultural contacts. Seeking the historical in mythology is sometimes termed ‘‘euhemerism,’’ after the Greek Euhemerus of Messene (ca. 300 BCE), who in The Sacred Scripture claims that the gods originally were mortal kings or otherwise great men. Historical diaspora plays a central role in African American myth studies. African American lesbian writer Audre Lorde saw her mythology of matrilineal diaspora as ‘‘moving history beyond nightmare into structures for the future’’ (Chinosole in Braxton and McLaughlin 1990). African American feminist Barbara Omolade (in Braxton and McLaughlin 1990: 284–85) calls scholars like herself ‘‘griot historians’’ who ‘‘must ‘break de chains’ of Western thought which controls the methods and versions of the historical process.’’ West African griots traditionally are male poet-musicians; Omolade uses

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the term symbolically to name women ‘‘shaped by an African worldview which evolved within democratic/consensus tribal societies where the oral tradition . . . is interwoven among music, art, dance, and crafts, and everyday activities intermixed with communication and connection with both the spiritual world and the ancestral past.’’ Boas stressed ‘‘salvage’’ or survey ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork among supposedly ‘‘dying’’ Native groups. This approach initially led him to consider myths and other kinds of folklore as direct reflections or quasicatalogues of present and past culture traits (see, for example, his 1916 Tsimshian Mythology and 1935’s Kwakiutl Culture as Reflected in Mythology). In time, he came to view myths as culture distortions, unsystematic cultural autobiographies that bring out ‘‘points which are of interest to the people themselves.’’ Ruth Benedict developed these ideas in psychological terms. Her Zuni Mythology (1935) includes sociopsychological analyses of proscribed behaviors in myths such as polygamy, child abandonment, and witchcraft as ‘‘compensatory daydreams’’ rather than as accounts of ‘‘actual’’ or ‘‘normal’’ Zuni behavior (in Georges 1968). Twentieth-century psychological myth studies initially were dominated by the psychoanalysis of Austrian Jewish neurologist Sigmund Freud and the analytical psychology of Swiss Protestant psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, a disciple-protege of Freud who broke with his mentor by 1914. Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Three Theories of Sexuality (1905) lay the foundation for the modern psychoanalytic study of myth, culture, and religion. He posited that, like myths and other folkloric-artistic expressions, dreams are disguised wish-fulfillments, symbolic compromises between inner desires and sociocultural prohibitions that conflict with their realization. American psychoanalyst Wolfgang Lederer (1968: vi) claims that Western mythology about women disguises how ‘‘the myth of the ‘weaker sex’ has to such extent slanted the perception of Western man that he must, to this day, consider any fear of women as unmanly and hence unacceptable.’’ In stark contrast are the powerful, nurturing images of the ‘‘feminine in American Indian traditions,’’ the grandmothers’ ways ‘‘recovered’’ by Laguna Pueblo/Sioux writer and critic Paula Gunn Allen (1986, 1991), and the women shamans ‘‘reclaimed’’ by American anthropologist Barbara Tedlock (2005). In Symbols of Transformation (1911–1912, 1952), Jung began to diverge from Freudian theory, deemphasizing biological-sexual drives as but one aspect of a generalized life force (libido). He proposed a three-level psyche (mind), including the personal conscious, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. The latter, which Jung also calls ‘‘the objective psyche,’’ manifests in dreams, myths, and other expressions as archetypes, that is, ‘‘inherited forms of psychic behavior’’ that ‘‘cause the praeformation of numinous ideas or dominant representations’’ like the Mother, the Sage, Divine Child, the collective Shadow, Rebirth, the Trickster, etc. (Jung in Dundes 1984). Jung’s influential construct of the contrasexual archetypes, the Anima (Latin for soul) in men and the Animus (Latin for mind) in women, are much debated by feminists (for example, Douglas 1990). The approach taken by Joseph Campbell, an American comparative mythologist, literary scholar, and popularizer of myth, is generally considered

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Jungian in flavor, although he never worked directly in analytical psychology per se. Campbell’s influential The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) deals almost exclusively with male exemplars of what he calls the ‘‘monomyth’’—the hero’s journey of departure, initiation, return—dealing with the ‘‘man or woman who has been able to battle past his [sic] personal and historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms.’’ The male-normative biographical patterns Campbell identifies are diversified in works like those by American lesbian Religious Studies scholar and Jungian analyst Christine Downing, for example, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love (1989), Psyche’s Sisters: Reimagining the Meaning of Sisterhood (1990), and Women’s Mysteries: Toward a Poetics of Gender (1992). Polish-born British social anthropologist Bronislaw K. Malinowski criticized Freudian and Jungian interpretations, claiming in a November 1925 lecture, ‘‘Myth in Primitive Psychology,’’ that mythology ‘‘studied alive’’ in the field is ‘‘not symbolic, but a direct expression of its subject matter.’’ Drawing on his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands (see his 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific), Malinowski defines myth as neither ‘‘intellectual explanation’’/‘‘a form of science’’ nor ‘‘artistic imagery’’/‘‘mere narrative,’’ but ‘‘a pragmatic charter’’ to validate belief, enforce morality, and codify ‘‘practical rules for the guidance of man’’ (in Dundes 1984). For Malinowski, myth constitutes ‘‘justification by precedent’’ for present-day social life in terms of ‘‘primeval reality,’’ functioning ‘‘to strengthen tradition and endow it with a greater value and prestige by tracing it back to a higher, better, more supernatural reality of initial events.’’ Likewise, the mythology of matriarchy, whether as part of a ‘‘golden,’’ prehistoric past or as an organizing principle of historic societies, has been viewed similarly as a ‘‘charter’’ for contemporary women’s greater empowerment. The relationship between myth and ritual has long concerned scholars. Romanian-born historian of religions Mircea Eliade, known for his work in comparative religion and mythology, emphasizes ‘‘the paradigmatic function of myth,’’ which ‘‘relates how things came into being, providing the exemplary model and also the justifications of man’s [sic] activities.’’ According to Eliade, the original mythic time when the world first came into being informs all rituals and significant human activities. Origin myths (cosmogonies) and ritual acts of foundation, consecration, inauguration, and renewal recreate that time symbolically so the present is infused with primordial power. In Eliade’s and others’ work on origin myths and rituals, there is ‘‘a fundamental premise: that procreation poses an antithesis to creation; to be procreant is not to be creative; parturition cannot be considered the symbolic equivalent of cosmogony [so] procreation is relegated to elemental or physical or biological status, while spiritual or metaphysical or symbolic creation becomes the valued paradigm for ritual, custom, art, narrative, and belief systems’’ (Weigle 1989: xi). Language studies have influenced mythology. In his four-volume Mythologiques (1964–71), French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who did fieldwork in Brazil during the 1930s, develops a grammar of North, Central, and South American Aboriginal mythology that is not based on particular myths

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but on the ‘‘deep structure’’ of cognitive meaning underlying many myths from various times and cultures. For Levi-Strauss and other structuralists, the collective language of myth articulates symbolic binary oppositions (for example, day/night, life/death, female/male) and their mediating terms (for example, dawn/twilight, a revenant, an androgyne). The patriarchal language of myth and ritual, particularly Western JudeoChristian and Roman Catholic ones, is the target of radical scholarship by American lesbian philosopher-theologian Mary Daly in books like Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973), Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage, and especially Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (1987), ‘‘conjured’’ by Daly ‘‘in cahoots with’’ American popular-culture scholar Jane Caputi. Psychic activism, ‘‘to smash phallocentric myth while creating womanidentified words, symbols and myths,’’ focuses Daly’s philosophy/thealogy; ‘‘she critiques patriarchal myth while inventing an astonishing variety of mythic identities for women and names for female power,’’ including Muses, Fates, Gorgons, Furies, Harpies, Spinsters, Witches, Hags, Crones, Nags, Scolds, Prudes, and Shrews (Caputi in Larrington 1992: 428; also see Hoagland and Frye 2000). In another contemporary avenue of myth interpretation, the study of ‘‘another mother tongue’’ informs the work of American lesbian poet and activist Judy Grahn (1984). In naming and narrating both ‘‘butches, bulldags and the Queen of Bulldikery [first-century CE British warrior-queen Boudica]’’ and ‘‘flaming faggot kings’’ worldwide and through history, she is exceptional in the Gay Spirituality movement, which is concerned primarily with gay men’s spirituality. According to Randy Connor and others, Queer Spirit, a school of myth studies arising from late-twentieth-century political activism, is inclusive. It is ‘‘an eclectic movement based in the beliefs that the divine source embraces homoeroticism, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism, and that persons enacting these behaviors or holding these beliefs have served in many cultures as spiritual functionaries, which include the role of (ritual) artist or craftsperson as well as that of (spiritual) warrior’’ (Conner et al. 1997: 25). American historian of religions and Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty) defines myth functionally as certain storytelling that recounts sacred narratives ‘‘shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it.’’ These narratives are ‘‘part of a larger group of stories’’ that are ‘‘believed to have been composed in the past about an event in the past, or, more rarely, in the future . . . that continues to have meaning in the present because it is remembered’’ (O’Flaherty 1988: 27). According to Doniger, myths are metaphoric and multivocal, including women’s and feminist voices; their comparative study should be a systematic method of metaphor interpretation/translation in the sense of ‘‘bringing across’’ cultures (Doniger 1998). She draws extensively on both Hinduism and comparative mythology in her work on gender and sexuality, for example, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (1980), Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (1999), and The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000).

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That women and mythology is harder to articulate than women in mythology stems in part from the paucity of texts, field data, and feminist interpretations about women’s own mythologies. There is also a differential evaluation of mythos and mundus, or this world, the mundane, generally considered closely associated with women. Mythology as usually understood deals with time beyond time, the otherworldly, the numinous and extraordinary, not with the everyday, the commonplace of this world, or what American religious studies scholar Lynda Sexson (1982) calls the ‘‘ordinarily sacred.’’ The differential evaluation of mythos and mundus owes much to German Protestant theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige, 1917). Otto claims that, like the burning bush in front of Moses (Exodus 3:1–6), the sacred ‘‘breaks through’’ and confronts humans as a phenomenon ‘‘wholly other’’ (ganz andere) that is terrifying (‘‘religious fear’’), a mystery both awe-inspiring and fascinating (mysterium tremendum and fascinans), and with the majesty (majestas) of superior power. Myth, that is, ‘‘richly symbolic story, song and ceremony,’’ is a primary means to express these numinous experiences, which overwhelm ordinary language (Weigle 1982: 286–87). When women are no longer silenced or their speaking together dismissed as too ordinary, as merely idle gossip or old wives’ tales, when more is known of their languages, narratives, and rituals with one another, it may be that gossip in its best and fullest sense of godsiblingship/midwifery will be seen as the mundane equivalent of mythos, and all such expression as sacred. See also: Androgyny; Feminisms; Fieldwork; First Nations of North America; Gender; Goddess Worship; Gossip; Grandmother; Lesbian and Queer Studies; Matriarchy; Midwifery; Nature/Culture; Old Wives’ Tales; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Storytelling; Text; Transgender Folklore; Warrior Women; Wicca and Neo-Paganism; Women’s Folklore. References: Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986; ———. Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991; Braxton, Joanne M., and Andree Nicola McLaughlin, eds. Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990; Conner, Randy P., David Hatfield Sparks, and Mariya Sparks, eds. Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Lore. London: Cassell, 1997; Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998; Douglas, Clare. The Woman in the Mirror: Analytical Psychology and the Feminine. Boston: Sigo Press, 1990; Dundes, Alan, ed. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984; Georges, Robert A., ed. Studies on Mythology. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1968; Grahn, Judy. Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984; Hoagland, Sarah Lucia, and Marilyn Frye, eds. Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000; Larrington, Carolyne, ed. The Feminist Companion to Mythology. London: Pandora Press, 1992; Lederer, Wolfgang. The Fear of Women. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968; O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Other People’s Myths: The Cave of Echoes. New York: Macmillan, 1988; Sexson, Lynda. Ordinarily Sacred. New York: Crossroad, 1982; Tedlock, Barbara. The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, and

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Auckland: Bantam Books, 2005; Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983; Weigle, Marta. Spiders & Spinsters: Women and Mythology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982; ———. Creation and Procreation: Feminist Reflections on Mythologies of Cosmogony and Parturition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Marta Weigle

N Naming Practices Names are labels for people, creatures, things, and ideas that distinguish them from others. North American names and naming practices—traditional patterns for choosing names—for women and girls are rooted in folk, popular, and elite culture. Naming customs frequently reflect female status, whether personal, familial, or societal. For girls in many cultures, ‘‘given’’ (or ‘‘first’’) names traditionally mirror ideas about what is feminine or hopes for the child to have qualities considered appropriate to her sex. For instance, in early New England, girls were often named Patience, Charity, or Mercy. From the nineteenth to the midtwentieth century, the most common name for girls in America was Mary in honor of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. In the last half-century, first names for American girls became more secular, with Linda ranked as the most popular girls’ name in 1950, and Emily in 2006. Girls have been named for characters in books, movies, or songs, and for celebrities. Although the ancient Romans often assigned birth-order numbers to their daughters’ names (for example, a father named Julius might have daughters called Julia I, Julia II, and Julia III), numerical assignments that establish a direct connection between a girl and her siblings through using an identical name are no longer used. However, girls are frequently named for relatives. In many Greek families, the first daughter is named for her mother’s mother, while Ashkenazi Jews name both girls and boys after deceased relatives. Double first names that acknowledge a child’s forebears on both sides of the family are common in the American South and in Spanish-language traditions for both girls and boys. A girl from Alabama typically might be named Betty Sue or Barbara Jean after her maternal and paternal grandmothers (while her brother is called Joe Bob or Tommy Lee), and a Latina child might be named Carmella Maria or Luisa Pilar for the same reason. One way to use a name to honor a relative is to employ a different form. In the author’s family, the name Marion became Mary Ann in the next generation, and Mary Beth in the generation following. As Julie Dash points out in her 1991 film Daughters of the Dust, enslaved

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parents in the South often gave their children unique names like Iona (‘‘I own’’) or Miyone (‘‘My own’’) in protest of their status as property. Forenames around the world frequently reflect gender, although which names are assigned to boys and which to girls changes over time and among cultural groups. A song made popular by Johnny Cash in the late 1960s, ‘‘A Boy Named Sue,’’ reflects strong opinions about proper names for boys and girls, especially in mid-twentieth-century America. However, some names are gender-ambiguous. For instance, ‘‘Robin’’ is used for females and males. Nicknames (often short forms) for traditionally feminine names can also be ambiguous. For example, Sam can be for Samantha (female) or Samuel (male), or Pat for Patricia (female) or Patrick (male). Playing on this ambiguity, in the 1990s, the television comedy show Saturday Night Live featured a longrunning skit with a character named Pat, in which others politely tried— always unsuccessfully—to determine if s/he was female or male. Family or surnames (which in North America and Europe are listed last) historically developed as a way to distinguish people with the same first name. In many cultures, surnames originated from five main sources; personal characteristics, such as descent (Younger); place characteristics, such as ‘‘by the river’’ (Rivers); occupations (Smith, Baker, Cooper); naming a child for the father (patronymic) or less often, for the mother (matronymic); and, among American Blacks, slave owners’ names assigned to enslaved persons and their progeny. Common English surnames are derived from the mother’s or father’s name; Williamson, obviously means ‘‘son of William’’ (father); however, Madison means ‘‘son of Maud’’ (mother). Some cultures specify daughters in their surnames; for instance, in Arabic, ‘‘Sumayya bint Khubbat’’ (Sumayya, daughter of Khubbat) and in Scandinavia, where in Sweden, ‘‘Hansdotter’’ is ‘‘the daughter of Hans,’’ and in Iceland, where Katrn Bryndsard ottir is ‘‘Karin, daughter of Bryndisar.’’ In Spain and Portugal, children are traditionally given both parents’ surnames, and women keep this name after marriage. This custom has been maintained in many Spanish and Portuguese former colonies such as Mexico and Brazil, and emigrants from these cultures often continue it. North American First Nations have a wide variety of naming practices, some of which involve observation of the natural world at the time of a child’s birth or naming ceremony. Naming rights often reside with women. For instance, Hopi children are named by the women of their father’s clan. Enslaved African Americans were often named by their owners, who frequently assigned their own surnames. In protest, former slave and abolitionist Isabella Baumfree changed her name to Sojourner Truth in 1843. With the rise of civil rights and African American cultural identity movements in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, many Black families responded to this history by giving their daughters innovative names, often with the prefixes ‘‘la’’ and ‘‘sha’’ (for instance, La Tasha or Shamika). In Western societies, surnames have become a way to reflect changing attitudes about women’s roles and status. In 1855, suffragist Lucy Stone refused to take her husband’s name when she married, in protest of women’s disenfranchisement (her husband, Henry Blackwell, was also a suffragist

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supporter). During the 1920s, women who wanted to keep their names after marriage founded the Lucy Stone League in her honor. The term ‘‘maiden name’’ dates to 1689 and refers to the family name a woman uses before she marries. The continued common usage of this term today suggests the belief that a woman is a maiden—that is, a virgin—before marriage. After the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s, many women in the United States chose to keep their maiden or ‘‘birth’’ name (usually their father’s), or to hyphenate their surname with their husband’s. In the province of Quebec, Canada, married women keep their birth names by convention and in civil law. Some married couples combine their surnames to form a new one. The author’s cousin and her husband, for example, created the new last name Kingser, an amalgam of their surnames. Naming practices are significant for lesbian relationships as well; a New Jersey woman sued and won in 2001 to be able to legally hyphenate her name with her partner’s. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Folk Custom; Gender. References: Alford, Richard D. Naming and Identity: A Cross-Cultural Study of Personal Naming Practices. New Haven, CT: HRAF Press (Human Relations Area Files), 1998; Da’ud ibn Auda (David B. Appleton). ‘‘Period Arabic Names and Naming Practices.’’ 2003. http://www.sca.org/heraldry/laurel/names/arabic-naming2.htm (accessed December 29, 2007); Eldridge, Larry. Women and Freedom in Early America. New York: New York University Press, 1997; Eleuterio, Susan. ‘‘Introducing Folk Culture to Students and Adults.’’ In Cultural Arts Resources in Teaching, ed. Paddy Bowman, 4–5. New York: City Lore, 1998; ‘‘Given Name Frequency Project.’’ http://www.galbithink.org/names/ agnames.htm (accessed December 20, 2007); Goldin, Claudia, and Shim, Maria. ‘‘Making a Name: Women’s Surnames at Marriage and Beyond.’’ Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 18, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 143–160; Grossman, Joanna. ‘‘What’s In a Name?’’ n.d. http://writ.news.findlaw.com/grossman/20001016.html (accessed December 20, 2007); Mphande, Lupenga. ‘‘Naming and Linguistic Africanisms in African American Culture.’’ n.d. Ohio State University. http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/35/paper1301.pdf (accessed December 20, 2007); ‘‘Native American Naming Traditions.’’ n.d. http://sweetgrasstraditions. tripod.com/customs.html (accessed December 23, 2007); Norman, Teresa. A World of Baby Names. New York: Perigee Press, 1996; Simms Pearson, Lonnye Sue. ‘‘What’s in a (Southern) Name?’’ n.d. http://usads.ms11.net/name.html (accessed December 23, 2007); Social Security Administration (U.S.). May 11, 2007. http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ (accessed December 20, 2007).

Susan Eleuterio Nature/Culture The distinction between the physical world that exists without or beyond the interference of human beings—that is, nature—and that which arises from people’s creation—that is, culture—remains in the popular imagination as an ideal type. The nature/culture distinction is a binary opposition. As such, each term is most easily conceived in contradistinction to the other, and each is presumed to be the other’s polar opposite. Serving much the same purpose as the bifurcated signifier ‘‘nature/nurture,’’ the dichotomy can be grasped as an idea, but is much more difficult to identify in practice. Very little that exists on Earth has not been touched in some way by humans. And though much of what people create is an attempt to transcend natural limitations, such as developing various forms of warm

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clothing in order to survive in a cold climate, humans are increasingly learning that their effects upon nature are more extensive than previously imagined. In other words, the opposition presumes that there is no interrelation between nature and culture; in reality, these two putatively separable domains are intimately intertwined. The nature/culture distinction is often mapped onto another ideal type of binary opposition: that between women and men. In most of the world’s cosmological mythologies, for example, the Earth itself is considered feminine; like a woman’s body, it is the obvious source and sustenance of life. Women are generally associated with nature because of their connection with the reproduction of person, plants, and animals, and with the nurturing of those entities. The same mythologies generally assign to males the qualities of disembodied spirit, rational thought, ingenuity, and discovery. Because they are usually the people doing the delineating and because they consider culture superior to nature, men have been associated with culture. In one of the earliest works of self-defined feminist anthropology, Sherry Ortner went so far as to call the distinction between nature and culture, and its correlation with the difference between women and men, a human fundamental and a source of the near-ubiquitous domination of human males over human females. Feminists have often reacted to the definition of women as ‘‘uncultured’’ by pointing to the many achievements and creations of women in realms unquestionably understood as cultural—politics, medicine, literature, the arts, and so on. They argue that it is not that women did not pursue such areas, but simply that their actions in those domains were ignored by the men who controlled the powerful institutions—including universities, legal courts, banks, publishing houses, and the like—to which women were not permitted access. Another, somewhat divergent, feminist strategy has been to work toward revaluing and reclaiming the positive connections between women and nature. Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature was among the first feminist works to confront seriously the nature/culture split in Western thought. Today, ecofeminists like Vandana Shiva are at the forefront of that effort, which has become less poetic and increasingly political with new awareness of the impending depletion of fossil fuels on which global capitalism currently depends, and the effects of global warming, to give only two of many examples. Of particular interest to folklorists is the way in which the nature/culture binary is expressed and recreated in traditional culture. For example, folklorist Cristina Bacchilega argues that Descriptive, thematic, and metaphoric ties with nature (often enacted through the metamorphosis of woman from/into plant, fruit, or animal) are the necessary means by which the construction of the Innocent Persecuted Heroine is made to appear as her ‘coming to life.’ And when Snow White, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and so many other Innocent Persecuted Heroines undergo trials and endure hostility (rather than accomplish tasks and seek competition), the woman-as-nature metaphor contributes to their plausibility and, at the same time, encourages readers/listeners to think of these ‘heroines’ in pre-cultural unchangeable terms, which in turn ensures these characters’ innocence as well as the reproduction of their persecution (3).

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Her argument here shows that women’s alleged connection with nature defines them as beyond culture, but also restricts them perennially to the victim position. See also: Cinderella; Class; Feminisms; Folktale; Gender; Mother Earth; Mothers’ Folklore; Race: Snow White. References: Baccilega, Cristina. ‘‘An Introduction to the ‘Innocent Persecuted Heroine’ Fairy Tale.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1993): 1–12; Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2000 [1978]; Ortner, Sherry. ‘‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’’ In Woman, Culture, and Society, eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 17–42. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974; Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005.

Pauline Greenhill Needlework The term ‘‘needlework’’ as used here refers to fancy needlework, though it is also used to refer to plain sewing. ‘‘Fancywork’’ is decorative—as opposed to utilitarian—needlework. Fancy needlework, therefore, was produced by women (only rarely by men) who had time to pursue it in addition to plain sewing, or who were relieved of utilitarian duties by servants or other members of the household. Genteel women and girls engaged in fancy or decorative needlework as testimony to their skills in the feminine arts as well as to indicate they were of a social position that permitted leisure for such non-utilitarian pursuits. The products of fancywork, especially small items such as pocketbooks, pin balls, and pincushions, were made to be given as gifts between women, as training or trial pieces for young women, or were elements of household furnishings (bed coverings and bed hangings, draperies, chair seats and covers, etc.) or items of clothing that became cherished possessions that were passed down from mother to daughter over the generations. Not all fancy needlework was a pastime for wealthy women of leisure, however, nor was all utilitarian sewing destined for immediate household use. Many a needlewoman depended on the income her handiwork could generate, and both plain and fancywork were produced for sale outside the home, although fancy needlework required special skills and hence special training over and above what the vast majority of girls and young women received. The context in which ‘‘work’’ was produced and the nature or quality of sewing activity are thus closely related to household income and management strategies, social standing and social display, and the construction of gender identity. Fancywork includes embroidery—embroidered pictures, tambour work, and canvas work—as well as lacework. It also includes muslin or ‘‘whitework,’’ cutwork, candlewicking, and stuffed work. Whitework is a generic term for needlework done on white fabrics with white yarns using a variety of techniques, including cutwork, its raw edges protected with a holding stitch, and the empty section infilled with a detached buttonhole stitch. Cutwork is a method of making needle lace in which an area of the background fabric is removed. Candlewicking was especially popular in

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the nineteenth century for coverlets and was done by hand or machine; it involves decorating fabric with raised stitches of soft roving or candlewicking yarns. Stitches used include French knots, whip, cross, satin, and bullion, sometimes clipped to create tufts. Stuffed or raised work refers to any kind of needlework with artificially raised areas; some sort of filling (carved wood, clay, fiber, or fabric) is used to shape a figure on a fabric ground that is covered with other fabric that is stitched down in a decorative manner. Application of cording also falls under the category of raised work. Women throughout the ages have found both pleasure and gratification in producing decorative needlework items; indeed, at times women’s social and gender identity is closely linked to needlework. This connection has often resulted in the imposition of an external ideology upon women, one that conflates femininity with needlework, especially embroidery, and essentializes women as naturally disposed toward sewing and needlework. A parallel ideology developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and America associating morality with ‘‘keeping within compass’’—defining the boundaries of women’s ideal behavior by insisting that they always keep their ‘‘work’’ to hand in order to have it to take up should they for any reason find themselves at leisure from their normal daily tasks (Swan 1995: 10–11). Hence throughout history, through needlework, women have exercised creativity and self-expression while at the same time being constrained by stereotypes and moralizing about this activity. Despite the fact that most fancy needlework requires advanced skills and investment of considerable amounts of time and effort, not to mention often rather expensive materials and specialized tools, in the early modern, modern, and postmodern eras, much of this work has been undervalued because it has been deemed handiwork, craft, or simply not true art because it has been produced by women in the home. Contemporary artists have attempted to subvert traditional notions of handicraft by producing seemingly domestic items that carry intellectual and ironic messages and that comment on larger social issues. Lou Cabeen, for example, has used the ‘‘keep within compass’’ theme in one of her works, Self-Portrait I, to comment upon the ways in which, up to the late twentieth century, training in sewing and embroidery reinforced a regimen of compliance and discipline upon young girls as part of their socialization. Other contemporary artists are likewise using needlework and textile art both to comment upon the ambiguity of women’s relationship to their needlework over time and to develop a new and expanding field of ‘‘fiber art.’’ See also: Class; Embroidery; Folk Art; Lacemaking; Sampler; Sewing; Women’s Work. References: Barry, Judith, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. ‘‘The Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art-Making.’’ In Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra L. Langer, and Joanna Frueh, 87–98. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988; Beaudry, Mary C. Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006; Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London: The Women’s Press, 1984; Swan, Susan Burrows. Plain & Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1650–1850.

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Second, revised edition. Austin, TX: Curious Works Press, 1995; Taylor, Sue. Gift to the Muse: The Art and Craft of Lou Cabeen. Sheboygan, WI: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 1995; Vincent, Margaret. The Ladies’ Work Table: Domestic Needlework in Nineteenth-Century America. Allentown, PA, and Hanover, NH: Allentown Art Museum and University Press of New England, 1988.

Mary C. Beaudry Nursing Nursing is a health profession that takes a holistic and scientific approach to promoting the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of persons, of families and family-like groups, of communities, and of civil bodies. The profession includes registered nurses, who have passed a national exam and been licensed by the state or province after being educated in a collegiate or diploma school; licensed practical nurses, who perform many routine patient care procedures under the supervision of a registered nurse or a physician; and nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives, and clinical nurse specialists, who as registered nurses have pursued special programs of graduate education and are licensed to work in more independent and specialized roles. Nursing functions include hands-on care for the healthy, the recovering, the aged, and the dying, support of physicians in operating rooms and clinical situations, assessment and evaluation, planning, advocacy, midwifery, research and publication, consulting, administration, and education of clients, the public, and the nursing profession. Nurses work in hospitals and clinics, homes, industries, many types of institutions, public health situations, the government, the military, and in Nursing Departments and schools on all levels from diploma schools and county technical schools up through doctorate-granting universities. Nursing creates its own folklore as well as sharing in the folklore of the situations and cultures in which nurses function. Nurses, moreover, engage in research on the value of their own folklore and on the folklore of clients, and adopt/adapt folk approaches in many types of clinical situations. Prior to the 1960s, most nurses were educated in hospital diploma schools. The conditions in such schools encouraged intense group solidarity and developed in nurses a number of traits typical of members of folk groups. Students, young, unmarried females, usually lived together, dormitory style, in a single large house with a housemother. Their day began with morning chapel and ended with ten o’clock curfew. In between came classes and work in the hospital. A spring or fall dance, a group-produced entertainment, or the spring capping ceremony for first-year students were the only breaks from the grueling schedule. In addition to necessary nursing skills and protocols, students learned the special etiquette that went with their place in the strict hospital hierarchy, the jargon of the profession, and the traditions of the sickroom, from interacting with patients to making beds with perfect hospital corners. They also learned the care and wearing of uniforms—how to launder and starch, how to press, fold, and wear the special school cap different from the caps of all other nursing schools, how to fold a handkerchief and pin the school pin in the center, and the importance of

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well-polished shoes. These nurses-in-training shared stories about strict supervisors, drunk and unconventional doctors, mishaps with enemas and wheelchairs, and returns to the dormitory long after curfew. They learned to distrust rival hospitals. And they became as ‘‘close as sisters.’’ Nurses returning after World War II, however, often used the G. I. Bill to go to college, and nursing education began to move from the hospital diploma school to the campus degree program. Licensed practical or vocational nurses became more prevalent. And opportunities for graduate work up through the doctorate, with accompanying opportunities for teaching and administration, likewise changed the profession. These changes are reflected in greater respect for the nurse and her (or his) opinions, more professional responsibility, professional-level compensation, and a more relaxed and egalitarian culture in the hospital or doctor’s office. Historically, nursing has been a women’s profession, and consequently gender tensions have been a factor in development of the in-group folklore. Because, however, nurses today come from such diverse educational institutions and function in such a broad, often specialized range of contexts, it is no longer possible to describe a single body of nursing folklore. Nurses do like jokes about the foibles of doctors. Every nurse knows of someone who has substituted apple juice for urine and then swallowed it for shock effect. And, whatever the institution, some nurse is likely to take delight in decorating for major and minor holidays. But generally, the folklore tends to reflect the circumstances in which the nurse functions. Pediatric nurses build personal-experience narratives around explosions of infantile feces and vomit. Nurses in crisis centers such as cancer clinics or emergency wards let off steam by alarming supervisors or doctors about fictional disasters. Surgical nurses tell of items accidentally sewn up inside patients. And each clinical situation has its own customs, priorities, schedules, and protocols, and its own jargon or folk speech to label procedures, identify client types, convey coded information when clients might be listening, and record information concisely on charts. Nurses, moreover, often see their world as increasingly dominated by paperwork and regulations that seem counterproductive. They may counter by personalizing work space and uniform (scrubs) and by breaking rules in ways perceived as harmless, such as permitting extra visitors or slipping patients unauthorized treats. They may attack symbolic icons of rigidity via defacing the photos on name tags, for instance, by drawing mustaches and funny hats, or through setting bizarre objects in inappropriate places for colleagues or supervisors to find. Folklorists have written very little about the nursing profession and its traditions. What little has been recorded tends to focus on the potential conflict when professional nursing meets traditional medical practices and practitioners. In environments where traditional curing practices thrive, however, nurses, especially public health nurses, have been in a position to observe the use of the plant remedy asafetida, potato necklaces, root and herb remedies, and the ministrations of lay midwives. And nursing (and medical) professionals in the second half of the twentieth century began to pay more attention to folklore, writing about evaluating ethnic folk-medicinal

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practices in the nursing situation and about the importance of understanding ethnic concepts of time, health, and family, among other things, in caring for members of ethnic groups or providing health education. They have researched traditional beliefs such as the relationship of moon cycle to parturition or the value of beer to breastfeeding mothers. Nurse-therapists now use storytelling in their care of Native Americans, the elderly, battered women, and those suffering from various forms of dementia, among other groups. They have developed paradigms of mental function based on folk psychology to better treat the mentally ill. Nurses and hospitals that have long accommodated Christian families and clergy who wish to conduct traditional bedside rituals, and today, especially in the American Southwest, may now find ways to accommodate Native American families and their healers who wish to conduct on-site rituals for the ill one. Indeed, recognition of folk culture is a manifestation of the holistic approach of modern nursing. See also: Ethnicity; First Nations of North America; Folk Belief; Folk Group; Folk Medicine; Gender; Humor; Occupational Folklore; Personal-Experience Narrative; Ritual; Storytelling. References: Banks-Wallace, J. ‘‘Story Telling as Tool for Providing Holistic Care to Women.’’ MCN: American Journal of Maternal and Child Nursing. 24: 1 (January–February, 1999): 20–24; Bates, Christina, Dianne Dodd, and Nicole Rousseau, eds. On All Frontiers: Four Centuries of Canadian Nursing. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2005; Ehrenreich, Barbara. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. New York: Feminist Press, 1972; Giger, J. N., R. E. Davidhizar, and G. Turner. ‘‘Black American Folk Medicine Health Care Beliefs: Implication for Nursing Plans of Care.’’ ABNF Journal, vol. 3, no. 2 (Spring, 1992): 42–46; Hirst, Sandra P., and Shelley Raffin. ‘‘‘I Hated Those Darn Chickens . . .’: The Power in Stories for Older Adults and Nurses.’’ Journal of Gerontological Nursing 27:9 (September, 2001): 24–29; Marcus, Marianne T. ‘‘Surgical Intensive Care Nursing Work.’’ In The Emergence of Folklore in Everyday Life: A Fieldguide and Sourcebook, ed. George H. Schoemaker. Bloomington, IN: Trickster Press, 1990; Marquez, Mary N., and Consuelo Pacheco. ‘‘Midwifery Lore in New Mexico.’’ The American Journal of Nursing, vol. 64, no. 9 (September, 1964): 81–84; Mick, Diane J. ‘‘Folklore, Personal Preference, or Research-based Practice.’’ American Journal of Critical Care, vol. 9, no. 1 (January, 2000): 6–10; Primeaux, Martha. ‘‘Caring for the American Indian Patient.’’ The American Journal of Nursing, vol. 77, no. 1 (January, 1977): 91–94.

William Bernard McCarthy

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O Occupational Folklore The study of occupational folklore examines expressive behaviors inspired by workplace experiences and concerns as they emerge both at the work site and in other social contexts, such as ‘‘happy hour’’ gatherings and company picnics. Folklorists’ early studies of work often centered on high-risk, natural resource-based occupations such as firefighting, steelworking, mining, and fishing, and thus dealt exclusively or predominately with masculine work sites. Many of these occupations, along with customary practices involving initiation pranks and retirement parties, foster traditions based on beliefs about good and bad luck. In high-risk contexts, complex webs of customary practices provide a sense of control and help build trust between workers. Traditions enacted outside the workplace may involve workers’ families as well. Labor unions have also figured prominently in folklore research, resulting from both folklorists’ early interest in the culture of industrial occupations and their continued commitment to the documentation of counter-hegemonic communicative forms. Over time, folklorists’ interests began to encompass a wider range of workers and work activities, including the service industries and many previously neglected aspects of domestic work, namely housekeeping. They began to address issues of differential identity in work settings outside the home, undertaking research, for example, on the experiences of female taxi drivers. Women—and particularly those who work in still-predominantly masculine occupations—not only participate in expressive behaviors already established in their jobs, but also develop new techniques to manage on-the-job discrimination and harassment from both clients and coworkers. Emerging issues for folklorists working in this area include the use of technologically enabled networks, as more and more employees work from home and participate in non-traditional work configurations such as job sharing; the proliferation of occupations that enlist or originate in Internet technologies means that shared physical space no longer defines work space. Thus, folkloric communication—for example, jokes, chain letters, occupational-experience narratives, rumors, and gossip—is often transmitted by e-mail, sometimes over vast distances, rather than face-to-face.

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Contemporary occupational folklore remains largely uncharted. Folklorists have yet to conduct significant studies of the expressive cultures of forced or coerced labor, such as those of child laborers and adult sex workers; ethnographies of corporate call centers, for instance, also remain to be done. See also: Folk Custom; Folk Group; Housekeeping; Prostitution/Sex Work; Rites of Passage; Sexism; Tradition. References: Boyd, Cynthia. ‘‘‘Just Like One of the Boys’: Tactics of Women Taxi Drivers.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, 213–22. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997; Byington, Robert H., ed. Working Americans: Contemporary Approaches to Occupational Folklife. Smithsonian Folklife Studies, Number 3. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978; Green, Archie. Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Narvaez, Peter. ‘‘‘I’ve Gotten Soppy’: ‘Send-Off Parties’ as Rites of Passage in the Occupational Folklife of CBC Reporters.’’ American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 33, no. 3 (1990): 339–52; Spradley, James P., and Brenda J. Mann. The Cocktail Waitress: Woman’s Work in a Man’s World. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975.

Holly Everett Old Wives’ Tales Old wives’ tales—stories, anecdotes, and/or beliefs handed down through generations of women—are generally related to traditional cures and other beliefs related to health and well-being. Relegated to the realm of superstition, old wives’ tales are not taken seriously in patriarchal knowledge, both medical and academic. Even in common usage, the term usually refers to unsubstantiated claims about curative powers and the avoidance of disease. Newer women-centered scholarship suggests, however, that old wives’ tales represent instead the accumulated knowledge of women in the areas of folk medicine and traditional healing. Feminist scholarship recognizes that because the wisdom of women in patriarchal or male-centered cultures is not valued, old wives’ tales are similarly devalued. Feminist theologian Mary Daly demands a reevaluation of the knowledge of old wives, hags, and crones. She encourages new recognition of the ways in which ‘‘malestream’’ history and scholarship have systematically erased, belittled, and abhorred these figures and the knowledge they possess and transmit. The scope of topics covered by old wives’ tales is broad, encompassing human health from birth until death. In many cultures, women have traditionally been warned away from consuming specific foods or performing certain actions while pregnant for fear of damaging the fetus. For example, if a woman consumes strawberries while pregnant, her child may be born with a reddish birthmark, known as a strawberry mark. Another tale cautions women not to raise their hands above their heads because this may cause the umbilical cord to become wrapped around the child’s neck. Though neither example has a basis in scientific fact, they explain the occurrence of real medical conditions. While numerous examples can be found of old wives’ tales that do not stand up to scientific scrutiny, there are many areas in which traditional beliefs about medicine are valid. For example, knowledge of the curative

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and palliative properties of some herbs, such as chamomile for nerves or echinacea for colds, comprises part of the large body of folk beliefs known as old wives’ tales. The subjects to which the largest collection of old wives’ tales pertain are those which have traditionally been considered the domain of women: pregnancy, childbirth, children’s health, gynecological health, and the health of the elderly. Certainly, an older woman who has experienced much and has been the primary caregiver of a family accumulates a store of useful knowledge about disease and health. She may also share and learn from other women within her neighborhood, developing a repertoire of practices which prove effective for her and her family, friends, and community. One must look at old wives’ tales closely in order to determine the nature of the belief and the concerns it addresses. An old wife, hag, or crone can be a respected or belittled figure, depending upon one’s perspective, but an understanding of folk belief and traditional medicine is essential for placing her wisdom in context. See also: Aging; Childbirth and Childrearing; Curandera, Folk Belief; Folk Medicine; Folklore about Women; Herbs; Grandmother; Mothers’ Folklore; Nursing; Pregnancy; Superstition; Women’s Folklore. References: Bergner, Paul, and David Hufford. Folk Remedies: Healing Wisdom. New York: Signet, 1999; Daly, Mary. Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, With a New Intergalactic Introduction by the Author. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990 [1980]; Root-Bernstein, Robert, and Michele. Honey, Mud, Maggots and Other Medical Marvels: The Science Behind Folk Remedies and Old Wives’ Tales. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997; UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) Online Archive of American Folk Medicine. n.d. http://www.folkmed.ucla.edu/ (accessed May 26, 2006).

Theresa A. Vaughan Oral History Oral history is an historiographic approach as much as a methodology. Its practice depends on interviewing people to gather their experiences and memories. In that respect, it shares with folklore the domain of personalexperience narratives (Dolby Stahl). With in-depth interviews that use openended questions, oral history methodology allows an interviewee to construct her own account in a reflexive mode of communication between the researcher and her subject. Folklorists, archivists, historians, media workers, community activists, artists, teachers, and health and social-care workers are among those who typically, and for a variety of purposes, explore the past through memory. Folklorists, for example, have sometimes been concerned with the historical usefulness of oral traditions and with the histories of often-marginalized folk groups whom they have interviewed and studied. From its beginnings in the late 1960s, oral history has been marked by the interdisciplinarity of its practitioners and by its engagement in debate and memorializing, which link the past to the present. Women’s history has played an important role in its development, originating debates about method as well as determining the content of what is investigated.

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What is remembered comes in many forms; narratives of experiences may be laced with comments that suggest that recall of the past is important for the transmission of cultural practices as much as for communicating a sense of difference and distance in relation to the present. Folklore plays a part in this; sayings, myths, poetic repertoires, and symbolic references form significant aspects of the structuring and illustrating of what is conveyed to an interviewer. U.S. oral historian Michael Frisch gives a useful understanding of what, he argues, oral historians do. He puts forward the twin concepts of ‘‘more history’’ and ‘‘anti-history,’’ suggesting that most oral historians are involved in either one or both approaches (186–7). Oral historians are engaged in ‘‘more history’’ when they are intent on revealing hitherto undocumented or unrecorded aspects of the past. For example, feminist oral historians in the early 1970s drew from oral and biographical sources to substantiate arguments about marginalized histories inaccessible through conventional documentary sources. Topics such as everyday domestic life, women’s industrial labor, maternity, sexuality, and birth control became fit subjects for research. However, given feminism’s political drive, the method was not simply a question of redressing an imbalance in the making and telling of history; new agendas for historical research were also a means for establishing demonstrable continuities with women’s oppression in the present. Understanding of the past shifted as feminists reconceptualized views of women’s social situations, challenging assumptions by enlisting accounts that used women’s words, knowledge, and stories. (See, for example, Sherna Berger Gluck’s interviews with suffragettes, Mary Chamberlain’s study of urban women’s knowledge, and Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis’s work with professional African American women.) ‘‘Anti-history,’’ Frisch argues, goes further, challenging established understandings of history by offering shortcuts to a more direct, emotional sense of ‘‘the way it was’’ (Frisch: 187). Accounts which bypass interpreters to speak from the heart are evident in the work of Italian oral historian Luisa Passerini’s exploration of working-class communities in Turin during the Fascist period. Similarly, Alessandro Portelli, in his volume of essays The Battle of Valle Giulia, points out how oral history ‘‘. . . tells us less about events than about their meaning’’ because it ‘‘forces on the historian . . . the speaker’s subjectivity’’ (Portelli 1981). He argues that popular forms play significant parts in this personalization of the past; he sees the persistence of folklore in remembered accounts, arguing that . . . folklore no longer appears as the residue of an archaic past, but rather as a contemporary, constantly renewed product of the permanent disruption of the culture of working people in the encounter with the cultural messages of the elite and of its remaking in cultural resistance (160).

To Frisch’s two forms of oral history activity we add a third: ‘‘how history.’’ ‘‘How history’’ exposes the processes of being an historian, activities which have become the basis of women’s oral history writing. An editorial in the UK journal Oral History explains: ‘‘How history’’ enables us to question and to understand the processes of being a historian. In its early days, oral history was less interested in process,

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in unravelling the ways in which accounts were derived, understanding the relationship between interviewer and interviewee, reflecting on the interviewer’s changing understanding of both history and self. In our view women and their oral history have put the ‘‘how’’ into history. This has happened partly through the opportunity which reflection on shared experience brings: it is partly through a need, an urgency, to tell and reveal hidden accounts, to right wrongs and to stake claims. But it is also a result of having to come to terms with the limits of sharing while we reflect on the divisions of class, race, age, culture, and impairment which continue to distinguish groups of women from each other. It is this tension which has generated the ‘‘how’’ of oral history.. . . (Oral History 1993: 2:2)

A collection of essays edited by Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, Women’s Words, was first published in 1991 to immediate acclaim and recognition for the directness with which it addresses a number of key issues debated by feminists. Perhaps what was most significant, in retrospect, was the reappropriation of these themes by U.S. feminists from ethnographers, psychologists, oral historians, and sociologists, and their application to a shared understanding of what is meant by the practice of oral history. The contributors, many of whom were already widely published oral historians and ethnographers, brought to the debate critical and transparent reflection on issues such as the subjectivities of both interviewer and interviewee, power in an interview relationship in which both parties are women, ownership and control over the interview and its interpretation, and an appreciation of multidisciplinarity. For example, Katherine Borland emphasized ‘‘that important commonalities among women often mask equally important differences’’ (1991: 72). And Daphne Patai attacks ‘‘the fraud’’ of ‘‘purported solidarity of female identity’’ as denying divisions of race, class, and ethnicity (1991: 144). ‘‘More history,’’ ‘‘anti-history,’’ and ‘‘how history’’ characterize and categorize oral history research and practice perhaps most specifically in the context of women’s history. Dolores Delgado Bernal, in her account of the Chicano movement of the 1960s, shows how events like the East Los Angeles School Blowouts, in which more than 10,000 high school students protested poor educational conditions by walking out of their classrooms, is typically told in Chicano terms. By talking to women who were involved, she reveals how Chicanas played leading roles, arguing for a ‘‘reconceptualization of leadership’’ as she identifies primary activities—networking, organizing, and consciousness-raising—that contribute to grassroots leadership development (Bernal: 237–8). Bernal’s research is an example of ‘‘more history’’; by including women’s accounts, she has added to the historical record, challenging and complementing what was an established story. Irina Sherbakova’s ‘‘The Gulag in Memory,’’ with its firsthand accounts of arrest and detention in Stalin’s Russia, serves, as do so many Holocaust memories, as ‘‘anti-history.’’ These testimonies add personal details about how events felt. For example, a woman arrested in 1937 recalls the absurdity of her dress in prison. She had been at a party at a Politburo member’s dacha: ‘‘They didn’t allow us to take in anything—our summer silk dresses and underwear were torn, stuck over our shoulders, our stockings were

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ripped. At the last minute before our prison transfer I received money from someone and we bought whatever there was in the prison chest’’ (242– 243). ‘‘How’’ oral histories include interpretations that focus on subjective interactions in the interview situation. However, increasingly, oral historians are looking at the ways in which remembering the past can help to inform current policy and practice. Involving participants in the process requires careful thinking, particularly if their sense of ownership is to be sustained so that their involvement leads to a positive sense of empowerment. As Susan, one of the participants in an oral history of women with learning difficulties confined to a convent in the mid-twentieth century, put it, ‘‘Even though I will never meet the people who’ll read this—I want them to know I’m a real person’’ (Stuart: 158). Collaborations in the production of their personal histories with people with learning difficulties has led some oral historians to detail representational and ethical issues, a process that provides helpful pointers to some of the issues surrounding the ‘‘how’’ of oral history itself: informed consent, anonymity, and confidentiality. See also: Activism; Class; Consciousness Raising; Crime-Victim Stories; Ethnicity; Fieldwork; Personal-Experience Narrative; Race; Storytelling; Women’s Folklore. References: Bernal, Dolores Delgado. ‘‘Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts.’’ In Women’s Oral History: the Frontiers Reader, eds. S. H. Armitage with P. Hart and K. Weathermon, 227–257. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2002; Borland, Katherine. ‘‘‘It’s not what I said’’: Interpretive Conflict in Oral Narrative Research.’’ In Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, eds. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, 63–75. London: Routledge, 1991; Chamberlain, Mary. Old Wives’ Tales: Their History, Remedies and Spells. London: Virago, 1981; Dolby Stahl, Sandra. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; Economic and Social Data Services. ‘‘Legal and ethical issues in interviewing people with learning difficulties.’’ 2000. http://www.esds.ac.uk/aandp/create/guidelineslearningdifficulty.asp (accessed January 15, 2007); ‘‘Editorial.’’ Oral History no. 2 (1993): 2; Etter-Lewis, Gwendolyn. My Soul is My Own: Oral Narratives of African American Women in the Professions. New York: Routledge, 1981; Frisch, Michael. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990; Gluck, Sherna Berger. Parlor to Prison: Five American Suffragists Talk about Their Lives. New York: Vintage Books, 1976; Gluck, Sherna Berger, and Daphne Patai. Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. London: Routledge, 1991; Passerini, Luisa. ‘‘Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism.’’ History Workshop, vol. 8 (1979): 82–108; Patai, Daphne. ‘‘Is ethical research possible?’’ In Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, eds. Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai, 137–153. London: Routledge, 1991; Portelli, Alessandro. ‘‘The peculiarities of oral history.’’ History Workshop, vol. 12 (1981): 96–107; ———. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991; Sherbakova, Irina. ‘‘The Gulag in Memory.’’ In The Oral History Reader, eds. Robert Perks and Alaistair Thomson. London: Routledge, 1998: 235–245; Stuart, Mary. Not Quite Sisters: Women with Learning Difficulties Living in Convent Homes. Kidderminster, UK: British Institute of Learning Disabilities, 2002; Thompson, Paul. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Third edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Yow, Valerie Raleigh. Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994.

€ urkmen € Joanna Bornat and Arzu Ozt

P Paperfolding and Papercutting Paper crafts have been practiced since the invention of paper in China sometime in the fourth century CE. Names for the arts of papercutting vary: in Germany and Switzerland, it is known as scherenschnitte; in Poland, wycinanki; in Japan, mon-kiri; in China, chien-chih; in Denmark, papirklip; in Holland, knippen; and in Mexico, papel picado. The end-product is very similar throughout the world—a piece of paper cut into fanciful designs using a punch, knife, or scissors. Papercutting dates from the fourth or fifth century in China and spread to Japan by the seventh century; however, the concept of creating symmetrically cut designs by folding paper before cutting it may have originated in Japan. Origami is a Japanese word meaning ‘‘paper-folding.’’ From Asia, the art of papercutting spread along the Silk Road (a major trade route linking the eastern Mediterranean basin to Central and East Asia between the first century BCE and the sixteenth century) until it reached first the Middle East and then Europe. By the seventeenth century, Italy, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland had developed distinct regional papercutting styles. German and Swiss immigrants fleeing from religious persecution brought scherenschnitte (‘‘paper snipping’’) to America. Originally, its use was limited to socially significant papers: religious texts; legal documents; birth certificates (geburtscbein); baptismal certificates (taufscbein); and confirmation and marriage certificates (trauscbein). The skill of Pennsylvania German and Dutch papercutting was most apparent in early American liebesbriefie (love letters). These exquisitely designed and lettered pieces inspired a vogue for lace-like paper valentines during the Victorian period. Traditionally, Jewish cut-outs bear pictorial symbols directly related to the Torah and later texts, but never human figures, prohibited by the commandment against graven images. Cut paper mizrot are hung on an east wall; religiously observant Jews face in that direction during evening prayers. Traditional marriage contracts (ketubot) are cut with ornate designs, and the religious festival of Shavaot (Pentecost) inspired cut-outs known as

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shevuoslech and raizelech. Hebrew characters are also painstakingly incorporated into many of these cuttings. In Poland, wycinanki (‘‘papercutting’’) not only continues the tradition of symmetrical cutting, but also adds layers of colorful, cut paper pieces to form purely decorative pictorial collages. These are hung from the rafters of cottages, pasted on newly whitewashed walls, and used as decorations at Christmas and Easter. Mexico’s papel picado date to pre-Columbian times. Today, these cuttings are used as traditional decoration for religious and ceremonial occasions, ornamenting altars in homes and street festivals. The irreverent and absurd are reflected in the work, often taking as its starting place the satirical images of artist Jose Guadelupe Posada. The practice of silhouette cutting was particularly popular in the United States in the nineteenth century. Practiced largely by women, it was considered a parlor art but also a way to preserve the images of loved ones. Rather a poor person’s version of photography, silhouettes, usually black images mounted on a white background, were also a way to show off images of composers and presidents. The Japanese do not look upon origami as an art form but as an integral, everyday part of their culture. While origami does not involve cut paper, it is a related art form. Since the sixth century, a few simple folds were intended to suggest a form rather than a realistic, detailed representation. Beginning with the nobility, origami slowly assumed new roles as different folds became associated with different classes and social groups. The crane, a symbol of long life and granted wishes, is possibly the most famous of the origami folds, having been forever cemented in the world’s mind by the story of twelve-year-old Sadako Sasaki’s attempt to fold 1,000 cranes to prevent her death from leukemia (‘‘atomic bomb disease’’) and for world peace. Although she died before she finished, her friends completed the 1,000 cranes and in 1958 built a monument to her and to the crane, the Children’s Peace Monument of Hiroshima. Since 1989, the practice of folding cranes, now organized by the Cranes for Peace Project of Santa Fe, New Mexico, has become a tradition repeated annually by small groups of elementary-school children from Japan and around the world; they send them in batches of 1,000 to the Children of New Mexico to be displayed at the Children’s Peace Statue in Santa Fe on August 6 of each year. In the United States, origami has, until recently, been considered purely a children’s craft. However, through the effort of the late Lillian Oppenheimer and the organization she founded, OrigamiUSA, the boundaries of origami have widened considerably, raising paperfolding to an art form in public perception. See also: Altar, Home; Class; Crafting; Festival; Folk Art; Folk Medicine; Girls’ Folklore; Jewish Women’s Folklore; Material Culture; Valentine’s Day; Wedding. References: Cranes for Peace Project, Santa Fe, NM. n.d. http://www.networkearth.org/ world/peace.html (accessed May 30, 2006); Engel, Peter. Folding the Universe: Origami from Angelfish to Zen. New York: Vintage Books, 1989; Fuse, Tomoko. Simple Traditional Origami. Tokyo: Japan Publications Trading Co., 1998; Joyce, Madalyn. ‘‘Wycinanki: The ABCs of Polish Papercutting.’’ http://www.sheldonbrown.org/joyce/wycinanki.html

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(accessed August 11, 2008); Kozlowski, L. G. Paper Cuts . . . Polish Style. n.d. Pittsburgh: Polska Folk Arts, 808 Phineas St., 15212, USA; Montroll, John. Teach Yourself Origami. New York: Dover Books, 1998; OrigamiUSA. n.d. http://origami-usa.org (accessed May 30, 2006); Rich, Chris. The Book of Papercutting. New York: Sterling/Lark Books, 1993; Scherenschnitte. n.d. http://www.hopalonggreetings.com/new_page_3.htm (accessed January 31, 2006); Temko, Florence. A Thousand Cranes. Torrance, CA: Heian International, 1998; Tranchard, Kathleen. Mexican Papercutting. Ashville, NC: Lark Books, 1998.

Nancy Piatkowski Personal-Experience Narrative Personal-experience narratives are performed, single-episode stories told in the first person to recount experiences deemed story-worthy in appropriate contexts and narrated as true because they are usually based on real incidents. Because stories encode culture and can be used creatively by individuals, they are a crucial site for examining the intersection of social structure and human agency. This use of narratives has been increasingly significant for understanding women’s folklife in at least two important ways. First, women’s expressive traditions that emphasize their own personal-experience narratives are means of voicing their otherwise too-often silenced knowledge. Second, acknowledging women’s expressive culture in personal-experience narrative can be a way to identify shared social conditions that affect their lives, to form community, and to empower themselves and others to promote social change. As Sandra Dolby Stahl (now Dolby) argues, individuals tell personalexperience narratives out of a need to share experiences. For those who have suffered trauma or otherwise been party to unusual events, the sharing of such narratives is often therapeutic; they facilitate coping, work to make sense of experiences, and help people to regain a sense of control over their lives. Both tellers and their audiences benefit from narrated experience, leading to what Donald Braid calls experiential meaning, a process of engagement that results in the listeners’ incorporation of others’ experiences into their own lives as ‘‘resources for living’’ (Thompson 1996: 26). Using methodologies and theoretical insights from Folklore Studies, folklorists draw on women’s personal narratives to learn about women’s experience and knowledge and to get at the complexity of gender, class, and cultural identities. For example, Susan Snow Wadley draws on oral life-history narratives to learn the perspectives of people in a rural village in India differently situated due to gender and caste. Wadley examines both how these persons were constrained by social structures, including severe poverty, and how they sought to resist and ridicule these constraints or to otherwise analyze their world. Women’s personal-experience narratives often give vent to grief, loss, and anger at injustice against women. For women experiencing violence and social inequality, research based on personal narratives may serve to bear witness to injustice and be part of a political process of empowerment. Eleanor Wachs’ work on the narratives of crime victims and Susan Kalcik’s

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article, ‘‘‘. . . like Ann’s gynecologist or the time I was almost raped’: Personal Narratives in Women’s Rap Groups’’ are significant contributions to the study of the personal-experience narrative as a genre of folklore. Elaine Lawless, in her book on the narratives of victims of domestic violence, argues that women’s personal-experience stories are often acts of bravery, and that their interpretations of their own experiences in such narratives are acts both of resistance and empowerment. When women’s personal-experience narratives are shared in a social context, individual experiences may come to represent a group’s shared experience, and in this way it gains value. This process occurs in spaces where women’s voices are dominant (that is, no longer silenced) and where they are free to analyze their social situation. As personal stories begin to shape a group narrative, individual stories gain power. The personal becomes political. The new group narrative becomes a new framework for thought and a blueprint for action. See also: Activism; Consciousness Raising; Crime-Victim Stories; Folk Group; Folklore of Subversion; Politics; Rape; Storytelling; Text; Violence. References: Dolby Stahl, Sandra. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989; Kalcik, Susan. ‘‘‘. . . like Ann’s gynecologist or the time I was almost raped’: Personal Narratives in Women’s Rap Groups.’’ Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975): 3–11; Lawless, Elaine J. Women Escaping Violence: Empowerment through Narrative. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001; Thompson, Stith, John Holmes McDowell, Inta Gale Carpenter, Donald Braid, and Erika Peterson-Veatch, eds. A Folklorist’s Progress: Reflections of a Scholar’s Life. Special Publications of the Folklore Institute, No. 5. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996; Wachs, Eleanor. Crime-Victim Stories New York City’s Urban Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988; Wadley, Susan Snow. Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur, 1925–1984. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Jessica Senehi and David Samper Photocopylore Photocopylore, also known as Xeroxlore, refers to traditional items reproduced by xerographic means. The ubiquitous photocopier replaced older technologies used for making paper copies, such as the mimeograph and carbon paper, and has itself been largely replaced by computers. Photocopylore often subverted the primary intentions of people in ostensible control of high-level technologies and thus reflected the customary practices of those who used them rather than the intentions of the institutions that owned or controlled them. Although copying technology often served apparently innocuous ends, such as the copying of family recipes and chain letters, it often parodied the values of the workplace through fake memos and the values of the dominant culture more generally through obscene cartoons and other resistant literature. Greater surveillance of all uses of work equipment for personal ends has recently become a watchword of corporate culture. Just as technology is an extension of human faculties, photocopylore also is an extension of oral tradition and of making objects of material culture, novelty items in particular. The first photocopylore was largely textual, as were earlier, more arduously produced typed and mimeographed items.

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In time, photocopylore became increasingly pictorial because of the ease of reproducing images. As access to the technology became more widespread and less costly, its creative use for commenting on and reflecting social concerns became more common. Photocopylore is an international phenomenon, but not all items are equally widespread. They may be adapted to different cultural contexts, but many are of interest primarily to specific groups, such as employees of a particular corporation, speakers of a particular language, and citizens of a particular country. Early photocopylore was largely male-centered, but an increasing percentage came to reflect a female perspective, such as ‘‘Twenty-five reasons why cucumbers are better than men,’’ a rebuttal to the earlier item, ‘‘Twenty-five reasons why beer is better than women.’’ Because of its heavy reliance on pictorial representation, its transgressive practices, whether employed by men or by women, are often considered obscene if not pornographic. Some photocopylore may be sexist, homophobic, and/or racist, but much of it celebrates the cultures of the marginalized. A popular example often seen around college and university campuses purports to explain the academy’s institutional hierarchy from teaching assistants to professors to deans to presidents—to the secretary at the top: ‘‘She IS God.’’ Much photocopylore remains unpublished, including two unexpurgated studies compiled in the 1970s by Cathy Makin Orr [Preston] and Michael James Preston. Published works available in English include those produced by Alan Dundes and Carl R. Pagter: Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded (1978); When You’re Up to Your Ass in Alligators . . . (1987); Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing (1991); Sometimes the Dragon Wins (1996); Why Don’t Sheep Shrink When It Rains? (2000); and Paul Smith’s The Complete Book of Office MisPractice (1984) and Reproduction Is Fun (1986). See also: Folk Group; Folklore of Subversion; Humor; Occupational Folklore; Race; Sexism; Text. References: Bell, Louis Michael, Cathy Makin Orr [Preston], and Michael James Preston. Urban Folklore from Colorado: Photocopy Cartoons. Research Monographs, LD000079. Ann Arbor: Xerox University Microfilms, 1976; Orr [Preston], Cathy Makin, and Michael James Preston. Urban Folklore from Colorado: Typescript Broadsides. Research Monographs, LD000069. Ann Arbor: Xerox University Microfilms, 1976; Preston, Michael J. ‘‘Xerox-Lore.’’ Keystone Folklore XIX (1974): 11–26; ———. ‘‘In Addition to Xeroxlore: Related Subversive Traditions.’’ The Other Print Tradition: Essays on Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Related Ephemera, eds. Cathy Lynn Preston and Michael J. Preston, 223–265. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1995; Roemer, Danielle M. ‘‘Photocopy Lore and the Naturalization of the Corporate Body.’’ Journal of American Folklore 107 (1994): 121–138; Smith, Paul. ‘‘Models from the Past: Proto-Photocopy-Lore.’’ In The Other Print Tradition: Essays on Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Related Ephemera, eds. Cathy Lynn Preston and Michael J. Preston, 183–222. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1995.

Michael J. Preston Piecework The term ‘‘piecework’’ is commonly associated with textile production and typically refers to handwork. It also relates to a commercial practice in

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the textile industry in which stitchers are paid by the finished piece. The majority of textile workers, artisans, and domestic stitchers are women, thus making piecework a rich topic for the investigation of women’s folklore. Analyses of communal activities such as quiltmaking are integral to performance-centered folkloristics with its foci of process and context, as well as to more classical folklore scholarship encompassing creative events and their products—storytelling, jokes, stitching methods, casual instructions, and demonstrations—making needlework important for the study of material culture as well. As a specific needlework category, piecework refers to multiple fragments assembled together in order to create quilts, appliques, San Blas molas, African kente cloth, etc. Styles vary from pieced designs of complex, often radially symmetric patterns and overall motifs on fabric backgrounds to vertically aligned African American strip quilts. Cloth can be pieced together in a variety of ways using different methods of joining, such as crochet and lace inserts, or patchwork techniques including applique and reverse applique. Applique consists of cut-and-shaped pieces attached to the upper surface of another fabric; reverse applique cuts through superimposed layers of cloth to reconstruct the design from underneath. The industrial connotation of piecework evokes a complex history of exploitation of female garment workers, often employed under horrendous conditions, working long hours in sweatshops, and receiving inadequate pay for labor-intensive work. Women’s folklore is studded with ballads extolling these women, commemorating tragedies such as New York City’s 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. Numerous stories gathered from interviews with immigrant women describe how power, gender, ethnicity, and class converge in the industrial context; many are personal-experience narrative accounts of inequity and fortitude told by women who began their lives in North America working in the textile industry. Piecework also applies to employment through the ‘‘putting-out’’ system, predicated on a division of labor that corresponds to various stages in textile fabrication. This structure is typical of cottage industries around the world, wherein entrepreneurial marketing agents coordinate needleworkers who do piecework in their homes. Many of these enterprises involve cultural revivals of traditional arts as part of local economic redevelopment projects. Folklorists are interested in the dynamic sociocultural aspects of these revitalization movements and in the role of women’s creativity as tradition-bearers relative to negotiating the commercial agendas and artistic potential of such projects. In the 1980s in Oaxaca, Mexico, a putting-out system to produce traditional embroideries at low cost for tourists resulted in the exploitation of isolated female villagers who had no other alternatives for employment. However, in Turkey, for example, Muslim women, who were not permitted to work outside their homes for religious reasons, could still earn an income through piecework systems that preserved both their privacy and customary manufacturing practices. See also: Folk Art; Needlework; Material Culture; Quiltmaking; Sewing; Women’s Work. References: Dewhurst, C. Kurt, and Marsha MacDowell. To Honor and Comfort: Native Quilting Traditions. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1997; Ice, Joyce.

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‘‘Women’s Aesthetics and the Quilting Process.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Ellis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 166–177. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1933; Waterbury, Ronald. ‘‘Embroidery for Tourists: A Contemporary Putting-Out System in Oaxaca, Mexico.’’ In Cloth and Human Experience, eds. Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, 246–71. Washington D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Suzanne P. MacAulay Politics Politics, defined as the art and science of guiding and influencing governmental policy, is an activity of the public sphere, ideally conducted to provide for the common welfare (people’s basic material needs) and to afford protection from foreign and domestic threats (local and national security). It has long been axiomatic that women’s folklore emerges from the private sphere. Yet women sometimes use their expressive traditions to exert influence on public policies and events, thereby asserting the values of the home in the marketplace and in public discourse. Women’s political action therefore blurs the boundary between the personal and the political and demonstrates the role of women in shaping their local, national, and global societies. Politics also refers to the getting and using of power not only in governmental spheres but throughout society. Women’s expressive cultures provide resources with which they can comment on power relations and invert or subvert them on occasion or even on a daily basis. Like men, women are socially positioned by their racial, ethnic, class, regional, and religious identities as well as by gender. But women are identified primarily with their sexuality while their political power is overlooked. Much of their political action in the home, workplace, and larger society is therefore obscured, not only because it may take place out of the public eye, but because women’s political struggles are themselves marginalized. Historically, women’s struggles for gender equality have been intertwined with— and often set aside in favor of—class struggle and fights for racial, ethnic, and religious equality. The relationship between women’s folklore and politics can be drawn in several ways. First, the portrayal of women in folk and popular cultures both reflects and reproduces women’s traditional exclusion from politics. However, in their own expressive cultures and practices, women resist these stereotypes. Second, women have used their expressive culture and networks in collaboration to achieve political goals, including the expansion of human and civil rights, peace, resistance in the face of political violence, and in the fight against a variety of forms of economic injustice. Much of women’s public and political experience has largely gone unrecognized as such. Third, women’s folk expressions—customary, oral, and material—in changing societies may or may not be recognized as political action. The depiction of women in European folk and popular culture articulates mainstream U.S. and Canadian social ideas, often stereotypical, about women and politics. The eighty-six folktales retold by Jacob and Wilhelm € Grimm in their 1812 collection, Kinder- und Hausmarchen (Children’s

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and Household Tales), while not explicitly political, are notable for their frequent portrayals of women as voiceless, powerless, punished, and often murdered. Contemporary feminists, however, may perform these stories in public, seeking to reinterpret them in ways that are personally meaningful and empowering for women. The traditional tales that women themselves (and occasionally men) tell, however, sometimes portray women’s wisdom as critical to the success of their families and communities. For example, a folktale from northwest India, originally told by a village carpenter to anthropologists William and Charlotte Wiser in the 1920s (Wadley: 38–40), describes a king and queen conversing in their carriage. As they pass a peasant, the king asks his wife, ‘‘What is the difference between that peasant and myself?’’ In response, the queen suggests that she trade places with the peasant’s wife. Soon, because of the queen’s hard work, thrift, and ingenuity, the peasant becomes king; and due to the laziness and waste of the peasant’s wife, the king is reduced to a peasant. In North America, the message of the tale is formulated as ‘‘Behind every great man, there is a great woman.’’ Variants of this tale have been told in the United States to lend credibility to the wives of male politicians. In one version from the 1990s, President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton stop at a gas station. Clinton asks his wife, ‘‘What is the difference between the gas station attendant and me?’’ She replies that she used to date him—but married Bill Clinton instead. Former Manitoba Premier Gary Filmon told a similar story at an awards dinner in 2005 in recognition of the contributions of his wife, Janice Filmon, known for her volunteer work in the community. The famous tale may be interpreted as legitimizing both the gendered division of labor and certain class-based stereotypes about femininity, including the presumption of upper-class ambition and lower-class sloth. Women can and have leveraged stereotypical ideas to gain political voice and power. For example, because of society’s idealization of motherhood— as a concept, if not as women’s reality—female politicians and activists may position themselves strategically, using their status as mothers as a political tool. Because women are more likely to be perceived as nurturers, they are sometimes able to exert moral pressure on the state without facing accusations of being soft, cowardly, or disloyal. Any positive association with maternal imagery might prove effective, depending on the context. The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (women’s suffrage) passed Congress by the single surprise vote of twenty-four-year-old Harry Burn, who had in his pocket a note from his mother telling him to vote for the bill. Nobel Peace Prize winner Emily Green Balch, first Secretary General of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Geneva, never bore children, yet she worked strenuously for the reform of U.S. child labor laws. More recently, when her son Casey was killed in the U.S.-Iraq War in 2004, Cindy Sheehan camped outside President George W. Bush’s home in Texas in hope of asking him, ‘‘For what noble cause did my son die?’’ His refusal to speak with her combined with her persistence in demanding a response is marked by many as the birth of the first activist anti-war movement of the twenty-first century in the United States.

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However, race and gender are interlocking social phenomena. In 1955, when Rosa Parks famously refused to yield her seat as instructed by a male White bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, the genteel customary southern norms for race trumped those of gender, and she was arrested. On the other hand, when Shirley Chisholm, the first African American to run for the presidency, visited her ideological enemy, rhetorically White supremacist George Wallace, in his hospital room after he was shot in 1972, womanly compassion trumped race hatred in the public imagination. She came closer to winning her party’s nomination that year than any woman up to that time in American history. In the face of the ‘‘disappearance’’ (police kidnap/murder) of between 11,000 and 30,000 dissidents during Argentina’s Dirty War (1976–1984), women whose children, grandchildren, sons, husbands, and other family members had been disappeared began to walk together, dressed in black, on Thursdays in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. The weekly appearance of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) gave expression to the people’s resistance to political oppression and violence. While some of the founding members were themselves disappeared, the larger group continues to walk in the plaza. After agitating for justice in this way for nearly thirty years, in July 2007, they gathered again to hear the testimony of the first person charged with torture and murder during the Dirty War. Women also drew on their expressive traditions to respond to the disappearance of friends and loved ones during Augusto Pinochet’s regime (1973–1990) in Chile. The women danced in public—alone—to render visible the absence of their husbands. Chilean women activists also created appliqued textiles (arpilleras) depicting their dance, losses, and lives; their needlework became a political tool for raising money to live on and to heighten consciousness on a global scale about disappeared people throughout the world. However, because mothers are associated with regenerating their nations, women’s bodies also become the terrain of political identity, political violence, and political discourse. For example, Malintzin Tenepal, a onceenslaved Aztec princess known to the Spanish as Dona Mari~ na and to Mexicans as La Malinche, was given to Hernan Cortes, served as his translator and mistress, and later bore him a son, becoming the mother of the first mestizo (person of Native and Spanish descent). Today she is remembered as a powerful symbol of conquest through rape, both as a benefactress without whom the horrors of conquest would have been even more unbearable and as a collaborator who betrayed her own people. Chicana feminists have taken up her image as ‘‘a symbol of the socioeconomic and educational limitations of contemporary life’’ in the United States (Castro: 150). More recently, images of women in Afghanistan, where gender segregation and ‘‘honor killings’’ of women by their male relatives are on the rise, were used by the U.S. government as part of the rationale for its current ‘‘war on terror.’’ Attention to their plight, however, has virtually disappeared from the rhetoric of that war. Joan Smith (1995) argues that powerful forces of political and economic conflict construct the nature of the household; the household, in turn,

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sustains the world political-economic system. Cultural ideologies are reproduced every day through participation in social systems, belief systems, institutions, languages, and myriad daily practices. Smith argues that the local community, the family, and the household are also sites where identity and social relations may be altered. Often, women draw on their folk traditions and the relative inscrutability of the homeplace to articulate an alternative politics. Further breaking with the conventional political paradigm, women often mobilize for political action collaboratively through networks. In South Africa during the apartheid of the 1960s and 1970s, Xhosa oral historians and storytellers performed their resistance in the township courtyards. Typically male, they motivated people in the struggle against their oppressors. When South Africa’s National Party forcibly removed all of the men from their communities to migrant barracks, their storytelling ended. However, South African storytelling is largely associated with home and hearth, so women collectively took up the role of telling stories that criticized the government and encouraged resistance. U.S. anti-nuclear activist Justine Merritt organized a protest in Washington, DC, in 1982 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. She and 20,000 others wrapped a ribbon around the Pentagon, the building that houses the U.S. Department of Defense. Drawing on their skills in the women’s arts of needlepoint, quilting, knitting, batik, and applique, they created a ribbon fifteen miles long with which to make their feelings visible and their power known. In Berkshire, England, women worked collaboratively from 1981 to 2000 at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp to protest the stockpiling and deployment of nuclear weapons. In their ‘‘Embrace the Base’’ protest of 1982, 30,000 women joined hands to encircle the nine-mile perimeter of the Greenham Common Air Force Base to mark the third anniversary of NATO’s decision to station cruise missiles in Europe. Committed to non-violence, the women camped, sang, danced, told stories, blocked convoys, and disrupted training activities, finally forcing the removal of cruise missiles from Greenham Common. The Greenham Commons Women’s Peace Camp Songbook includes ‘‘Carry Greenham Home’’ by American folksinger Peggy Seeger, based on the Scots melody, ‘‘Mari’s Wedding’’: ‘‘Velvet fist in iron glove, bring the message home’’ (Period Pieces, Tradition [Ryko] TCD 1078.) At the Pentagon and at Greenham Common, women created performance spaces in which to articulate their political concerns, thereby undermining oppressive stereotypes about women’s power and purported powerlessness. Manitoba, Canada, has a long history of women’s political organizing. Women from different ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds in Winnipeg created a Housewives’ Consumers Association to lobby the federal government to control food prices after World War II and during the Cold War. Those involved in the Association organized and publicized themselves as concerned homemakers and mothers worried about rising food prices. In response to their protest rallies, the Liberal Party government at the time accused the Association of being a Communist organization, thereby discrediting them in the eyes of the public. The housewife represented

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security and safety in the home; Communism was viewed as dangerous, violent, and threatening to the home and the nuclear family. Such setbacks, however, did not disturb the actions of the Association. In March 1947, twelve delegates from each western Canadian province traveled to Ottawa to meet with the finance minister of Canada regarding his economic policy. Their visit was not successful in swaying him, but it generated greater awareness about governmental policy in the general population. In 1901 in New York City, Mary Harriman, a young, upper-class socialite who wanted to use her influence to address complex social problems, mobilized eighty women to create the Junior League for the Promotion of Settlement Movements to improve child health, nutrition, and literacy among immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Junior League women are typically White women married to professional men who are leaders in their communities. Drawing on their privileged social networks, they raise millions of dollars for community projects. In Winnipeg, the Junior League’s efforts were critical in establishing the Winnipeg United Way, Osborne House (a women’s domestic abuse shelter), the Manitoba Arts Council, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, Manitoba Theatre for Young People, and Volunteer Manitoba. More than 100 years after its founding, upper-class women still impact their communities through the International Junior League; however, as the dissolution of the Winnipeg chapter in 2007 has made painfully clear, so many women are now absorbed with the demands of career and family that there may not be a next generation of privileged women to take up its charter. That women have used their cultural traditions to assert themselves in the public arena speaks to women’s agency and power. On the other hand, it is because of women’s exclusion from the public sphere and because of oppressive power relations at home that women have been restricted to muted and ambiguous forms of expression in order to survive but have gained relatively little real control in their relationships and societies. As a result, we celebrate women’s use of folk knowledge, folk culture, and collaboration, but simultaneously regret their lack of access to mainstream political strategies. Women’s political movements, however constrained, demonstrate women’s political experience and practice, making their visions more visible— and potentially more effective—than mainstream politicking. Women’s informal political traditions have particular qualities that make them especially valuable for promoting the common welfare of the people. Collective and collaborative communication and work styles, for example, build strong emotional community bonds, thereby including more points of view and incorporating more peoples’ talents than do mainstream politics. Songmaking and storytelling are further means by which women organize and create community. And their rituals and visual arts act dramatically to make the unseen seen and the undeniable real. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, unmediated by language, conveys the enormity of human loss resulting from the spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (SIDA in Mexico) throughout North America. The women’s art of creative, collective quilting was adopted in 1987 by a small group of HIV

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(Human Immunodeficiency Virus)-positive individuals. With each panel of the quilt accompanied by a story and photograph of a loved and remembered victim, the AIDS Quilt is used to advocate for gay and lesbian civil rights and to encourage changes in health policies and education regarding HIV and AIDS. In the twenty years since its inception, the AIDS Memorial Quilt has grown to include more than 44,000 individual three-by-six-foot quilted panels; it has become not only ‘‘the largest ongoing community arts project in the world’’ (according to the NAMES Project Foundation), but an enduring, emotionally healing, communal performance of memory and a call to social justice activism. Linda Pershing points out that patchwork is a metaphor for political processes that build community and engender peace. Quilting brings together diverse and devalued scraps to make something beautiful that comforts and protects, and is thus a metaphor for the value of inclusion and collaboration toward a common goal. Cooking comforts, nurtures, and sustains. Needlework mends the worn and torn. Even dancing—perhaps the most public form of women’s folk culture—can serve as a metaphor for moving gracefully and joyfully through life, in synergy with others. The processes whereby women have worked together to make sense of their situations and collaborate to problem-solve and meet their common and individual needs, even when survival is at stake, can serve as models of deep democracy. Practices from women’s folklore can be used in current times to create public and semipublic spaces wherein both women and men can collaborate in defining their social history, articulating current needs and experiences, and envisioning the future. See also: Activism; Class; Folk Dance; Folk Music and Folksong; Folktale; Gender; Grandmother; Mothers’ Folklore; Needlework; Quiltmaking; Rape; Storytelling; Violence. References: Agosin, Marjorie. Scraps of Life: Chilean Arpilleras. Trans. Cola Franzen. Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press, 1993; The AIDS Memorial Quilt—The NAMES Project Foundation. n.d. http://www.aidsquilt.org/about.htm (accessed July 12, 2007); Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993; Arditti, R. ‘‘The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Struggle against Impunity in Argentina.’’ Meridians, vol. 3, no. 1 (2002): 19–41; Arneil, Barbara. Politics and Feminism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999; Association of Junior League International. n.d. http://www.ajli. org (accessed July 16, 2007); Bergoffen, Debra. ‘‘Engaging Nietzsche’s Women: Ofelia Schutte and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.’’ Hypatia, vol. 19, no. 3 (2004): 157–168; Bottigheimer, Ruth. Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the The Tales. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987; Canstro, Rafaela G. Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals and Religious Practices of Mexican-Americans. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; Coughran, Neema. ‘‘Fasts, Feasts, and the Slovenly Women: Strategies among North Indian Potter Women.’’ Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 57, no. 12 (1999): 257–274; Foucault, Michael. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans, A. M. Sheridan Smith. Reprint edition. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993 [1972]; Fuchs, Elinor. ‘‘The Performance of Mourning.’’ American Theatre, vol. 9, no. 9 (1993): 14–18; Guard, Julie. ‘‘Chapter 5: Women Worth Watching: Radical Housewives in Cold War Canada.’’ In Whose National Security?: Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, eds. G. Kinsman, D. Buse, and M. Steedman, 73–88. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000; Hawkins, Peter. ‘‘Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt.’’

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Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no 4 (1993): 752–780; Laware, M. ‘‘Circling the Missiles and Staining Them Red: Feminist Rhetorical Invention and Strategies of Resistance at the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common.’’ National Women’s Studies Association Journal, vol. 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 18–41; Martin, Joann. ‘‘Motherhood and Power: The Production of a Women’s Culture of Politics in a Mexican Community.’’ American Ethnologist, vol. 17, no. 3 (August 1990): 470–490; Mills, Margaret A. ‘‘The Gender of the Trick: Female Tricksters and Male Narrators.’’ Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 60, no 2 (2001): 237–258; Parks, Francis McMillian. Personal communication, November 28, 1994; Pershing, Linda. ‘‘Peace Work out of Peacework: Feminist Needlework Metaphors and The Ribbon around the Pentagon.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 327–357. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Rollason, Kevin. ‘‘Legacy of Giving.’’ Winnipeg Free Press. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Saturday, June 30, 2007, 38–40; Seeger, Peggy. The Peggy Seeger Songbook: Forty Years of Songmaking. New York, London, and Sydney: Oak Publications, 1998; Stone, Kay. ‘‘Difficult Women in Folktales: Two Women, Two Stories.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, 250–253. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997; Wadley, Susan Snow. Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur, 1925–1984. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Jessica Senehi and Marcie G. Hawranik Popular Culture Popular culture is the term for artistic expressions of the people, at least half of whom are women. Its academic definition overlaps substantially with that of folklore as both involve the broad study of creative expression in context. Sometimes women’s popular culture subverts the status quo; sometimes it reflects women’s lives, including prejudices they face. Whether a popular form celebrates women, demeans them, or interpretably or alternatively does both, understanding it teaches us much about women’s culture and folklore generally. Some scholars argue that popular culture is a post-industrial phenomenon beginning late in the nineteenth century, and link it exclusively to mass media phenomena. Others, like Emmanuel Ladurie, Natalie Z. Davis, and Peter Burke, trace it farther back, considering it the ‘‘expressive materials of any group, large or small, pre-industrial or post-industrial.’’ Most folklorists and feminists use the phrase in this second sense of the aesthetics and pastimes of everyday life: ‘‘popular’’ means ‘‘of the people.’’ Popular culture thus usually connotes creative expressions of ordinary people as opposed to those of a society’s elite or educated classes (typically literature, visual art, and music). The term ‘‘culture’’ has many layers of meaning. Today, it is most often understood, following Raymond Williams, as those processes of learned behavior and creative expression that can be interpreted at some level as symbolic. Popular culture encompasses a wide variety of genres: television programs, films, popular (pulp) fiction, graphic novels, comics, music, fashion, entertainments including circuses, gambling, festivals, beauty pageants, rodeos, games, parks, food, sports, toys, religions, fads, celebrity icons, bumper stickers, and graffiti. This is a suggestive rather than a comprehensive list. What often

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separates the field of Popular Culture Studies from that of Cultural Studies is the extent to which the context (worldviews, attitudes, thoughts, opinions, and lifestyles) of art makers and audiences are taken into consideration in studying or evaluating it. Like folklorists, scholars of popular culture consider interactions between the art itself (the lore or the culture) and the people who make and/or use the art (the population, populace, or folk). Its detractors consider popular culture to be of poorer quality or less worthy of academic study than ‘‘high art’’ because it lacks cultivation or confirmation from elite critics of its aesthetic worth or complexity. Feminist folklorists however, recognize the political implications of this view. Patriarchal perspectives consider men and their artistic works more advanced than the arts and lives of others. Critics of this notion suggest that, too often, Euro North Americans, whose popular culture is disseminated on a grand scale throughout the world, assume the privilege and entitlement of White men under patriarchy; Euro North Americans anticipate and readily celebrate their own cultural productions much more quickly and easily than they do art made by people of Color, by persons of non-European-origin cultures, and by women. Feminist folklorists advocate working to understand popular culture in its own terms, articulating presumptions about culture, and recognizing how privilege may influence aesthetic interpretation. They note that, like all human expressions, popular culture reflects a wide range of talent, depth, and complexity. Just as folklore studies have recognized and admired the skills and aesthetics of the traditional arts—Turkish rugs, Pueblo pottery, Irish folktales—so popular culture scholars identify and respect the aesthetics of popular culture forms—free-style rap, comic book art, television programs, local food contests, celebrity fandom, and science fiction. They assert that all such genres have endless potential and contain profoundly rich, symbolic art. While some examples of pop culture may be shallow or short-lived, others are likely to perplex, challenge, delight, stimulate, horrify, pacify, anger, soothe, humor, delight, and provoke audiences and critics alike for centuries to come. Women’s connections to popular culture both enhance and complicate conceptions and discussions of its forms and aesthetics. A society’s popular culture often reflects the lives of its disenfranchised members by including non-canonical expressions (those outside the body of generally acclaimed and approved great works of art). Popular culture, then, is an ideal site for locating sympathies and connections to women and Women’s Studies, since women are often disenfranchised and rarely canonized. But since popular culture reflects the standards, beliefs, and practices of an entire society, discrimination against and negative attitudes about women and girls surface in it as often as in elite-origin cultural forms. Of course, popular culture, like any art form, can be both mainstream and subversive at the same time— which is part of what makes it so interesting. Women, like any underclass, have a better chance of maintaining control over their own artistic expressions in spontaneous and grassroots situations than they do in forms with high profiles and/or profit potentials. Popular forms made by or for women however, remain controversial even in academic

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popular culture studies; they are sometimes mocked, sometimes elevated. For example, early popular culture theorist J€ urgen Habermas (1962) suggested that pulp fiction in general, and romance novels for women in particular, were the quintessence of false consciousness, alienated thinking, and commodity capitalism. That women are interested in reading such rubbish only showed how deluded they are, claimed Habermas. In contrast, feminist Janice Radway looks not only at the romance novel industry and its women-focused marketing practices, but also the ways in which women read resistantly to find escape from their lives, and for practice in imagining less oppressive possibilities for themselves. Some genres of popular culture, like the romance novel, dominated by and focused on women, may actually subscribe to the dominant cultural philosophy, stereotyping women as dependent on men for fulfillment. Despite the fact that romance novels are devoted, at least on one level, to the very outcomes patriarchy expects (seeing women happily married and ready to produce children), these works are generally belittled and despised, especially by powerful men. They, and many feminists as well, may nonetheless mock those women who find in literary romances ways to take charge, artistically explore, and possibly even enjoy the sensual possibilities of their historically assigned functions. Many romance readers and writers, however, subvert the genre with readings that move them beyond the novel’s assigned roles. Religion provides another way through which women take control of their lives and participate in creatively expressive communities. Women who find the dogma and rituals of their religious organizations too oppressive and/or too male-centered may found popular religious groups. Such groups are sometimes still connected to the dominant father institution but allow for more fulfilling creative outlets and communal experiences for women. Women’s groups may also form subcultures within their churches, mosques, temples, or synagogues. There are also as many new religions and spiritual communities sprouting up now in North America as have arisen ever in its history (see for example Sarah Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community, 2001; Elaine Lawless, Holy Women, Wholly Women: Sharing Ministries Through Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography, 1993; and Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in American Today, 1979). Some of these are women-centered, like Wicca and Neo-Paganism, wherein women are venerated figures, functionaries, and officials, and play significant roles as adherents. But even in the most traditional worship communities, women may come together to form their own symbolically communicative groups. In Roman Catholicism, for example, women are disallowed from becoming priests, and many feel frustrated at being locked out of such opportunities to fully express their most profound spiritual experiences. Yet, since the earliest days of Christianity, women have founded spiritual societies that allowed them expressive outlets. Although many female medieval mystics had little power or prestige in their own day, they nonetheless wrote music and poetry that is now enjoying popular renewal. Eleventh-century Hildegard of

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Bingen, for example, though limited in education, headed a convent, composed music, and wrote treatises on natural history and visionary works of religious literature. Her accomplishments reflect a continuing tradition of ways in which women have enlisted and enjoyed popular expressive modes, regardless of social status. Recently, all-women musical groups such as Sequoia and Anonymous 4 have produced mass-marketed compact discs that interpret Hildegard’s music using a pop aesthetic that appeals to contemporary tastes. Music such as Hildegard’s, now 900 years old, continues to provide inspiration to some groups of women religious who play it at gatherings; following her example, they also devise and lead their own creative versions of liturgical celebrations. While the official culture of the Catholic Church maintains male-centered control over the Sacrament of the Mass, dictating how people may worship and express themselves within it, at the more informal level of individual churches women can build sub-cultures of their own, rich in symbolism, history, and significance. Some particularly active groups in the Unitarian and Episcopal traditions, for example, have succeeded in changing church policies to allow for the ordination of female and queer priests and ministers, in changing liturgical language to less sexist forms, and in recovering submerged and/or invisible women from earlier texts and interpretations. In Judaism, there have been women rabbis and cantors in Reform and Conservative Judaism since the last quarter of the twentieth century, the consequence of women’s movement and a reinvention and/or recovery of Shechinah (the feminine side of God), the matriarchs (Sarah, Rachel, Rebekah, and Leah), and the role of women in the liturgy. In many cases, women involved in popular religious communities produce tangible products that reflect the processes of their cultures, for example, they may trace the significance of women in the Bible, record music, create or decorate sacred spaces, prepare elaborate meals, or design and sew special clothing. The U.S. television industry significantly intersects with women’s issues in the domain of popular culture, an arena in which it holds undisputed global sway. Men overwhelmingly dominate the television industry as executives, producers, directors, writers, editors, and staff who determine the types and content of the programs they broadcast. For decades, girls and women on television have been stereotyped according to male images, expectations, and desires, stereotypes that, in general, reflect socioeconomic patterns. In an economy dependant upon continuous growth, women are expected to ensure that their children will become (re)producers and consumers. Within North America’s systems of corporate capitalism, the expansion of consumption thus remains women’s primary life-goal, resulting in images of women on television that are overwhelmingly either sexualized or domesticated. Classical television moms—like June Cleaver of Leave It To Beaver, at home all day in her wide-skirted dress, endlessly cooking, cleaning house, and seeing to the children’s every need—are no longer the only option portrayed, though. Some critics argue that newer, less domesticated images of female sexuality in television roles are evidence that women are no longer stereotyped as reproducers and consumers; instead they are allowed a wide range of social roles and responsibilities.

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Others, however, insist that today’s hypersexualization of women playing the roles of educators, lawyers, doctors, police, politicians, and so on is equally demeaning. Today’s television images still portray women as almost exclusively White, middle class, and heterosexual. Even when lesbians and women of Color do appear in prime time, it is generally to serve as foils, victims, deviants, or objects of male desire, not as role models in their own right. And despite the widely acknowledged commercial success of the series Rosanne, few mainstream television programs have depicted workingclass women as primary characters since its nine-year run ended in 1997. Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women suggests that television programs and films vilify truly independent women—making them predatory human beings like Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction (1987) or very unhappy ones like the single women on the series thirtysomething (1987–1991). Numerous ‘‘reality shows’’ like The Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire, Married by America, Race to the Altar, and others emphasize women as desperate to get married—to anyone who seems prosperous and handsome—much in the mold of folktales originating hundreds of years ago. And independent, married women are no less ‘‘desperate’’ as seen in the first season of Desperate Housewives (2004–2005). In general, women in television still break very few molds, and even those who win out over hostile forces must face them again and again on a weekly basis. Most television programming that features women as developed characters still ultimately portrays them as wives and mothers, as striving to become wives and mothers, or as otherwise seeking to attach themselves to men. Exceptional television women like Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards (1970–1977), The Bionic Woman (1976–1978), Murphy Brown (1988– 1998), and more recently, female action heroes like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), La Femme Nikita (1997–2001), and New Zealand’s Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), represent the possibility of greater female independence compared with most women on television. But too often, even they do not stray too far from gender conventions. Diahann Carroll played Julia Baker, a widowed single mother and nurse in Julia (1968– 1971), a situation comedy that featured the first African American woman in a leading role; this early pro-woman show was later criticized for being apolitical regarding race. At about the same time, Mary Richards, played by Mary Tyler Moore, searches throughout her series for the perfect man and relies extensively upon her male boss and colleagues. More recently, Sex and the City (1998–2004) is applauded for showing single women as strong, honest, independent, and happy, albeit hypersexualized. But that series features many episodes in which the women lament their inability to find the right (male) partner, and ends with each attaching herself to a man in a long-term relationship (either married and starting a family or on the road to marriage and security). Female superheroes on television, like Jamie Summers (The Bionic Woman) and its more contemporary women warriors (Sydney in Alias, Xena, Nikita, and Buffy), remain closely bound to men, who guide them, may determine their fates, help them in battles, or even fight against them.

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But one can argue that men are also tied to these superheroic women, who do the same for them. All of these characters get into intensely violent physical and emotional battles, not only with their enemies, but also with their love partners, family, and friends. They live in constant torment, face monsters, demons, and/or terrorists, all the while lamenting their hellish fates. While many feminists view Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a successfully realized icon of liberal feminism’s goals concerning ‘‘the joy of female power: getting it, using it, sharing it’’ (Whedon 2004), these television dramas can also function as projections of hostility toward strong and independent women. North American feminists have long realized the subversive power of popular culture. When the dominant society disenfranchises or oppresses us, we will find ways to express ourselves in informal popular culture. In 1989, for example, the Guerilla Girls plastered New York City with broadsides noting that the Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed a large number of female nudes but only a tiny percentage of works by female artists; was female nudity a requirement for admission? Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues uses humor, wit, and some fieldwork-based performance techniques to bring new perspectives on women’s lives to theaters and even to television’s Home Box Office (HBO 2002). And the National Women’s Music Festival and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival offer venues for women’s music that may not find mainstream appeal. Like popular culture itself, many women’s groups, writers, and activities find themselves labeled and treated as second-rate. Such marginalization can, however, confer on some women and girls a level of autonomy that allows them free, unfettered creative expression; since their work and practice is dismissed as unserious, they can do what they want. Some of us turn to quilting or gardening, as Alice Walker’s foremothers did. Others get together for coffee klatches, potlucks, and book clubs that strengthen individual and community ties. We speculate about gender and society in popular fiction, as do science fiction writers Joanna Russ, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Sherri S. Tepper, to name only a few. And many of us commit political acts advocating for peace and justice, like making bumper stickers or wrapping a ribbon around the Pentagon. Culture produced by and for women, however popular with the male population, cannot, ultimately, be suppressed. See also: Activism; Aesthetics; Feminisms; Festival; Film; Folk Art; Folk Music and Folksong; Folklife; Folklore About Women; Girls’ Games; Graffiti; ~ Lilith Fair; Mass Media; Piecework; Politics; Quinceanera; Race; Women Religious; Women Warriors; Women’s Folklore; Women’s Friendship Groups; Women’s Music Festivals. References: Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess Worshippers, and Other Pagans in American Today. New York: Penguin/Arkana, 1979; Anonymous 4. CD. The Origin of Fire: Music and Visions of Hildegard von Bingen. Arles, France: Harmonia Mundi (Catalog # HMU 907327). Distributed in North America by Harmonia Mundi USA, Burbank, CA, 2005; Bowling Green State University Department of Popular Culture, Bowling Green, OH. http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/popc/ page16730.html; Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, New York: Harper & Row, 1978; Buszek, Maria Elena. Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular

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Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006; Davis, Natalie Z. Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977; Diamant, Anita. The Red Tent. New York: St. Martins/Picador, 1997; Ensler, Eve. The Vagina Monologues. Home Box Office Television, 2002; Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Crown Publishers, 1991; Gans. Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1974; Guerrilla Girls. Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin, 1998; Habermas, J€ urgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Reprint edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991 [1962]; Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. Carnival in Romans. George Braziller, 1979; Lawless, Elaine. J. Holy Women, Wholly Women: Sharing Ministries Through Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press and the Publications of the American Folklore Society, New Series, 1993; Nye, Russell. Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America. New York: Dial Press, 1970; Orenstein, Catherine. ‘‘Fairy Tales and a Dose of Reality.’’ New York Times, March 3, 2003. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/ 03/03/opinion/03OREN.html; Pershing, Linda, and Margaret R. Yocom. ‘‘The Yellow Ribboning of the USA: Contested Meanings in the Construction of a Political Symbol.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 55, no. 1 (1996): 41–85; Pike, Sarah M. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture. Reprint edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1991 [1987]; Sawin, Patricia. Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth through Her Songs and Stories. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004; Sequentia. CD. Hildegard von Bingen: Canticles of Ecstasy. New York: RCA Music (Catalogue #77320), 1994; Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Reprint edition. New York: Harvest Books (Harcourt), 2003 [1983]; Whedon, Joss. DVD. ‘‘Behind the Scenes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’’ Special Features: Season 6; disc 3. Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Panel Discussion, June 18, 2002. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Inc., 2004; Williams, Raymond. Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press USA, 1985 [1976].

Mary Magoulick Pottery Pottery is the act and end product of shaping clay, often into vessels, and firing it so that it becomes permanently hardened. It ranges from the purely decorative to the primarily functional, is found in nearly all cultures, and is generally handbuilt or wheel thrown. The potter’s gender is largely culturedependant. American folk pottery by those of European descent was mostly made by men. In First Nation communities, however, notably in the American Southwest, pottery was commonly made by women. In contemporary North America, both men and women are potters. In Mexico and Central America, pottery is handmade by both men and women, depending upon the area. In North America, functional pottery, used for storage, serving of food and drink, and cooking, was made by hand until the twentieth century, when it shifted to factory production. Functional ware can be decorated as long as the decoration does not interfere with its use. Pottery such as china, in contrast, is intended primarily for decoration or functional use on special occasions. It has long been factory-produced, although from the eighteenth

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to the twentieth century in North America it was generally hand-decorated by women. China painting was considered a delicate craft suited to women’s dexterity, while the very physical labor of producing pottery on a wheel was considered better suited to men. China painting is practiced as a craft today; factory-produced functional ware can be painted in freestanding shops, requiring less technique. In the American Southwest, since the early twentieth century, Pueblo people have experienced a renaissance of pottery making. The still classic 1929 study by Ruth Bunzel, The Pueblo Potter, was groundbreaking not only for its sensitive discussion of form, technique, symbolism, style, and personal creativity, but also because of the feminist folklorist’s revolutionary field research method of actually learning pottery-making from Pueblo women. Maria Martinez and her husband Julian are generally credited with the pottery tradition’s reinvigoration and evolution in San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico, which spread rapidly to other pueblos and ethnic groups in the Four Corners area. Martinez made pottery (handbuilt, and shaped and smoothed with the help of paddles, stones, and other tools) that was then decorated by her husband. This pottery is now made by her descendents as well as by other families in the area, and women still tend to make it. Figurative pottery (sculpture or sculptural elements that represent people, animals, and objects) is now produced in areas of North America where it was not traditional, primarily because the Euro American aesthetic tends to favor it. Face jugs are popular in the American Southeast, while ‘‘storyteller’’ figurines, first made by Helen Cordero of Cochiti Pueblo in 1964, are produced by Native Americans. See also: Aesthetics; Fieldwork; Folk Art; Gender; Tradition; Women’s Work. References: Babcock, Barbara. ‘‘‘At Home, No Womens are Storytellers’: Ceramic Creativity and the Politics of Discourse in Cochiti Pueblo.’’ In Creativity/Anthropology, eds. Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan, and Renato Resaldo, 70–99. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993; Bunzel, Ruth. The Pueblo Potter. New York: Columbia University Press, 1929; Glassie, Henry. The Potter’s Art. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999; Marriott, Alice. Marı´a: The Potter of San Ildefonso. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948; Peterson, Susan. Pottery by American Indian Women: The Legacy of Generations. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997.

Theresa A. Vaughan Pregnancy Pregnancy is the process of human gestation; the carrying of one or more embryos or fetuses by females. Pregnancy and childbirth are universally recognized as significant events in the life cycle, that is, as rites of passage. Traditionally, a gestating woman and the child she was carrying were believed to be extremely open to, perhaps even vulnerable, to varying influences, impressions, and forces both natural and supernatural. For this reason, women practice a number of culturally patterned medical and socioreligious traditions and treatments for the varying phases of pregnancy and birth in an attempt to counteract and control these influences.

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Traditional or non-official practices and beliefs associated with pregnancy and birth are often regarded as ‘‘old wives’ tales,’’ that is, as primitive or uninformed superstitions, or as the outdated practices of midwives. In the nineteenth century, when early folklorists and antiquarians began to collect what they regarded as survivals (relics of the past, particularly traditions and beliefs common to rural areas), examples associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy were gathered as part of folk medicine traditions. Scholars documented practices believed to ensure conception, to guard against miscarriage or bring about abortion, to protect the mother and developing child during gestation, to determine the sex or personality traits of the child, and to bring about a safe delivery. These were recorded in large collections of folkways and rural practices. Anthology-style collecting continued well into the twentieth century; later examples include Marie Campbell’s Folks Do Get Born (1946) and volume six of the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore (White 1961). Such works, however, often treat examples as unique and isolated— practiced perhaps only in a specific community or time period—as if they were unrelated to a larger belief system of women’s folklore, the historical practices of midwifery, and the changing and dynamic influences of surrounding cultures and communities. Portrayals of women’s practices generally reflect an early view of folk medicine, perceived as resting ‘‘between official, scientific medicine (the top layer) and primitive medicine (the bottom layer)’’ (Hufford: 229). This definition was evolutionary in that it represented an understanding of folk medicine as ‘‘having developed from its crudest, most primitive form in its modern, Western, highly sophisticated state’’ (228). The approach entirely overlooked the dynamic interrelations between preserved or recorded items of traditional practices and beliefs associated with pregnancy and birth across community and cultural boundaries. It also failed to acknowledge their proper context within the larger history of midwifery and women’s folklore and folklife. Traditional pregnancy practices, however, were not precursors to standard pregnancy care; they have continuously existed alongside official medicine. Contemporary North American women hold traditional beliefs and engage in practices associated with pregnancy in concert with and alongside modern obstetrical care and practice. Recent definitions and understandings of folk medicine, along with more research into the history of traditional pregnancy and birth, have produced several comprehensive studies within women’s history and folklore (see especially Hufford, Hanson, Davis-Floyd, and Hoffert). Until the nineteenth century, the law did not recognize a pregnancy until the stage of ‘‘quickening’’ (the first fetal movement perceived by a pregnant woman during the fourth or fifth month of gestation). Practices believed to ensure conception were current throughout North American history and into the contemporary period. Examples include rubbing one’s stomach against a pregnant woman’s to bring about a pregnancy, and eating large quantities of eggs. According to Ozark folklore, a woman anxious to become pregnant should have her friends and relatives place their babies on her bed. Common to North America, douches—usually baking soda or

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vinegar—were believed to bring about the birth of a male or female child respectively, as were eating salty foods (male) or large amounts of red meat (female) Many pregnancy practices were and are closely intertwined with food, either through taboos or by craving fulfillment based on the understanding that ingesting certain foods can either damage a fetus or ensure the birth of a strong, healthy infant. Probably the best-known examples of dietary traditions among pregnant women, however, are the food cravings that receive so much mocking attention in contemporary popular media. Cravings are a widespread cultural symptom or indication of pregnancy. A number of beliefs associated with pregnancy cravings and food reflect the traditionally held doctrine of material impression—the belief that certain foods or the unrequited desire for certain foods will somehow mark the child with a particular birthmark, personality trait, or in some other way. Examples include the belief that a baby will be born with fewer permanent red spots (‘‘stork bites’’) or a strawberry birthmark if its mother eats too many cherries or strawberries, or that a baby will have a ‘‘chocolate mark’’ (a darker birthmark) if the mother sits on, let alone eats, a piece of chocolate. Also related to diet is the belief that an expectant mother’s food choices and eating habits—overeating, for example, or denying herself certain foods—can affect a newborn’s taste preferences. One mother who had eaten many peaches during her pregnancy believed that this was the reason her child wouldn’t eat peaches at all. In the same way, tradition decrees that a child will be marked as a result of its mother’s unfulfilled desire. For example, a child who is a glutton for a certain food is excused by the explanation that his mother must have craved that food and gone unsatiated during her pregnancy. The incidence of cravings among pregnant women is a significant part of recorded pregnancy lore, as is the associated role of pica during pregnancy. Latin for magpie—a bird noted for its habit of eating almost anything—pica is a craving for and the eating of non-food substances such as clay, chalk, starch, or ashes. There are numerous accounts of pica in folklore collections and in medical journals, as well as references to clay-eating and starch-eating in popular American novels such as Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Traditions associated with food eaten during pregnancy, like other forms of pregnancy folklore, have elements that are not culturally and ethnically specific: Mexican Americans, African Americans, people of European or Asian descent, and Native Americans have similar beliefs concerning various food items and a pregnant woman’s food intake. Each culture, however, also has unique, culturally specific elements. For example, the Zu~ ni, like a number of other ethnic groups, present dolls to pregnant women as insurance for a safe delivery. However, the Zu~ ni also plant seeds in the floor of new houses to promote reproductive fertility, a practice that is culturally specific. Extensive conversation among women and especially those who are pregnant, other traditional forms of transmission of women’s knowledge and practices, and burgeoning industries associated with pregnancy, babies, and birth all influence current beliefs and tradition. While the means of knowledge transmission about the treatment and care of pregnant women have

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changed, the prominence of traditions and beliefs about pregnancy and birth, completely separate from medical practice, has not. Women continue to offer each other advice, guidance, and condemnation at every step of a pregnancy regarding dietary practices to influence the conception of either a male or a female child; food products helpful for avoiding or curing morning sickness (ginger, salt); food taboos (seafood, coffee, cheese, etc.); activities to avoid to protect the unborn baby (lifting or reaching above the head for fear that the umbilical cord will become wrapped around the fetus’s neck); items and activities to induce labor (some involve salads, sex, or castor oil); and even foods to ensure a safe, prompt delivery (raspberry tea) and to improve milk production (fenugreek, milk thistle). See also: Abortion; Birth Chair; Childbirth and Childrearing; Doula; Folk Medicine; Home Birth; Midwifery; Miscarriage; Old Wives’ Tales; Rites of Passage; Sex Determination. References: Borst, Charlotte G. Catching Babies: The Professionalization of Childbirth, 1870–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995; Brady, Erica, ed. Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001; Davis-Floyd, Robbie. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1978; Hanson, Clare. A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750–2000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Hoffert, Sylvia. Private Matters: American Attitudes Toward Childbearing and Infant Nurture in the Urban North, 1800–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981; Hufford, David. ‘‘Contemporary Folk Medicine.’’ In Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America, ed. Norman Gevitz, 228–264. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988; Leavitt, Judith Walzer Leavitt, ed. Women and Health in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984; Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experiences of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996; Randolph, Vance. Ozark Magic and Folklore. New York: Dover Publications, 1947; Snow, L. F. and S. M. Johnson. ‘‘Folklore, Food, Female Reproductive Cycle.’’ Ecology, Food, and Nutrition 7 (1978): 41–49; White, Newman Ivey, Henry M. Belden, eds. The Folklore of North Carolina, collected by Dr. Frank C. Brown During the Years 1912 to 1943 in Collaboration with the North Carolina Folklore Society. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952–1964.

Amanda Carson Banks and A. E. Edwards Princess A princess is the daughter of a king and/or queen, but because of the term’s associations with privilege and entitlement, it has also become linked to those whose behaviors exhibit princess-like qualities. When non-royal women and girls are called princesses, the usage is not usually complimentary. Rarely powerful women, princesses are more often associated with being rescued than they are with being in control. A notable exception is the late Princess Diana, the first wife of Queen Elizabeth II’s first-born son, Charles. In her life and legend, Diana exemplified the disenfranchisement of women in law and society but also how women may use what privilege they have to work toward tolerance and peace. A series of anti-Semitic, sexist, and often homophobic jokes circle upon the figure of the Jewish American Princess (JAP), who is allegedly marked

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by her spoiled behavior and unearned sense of entitlement. In 1985, folklorist Alan Dundes commented, ‘‘It may be more than a coincidence that the joke cycle came into favor at a time when women’s liberation and feminist ideology were becoming increasingly well known (and may have been regarded as threatening by old order male chauvinists)’’ (470–471). Dundes, however, sees the JAP as a retrogressive figure; he underestimates the jokes’ possibilities for feminist coding, and thus for feminist interpretation. To take only a few examples, the JAP has no truck with unpaid domestic labor: ‘‘What does a JAP make for dinner? Reservations’’ (Dundes: 462). She refuses to trade her sexual services in the libidinal economy, instead relegating sex for when she, and not her husband or boyfriend, wants it: ‘‘What’s the definition of a JAP nymphomaniac? One who only has sex on days she gets her hair done’’ (463). In addition, she fails to worship her husband or boyfriend as a masterful patriarch, and recognizes that she, not he, is in control: ‘‘What does a JAP do with her asshole in the morning? Dresses him up and sends him to work’’ (473). When ‘‘princess’’ is not being used to derogate and other its subjects, it usually refers to a woman or girl in dire need of rescue. From ‘‘Sleeping Beauty’’ to ‘‘Super Mario Brothers,’’ princesses in folktales and video games alike require men (who may or may not be princes) to save them. However, more recent popular interpretations, as in the Shrek films, for example, make the princess anything but a weakling. She can fight as well as the male characters and stands up for herself, but also has the more feminineassociated powers of healing, cooking, and peacemaking. Other notable exceptions in popular culture include Xena: Warrior Princess (played by New Zealander Lucy Lawless), introduced in each episode of her six-year television series (1995–2001) as ‘‘a mighty princess, forged in the heat of battle . . . Her courage will change the world,’’ and Charity, Faith, and Hope, Gail Simone and Lea Hernandez’s comic book Killer Princesses; they are sorority-girl assassins who regularly dispatch terrorists but return from their adventures (with perfect makeup) in time to get to class. Like Fiona in the Shrek films, these princesses are known for their fighting skills, artillery, and attitude, not their tiaras. Fantasy princesses have a lot of cache with young girls in North America, especially at Halloween. Their images adorn toys and clothing marketed to ‘‘Daddy’s little princess,’’ a common term of endearment that designates Daddy as a metaphorical king and his daughter thus also royalty. Modeled on images of fairy princesses in films made by the Walt Disney Company, such figures are easily identifiable in their pastel chiffon gowns, diamond tiaras, and silk dancing slippers. Disney’s recent release of a ‘‘Princesses Collection’’ on DVD has generated a surge of merchandising. Dreamy cartoon icons like Aurora from Sleeping Beauty (1959), Ariel from The Little Mermaid (1989), and Jasmine from Aladdin (1992) have appeared on everything from hair bands and socks to lunchboxes and backpacks. Even the most ardent feminist mothers are challenged by their daughters’ desires for pink, frothy princess wear. Sometimes connection to royalty, specifically to princesses, is invoked by women and men to claim a privileged ethnic location. Rayna Green wryly

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comments upon the perennial reappearance of the ‘‘Indian Princess’’ in European appropriations of First Nations folkways. She notes: ‘‘Many allege some relationship with a specific famous Indian . . .; if they are from Virginia, Pocahontas. But most simply claim they are ‘part-Cherokee’ . . . often through some distant grandmother who was, as the phrase always goes, a ‘Cherokee Princess’’’ (46). Actual princesses have much more difficult lives, as exemplified by the late Princess Diana. See also: Cinderella; Cyberculture; Fashion; Film; Folktale; Gender; Indian Maiden; Joke; Mass Media; Popular Culture; Race; Sleeping Beauty; Women Warriors. References: Biddle, Lucy, Tony Walter, Marion Bowman, Margaret Evans, George Monger, Jennifer Chandler, and Juliette Wood. ‘‘Topics, Notes and Comments: The Diana Phenomenon.’’ Folklore 109 (1998): 96–111; Dundes, Alan. ‘‘The J. A. P. and the J. A. M. in American Jokelore.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 98, no. 390 (1985): 456–475; Green, Rayna. ‘‘The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe.’’ Folklore, vol. 99, no. 1 (1988): 30–55; Ornstein, Peggy. ‘‘What’s Wrong with Cinderella? One Mother’s Struggle with Her Three-Year-Old Daughter’s Love Affair with Princess Culture.’’ New York Times Magazine, December 24, 2006; Sherman, Sharon R. ‘‘Perils of the Princess: Gender and Genre in Video Games.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 56, no. 3/4. (Summer/ Autumn 1997): 243–258; Simone, Gail, and Lea Hernandez. Killer Princesses. Portland, OR: Oni Press, 2002; Waelti-Walters, Jennifer. ‘‘On Princesses: Fairy Tales, Sex Roles and Loss of Self.’’ International Journal of Women’s Studies 2 (1979): 180–88.

Pauline Greenhill and Liz Locke Processional Performance Women’s participation in parades and religious processions occurs in many cultures and has been documented for centuries. In the classical Mediterranean world, there is evidence of Spartan women participating in public festivals. In Asia, Europe, and the Americas, women continue centuries-old traditions of walking as a group as part of their communities’ celebrations. Parades are more spectacle than processions in that they are often larger, include floats, and offer a site for the public display of a community’s shared sense of itself. Women participate in processions through contemporary religious festivals; women engage in public displays through secular parades and pageants; and through local and community events, women participate in marches and performances that carry the same requisite elements of religious processions and secular parades—walking as a group along a designated path with a particular focus or emphasis to express a shared belief or position. The Miss America pageant and other beauty contests do not strictly adhere to the definition of procession; however, they are spectacles wherein women display and perform their communities’ sense of femininity. Many traditional performances and processions that were once reserved for males now include women. Such is the case with the southwestern United States and northern Mexico matachines dance performance ritual that includes a procession. As in other folk celebrations dating back to the Middle Ages, women were not allowed to appear in public processions or to dance with a group until fairly recently. The historical exclusion of women as performers or participants did not and does not preclude that

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the festival principal protagonists be female. For example, in the Mama Negra (‘‘Black Mother’’) Festival in Ecuador, men perform the Ritual of the Mama Negra that dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, when the Cotopaxi volcano erupted and the Virgen de las Mercedes was declared Patroness of the Volcano. The ritual includes a sacred tragedy that dramatizes the liberation of enslaved Africans, with mestizo (a person of mixed race) men playing all the roles, including that of Mama Negra. Often, women’s festival processions seek to establish a balance in a patriarchal world. During the Japanese Festival of the Steel Phallus, a celebration begun centuries ago by prostitutes seeking success in business and protection from syphilis, celebrants parade images of huge penises and eat penisshaped lollipops. Today, proceeds raised during this Shinto fertility festival go to benefit AIDS research. In the Spanish town of Zamarramala near Segovia, women follow two elected alcaldesas (women mayors) in their parade from the church to a festival site in honor of St. Agatha; women ‘‘rule’’ the town on this saint’s day in early February. In the communities of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, women celebrate during all-night parties once a year; during their procession through the town, they toss gifts to spectators. A straw man is burned in effigy as part of the festival. Around the world, Catholic Marian traditions include processions and performances held in May to honor the Virgin Mary. Young girls and single women in U.S. Latino culture are hijas de Marı´a (daughters of Mary); that is, they belong to a sodality (a devotional or charitable association of Roman Catholic laity); dressed in white, they honor Mary with daily floral offerings and march in processions. Likewise, little girls dressed in white in the Philippines’ Flores de Mayo (Flowers of May) Festival offer floral gifts to Mary. During the last day of the month-long festival, a young woman performs as Santa Elena (mother of Constantine the Great, discoverer of the true cross) and heads a procession of the town’s young women, who are wearing white and carrying flowers. In addition to the daily floral offerings, parades of women clad as figures from the Bible occur throughout the country. Aside from religious performance and processions, women’s political or secular parades display public solidarity. Jennifer Borda (2002) explores the women’s suffrage movement’s use of parades as a rhetorical strategy to visibly place women in the public political arena. Also in the United States, marches and parades for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and contemporary pro-choice and anti-abortion vigils and processions in support of a particular political stance can be interpreted as partisan performance strategies. Another example of the partisan nature of these strategies is the Million Woman March. In part because of the criticism that women were not part of the original Million Man March that Louis Farrakhan had organized two years earlier in 1995 (gendered partisanship), and in part to continue to put a face and a voice to the issues that were still confronting the African American community (ethnic/racial partisanship), huge numbers of African American women and girls (organizers claim at least one million participants) gathered in 1997 in Philadelphia to march, protest, speak out, and call for action on a wide variety of social and political issues.

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Women also perform their solidarity in the many Gay Pride parades in Canada and the United States. Lisa Hagen-Smith analyzes the Pride parade in Winnipeg, exploring the tensions between politics and celebrations that such events harbor. ‘‘The PRIDE parade in Winnipeg appropriates a parade route with waving banners, drag queens on roller blades, dykes and their dogs, balloons and rainbow flags, but it is also constructed as a site of protest’’ (114–115). Pride parades in other North American cities present the same tensions and celebratory opportunities. Women participate in a wide variety of festivals, parades, processions, and communal performances—from performances at the Red Hat Society’s annual conference, where women over fifty gather to celebrate, to the traditional December reenactment of the miraculous apparition of Mary to Juan Diego in Mexico, to Santa Lucia processions in Italian American and Swedish American communities, to marching in gay pride parades, to participating in the Mermaid Parade on Coney Island, New York, in which costumed ‘‘mermaids’’ march to open the beach for the summer in front of 500,000 spectators. Women’s processional performances—‘‘performance in motion through space’’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and McNamara: 2)—along with parades and other large spectacles, are collective cultural expressions that function as community-wide celebrations and reminders of solidarity among women, whether on political, social, or spiritual terrain. See also: Festival; Gender; Goddess Worship; Legend, Religious; Lesbian Folklore; Politics; Prostitution/Sex Work; Race; Virgin, Cult of the; Virgin of Guadalupe; Women’s Friendship Groups; Women’s Suffrage Movement. References: Borda, Jennifer L. ‘‘The Woman Suffrage Parades of 1910–1913: Possibilities and Limitations of an Early Feminist Rhetorical Strategy.’’ Western Journal of Communication 66, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 25–52; ‘‘Celebrating Women.’’ 2004. n.d. http:// www.celebratingwomen.com/index.html (accessed July 14, 2005); Dresser, Norinne. Multicultural Celebrations: Today’s Rules of Etiquette for Life’s Special Occasions. Pittsburgh: Three Rivers Press, 1999; ‘‘Fairs Festivals.’’ India Heritage Hotels.’’ 2001. http:// www.india-heritage-hotels.com/fairs-and-festivals-in-india.html (accessed July 14, 2005); Gianturco, Paola. Celebrating Women. New York: powerHouse Books, 2004; HagenSmith, Lisa. ‘‘Politics and Celebration: Manifesting the Rainbow Flag.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 19, no. 2 (1997): 113–121; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, and Brooks McNamara. ‘‘Processional Performance: An Introduction.’’ Special issue on Processional Performance. The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 2–5; ‘‘Rajasthan Culture.’’ Destinations India. 2004. http://www.destinationsindia.com/tour-on-palace-onwheels/rajasthan-culture.html (accessed July 15, 2005).

Norma E. Cantu Prostitution/Sex Work Prostitution is the exchange of sexual services usually by women for money and/or gifts, usually from men. The term ‘‘prostitution’’ sometimes holds pejorative connotations; ‘‘sex work’’ is an alternative emphasizing its economic aspects. Although prostitution has been comparatively neglected by folklorists, its relevance to women’s folklore is multiple. The female prostitute appears as a character in a number of oral genres, including ballads, proverbs, and dirty jokes. Prostitution is also associated with genres of

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female performance; ballerinas, for example, were once presumed to do sex work as well as dancing. Historically, the prostitute has been constructed as a symbol used primarily to limit expressions of female sexuality. In addition, she has been a scapegoat for disease epidemics. The act of visiting or approaching a prostitute is a ritualized form of male bonding in which a woman plays a central role. Recently, sex workers have begun to organize to reconfigure and redefine their roles and activities. Portrayals of prostitutes in oral genres include both negative and positive images. Various obscene jokes portray prostitutes as witty. For example, she one-ups her customer when he complains about the roughness of her pubic hair, replying: ‘‘Well, why don’t you move up a few inches; you’ve been lickin’ the carpet’’ (Davis Johnson 1973: 213). In American frontier stories, the prostitute provides one of the standard images of femininity. She is loud and hard-drinking, but often possesses the cliched ‘‘heart of gold.’’ Really a tender ‘‘good woman’’ brought low, usually by misfortune, she only has her customer’s best interests in mind. Though rarely a suitable love-interest, she is often a valued helper. In ballads such as ‘‘The Shirt and the Apron,’’ a prostitute successfully steals everything a sailor owns: My watch and clothes and fifty pound my ducksie with it fled, And she leaved me here, poor Jack alone, stark naked on the bed (discussed in Greenhill 1995: 174)

She takes on the role of deceiver. The Japanese proverbs, ‘‘Sincere prostitutes and square eggs do not exist’’ and ‘‘One is not supposed to see a prostitute or a lamp in the daytime’’ (Storm 1992: 172) also emphasize the prostitute’s deceptiveness; in the latter, her beauty exists only in shadows and artifice. In both of these examples, her duplicitous nature is negative, linked to deception that harms her (male) victim. In others, prostitution is portrayed as the consequence of undisciplined female sexuality. In the bawdy ballad, ‘‘The Tying of the Garter,’’ a chance encounter transforms a woman from a laboring country girl into a ‘‘fancy whore’’ (Preston 1992: 335). A Yoruba (Nigerian) proverb warns that ‘‘the clitoris is the cap of prostitution which the vagina wears from heaven’’ (Ojoade 1983: 212). In these genres, the prostitute is characterized by her unashamed and limitless sexuality. It provides her the means by which she deceives victims (or, in the more positive portrayal, defends herself from insults and attempted deceptions) and the resources through which she helps her friends. The portrayal of the prostitute both as a ‘‘good woman’’ with a tender heart and as a deceiver/destroyer of ‘‘good men’’ mirrors ambivalent attitudes toward female sexuality. Explaining the prostitute’s role in frontier American society, folklorist Beverly Stoeltje writes, ‘‘Relations between sexes within society were based on a nineteenth-century idealization of women, who was to be treated with ‘honor’ and politeness but without emotion. . . . For passionate, heterosexual relations on the frontier, one must look beyond institutionalized society to the wilderness, inhabited by animals and bad women and bad men’’ (1992: 40). Reflecting the classic madonna/ whore dichotomy, in order for the madonna and heterosexual female sexual

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desire to coexist, the whore must also be present. Thus, she is neither unproblematically celebrated nor wholly condemned. Good examples in popular culture of prostitutes simultaneously empowered and vilified may be found in Joss Whedon’s short-lived television series, Firefly (2002), featuring Inara Serra, a futuristic ‘‘registered companion’’ whose presence on the space ship Serenity frequently gains the crew access to otherwise closed locations, and in the episode entitled ‘‘Heart of Gold,’’ Nandy, a brothel madam who pays with her life for taking a stand against her small town’s vicious patriarch. A similar ambivalence informs discourses about female performers. Prostitution has been linked to women’s performance in examples as temporally and culturally divergent as the heteratae (‘‘comrades in arms’’) of classical poque in France, Greece, the courtesans of Renaissance Italy and the Belle E geisha in Japan, the ghawazee singer-dancers of Egypt, shikhatt dancersingers in Morocco, temple dancers in India, tar drummers in Afghanistan, and South African shebeen singers. It is difficult to know how many of these women sell sexual access to their bodies and how many are merely perceived to do so. There is also a range in the kinds of prostitution associated with female performers: geisha and hetaerae are more akin to mistresses or ‘‘kept women,’’ limiting access to their bodies to a single partner in a long-term relationship. In contrast, shikhatt performers are considered accessible to anyone who can and will pay for the privilege. Female performers transgress many of the constraints imposed on other women. They display themselves to male gazes in ways that are often explicitly meant to evoke desire; they earn income independently of a father, brother, or husband; and they demonstrate mastery of an often-difficult art form. Thus, they are desired and valued for the entertainment their bodies and talents provide, but considered dangerous due to their independent lives. Prostitution is one way to limit such women’s freedom and power, either through a real-life transaction, in which money brings their bodies back into male control, or through accusations that they include sexual services for money, which render their potentially high-status, desirable occupation as performers into a stigmatized, undesirable one. Individual female performers negotiate this tension with varying degrees of success according to their ability to manipulate the cultural constraints in which they are enmeshed. However, there is little or no ambivalence in discourses about other nonfictional prostitutes. Their bodies are rendered by non-prostitutes into symbols that control and define public expressions of women’s sexuality. Examining police and press statements about prostitutes’ murders, Jane Caputi argues that ‘‘we learn that it is normal to hate prostitute women. . . . [The killer’s] deeds only become socially problematic when he turns to socalled innocent girls’’ (1989: 451). She further argues that emphasizing murdered women’s occupation as prostitutes ‘‘lulls non-prostitute women into a false feeling of safety. . . . and—most effectively—it diverts blame to the victim’’ (1989: 452). As faceless, numerous, and neglected murder victims, prostitutes embody the concept of ‘‘asking for it,’’ the idea that an actively sexual woman puts herself at risk of rape, abuse, or murder merely because she is a sexually active woman.

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Kristen Luker demonstrates how American Progressive-era (1890–1913) constructions of prostitutes as transmitters of venereal disease allowed the states to regulate all women’s behaviors. Although female advocates of social reform argued that disease should be controlled through regulating male as well as female behavior, in practice, male consumers of prostitution were unregulated while its female providers were incarcerated. The definition of prostitution subsequently expanded from an exchange of sexual services for money to include ‘‘the giving or receiving of the body for indiscriminate sexual intercourse without hire’’ (1998: 622). Luker estimates that during World War I, ‘‘more than a thousand women a month were taken into some form of custody.’’ Twenty to thirty percent were first-time offenders, probably guilty of no more than ‘‘offending middle-class standards of female propriety’’ (1998: 623). Although prostitution is generally characterized as female behavior, heterosexual prostitution could not take place without male participation. In Hygiene and Morality (1910), American nurse Lavina Dock addressed male agency in spreading sexually transmitted diseases, arguing that ‘‘the doctrine of ‘physical necessity’ has been invented by for men by themselves’’ (quoted in Luker 1998: 607). That doctrine allowed men to participate in prostitution without suffering any attendant stigmatization. In a rare study of how and why men use prostitutes, Lester Kirkendall (1960) concludes that the majority of teenage boys visit them as a form of male bonding rather than out of sexual need. He argues that few really wish to partake in prostitution: ‘‘If they could stay there alone for thirty minutes and come out with a story to tell their friends, they would have achieved all they wish’’ (1960: 147). Indeed, the majority of participants ranked the sexual experience as unsatisfactory. In his analysis of discourses about three sex scandals, Joshua Gamson concludes that ‘‘the men who purchased sexual services were located in a masculine world in which prostitute visits were often narrated as demonstrations of manhood’’ (2001: 197). Thus, men use the prostitute’s body to ritually construct an image of positive masculine power to display to other men, although their actual feelings about their experience with her may be mixed or negative. In the early 1970s, sex workers began to contest others’ representations of them. An American ex-prostitute, Margo St. James, founded COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) to unite sex workers and sympathizers in the goal of decriminalizing prostitution and legitimizing prostitution as work, with nondiscriminatory access to workers’ rights. The movement she started quickly became international. Today, there are prostitutes’ unions in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States; there have been international conventions on sex workers’ rights. Sex workers’ writing about sex work includes Prostitutes, Our Life (1980); Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry (1987); Good Girls/Bad Girls: Feminists and Sex Trade Workers Face to Face (1987); and Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients (1999). The latter includes discussions by lesbian, gay, and transgendered sex workers. With greater political power gained through organizing, sex workers have largely resisted becoming symbols of

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contagion during the contemporary AIDS crisis. Instead, they are often acknowledged as having the expertise and power to help educate about safer sex and have partnered with state and city governments in AIDSprevention efforts. COYOTE’s efforts have not achieved the goal of widespread decriminalization in the United States. However, a number of countries have experimented with various forms of legalization. In general, they are not considered successful by sex work activists because such legalization focuses not on prostitutes’ needs, such as their ability to control their working hours and conditions, but instead on the perceived needs of clients and communities. COYOTE prefers complete decriminalization, defined as ‘‘the repeal of laws against consensual adult sexual activity, in commercial and non-commercial contexts’’ (PEN 2005), including pimping and procuring laws, which seek to protect prostitutes from being commercially and emotionally exploited by third parties. Activists argue that vague language means that in practice, the laws ‘‘serve only to isolate prostitutes from family and friends and in fact push them into unsavoury relationships rather than the reverse’’ (Davis 1994), adding that laws against domestic violence, kidnapping, and extortion would be sufficient if authorities chose to enforce them on prostitutes’ behalf. WHISPER (Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt) seeks to highlight the violence and dehumanization that is so frequently part of sex workers’ lives, arguing that no woman freely chooses prostitution. Melissa Farley lists the experiences that its members describe as the components of contemporary sex work on her Prostitution Research and Education Web site: ‘‘sexual harassment, rape, battering, verbal abuse, domestic violence, a racist practice, a violation of human rights; childhood sexual abuse, a consequence of male domination of women, and a means of maintaining male domination of women.’’ WHISPER members profess that ‘‘prostitution isn’t like anything else. Rather everything else is like prostitution, because it is a model for women’s condition, for gender stratification and its logical extension, sex discrimination’’ (Evelina Giobbe quoted in Delacoste and Alexander 1987: 268–269). Though sex workers do not speak in a unified voice, COYOTE’s and WHISPER’s positions have in common their refusal to allow prostitutes to be reduced to voiceless symbols for the advancement of others’ agendas. See also: Activism; Ballad; Folk Belief; Joke; Politics; Popular Culture; Proverb; Scandal; Sexuality; Violence; Wage Work; Women’s Work. References: Bell, Laurie, ed. Good Girls/Bad Girls: Feminists and Sex Trade Workers Face to Face. Seattle: The Seal Press, 1987; Caputi, Jane. ‘‘The Sexual Politics of Murder.’’ Gender and Society 3 (1989): 437–456; Davis, Sylvia. ‘‘Prostitution in Canada: the Invisible Menace or the Menace of Invisibility?’’ 1994. http://www.walnet.org/csis/papers/ sdavis.html (accessed August 11, 2008); Davis Johnson, Robbie. ‘‘Folklore and Women: A Social Interactional Analysis of the Folklore of a Texas Madame.’’ Journal of American Folklore 86 (1973): 211–224; Delacoste, Frederique, and Priscilla Alexander, eds. Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry. Second edition. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1998 [1987]; Farley, Melissa. ‘‘Prostitution Research and Education: Factsheet on Human Rights Violations.’’ 2000. http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/factsheet.html; Gamson, Joshua. ‘‘Normal Sins: Sex Scandals as Institutional Morality Tales.’’ Social

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Problems 48 (2001): 185–205; Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘‘Neither a Man Nor a Maid’: Sexualities and Gendered Meanings in Cross-Dressing Ballads.’’ Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995): 156–177; Jaget, Claude, ed. Prostitutes, Our Life. Trans. Anne Furse, Suzie Fleming, and Ruth Hall. London: Falling Wall Press, 1980; Jenness, Valerie. ‘‘From Sex as Sin to Sex as Work: COYOTE and the Reorganization of Prostitution as Social Problem.’’ Social Problems 37 (1990): 403–420; Kirkendall, Lester A. ‘‘Circumstances Associated with Teenage Boys’ Use of Prostitution.’’ Marriage and Family Living 22 (1960): 145– 149; Luker, Kristen. ‘‘Sex, Social Hygiene, and the State: The Double-Edged Sword of Social Reform.’’ Theory and Society 27 (1998): 601–634; Ojoade, J.O. ‘‘Yoruba Proverbs: Some Examples.’’ Folklore 94 (1983): 201–213; Preston, Cathy Lynn. ‘‘‘The Tying of the Garter’: Representations of the Female Rural Laborer in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-Century English Bawdy Songs.’’ Journal of American Folklore 105 (1992): 315–341; Prostitutes’ Education Network (PEN). ‘‘Prostitution Law Reform: Defining Terms.’’ 2005. http:// www.bayswan.org/defining.html (accessed August 11, 2008); Stoeltje, Beverly J. ‘‘‘A Helpmate for Man Indeed’: The Image of the Frontier Woman.’’ Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975): 25–41; Storm, Hiroko. ‘‘Women in Japanese Proverbs.’’ Asian Folklore Studies 51 (1992): 167–182; Sycamore, Matt Bernstein. Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients. San Francisco: Harrington Park Press, 1999; Whedon, Joss. DVD. Firefly. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002.

Miriam Robinson Gould Proverb A proverb is a popular saying with didactic-moralistic potential that conveys socially and culturally agreed-upon knowledge, wisdom, truths, judgments, and interpretations of people, life situations, and relationships succinctly in a relatively fixed, standardized form. Two examples of proverbs that are internationally common in related forms are ‘‘It is not work that kills, but worry’’ and ‘‘Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.’’ While scholars have concentrated on the proverb overwhelmingly from a man-as-human-norm perspective and less on specifically women’s use of proverbs and their place in them, proverb scholars are making inroads into differentiating proverb use and meaning while taking gender into consideration. Much work remains to be done, as the proverb ‘‘Man works from sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done’’ might imply. In Proverb Studies and Folklore, specific concerns with women’s expressivity follows the manner in which developments in these disciplines often parallel those in Literature Studies and in the social sciences. As a folklore genre, the proverb is deceptively simple-looking and sounding. Particularly convincing because it sounds just right, it incorporates one or more poetic devices, such as alliteration, allegory, assonance, ellipsis, metaphor, rhyme, rhythm and meter, metaphor, and personification. For example, ‘‘Children, chickens, and women never have enough.’’ As in ‘‘A man chases a woman until she catches him,’’ proverbs may employ wit, irony, ambiguity, and various forms of humor. With their ‘‘telegram’’ or shorthand style, proverbs allow users to crystallize complex stories and pictures into a few key aspects of situations. One can find proverbs in everyday conversation, such as in ritualized exchanges that establish and maintain social bonds and shared commonalities. They are implicated in relation to other folklore genres, such as riddles, tales, songs, and jokes.

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Proverbs are also used in mass media and popular culture: advertising, political speeches, graffiti, and pop music. A Dole bananas advertisement advises, ‘‘Waist not, want not’’; an NBC Radio Network ad promoting radio advertising says, ‘‘Hearing is believing’’; and there are numerous variations on ‘‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’’ An ad for Pierre Cardin perfume commented that, ‘‘Behind every great woman, there’s a man.’’ Movies incorporating proverbs are Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), the complete proverb of which states ‘‘. . . but marry brunettes,’’ Live and Let Die (1973), and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992, . . . ‘‘rules the home [or the world]’’). In the musical Chicago, the song ‘‘When You’re Good to Mama’’ includes lines based on proverbs, such as ‘‘this hand washes that one,’’ ‘‘boost me up my ladder, kid, and I’ll boost you up yours,’’ and ‘‘life is tit for tat.’’ These lines are related to the proverbs ‘‘There’s no boosting a man up the ladder unless he’s willing to climb’’ and ‘‘One good turn deserves another.’’ Proverb users associate their sayings with social-communal authority and tradition, so when a speaker uses a proverb, she speaks with a voice of authority beyond her own. This may allow her to ease a complex and sensitive social situation by de-personalizing her remarks, simultaneously putting herself in a one-up position vis-a-vis the listener because she compels reciprocal acknowledgement of a implied greater community. Studies of proverbs show that social movements benefit from modifying and distorting proverbs. Feminists utilize proverbs in a number of ways, such as to raise consciousness by highlighting the misogyny many proverbs express. Feminists assign the proverb new function, subverting its force to catalyze social change while allying it with the source of its power, tradition, and familiarity. For example, new renditions of old proverbs include ‘‘The best man for the job . . . may be a woman,’’ ‘‘A man’s castle is his house—let him clean it,’’ ‘‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,’’ and ‘‘A woman’s place is in the House . . . and in the Senate.’’ Proverbs overtly and discreetly express a society’s power relationships, stereotyping and presenting gender and other roles in traditional forms of folklore for easy transmission. One can fruitfully trace women’s historical images in oral folklore through proverbs that comment on women’s relationships and responsibilities. For example, ‘‘A man works from sun to sun, a woman’s work is never done’’ and ‘‘Children, chickens, and women never have enough.’’ Also, ‘‘A big wife and a big barn will never do a man any harm,’’ but ‘‘Where there’s a woman, there’s trouble,’’ ‘‘All women are good . . . good for something or good for nothing,’’ and ‘‘Call no man unhappy till he is married.’’ Furthermore, ‘‘It takes a smart woman to be a fool,’’ ‘‘Girls will be girls,’’ and ‘‘If you take the child by the hand, you take the mother by the heart.’’ Finally, ‘‘If the crops aren’t good, you lose one year; if your wife isn’t good, you lose a whole lifetime.’’ Whether proverbs represent women in a positive or negative light, they tend to do so in essentialist or idealizing terms. Thus, ‘‘A virtuous woman, though ugly, is the ornament of the house’’ and ‘‘A virtuous woman is rarer than a precious jewel.’’ Ethnic and national groups also implement proverbs to teach group members the characteristics of their own and other groups

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and make cross-cultural and cross-national comparisons. One often finds groups similarly assign characteristics to each other and to women in their proverbs, so that proverbs like ‘‘The German woman excels in the shed; the Czech woman will have people fed; and the French woman is best in bed,’’ ‘‘Three things are bad in a house: rain, a scolding wife, and smoke,’’ ‘‘A woman’s tongue is the last thing about her that dies,’’ ‘‘Wedlock is a padlock,’’ and ‘‘No house is big enough for two women’’ find parallels in many groups’ proverb stock. Proverb research emphasizes the collection and documentation, analysis, and interpretation of proverbial material. Extensive proverb study has resulted in hundreds of definitions, vast collections and bibliographic surveys, and a rich research tradition of investigating proverbs’ origins, histories, distribution, variants, functions, and meanings. All of this attests to the genre’s complexity and importance in and of itself, but also as the potential reflection of human ingenuity and of social, cultural, and historical dimensions, patterns, and principles. Fields that engage in proverb study range across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. Various theoretical and methodological approaches and orientations are utilized within and across disciplines, including the structural, functional, rhetorical, and communication/performance approaches, or a combination thereof. Proverbs are powerful linguistic tools that individuals strategically implement from within cultural frameworks to fulfill a range of pragmatic and social functions. One question that researchers increasingly consider crucial to understanding processes of proverb use, meanings, and functions pertains to context. Factoring in context and the interactional situation opens a space in which to consider specific individuals in the communication or performance event. This allows one to question the role of gender, age, and class, for example, and of the speaker(s) and listener(s). Also, it furthers one’s ability to recognize the polyfunctionality and multiple meanings of a given proverb. A single proverb stores many potential meanings and has different potential uses for its interlocutors. Another facet of proverb study is the struggle to classify and categorize just what constitutes a proverb on two levels. On one level are the system and principles guiding individuals within a cultural and linguistic community in their definition, use, and understanding of proverbs. This community-specific constitution of the proverb may overlap, but also differ from, fall short of, or exceed the other level. The latter refers to a more universal, cross-cultural, and super-cultural perception of proverbiality. Thus, definitions on the disciplinary and etic level often distinguish between proverbs, proverbial phrases, and even broader classifications of proverbial material. One can identify writers with specific orientations to proverb study, though they usually work with elements of complementary approaches. Archer Taylor’s classic, transformational work and Wolfgang Mieder’s work on American and international proverbs come out of the historical-comparative tradition. E. Ojo Arewa’s and Alan Dundes’s 1964 work pursues a functionalist-communications line. Context-centered communication and performance-approach studies are numerous and include the work of Shirley L. Arora and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Neal R. Norrick applies speech act

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theory to the study of proverbs and provides a useful and clear overview of relevant theories and methodologies. Peter Grzybek provides valuable work on the semiotic study of proverbs. This list mentions only a few of the many approaches to proverb studies. See also: Feminisms; Folklore About Women; Sexism; Tradition; Women’s Folklore. References: Arewa, E. Ojo, and Alan Dundes. ‘‘Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking Folklore.’’ American Anthropologist, vol. 66, no. 6, Part 2 (1964): 70–85; Arora, Shirley L. ‘‘The Perception of Proverbiality.’’ In Wise Words: Essays on the Proverb, ed. Wolfgang Mieder, 3–29. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994; Briggs, Charles L. Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988; Bronner, Simon J., ed. Creativity and Tradition in Folklore: New Directions. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1992; Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction. Fourth edition. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1998; De Caro, Francis A. Women and Folklore: A Bibliographic Survey. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002; Dundes, Alan. ‘‘Slurs International: Folk Comparisons of Ethnicity and National Character.’’ In Wise Words: Essays on the Proverb, ed. Wolfgang Mieder, 183–209. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994; Grzybek, Peter. ‘‘Foundations of Semiotic Proverb Study.’’ In Wise Words: Essays on the Proverb, ed. Wolfgang Mieder, 31–71. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994; Kershen, Lois. American Proverbs About Women: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. ‘‘Toward a Theory of Proverb and National Character.’’ In Wise Words: Essays on the Proverb, ed. Wolfgang Mieder, 111–121. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994; Lewis, Mary Ellen B. ‘‘The Feminists Have Done It.’’ Journal of American Folklore 87 (1974): 85–87; Mieder, Wolfgang, ed. Wise Words: Essays on the Proverb. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994; Mieder, Wolfgang, and Alan Dundes, eds. The Wisdom of Many: Essays on the Proverb. New York: Garland Publishing, 1981; Norrick, Neal R. How Proverbs Mean: Semantic Studies in English Proverbs. Berlin: Mouton, 1985; Oring, Elliott, ed. Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1986; Schipper, Mineke. Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004; Taylor, Archer. The Proverb and Index to ‘The Proverb.’ Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1962; Whiting, Bartlett Jere. Early American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Lisa S. Rhein Public Folklore Public folklore is broadly defined as those materials of folklore collected for presentation to a general audience through exhibitions, concerts, festivals, school programs, and other public venues—as well as publications, recordings, films, and other products created for a general audience—with the goal of creating a greater awareness and understanding of regional, ethnic, and community culture. Women have had great influence in the development of the field of Public-sector Folklore since the mid-nineteenth century. In the early years, many American folklore collectors were women; much of their work found its way into archives, publications, museum collections, and recordings available to the public. Folklorist and journalist Mary Alicia Owen (1850–1935), for example, used her extensive collections of Mesquakie Aboriginal lore and ‘‘Missouri Negro traditions’’ as the basis for journalistic writings; she deposited her substantial material-culture collections

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into museums. Other early women folklorists whose collections found their way into public archives, and in some cases have recently become available on the Internet, include Frances Densmore (1867–1957), Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838–1923), Helen Heffron Roberts (1888–1985), Jovita Gonzalez de Morales (1904–1983), and Laura Bolton (1899–1980). These women, who were mostly from genteel backgrounds, were often considered unconventional, to say the least, by their friends and families. Their perseverance blazed a trail for future women collectors in both academic and publicsector circles. During the 1930s, several women were involved in Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects collecting and publishing folklore collections for the public. Sidney Robertson Cowell (1903–1995) organized and directed a California WPA project surveying musical traditions in Northern California. Photographer Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), working for the Farm Security Administration photographic unit, produced virtuoso photos documenting migrant workers, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers; her images were used widely in publications and exhibitions. Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), writer, playwright and folklorist, worked with Alan Lomax collecting African American folksong traditions in the South. Her popular publications, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Mules and Men (1935), make extensive use of her folklore collections and her own experience growing up in Florida. Many of Hurston’s contemporaries, including Josefina Niggli (1910–1983), playwright, screenwriter, and author of Mexican Village (1945), also wrote from their own cultural experiences. Women educators, such as Dorothy Howard (1902–1996), and Aurora Lucero-White Lea (1894–1965) were also pioneers in what we now call the ‘‘Folklore and Education’’ movement, which seeks to incorporate folklore materials and methodology into the American K-12 (kindergarten–grade twelve) curriculum. Many early advocates of this work, like Howard, were not trained folklorists; rather, they were teachers with a strong interest in the subject matter and a belief that folklore materials would engage students in the study of their own families and communities. Some were folklorists, like Aurora Lucero-White Lea, author of The Folklore of New Mexico (1941), who became a school administrator and influenced the introduction of folklore into the general curriculum in her state. Their legacy is carried on by the Folklore and Education Section of the American Folklore Society, founded in the 1980s by Karen Baldwin, and the National Network for Folk Arts and Education, begun in the 1990s and headed by Paddy Bowman. American folk festivals have also been significantly shaped by women. Sarah Gertrude Knott (1895–1984) founded the National Folk Festival in 1933; it continues to this day under the leadership of the National Council for Traditional Arts. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival has had substantial input and leadership over the years from women, including scholar and musician Bernice Johnson Reagon, who worked with founder Ralph Rinzler for many years, and until her retirement in 1993, worked as a folklorist, curator, and program director in another division of the Smithsonian Institution. Folklorist Alicia Gonzales worked on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

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in the 1980s and went on to other positions within the Smithsonian Institution, including advising on the recently opened National Museum of the American Indian. Rayna Green, chair of the Division of Cultural History and director of the American Indian Program at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, has also done a substantial amount of work with the festival over the years. Diana Parker has been the director of the Smithsonian Festival since 1984. Many American folklorists who got their start in the North American folksong revival movement of the 1950s and 1960s went on to become influential leaders in Public Folklore. Chief among these is Bess Lomax Hawes, who became the second director of the National Endowment for the Art’s Folk Arts Division in 1977, and served in that position during the program’s formative years. One of the areas of funding established by the NEA’s Folk Arts Division went toward creating ‘‘State Folklore’’ or ‘‘State Folk Arts’’ positions. Women were among the earliest ‘‘State Folklorists’’ benefiting from this funding; Jane Beck, for example, now the executive director of the Vermont Folklife Center, was appointed Vermont State Folklorist in 1978. Ellen Stekert wrote the legislation to create the Center for the Study of Minnesota Folklife in 1976. The paths of women in Public Folklore in Canada have had some parallels and some differences with those taken in the United States. Canadian folklore scholar Carole Carpenter notes that ‘‘the popular perception of the folk and their lore in the United States has evolved as markedly different from the widespread ideas about the same in Canada. As a result there has been possible a politicization and institutionalization of folklore throughout the culture that gave birth to public folklore work, state folklorists, and folklore-related legislation in the U.S.A., but the same could not occur in Canada, for reasons traceable in part to the legacy of the Canadian-American interaction.’’ Nevertheless, a number of women folklorists have worked in the public realm in Canada. Notable among them was Edith Fowke (1913–1996). Fowke was disappointed with the quantity and quality of Canadian folksongs available to the public, and became an avid collector, recorded many albums of folk music, published popular works, and produced radio programs. She is well known as a collector and compiler of children’s folklore, and served as president of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada. Baby-boomer women working in Public Folklore in the United States reflect an even broader view of the field, building upon the work of those who came before them. Among them are Oscar-winning filmmakers (Marjorie Hunt, who won the Best Short Documentary Oscar for ‘‘The Stone Carvers’’ in 1984); founders of not-for-profit folklore organizations (Deborah Kodish, who founded the Philadelphia Folklife Project in 1987); the head of a national agency (Peggy Bulger, current director of the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center); the director of a major funding organization (Elizabeth Peterson of the Fund for Folk Culture); and women who combine successful academic careers with significant work in the public sector (for example, Margaret Yocom, who teaches at George Mason University and spends her summers as a consultant to the Rangeley Lakes Regional

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Logging Museum in Maine). Due in large part to their efforts, the up-andcoming generation of women folklorists will have even more choices for challenging and rewarding work in the public sector. It must also be acknowledged that a significant portion of the North American folklore materials presented in public programs, publications, recordings, etc., collected by folklorists have been gathered from women. Some of the ‘‘informants,’’ or members of culture groups documented for public folklore products, are truly folklorists in their own right, or, as we call them in Public Folklore circles, ‘‘community folklore scholars.’’ Keepers of song such as Hazel Dickinson, Native American activists such as Clydia Nawooksy, and advocates for the arts of refugees such as Pang Xiong Sirirathasuk have given us more through their actions and artistry than we could have learned in a lifetime of academic study. Folk Heritage Award-winner and community scholar Eva Castellanoz, who also works in Idaho and Washington state, is considered a one-woman institution on Oregon and its folklore. In glancing through the description of National Heritage Award winners over the years (1982–present), the inspiring power of women in retaining folklore and spreading its influence to public audiences far and wide becomes immediately apparent. See also: Festival; Film; Folk Art; Folk Music and Folksong; Folklife; Tradition-Bearer; Women Folklorists. References: Belanus, Betty J., and Gregory Hansen, eds. ‘‘Public Folklore.’’ Special issue of Folklore Forum, vol. 31, no. 2 (2000); Blacker, Carmen, and Hilda Ellis Davidson, eds. Women and Tradition: A Neglected Group of Folklorists. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2001; Cant u, Norma E., and Olga Najera-Ramı´rez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Carpenter, Carole, ed. ‘‘Boundaries/Frontiers.’’ Special issue of Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 13, no. 1 (1991). http://www.celat.ulaval.ca/acef/131a.htm (accessed August 11, 2008); Greenhill, Pauline, and Diane Tye, eds. Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997; Hardin, James. ‘‘American Women: American Folklife Center.’’ Library of Congress American Memory. n.d. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awafc11/ (accessed August 11, 2008); Kurin, Richard. Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Culture Of, By and For the People. Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies. Washington, DC, 1998; ‘‘National Endowment for the Arts, National Heritage Fellows.’’ Tapnet: Traditional Arts Programs Network. n.d. http://afsnet.orgtapnet (accessed August 11, 2008); Rosenberg, Jan. ‘‘Dorothy Howard: An Annotated Bibliography.’’ Presented as ‘‘A History Lesson in Folklore in Education: Dorothy Howard’’ at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, Oakland, CA, October 1990. http://afsnet.org/tapnet/rosenberg.htm (accessed August 11, 2008); Wallace, Andrew. ‘‘The National Folk Festival: The Sarah Gertrude Knott Years.’’ Folklife Center News, vol. 24, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 3–6.

Betty J. Belanus Purdah Originally defined as the seclusion of women from everyday society, particularly male society, purdah is an ancient tradition which has played—and continues to play—a role in many cultures. Over time, it has become synonymous with the specific devices used to separate women from men—from the curtains and screens used in old Persia and modern India, to the wide variety of robes, scarves, and veils worn by devout Muslim and Hindu

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women around the world. Christian and Jewish women, from early Roman times, have worn veils over their hair as a sign of modesty. Traditionally, in Western Christian cultures, a bride wears a wedding veil to symbolize her humility and willingness to submit to her husband and to God. In the Catholic Church, nuns ‘‘take the veil’’ when they take their final vows as a symbol of their devotion to God. In traditional Muslim and Hindu cultures, purdah has long been viewed as a means of protection for both sexes. By remaining hidden behind a screen or curtain, or by disguising her physical appearance, a woman is thought to shield the men around her from having lustful thoughts. The practice is also said to protect women from their own vanity by disguising their physical features, rendering all women uniform in appearance and anonymous. The Qur’an contains no specific rule requiring Muslim women to submit to purdah, but it does ask them to be compliant and practice modesty in dress. This has led to a number of different interpretations in the level of concealment required of devout Muslim women, and is usually dependant on the level of religious orthodoxy in a region. The most extreme form is the Afghan burqah, a full-body covering which leaves only the hands visible. The chador, common in Iran, is an all-enveloping black mantle which leaves the face uncovered. A third purdah device—the most common and the most variable—is the hijab (Arabic for ‘‘protection’’); this scarf may vary in size from a simple head-covering to a long, loose wrap that envelops the head and body. Although traditionally available only in black and made of relatively inexpensive fabric, North American women, among others, have begun to demand purdah clothing in a variety of colors and expensive fabrics. Garments for the wealthy and for middle-class holiday wear are more stylishly tailored, and are often decorated with cutwork, pearls, lace, and embroidery. Purdah has been condemned largely as bigoted and anti-feminist in the West. Women who practice the custom, however, cite it as a means of drawing a necessary social line between women and men. In recent years, veiling has become a subversive strategy in some areas by which women can speak against secular and Western influences on their traditional culture. See also: Fashion; Hair; Muslim Women’s Folklore; Sexuality; Veiling; Women Religious. References: El Guindi, Fadwa. Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. Dress, Body, Culture Series. New York: Berg, 1999; Kahn, Sitara. A Glimpse Through Purdah: Asian Women—The Myth and the Reality. Stoke-on-Trent, England: Trentham Books Ltd., 1999; Saiyid, Dushka. Muslim Women of the British Punjab: From Seclusion to Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998; Shirazi, Faegheh. The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.

Charlene Brusso

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Q Quiltmaking Quilts are usually defined as textile bedcovers made in three layers: a decorative top, a soft inner filling, and a plain back or lining. Quiltmaking, the process by which quilts are created, is traditionally a home-centered activity practiced by women. A number of needlework techniques may be used in quiltmaking, including piecework (joining together two or more fabric pieces directly), applique (sewing a fabric motif onto a larger background), and quilting (stitching the layers together). Historically, the concept of the quilt seems to have emerged from the convergence of two separate traditions. The first is referenced by the origin of the word ‘‘quilt’’ from the Latin culcita, meaning ‘‘stuffed sack.’’ Various textiles made from two large pieces of fabric filled with feathers, wool, cotton, rags, or other materials have provided warmth since prehistoric times. Contemporary examples include duvets, sleeping bags, and thick comforters. Such functional bedcovers have been made from either fine or coarse fabrics, depending on the resources available to the maker. The second influence on the development of the quilt is a decorative tradition of embellished textiles, including bedcovers, using embroidery and other needlework skills. Highly decorated textiles typically held a prominent place in household furnishings in preindustrial cultures throughout Europe and Asia. Decorative needlework traditions brought to the New World by various immigrant groups combined, blended, and developed into the distinctive patterns that characterize American patchwork quilts. Quilts serve a number of physical and symbolic functions. Because they are traditionally made by women, quilts represent a female-centered heritage of creativity and continuity through the generations. Many quiltmakers derive satisfaction from participating in a craft tradition enjoyed by their female ancestors. Quilts made by earlier generations are often prized as family heirlooms. But men also have made quilts. Historically, men whose traditional professions required needlework skills, such as tailors, sailors, and soldiers, expressed their creativity through quiltmaking. Other men have made quilts for the same reasons as women.

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Human beings have innate needs to enjoy and create art. Among these are the desire to use our hands to make things, to enhance our surroundings, to be playful, to give order and shape to feelings through patterning, to express and assert ourselves, and to connect with other people. Because the basic skills and techniques involved in quiltmaking are relatively simple and the materials readily available, quiltmaking is a popular choice for individual artistic expression. The majority of quilts are the work of individual makers who draw inspiration from an awareness of quiltmaking traditions as well as from their own artistic resources. Thus, a particular quilt represents some mixture of traditional and personal design elements. Immigrant groups sometimes adapted their traditional needlework or design traditions to quiltmaking. Within a community, over time, quiltmakers develop certain preferences for color, pattern, or technique. Throughout the nineteenth century, there were recognizable regional variations in American quilts. During the twentieth century, styles became more homogeneous across the country due to the influence of published patterns and illustrations. Quilts are most often constructed using geometric or curvilinear patterns. As quilting gained popularity in the late nineteenth century, many new patterns were developed. By the 1890s, family periodicals circulated quilt patterns, and many were given names. The names attached to particular patterns are subject to much variation. Although some writers have suggested that nineteenth-century quiltmakers may have used particular quilt patterns to encode political or personal messages, there is little evidence that pattern names were accorded much significance until the twentieth century. The notion of the quilting bee, in which a number of quilters gather to stitch the layers together, is a popular image of the quiltmaking process. Traditionally, group quilting was one of a number of communal work activities, such as corn-shucking and house-raising, by which heavy or tedious work might be accomplished by a group in a short time. Rather than an institution governed by a single set of rules, however, group quilting experiences have included a range of large public affairs, regular churchsponsored events, and informal gatherings of family or friends. The ideal of the quilting bee has served as a metaphor for communal service, civic participation, the American pioneer spirit, and for democracy itself. Group quilting also has traditionally offered opportunities for women to gather to socialize. Quilts are frequently associated with preparations for marriage. In many traditional communities, the bride’s family typically expects to supply the young couple’s household furnishings, including textiles. Some writers have stated that young women were expected to make or gather a certain number (often twelve) of quilts before marriage, and this may have been true at times for some families or in some communities. In many families, past and present, a special quilt is presented to a woman when she marries. Many women make small quilts for children, whether their own or those of relatives or friends. Many women first discover the satisfaction of quilting by making a quilt as a gift, then go on to make quilts for themselves and others.

~ QUINCEANERA 499

Before the development and adoption of the sewing machine in the 1850s, all sewing was done by hand. Late-nineteenth-century quiltmakers frequently used machine stitching to construct quilt tops. While some also used the machine to quilt the layers together, the majority of quilts from this period were made by hand. During the early twentieth century, the colonial revival movement encouraged a nostalgic interest in decorative arts associated with the past. Quiltmakers of this era often eschewed the sewing machine as inappropriate for their attempts to reinterpret the ‘‘colonial’’ heritage of quiltmaking. During the late twentieth century, quiltmaking experienced another cyclical revival as many women and men discovered the craft. The new generation of quiltmakers spurred the growth of numerous commercial enterprises, supplying fabric, tools, classes, and publications; and they formed quilting clubs, usually called ‘‘guilds,’’ throughout the United States and in many other countries. See also: Aesthetics; Dowry; Folk Art; Material Culture; Needlework; Sewing; Women’s Friendship Groups; Women’s Work. References: American Quilt Study Group. Uncovering. Journal. Lincoln, NB: American Quilt Study Group, 1980– ; Benberry, Cuesta. Always There: The African-American Presence in American Quilts. Louisville: Kentucky Quilt Project, 1992; Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995; Frye, Gladys-Marie. Stitched From the South: Slave Quilts from the Antebellum South. Reprint edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002; New York: Dutton Studio Books, 1990; Horton, Laurel. Quiltmaking in America: Beyond the Myths. Nashville: Rutledge Hill, 1994; ———. Mary Black’s Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005; Ice, Joyce. ‘‘Splendid Companionship and Practical Assistance.’’ In Quilted Together: Women, Quilts, and Communities, 6–32. Delhi, NY: Delaware County Historical Association, 1989; National Digital Library Program and the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, American Memory. ‘‘Quilts and Quiltmaking in America, 1978– 1996.’’ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/qlthtml/qlthome.html (accessed August 11, 2008); Pershing, Linda. The Ribbon Around the Pentagon: Peace by Piecemakers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996.

Laurel Horton

Quincea ~nera ~ La quinceanera, literally ‘‘the fifteenth year,’’ is an important rite of passage for Latina girls. The term also refers to the girl whose quincea~ nera is being celebrated. Rituals that mark status changes—graduation, marriage, and induction into different groups (military, scouts, and first jobs)—usually involve special dress, a period of isolation with peers and away from the rest of society, some kind of formal ceremony, and recognition of the changed status. Usually, the young woman, along with her family, community, and church, marks her transition to adulthood with a special Mass at church and a party. Non-Catholic quincea~ neras may also have a church service. Until the 1950s, the Catholic service involved the saying of a rosary only, lest it be too much like a wedding. Derived from Spanish and Western European coming-out or coming-of-age parties, which announced a girl’s

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impending womanhood and readiness for marriage to eligible men, the custom is observed in many parts of Mexico, Puerto Rico, several countries in Central and South America, and among many Latino communities in the United States and Canada. Debutante balls (from the French, d ebut, literally making a beginning) or coming-out parties evolved in early industrial Europe as a way to ensure marital alliances between young men and women of the aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeoisie. These social introductions provided a way for the sons and daughters of the up-and-coming middle class to marry into the gentry. The former improved their social standing, while the latter gained capital. Besides being the topic of many a Victorian novel, this tradition was introduced to colonial Philadelphia and parts of the American South in the mideighteenth century. Frequently known as cotillions, the practice, which persists in the United States, has evolved into charity balls for young men and women from families with relatively high income levels and social standing. Atlanta, Boston, Charleston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City, Memphis, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, Richmond, Savannah, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, to name just a few, continue to host balls and cotillions. The parents of debutantes must contribute funds to a particular cause for their daughters to gain entree, and thus be introduced to the appropriate potential suitors. The ritual, like the quincea~ nera, involves escorts, flower girls, and other participants. Like other rituals, debuts and quincea~ neras provide a communitysanctioned method of marking natural or social transitions when outcomes are unpredictable; they help individuals feel that they belong to a larger group. Such ceremonies attempt to control the natural world by marking a natural, physical change like birth, adolescence, and death with a social/ sacred ceremony. Through such transitional rituals (rites of passage), individuals learn their role in the larger social group; such ceremonies pass on group history to novices and remind the larger group of the importance of cultural continuity. Yet, every generation makes changes arising from local and personal taste as well as from variable family traditions that serve to keep the ritual relevant as it ushers each quincea~ nera into the next phase of community life. According to Merenciana Cortez, a fourth-generation Mexican American residing in Iowa, her quincea~ nera lets ‘‘the world know that I’m becoming a young woman now and have to take on responsibility. I’m not the little girl anymore who needs help. [The quincea~ nera is] a community effort, a family effort—not just your parents, but you have godparents who contribute to everything. Everybody pitches in for you. You have a godmother who buys your dress for you or makes it. You have at least fourteen escorts, boys and girls. Think of it like a marriage ceremony, except there’s no groom.’’ Before her birthday, Merenciana spent several months working on her quincea~ nera. Her mother made the dresses for all fourteen of her attendants, each of whom represented one of her fourteen years, with the quincea~ nera herself representing the fifteenth. ‘‘Late nights, [my mother and I would] stay up cutting the patterns out and marking them. I had plenty of fun marking dresses for hems. She’d sit there and sew with her little Singer [sewing machine].’’

~ QUINCEANERA 501

At the party on the evening after the Mass, the attendants dance first, traditionally a waltz. Next, the quincea~ nera dances with one or two of her male attendants while the rest of the young people also dance. Finally, the young woman dances with her father and her padrino (male sponsor). Only then can the rest of the guests come out on the dance floor. Sponsors, known as padrinos and madrinas, usually pay for the special items used in the girl’s quincea~ nera ceremony: her earrings (los aretes), necklace (el collar), ring (el anillo), headpiece (la corona or diadema), bouquet (el ramo), the food for the party (la comida), the band (la  musica), the invitations (las invitaciones), and souvenirs for the guests (los recuerdos). Often, the seamstress who makes the girl’s quincea~ nera dress ~ also creates a last doll (la ultima muneca) with a similar dress, a keepsake symbolic of leaving childhood behind. After the religious ceremony, a particularly touching part of the social ceremony takes place: the girl removes her flat shoes, which her parents take, and replaces them with high heels, marking her transition to adulthood. See also: Dolls; Family Folklore; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Tradition; Women’s Folklore. References: Alvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Plume, 1991; ‘‘Ana’s Quincea~ nera Web Page!’’ n.d. http://latino.sscnet.ucla.edu/research/ folklore/quinceaneras/ (accessed August 5, 2005); Cant u, Norma E. Canicula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995; ———. ‘‘Chicana Life Cycle Rituals.’’ In Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, eds. Norma E. Cant u and Olga Najera-Ramirez. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Chavez, Denise. The Last of the Menu Girls. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1986; Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1983; Cohen, D. The Circle of Life: Rituals from the Human Family. San Francisco: HarperCollins, ~ 1991; Erevia, Sister Angela. Quinceanera. San Antonio, TX: Mexican American Cultural ~ Center, 1980; ‘‘History of the Quinceanera as a rite of passage.’’ n.d. http://latino.sscnet. ucla.edu/research/folklore/quinceaneras/aqlitrep.htm (accessed August 5, 2005; Holland, ~ Elizabeth. ‘‘Quinceanera: Latino Sweet Sixteen,’’ from an interview with Carmen Neris, Philadelphia, 1992. http://www2.hsp.org/exhibits/Balchpercent20exhibits/rites/latino. ~ html (accessed August 5, 2005); Lankford, Mary D. Quinceanera: A Latina’s Journey into Womanhood. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1994; Manning, T. C. Quincea~ nera Guidelines. Multilingual Apostolate Spanish Liturgy: Archdiocese of Los Angeles Liturgical ~ Directives Official Bulletin, 1978; Matiella, A. C. La Quinceanera. Santa Cruz, CA: Network Publications, 1989; McLane, D. ‘‘The Cuban-American Princess.’’ New York Times Magazine, February 26, 1995, 42–43; Orlean, S. ‘‘Old-fashioned Girls.’’ The New Yorker 65 (February 12, 1990): 82–88; ‘‘Quincea~ nera/Fifteenth birthday, female.’’ n.d. http://www.galegroup. com/free_resources/chh/activities/quinceanera.htm (accessed August 5, 2005); Quintanilla, G. C. and J. B. Silman. El Espiritu Siempre Eterno del Mexico Americano. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1977; Santiago, Esmeralda. When I Was Puerto Rican. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993; Smith, R. H. ‘‘Sweet Fifteen: a cross between a wedding ~ and a deb ball, the Mexican quinceanera party marks a girl’s entry into womanhood.’’ Texas Monthly 16 (January, 1988): 96–99.

Rachelle H. Saltzman

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R Race People, places, histories, and stories; customs and cuisine; music, speech, dance, and ornamentation—all of this and more reside in the concept of ‘‘race.’’ The notion of race, as opposed to ethnicity, has a complex and convoluted history. For folklorists, the idea’s backgound exemplifies the processes of mental category formation and maintenance as well as the profound significance of ideational and customary continuity. Taken to mean ‘‘distinct kind’’ or ‘‘species,’’ race is an etic (outsider’s) analytical category intended to classify individuals and groups of people in terms of their physiological traits and behavioral tendencies. In the case of race in North America, we learn about the other, as we learn all of our folkways, informally, as a ‘‘fact of life.’’ The very concept of race is an item of folklore, a product of European male mythologizing, taxonomizing, and othering as normative social processes. Its compelling metaphors, beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, values, social practices, popular culture, and material culture are felt not only in North America, but throughout the world. Racism and sexism combine in pervasive yet insidious ways, and traditional and popular cultures are central supports that buttress the arrangement. The origins of racism are linked with ancient attempts to distinguish women from men. Nevertheless, activist women of Color and their allies, including folklorists, continue to work against a system that unfairly privileges some women and men over others. The notion of race as a biological fact, initially disputed by American evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin in 1972, has yielded in recent decades to the idea that race is a social construction, albeit an occasionally useful or even welcome one, especially when it comes to allocating federal funds for social programs. Groups designated as races can be considered ethnicities in the sense that they are also historical collectivities claiming descent from a common set of ancestors. Historian and race theorist George Frederickson offers a helpful distinction between ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘ethnicity’’ when he writes that race is ‘‘what happens when ethnicity is deemed essential or indelible or hierarchical’’ (154–155).

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Some contemporary evolutionary biologists, however, insist that race is ‘‘real.’’ Their contention arises from recent results of work on the human genome. They claim that although the shapes of our eyes, noses, or skulls, and our hair color, skin color, and the heaviness or hairiness of our bodies are admittedly misleading guides to our ancestry, all of these features taken together show genetic correlations to the five races identified by classical European anthropology: Europeans (White), East Asians (Yellow), Africans (Black), Native Americans (Red), and Australasians (Brown). These color designations survive in North American folklore as well—and in a notoriously essentialized hierarchy of value—in the form of a civil rights era girls’ jump-rope rhyme: If If If If If

you’re you’re you’re you’re you’re

White, you’re right Yellow, you’re mellow Red, go ahead Brown, stick around Black, get back (Riggs 1986)

According to evolutionary biologist Armand Marie Leroi, ‘‘people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well.’’ However, Leroi’s second reason for retaining the concept—one clearly in concert with race as a social construction—claims that ‘‘Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.’’ Stereotypes are, of course, also ‘‘a shorthand that enables us to speak . . . with no great precision’’ about other people. If the Basque are a race, so too, for example, are the Roma (Gypsies), Bantu-speakers, the Hmong, Jews, the Boer—and among many Americans since the attacks of September 11, 2001—Muslims. But the use of the word ‘‘race’’ in these cases is an absurdity to even tangentially educated people, who generally recognize that there are no subspecies of Homo sapiens sapiens. Thus, for example, Muslims (adherents of Islam) comprise a wide variety of ethnocultural and linguistic groups around the world that are culturally and physiologically different from one another. Similarly, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews come from different parts of the European continent and are also culturally and physiologically distinct. Kwame Appiah makes a useful distinction between the adjectives ‘‘racial’’ and ‘‘racialized.’’ The former term alludes to purportedly intrinsic and unchangeable human traits and tendencies, while the latter, as suggested above, refers to the ways in which particular traits and tendencies are projected onto human populations, thereby creating identities for peoples who do not otherwise share one. Blacks, for example, did not think of themselves as ‘‘Black,’’ ‘‘Negro,’’ or ‘‘African’’ before the advent of the slave trade. Further, racism, classism, and sexism constitute interlocking oppressions. Our historically preconceived ideas about race, like those pertaining to class distinctions, cannot be productively divorced from our historically preconceived ideas about sex and gender. Wealth and slavery—and sexualization and mis-sexualization—like racialization and ‘‘color blindness,’’ create mental categories of otherness, not descriptions of cultures or persons.

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In De Generatione Animalium (On the Generation of Animals) and other works, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) established an extraordinary—and remarkably durable—categorical distinction between females and males in his explanation of their differential contributions to embryonic development. He posits that the irrational, passive female body is merely the matter upon which the effective, active, rational male principle (semen) works to generate life. He compares male semen to ‘‘the artist’’ and the female body to the ‘‘raw material’’ out of which the male shapes his ‘‘art’’ (a new person like himself). Additionally, all of the Greek virtues reside in the male; women, by contrast, are duplicitous, sneaky, and grossly material in both their bodies and ambitions. Aristotle’s legacy to us is that we still imagine ‘‘femininity’’ as belonging to ‘‘a race apart.’’ In this view, women’s feminine falseness of speech can never be tempered by masculine candor to produce a more-or-less honest, more-or-less spiritual, woman, any more than mating a mallard with a mole will yield a duck-billed platypus. In 1862, Victorian anatomist Robert Knox stated authoritatively that ‘‘men [sic] are of various Races; call them Species, if you will; call them permanent Varieties; it matters not . . . in human history race is everything’’ (quoted in Ritvo: 77). Taking their lead from Aristotle and Carl Linnaeus’s 1735 System Naturae (The System of Nature), a taxonomical system that took great pains to separate humans from other animals—and apparently confusing females with straightforward males—eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury British naturalists considered the male representative in every species, claiming that ‘‘When a female individual comes under notice, it is frequently very difficult, if not impossible, to determine the species to which she belongs’’ (quoted in Ritvo: 165). In terms of sex and gender, taxonomic classification essentially functioned as a metaphor for preexisting attitudes and beliefs about the ambiguous but unbridgeable gap between the sexes. A very early example of just such a gendered folk taxonomy is evident in Semonides of Amorgos’ poem dating to the seventh century BCE, ‘‘On Women’’ (Trans. Marilyn Arthur, now Katz), in which he describes women as belonging to ten ‘‘tribes,’’ all but one of which bring misery to their husbands. The poem begins with the claim that ‘‘From the beginning, the god made the mind of woman a thing apart,’’ then goes on to describe the various and specific entities from which all women arise: the filth-wallowing sow, the crafty fox, the yapping dog, the simple-minded dust of the Earth, the changeable sea; the horny and obstinate donkey, the indolent and luxury-loving mare, the ugly and tricky monkey, and finally, the clean and industrious bee, to whom no blame may be attached (Pomeroy: 49–52). The idea that women constitute a species or race ‘‘apart’’ has not been abandoned in the modern imagination. When presented with a genetics research finding that about 15 percent of the 200 to 300 genes on the second X (female) chromosome, assumed passive until 2005, are, in fact, active, complex, and unpredictable, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times opined: ‘‘This means men’s generalizations about women are correct, too. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different species.’’ Of course, to be members of different biological species, women and men would each have to be capable of producing fertile offspring within

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their own group—women with women, and men with men. This result is not (yet) scientifically possible. Certainly, ancient Greek males perceived the fictional Amazons (no males) as a race apart from themselves, so much so that their existence seems to have required a complementary species, the Centaurs (all males) to keep their dimorphically gendered world in balance. Each same-sex species represented an extreme form of masculinity: in Amazons, it was blended as the monstrous-human (armed women) and in Centaurs, with the bestial-human (irrational men) to produce an abyss of difference between the two anti-logical species. Racism, which ‘‘expresses itself in institutional patterns or social practices that have adverse effects on members of groups thought of as ‘races’’’ (Frederickson: 151), is the result of such inherited category formation as well. If women were today, as in the ancient world, considered a race apart, we could say that they were subject to ‘‘racism,’’ regardless of their skin color or region of origin. But women of Color are more historically burdened by othering than are White women. Racism is a conscious or unconscious, acknowledged or unacknowledged, personal or institutionalized hatred (or alternatively, a romantic idealization) of groups and persons unlike oneself. Plantation slavery in the United States, starting when the first enslaved Africans made landfall at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, has had a lasting, brutal, and cancerous effect on North America’s varied cultures’ histories, politics, gender relations, and folkways. Yet much of its legacy remains invisible to, and therefore rarely spoken of, among Whites. Most of us, for example, are unaware of the history of the Sims’ speculum, an object familiar to any woman who has undergone an allopathic gynecological examination. Folklorist Tyrone Yarbrough has recently published on James Marion Sims, ‘‘the father of American gynecology,’’ who developed the instrument by brutally experimenting on the bodies of enslaved women in South Carolina in the 1840s. Women of Color in the United States and Canada are still in the position of being targeted both as people of Color and as women. Though obviously genocidal practices like the notorious Tuskegee experiments (1932–1972), in which African American men were infected with syphilis and left untreated so that White researchers could follow the progress of the disease to its inevitable mortal resolution, no longer continue in the same form, the categories and stereotypes that both Black and White North Americans employ daily do. Ongoing racial profiling by police organizations, racially targeted environmental degradation, and the disproportionate incarceration of Black men (and increasingly, women) are only a few examples. Yet the academic study of Folklore, intended as it is to speak for and with the marginalized, has not historically privileged women of Color in its discourse. Significantly more folklore research is needed by and about women of Color, that is, by those best suited to discuss and combat (along with more White, anti-racist feminists) the roles that racializing stereotypes play in their lives. Stereotypes—non-evaluative characterizations that focus on only one or a few attributes of a group or individual involving ‘‘either-or’’ judgments—are

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notoriously stubborn and difficult to dispel. Contemporary White women stereotype Black women and vice versa. Black women are anecdotally described by Whites as lower-class, caring, funny, loud, honest, stubborn, and without ambition, though more intelligent than their male peers. This last stereotype thrusts its own disproportionately heavy burden on heterosexual Black women. White women, on the other hand are characterized as sensitive, materialistic, emotional, and attractive. These caricatures have their origins in the post-Civil War period known as Jim Crow, an overt form of apartheid that ruled customary life for Blacks and Whites in the American South from 1876 until, arguably, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The most prevalent, and perhaps the most insidious image used to ‘‘represent’’ Black women under Jim Crow, was the ‘‘Mammy’’ figure, described in activist-filmmaker Marlon Riggs’ Ethnic Notions as an unthreateningly sexless, strong, pitch-black, docile, rough-mannered, ugly, controlling, bandana-wearing, forever-smiling, happily obedient defender of the White family who owned her. Her distinctive physical features—she is fat and kinky-haired with bulging eyes and huge lips—make her both ridiculous and grotesque. Ethel Waters plays a Mammy character in Cabin in the Sky (1943), in which, as she irons her White mistress’s clothes, she sings ‘‘Darkies Never Dream.’’ Other enduring stereotypes include the ‘‘Pickaninny’’ girl, the ‘‘Tragic Mulatta,’’ the ‘‘Evil Temptress,’’ and the ‘‘Hoodoo Woman.’’ Alternatively, an empathetic set of representations of four different individual civil-rights-era women can be found in Nina Simone’s brilliant composition, ‘‘Four Women’’ (1966)—Aunt Sarah (an elderly worker), Siffronia (a mixed-race child of rape), Sweet Thing (a light-skinned sex worker), and Peaches (an angry militant). Racializing stereotypes of other women of Color abound as well. Although Latinas may have been born in North America or have come to the United States or Canada from any number of Spanish-speaking countries, they are lumped together in the racializing imagination. Especially since the rise of the anti-immigration movement in the United States, Latinas are generally thought by Whites to be Mexican if they live in the Southwest, Puerto Rice~ na in New York, and Cuban in Florida. While the distinctive cultural traits of Spaniards, Uruguayans, Venezuelans, Colombians, and Dominicans are radically different from one another, the stereotype is the same for all. Latinas are anecdotally perceived by Whites as both sullen and sociable; both sexually passive and antagonistic; intelligent but uneducated; and materialistic but lacking in ambition. The fact that some of these traits contradict one another should come as no surprise given that they reflect White attitudes, not the personal traits of the women at whom they are aimed. Unable to distinguish between persons from the majority-Asian regions of Central, East, and Southeast Asia, Whites also caricature Asian women as if they all belong to the same ethnic group. A Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or Hmong woman living in North America is expected to be soft-spoken, wellmannered, scholastically ambitious, hard-working, family-oriented, and passive. On the other hand, she can also expect to be hypersexualized by both White men and women. All First Nations women, regardless of their

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ethnicity, are perceived as physically, emotionally, and spiritually strong, but are also expected to be silent, sullen, passive, and long-suffering. Again, it is not only women whom these characteristics attempt to describe, but the multiple historical burdens of misogyny, White supremacy, colonization, enslavement, and sexual exploitation that they have been forced to carry. But racism is not abstract, especially when combined with nationalist, nativist, and xenophobic sentiments of the majority population with whom people of Color live in North America. According to the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, there was a 40 percent increase in the number of racially motivated hate groups in the United States between 2000 and 2006. Much hatred is driven by such groups’ exploitation of White American fears about ‘‘undocumented immigrants’’ taking jobs away from them, demanding free health care, refusing to learn to speak English, and even conspiring to reclaim the Southwest for Mexico. Using the same logic that upholds institutional racism in education, the courts, banking, employment, housing, politics, publishing, and other areas of modern life, hate groups—including the Ku Klux Klan, racist skinheads, neoconfederates, White nationalists, Christian Identity Movement members, and others—see their own racial identities as normative and others as threats to good order, economic stability, and ‘‘the American way of life.’’ Women of Color suffer disproportionately from these attitudes and the frequently violent behaviors that accompany them, including rape. In addition to the bias against them that raped women experience from doctors, police, prosecutors, judges, and even their own defense lawyers, internalized oppression—the belief that what racialized stereotypes say about oneself must, on some level, be true—makes such violence especially difficult to address. For example, after enduring centuries of dehumanizing attitudes and acts at the hands of Whites, Black women are more unwilling to report rape than White women, in part because of their own acceptance of race myths (such as that victims deserve some blame for what happens to them or that women cannot be forced into sex) at higher rates than White women. Psychologically internalized privilege is internalized oppression’s opposite, allowing the holder to assume that her own pale skin will ensure a life of comfort, if not wealth; respect, if not honor; and social harmony, if not bliss. The contrasting expectations that North Americans expect for their lives as a result of the racialized group into which they were born were immortalized in a baseball metaphor attributed to Texas journalist and social-justice activist Molly Ivins: ‘‘Some of us were born on third base, told that we’ve just hit a triple. Some of us were born on home plate, told that we’ve just struck out.’’ The effects of knowing that you may never get your turn at bat—or that having been born both female and of Color means that you have already racked up two strikes—are frustrating, demoralizing, depressing, and intolerable. In her invaluable article ‘‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,’’ anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh compares White privilege to male privilege. Her list of expectations as a White woman includes such

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statements as, ‘‘I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed,’’ ‘‘Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability,’’ and ‘‘If a traffic cop pulls me over or the Internal Revenue Service audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.’’ McIntosh makes a useful distinction between those privileges that ‘‘should be the norm in a just society,’’ and those which ‘‘like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.’’ Her article movingly demonstrates that white skin privilege and racism must be properly understood, and that both harm all who come into contact with them, not only those marginalized groups that suffer their most obviously damaging effects. In majority-White North America, women of Color especially, again because they belong to two devalued groups simultaneously, inevitably possess what sociologist and philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) called ‘‘double-consciousness,’’ a concept he introduced in his now-classic The Souls of Black Folks (1903): It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s souls by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his [sic] two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois: 2–3, emphases added)

The passage describes the experience of hearing and witnessing one’s knowledge of oneself ventriloquized and reflected by an other who has, in fact, both failed to apprehend oneself as truly other and simultaneously appropriated one’s otherness in order to define itself. It describes experiencing oneself as ‘‘not me,’’ a racialized caricature of a human being. It is well understood that Whites have, since fifteenth-century explorers starting bringing them into contact with persons unlike themselves, used the racialized other as a means of self-identification. Generally having more cultural capital than people of Color, especially women, they are not compelled to understand what is going on, for example, in a Zuni woman’s or a Chicana’s mind. She is unlikely to be in a position to affect her White interlocutor one way or another. However, she must know what is going on in the mind of the White other because ignorance or inaccuracy about what that other is thinking can have devastating consequences for her. But always having to ‘‘be of two minds’’ when in the company of Whites is exhausting. Du Bois famously said that ‘‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.’’ Young women of Color, and especially feminists of Color, are joining their energies today rather than letting race fatigue ‘‘slow them down or turn them ’round’’ (in the words of a civil-rights-era protest song). The many activist feminist theorists of Color whose anti-racist writing has been influential in Folklore, Ethnomusicology, and related disciplines include Gloria Anzald ua, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Y. Davis, bell hooks, Winona LaDuke, Uma Narayan, and Julia Kristeva. Noted feminist

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women folklorists of Color include Paula Gunn Allen (1939–2008), Norma Cant u, Rayna Green, and Marilyn White. Taking what they know of themselves and their traditions as valid rather than believing racialized stereotypes about them, they will certainly help pave a way for eventual changes in North American attitudes about race, gender, and personhood in the twenty-first century. See also: Activism; Class; Ethnicity; Feminisms; Film; Folk Belief; Folk Group; Gender; Immigration; Jump-Rope Rhymes; Politics; Rape; Sexism; Violence; Women Warriors. References: Dowd, Maureen. ‘‘X-celling Over Men.’’ New York Times, March 20, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/opinion/20dowd.html?hp (accessed December 31, 2007); duBois, Page. Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-history of the Great Chain of Being. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991 [1982]; Feminist Sexual Ethics Project. ‘‘Victim Race and Rape.’’ http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/ Pages/victimraceandrape.html (accessed December 31, 2007); Frederickson, George M. Racism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002; Hernandez, Daisy, and Bushra Rehman, eds. Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. New York: Seal Press, 2002; Leroi, Armand Marie. ‘‘A Family Tree in Every Gene.’’ New York Times, March 14, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/ opinion/14leroi.html (accessed December 29, 2007); McIntosh, Peggy. ‘‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.’’ Excerpted from Working Paper 189. Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, 1988. http://www.case.edu/president/aaction/ UnpackingTheKnapsack.pdf; Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken Books, 1975; Riggs, Marlon, dir. Ethnic Notions. California Newsreel, 1986; Ritvo, Harriet. The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997; Royce, Anya Peterson. ‘‘Symbols, Stereotypes, and Styles.’’ In Ethnic Identity: Strategies of Diversity, 145–178. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982; Simone, Nina. ‘‘Four Women.’’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼qCwME6Jpn3s (accessed December 30, 2007); Southern Poverty Law Center. ‘‘The Year in Hate.’’ Intelligence Report, vol. 125 (Spring 2007): 48–51; Yarbrough, Tyrone. ‘‘Slavery and Gynecology.’’ Denver Urban Spectrum, March 2006.

Liz Locke Rape Rape (from Latin rapere, ‘‘to seize or carry off by force’’) is today understood as a crime of violence—sexual acts forced upon a person—yet in the United States, legal definitions of rape vary from state to state. With the notable exception of incarcerated men, women comprise the majority of victims and men the majority of perpetrators of rape. In the United States in 2004, nearly 95,000 women were raped, yielding an average for that year of one forcible rape every six minutes (DOJ/FBI). In Mexico in 2006, the rate was about two rapes per hour (Reyes 2006). In the early 1980s, ‘‘rape’’ was replaced in the Criminal Code of Canada by the term ‘‘sexual assault’’; still, only 6 percent of sexual assaults are reported to police (Canadian Health Network), and reported rates in 2004 were one per 1,357 people (Violence Prevention Initiative). In the United States in 2001, Black and White women experienced rape at approximately the same rate; however, Native American women were two and a half times as likely to be raped as White women, and four times as likely as Asian women (DOJ). Although sexual

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violence against Latinas in the United States dropped in 2005 (ibid.), hundreds of rapes, abductions, and murders of women in the U.S.-Mexico border towns of Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, and Chihuahua that began in 1994 remain unsolved as of mid-2007 (Amnesty International). And in 2003, onethird of the 160,000 women who served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan reported having been raped by another soldier or superior officer; 37 percent reported multiple rapes, and 14 percent reported that they were gang-raped (Corbett). Though pervasive, the existence of rape in North America is, as elsewhere, often denied. Though psychologically—and sometimes physically— devastating to its victims, they are often stigmatized if they report the crime. Law enforcers encourage victims to prosecute, yet victims are often doubted and blamed, and conviction rates are far lower for rape than for other violent crimes (DOJ Convictions). While the folklore of rape has its origins in the ancient world, the experience of rape—and male ambivalence about it—has changed little over time. Given its prevalence and the psychological tensions that imbue it, rape is frequently the subject of folklore, including myths, folktales, urban legends, jokes, anecdotes, ballads, profanity, proverbs, cartoons, Internet video clips, personal-experience narratives, and song lyrics. Each genre offers both implicit and explicit examples that reference sexual violence. A foundational story in Western civilization tells of the early Romans’ rape of the Sabine women. In order to people their new city, they seized women from the neighboring Sabines; here, the term ‘‘rape’’ refers as much to their act of carrying the women away as to their behavior toward them afterward. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a book that portends to be a history of the world, the reader is regaled with tales involving more than fifty rapes, some comic, some sympathetic, all lovingly told. Urban legends such as ‘‘Scream Session Rape’’ (a woman is raped as her cries for help go unheard during a campuswide scream session) and folktales such as ‘‘Little Red Riding Hood’’ (a wolf, often interpreted as a rapist, menaces a girl visiting her grandmother) contribute to women’s fear of rape. The stories serve simultaneously as warnings and patriarchal strategies for restricting women’s independence. In ‘‘Sleeping Beauty,’’ a long-unconscious woman awakens to being kissed by a strange man. Rather than expressing outrage, she commits the rest of her life to him. General acceptance of this tale suggests widespread assent to the idea that men may engage in sexual acts with women without consent and that women want to be raped. Such stories also serve to reinforce the idea that it is primarily strangers who rape. In fact, it is estimated that in 80 percent of reported sexual attacks, the rapist is known to the victim; the estimate rises to 90 percent among college students (Center for Problem-Oriented Policing). Much folklore with rape content is indivisible from a patriarchal culture that equates masculinity with dominance. Robert Jensen asks us to . . . consider the results of a study on sexual assault on U.S. college campuses. Researchers found that 47 percent of the men who had raped said they expected to engage in a similar assault in the future, and 88 percent of the

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men who were reported for an assault that met the legal definition of rape were adamant that they had not raped.. . . Rape is illegal but the sexual ethic that underlies rape is woven into the fabric of the culture (Jensen 2002).

Males can prove their masculinity by sexually overpowering a woman, a child, or another man, even if only symbolically. Some jokes, for example, explicitly advocate rape without naming it, allowing both tellers and audience to deny the joke’s meaning and thus to support the protagonist’s desire to forcibly rape a woman: ‘‘I learned about sex watching neighborhood dogs. I think the most important thing I learned was: Never let go of the girl’s leg no matter how hard she tries to shake you off.’’ Others name the crime: ‘‘Why did they cut Helen Keller’s hands off before they raped her?’’ ‘‘So she couldn’t scream for help.’’ Such jokes normalize sexual violence, treating it with humor, thereby perpetuating denial of the enormity of the problem. Rape content in jokes also references homophobia, especially against homosexual males. In telling them, narrators express their hatred of homosexuals, and sometimes their own unrecognized homosexuality. Alluding to the idea that a gay man is likely to earn his living as an interior decorator, one joke asks, ‘‘How can you make a gay man scream twice?’’ to which the answer is, ‘‘Fuck him real hard. Then wipe your dick off on his curtains.’’ And a joke that enlists comic-book characters depicts the simultaneous rape of both a man and a woman by an American icon: Superman is flying around when he sees Wonder Woman laid out sunning herself nude. He decides to have a little fun. He swoops down, fucks her, and flies away so fast she can hardly tell what has happened. ‘‘What was that?’’ Wonder Woman asks. The Invisible Man says, ‘‘I don’t know, but my ass is killing me!’’

Profanity is rampant in allusions to sexual violence. In many expletives, the teller verbally rapes the receiver, as with the phrase ‘‘fuck you,’’ an example of the conflation of sexual penetration, violence, and domination. This conflation emerges frequently in political folklore. An image disseminated after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center depicts the rebuilt complex, this time with three towers, sized and positioned as the obscene ‘‘fuck you’’ hand gesture. The mass rape and the sexual enslavement of women during wartime were recognized as crimes against humanity only in 2001. On the other hand, survivors of sexual violence enlist various folklore genres as means to self-empowerment. Victoria L. Pitts (2003) explores how incest survivors modify their bodies with tattooing and piercing, a strategy for reclaiming their bodies and lives. And folklorist Susan Kalcik (1975) describes how women sharing personal narratives about rape contributed to consciousness raising in the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s: North American women realized the pervasiveness of sexual violence directed at them, thereby transforming rape from a personal into a political issue. Their efforts paved the way for the development of rape crisis centers, rape counseling programs, self-defense classes, ‘‘Take Back the Night’’ activities on college campuses and beyond, and improvements in the legal definitions of rape.

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Sharing personal-experience narratives plays an important role in victims’ healing processes. Talking about what happened can help survivors define their experiences, pursue legal action, and disseminate information about perpetrators. Because victims continue to be stigmatized, blamed, and shamed, many girls, boys, women, and men never reveal their experiences, contributing to long-term trauma and psychological difficulties as well as the continued societal denial of the prevalence of rape. See also: Activism; Body Modification and Adornment; Consciousness Raising; Folktale; Joke; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Personal-Experience Narrative; Sexuality; Violence; Women’s Movement. References: Amnesty International. ‘‘Mexico: Ending the brutal cycle of violence against women in Ciudad Juarez and the city of Chijhuahua.’’ March 2004. http:// www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR41/011/2004 (accessed June 5, 2007); Canadian Health Network. ‘‘Sexual Assault: Dispelling the Myths.’’ n.d. http://www. womanabuseprevention.com/html/sexual_assault.html (accessed June 5, 2007); Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (COPS). n.d. http://www.popcenter.org (accessed August 11, 2008); Corbett, Sara. ‘‘The Women’s War.’’ New York Times Magazine, March 18, 2007; Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics: ‘‘Convictions per 1,000 population.’’ n.d. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs; ———. Federal Bureau of Investigation. ‘‘Crime in the United States 2004: Forcible Rape.’’ n.d. http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/forcible_rape.html (accessed June 1, 2007); ———. Bureau of Justice Statistics: ‘‘Victim Characteristics.’’ n.d. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/ cvict_v.htm#race (accessed June 5, 2007); Ellis, Bill. ‘‘Making the Big Apple Crumble: The Role of Humor in Constructing a Global Response to Disaster.’’ In Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture, ed. Peter Narvaez, 35–79. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003; Gilman, Lisa. Experience, Narrative, and Silencing: Exploring the Concealment of Sexual Violence. Master’s thesis, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1996; Kalcik, Susan. ‘‘‘. . . like Ann’s gynecologist or the time I was almost raped’: Personal Narratives in Women’s Rap Groups.’’ Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975): 3–11; Jensen, Robert. ‘‘Men’s pleasure, women’s pain: A dangerous sexual ethic is woven into cultural fabric.’’ Fredericksburg (TX) Free Lance-Star, September 1, 2002. http://uts. cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/rapeisnormal.htm (accessed June 1, 2007); Pierce-Baker, Charlotte. Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape. New edition. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000 [1988]; Pitts, Victoria L. In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; Reyes, Adria. ‘‘Mexico: Gender Violence Continues to Claim Victims.’’ Inter Press News Service Agency, August 14, 2006. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews¼34338; Richlin, Amy. ‘‘Reading Ovid’s Rapes.’’ In Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin, 158–179. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press; Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Revised edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; Violence Prevention Initiative: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador (Canada). n.d. http://www.gov.nf.ca/vpi (accessed August 11, 2008).

Lisa Gilman and Liz Locke Recipe Books Recipe books may be individually or collectively assembled and locally circulated or commercially produced and distributed collections of instructions for preparing food, usually as named dishes. Both kinds of recipe books have been the subject of scholarly examination, revealing both conformity and subversion in the cultural encoding of foodways. For many

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women, cookbooks represent a patriarchally sanctioned form of self-expression. Women compile and contribute to the books themselves, recreating dishes from recipes found therein. Generations of women have come to value such books as valuable archives of family and community history. One’s first encounter with a recipe book is often in the home kitchen, helping a female relative measure, mix, or stir. There, commercial cookbooks may bulge with loose sheets of paper upon which friends or family have written or printed favorites and recipes torn from magazines and newspapers. Frequently consulted recipes become marked with use; scribbled notes, stains, and splatters attest to repeat performances. Personal collections of recipes may begin with childhood favorites prepared by a mother or grandmother. Some gather these recipes in simple loose-leaf binders, perhaps protecting the pages with plastic covers. A grandmother’s handwritten recipe for a special dish in the repertoire of family tradition may be passed down as an heirloom from mother to daughter. Churches, temples, civic groups, and others produce community cookbooks that serve as fundraisers; but they also function (either intentionally or implicitly) as markers of class, ethnic, gender, and religious affinity. Lessons regarding group identity may be found in these pages—you are what you (do or do not) eat. As an enterprise of women’s groups for the last two centuries, community cookbooks are an important resource for documenting the histories and modes of regional foodways. Some foodways scholars have recently interpreted cookbooks representing national cuisines as hegemonic texts, whether written by cultural insiders or outsiders. Operating on the same principles of affiliation as community and regional collections, membership, and the terms thereof, are writ large in such texts. Similarly, the popularity of ethnic cookbooks in North America contrasts sharply with calls for immigration restrictions and aggressive foreign policy. It is crucial to understand recipe books, at any level of production, as complex texts written in the polysemic language of food. While a treasury of family tradition may be read as women’s gifts to one another down through the generations, cookbooks may also be read as a denial of individual expression in that approved forms for food preparation are fixed and standardized, discouraging creativity and innovation. A community collection can serve as a manifesto of exclusivity in approving the foodways and cultures of particular groups as representatives of a nation or other collectivity, thus excluding all others. The documentation of national cuisine as a tool of empire can locate food cultures in an idealized past now transcended by civilization. See also: Foodways; Housekeeping; Tradition-Bearer; Women’s Work References: Bower, Anne L., ed. Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1997; Inness, Sherrie A., ed. Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2001; ———. Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2001; Long, Lucy, ed. Culinary Tourism. Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 2004; Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Holly Everett

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Recitation Recitations are non-improvised, solo dramatic readings or memorized oral performances of set pieces of prose or poetry. Even in patriarchal cultures and religions, women have often been significant oral performers of sacred texts—reading or reciting biblical scripture verses or reciting the Qur’an, for instance. As teachers, European and colonized women have been centrally responsible for the maintenance of formal school practices such as recitation and monologue whereby children learn by heart patriotic verse, popular poetry, and the canonical classics like Shakespeare and Keats, and perform them in class or at school concerts. However, recitation or monologue in the Anglo European and North American folk traditions is often described as a quintessentially masculine genre, performed by men about male culture. Some of the best-known recitation texts relate to male occupations such as that of the cowboy, and men often recite, in addition to their own compositions, the works of poets like Rudyard Kipling and Robert Service, whose topics are militaristic and/or colonial. Male culture is a common recitation topic, but women are frequently its subjects. Many African American toasts not only pertain to male prison and drug cultures, but are also virulently misogynistic. Negative portrayals of women as viragos and whores pervade the tradition cross-culturally. In Newfoundland, Francis Colbert was often asked to recite ‘‘St. Peter at the Gate’’ (about a loud, pious, obnoxious, pushy woman who is denied a place in heaven) at weddings, where the text serves as a forceful example of how women should not behave. Moses Ingram’s ‘‘The New School Marm’’ is about a sexually aggressive teacher who seduces a young man after a community dance, but hypocritically punishes her male students for looking at her body. Nevertheless, there is a strong tradition in Britain, the United States, and Canada of women who both create and perform recitations. The contexts in which women perform recitations tend to be within their own families and communities. At family get-togethers in the rural United States, women recited pieces of their own composition, humourous verse, nonsense rhymes, and even song texts if they were not confident of their singing ability. The female and male poets in folklorist Karen Baldwin’s family wrote and recited works about each other which they performed only within the family, but also created poems about their community and current politics which they gave at schoolhouse and church gatherings. Recitations by both women and men are associated with ‘‘times’’—public or private social gatherings—in Newfoundland. Greta Hussey’s ‘‘The Family Album,’’ about an older woman introducing her community to a new arrival using her photograph collection, was presented at a ‘‘time’’ in her home community to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Newfoundland’s joining Canadian confederation. In a collection of western American recitations, male and female reciters are represented in approximately equal numbers, and women in this group recite their own, family members’ and popular pieces. At least one woman from Yorkshire recited her own compositions and those of popular poets at local entertainments. See also: Family Folklore; Folk Poetry.

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References: Baldwin, Karen. ‘‘Rhyming Pieces and Piecin’ Rhymes: Recitation Verse and Family Poem-Making.’’ Southern Folklore Quarterly, vol. 40, nos. 1/2 (1976): 209– 238; Cunningham, Keith, ed. The Oral Tradition of the American West: Adventure, Courtship, Family, and Place in Traditional Recitation. Little Rock, AR: August House Publishers, 1990; Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘The Family Album: A Newfoundland Women’s Recitation’’ in Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 6, nos.1/2 (1984): 39–62; Renwick, Roger deV. ‘‘Two Yorkshire Poets: A Comparative Study.’’ Southern Folklore Quarterly 40, no. 1/2 (1976): 239–282.

Pauline Greenhill

Red Riding Hood Red Riding Hood is the protagonist in a popular children’s folktale. It tells the story of a young girl on her way to visit her ailing grandmother and her encounter with a wolf. Sometimes viewed as a simple morality tale advising girls of the evils that arise from straying from parentally prescribed social expectations, the story has been widely and variously used and transformed. Since the advent of psychoanalysis, it is generally agreed that the girl’s red cape or hood is a symbol of menarche or menstruation. Le petit chaperon rouge (‘‘The little red hood’’), published by Charles Perrault in 1697, was designed for the entertainment of the French nobility. The story was intended as a warning to wealthy ladies about the charming young men of Parisian high society, men who could easily damage a woman’s reputation. A popular saying in France when a girl lost her virginity was that ‘‘she had seen the wolf.’’ The color red was associated with ‘‘fallen women.’’ € Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm’s version, Rotkappchen (1812), relayed Victorian ideals of virtue, emphasizing family solidarity and morality. The € Marchen (‘‘folktales’’) they collected and compiled were intended to be educational; the tale was told as a warning to not talk to strangers. However, modern critics tend to view the story as a warning to girls about the dangers of seduction and sex. Upon setting out to visit her aged grandmother, Little Red Cap is instructed by her mother not to stray from the forest path so that she does not drop the wine bottle she carries, a symbol of her virginity. Accosted by a charming wolf, she not only speaks with him, but in doing so realizes that he has devoured her grandmother and is about to eat her. In this variant, a huntsman appears who kills the wolf, thereby rescuing the girl (and her grandmother from the wolf’s stomach); the human-hunter (as opposed to the wolf-predator) as a rescuer of women places an emphasis on the patriarchal values of the Victorian age. However, in an early Italian variant, La finta nonna (‘‘The false grandmother’’), Red Riding Hood manages to escape the wolf’s predation through her own cunning and intelligence. The wolf has already eaten her grandmother, but the girl tricks him into following her to a river whose spirit she has bribed. The river swallows him up and Red Riding Hood escapes. Here, we are given a capable girl who matches wits with her seducer; the tale was received as a female coming-of-age story, rather than as a warning. A 1943 animated film depicts Red Riding Hood as a stripper, vamping for a wolf dressed in top hat and tails. In 1953, a cosmetics ad promised buyers

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of ‘‘Riding Hood Red’’ lipstick that it would turn ‘‘the most innocent look into a tantalizing invitation’’ and ‘‘bring the wolves out.’’ By the 1970s, feminist folktale scholars and others had begun to discuss the tale as a romanticization of rape; the Merseyside Fairy Story Collection, published in 1972, ended its version of the tale with Red Riding Hood stabbing the wolf to death with a sewing knife, skinning him, and using his fur to line her cloak (Orenstein 2002). In more radically feminist stylings, Red Riding Hood has become the aggressive seducer herself, using the wolf to obtain sexual pleasure and thus power over her attacker. See also: Cosmetics; Film; Folktale; Grandmother; Menarche; Menstruation; Rape; Violence. References: Calvino, Italo. Italian Folktales. Reissue edition. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1992; Douglas, Mary. ‘‘Consumed Children and Child Cannibals: Robertson Smith’s Attack on the Science of Mythology.’’ In Myth and Method, eds. Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger, 29–51. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996; Dundes, Alan, ed. Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989; McGlathery, James M. A History of Criticism on a Popular Classic. Columbia, SC: Camden House, Inc., 1993; Orenstein, Catherine. Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale. New York: Basic Books, 2002; Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Revised edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; Zipes, Jack, ed. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. Second edition. New York: Routledge, 1993; ———. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forest to the Modern World. Second edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Claire Dodd Region: Australia and New Zealand Australian and New Zealand folklore celebrates few women either as subjects or performers. This lack stems in part from the relatively recent frontier history of both countries, in which men greatly outnumbered women, and the dominance of masculine occupations such as whaling, sealing, gold mining, and shearing. Arising from this history, local conceptualizations of national character and folklore have tended to be explicitly male-biased. Australia’s most popular song and unofficial national anthem is ‘‘Waltzing Matilda,’’ a song that encapsulates the essence of the Australian national selfimage but, despite its title, mentions no women. White women appear in Australian folklore as pioneer heroines, enduring and surviving the isolation and dangers of life in the bush; or they are victims, in the motif of the White woman held captive by Aborigines, for example. But folk tradition seems to reserve most attention for women villains like the New Zealander Minnie Dean, the notorious ‘‘Winton baby farmer’’ who was hanged in 1895 for murdering the infants she adopted. Oral tradition holds that she killed babies with a hatpin and that nothing will grow on her grave. In the early 1980s, Australian Lindy Chamberlain also achieved notoriety as an infanticide. When her baby daughter Azaria vanished during a bush picnic, the coroner initially found that she had been carried off by a dingo (a wild dog). No body was ever found. A second inquest led to Lindy being charged with murdering the baby with a pair of

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scissors. Widespread rumors about the Chamberlains, who were Seventhday Adventists, suggested that Azaria had been killed in a bizarre religious sacrifice. Lindy’s tough and independent character, qualities that would have been praised in an Australian male, may have been negatively construed in a woman, fueling the rumors against her. Spectators at the trial wore T-shirts with the slogan, ‘‘Acquit the Dingo.’’ Chamberlain was convicted and spent several years in prison before the conviction was overturned. In the land of ‘‘blokes’’ (guys) and ‘‘sheilas’’ (girls or young women; girlfriends), male folk humor depicts women as alien and dangerously sexual creatures, while the male self-image is of the shy, hapless country boy who is closer to his sheepdog than to his girlfriend. In the 1950s and 1960s, the popular comic songs of New Zealander Peter Cape relied heavily on these stereotypes. In ‘‘Talking Dog,’’ the country bachelor relies on his dog (‘‘guri’’) to choose him a wife: He hops on the tractor and goes down to the hall Lots of lovely crows there lined up against the wall Says to his guri, ‘‘Leave the choice to you,’’ Dog cuts out a good one, says, ‘‘She’ll do.’’

During this period, the annual university student revues were a popular part of the local entertainment scene in New Zealand’s major cities. In some cities, women were not permitted to perform in public productions; female roles were played by male students in drag. A popular feature of these shows was the traditional male ballet, in which men in drag cavorted as hypersexualized women for laughs. When women did take leading roles, female characters were few and confined to stereotypes of the sexpot or (occasionally) the sexless career woman. Much of the research into the folklore of women in Australia and New Zealand has focused on Aboriginal and Maori women, including work on € the music and rituals of Aboriginal women, Aboriginal laments (ngathimanikay), and love songs (waiata aroha) sung by Maori women. Research has also begun to uncover the hitherto overlooked folk literature produced by European women, for example, the following traditional lullaby adapted by a woman living in a remote area in Western Australia: . . . I miss your Nan, no-one to help In times of strife when he gives me the belt The pub, it calls your dad away The beer, it takes all his shift-working pay.

Little of women’s folk speech has found its way into written form, but most Australian and New Zealand women would recognize a warning against a man from the ‘‘WHS’’ or ‘‘Wandering Hands Society,’’ would appreciate the skill required to ‘‘run up a dress,’’ and would know what to do when the ‘‘bubby’’ has a ‘‘cackie nappy’’ (a dirty diaper). Folk crafts showcase women’s abilities to improvise and ‘‘make do.’’ Australian Wagga blankets, for example, are made from recycled pieces of clothing and blankets sewn onto a backing made from flour sacks. Quilting,

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called ‘‘patchwork,’’ has seen a revival since the 1970s, influenced by the quilt revival in the United States. In a concession to the Australian climate, quilting of layers is usually absent. Hand-knitted goods are prized gifts, not because they are cheaper to produce than store-bought equivalents, but because they give concrete symbolic form to significant relationships with family and friends. Gardening is widely practiced by both sexes, but men and women may approach this hobby with different aesthetics and attitudes. Women gardeners are connected by networks of plant gifts and exchanges, and so for them, plants are meaningful because of the memories and social associations that they arouse. The country hall is the focal point of social life in rural districts in both countries. The hall was the location for community dances and other social events, where gender roles can be summed up by the traditional invitation formula used in New Zealand: ‘‘Ladies a plate; gents a crate.’’ In other words, men were responsible for bringing the beer; women were responsible for the food (as well as the clothes and decorations). At a country dance, the realm outside the hall was a male domain of surreptitious drinking (no alcohol was permitted inside), smoking, fighting, and pranks. The women were expected to stay inside all night, and many would be involved in ‘‘cutting the supper’’—preparing food for the supper that culminated the evening. The ‘‘kitchen tea’’ and the ‘‘deb ball’’ are two social events that Australian women celebrate primarily among and for themselves. Friends and bridesmaids arrange a kitchen tea, or gift evening, when a woman announces her wedding date. In the past, they were announced publicly and the whole district might attend, but today they are more likely to be private functions for women only. Guests bring gifts of a domestic nature, and enjoy morning or afternoon tea. The whole event serves to endorse the bride-to-be’s choice of partner. Deb balls marked the coming-out—the public social introduction—of marriageable young women. Widely popular in Australia from 1945 to the late 1960s, they are still a major social event in many rural communities. The balls are governed by strict conventions and include many features similar to weddings, including long white dresses, page boys and flower girls, a wedding-style cake, and formal speeches and toasts. In a 1980s variation, older women who never made their debut organize ‘‘second-chance deb balls.’’ Another variation is the ‘‘reverse deb ball’’ featuring men in drag, usually organized by soccer clubs to raise funds. See also: Cross-Dressing; Farm Women’s Folklore; Folk Custom; Foodways. References: Anderson, Hugh, Gwenda Beed Davey, and Keith McKenry. Folklife: Our Living Heritage: Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia. Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 1987; Cape, Peter. An Ordinary Joker: The Life and Songs of Peter Cape. Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2001; Carr, Julie. ‘‘In Search of the White Woman of Gippsland.’’ Australian Victorian Studies Annual 1 (1995): 41–50; Dixon, Miriam. The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present. Fourth edition. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999; Gentle, Allison. ‘‘Barbara Baynton and the Missing Women.’’ Australian Folklore 14 (1999): 32–43; Higgins, Christine. ‘‘Naturalizing ‘Horror Stories’: Australian Crime News as Popular Culture.’’ In Australian Popular Culture, ed. Ian Craven, 135–148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Hood, Lynley. Minnie Dean: Her Life and

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Crimes. New York: Penguin, 1994; Hosking, Susan. ‘‘‘I ‘Ad to ‘Ave Me Garden’: A Perspective on Australian Women Gardeners.’’ Meanjin, vol. 47, no. 3 (1988): 439–53; Hughes, Beryl, and Sheila Ahern. Redbrick and Bluestockings: Women at Victoria, 1899–1993. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1993; Isaacs, Jennifer. The Gentle Arts: 200 Years of Australian Women’s Domestic and Decorative Arts. Sydney: Lansdowne Press, 1987; Keesing, Nancy. Lily on the Dustbin: Slang of Australian Women and Families. New York: Penguin Books, 1982; Magowan, Fiona. ‘‘Shadows of Song: Exploring Research and Performance Strategies in Yolngu Women’s Crying-Songs.’’ Oceania, vol. 72, no. 2 (2001): 89–104; Orbell, Margaret. ‘‘My Summit Where I Sit: Form and Content in Maori Women’s Love Songs.’’ Oral Tradition, vol. 5, nos. 2/3 (1990): 185–204; O’Shea, Helen. ‘‘Kylie Does Her Deb.’’ Australian Folklore 8 (1993): 100–11; Seal, Graham. ‘‘Azaria Chamberlain and the Media Charivari.’’ Australian Folklore 1 (1987): 68–95.

Moira Smith Region: Canada The northernmost North American country, Canada, colonized and dominated first by Britain and France, and later dominated and culturally colonized by the United States, nevertheless retains a distinct sociocultural mix and political economy. The second largest country in the world, it is a confederation of ten provinces—Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia—and three territories—Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories. Its land size is matched by extreme cultural diversity, making it impossible to identify characteristics of Canadian women’s folklore and folklife that would be shared by all or that are unique to the country. Canada’s distinctiveness lies in the specific combination of ethnicities, regions, and cultures, not in singular elements. Nevertheless, unlike any other primarily English-speaking country except the United States, Canada has a long and continuing history of academic folklore scholarship. Women and feminists have contributed extensively to the documentation of its traditional and popular cultures, and have been particularly significant to the understanding of women’s roles in Canada’s folklore and folklife. Canada’s national centennial in 1967 inspired debate about Canadian identity. For example, some said that, unlike the United States—at the time described as a ‘‘melting pot’’ in which all ethnicities comprised a single amalgam—Canada was a mosaic. Canadian identity, then, formed a picture evident from a distance, but each element comprising that image retained its distinctiveness. Each ethnic and regional group making up Canada’s mosaic remained separate from, but nevertheless interacted with, the others. Sociologists claimed that Canada was a vertical mosaic, in which a few regions and ethnicities—particularly central Canada and the English— were socioeconomically privileged, while others were relegated to subordinate status. Writer Margaret Atwood argued that Canadian literature focused on survival against the hostile forces of nature. Some Canadianists suggested that their countryfolk suffered from a ‘‘garrison mentality,’’ a defensiveness arising because of their competition with nature, but also because of their history of political domination from elsewhere. All of these hypotheses are now recognized as oversimplified, reflecting ideas from Ontario and

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Quebec, English and French, and patriarchal conceptualizing. They fail to consider the experiences of Canadian women and of regional and ethnic groups outside the mainstream. Women’s movements in Canada have a long and diverse history. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in Owen Sound, Ontario, in 1874, was initially formed to stop the liquor trade, but was also vigilant against what it saw as threats to morality. However, its basis in women’s right—indeed, their obligation—to participate in the public and political spheres established an organizational base for women’s agitation for the vote in English Canada. Manitoba was the first province to give women the vote, in 1916; the rest followed by 1924, with the exception of Quebec, where women were not enfranchised until 1940. Inuit women and men gained the vote in 1950, but other First Nations did not until 1960. Women’s organizations often used traditional and popular culture to convey their ideas. Manitoba’s June Menzies, organizing around the case of a farm woman in the 1970s, who found, when she left her abusive husband and claimed her rights to the farm she had run almost single-handedly, that she was denied because she was a wife, recalled: I got a couple of my friends to come with me to put on a skit. It would be called ‘‘The Balloon Lady.’’ We would have this lady floating along, upheld by inflated balloons. The balloons would represent marriage rights, pension rights, employment rights, and all the rest of it. We talked about Mrs. Murdoch and her experiences, and with each group of rights she thought she had, prick, the balloon would be burst. At the end, the balloon lady was flat on the ground without any support (quoted in Rebick 2005).

Inaugurated in 1960, the Voice of Women, a grassroots feminist pacifist organization, was best known for vigils, protest marches, conferences, and sponsored exchanges with Soviet and Vietnamese women. But the group also conceived an innovative campaign, combining protest, education, and service, in which members knitted dark-colored baby clothes for North Vietnamese infants during the Vietnam War. Women worked on these garments in public; when asked why they were not employing softer colors, they explained that dark ones made the babies wearing them less visible to snipers and/or bombers. Women’s-movement activity from the 1960s turned on the formation of various groups, such as F ed eration des femmes du Quebec (Association of Quebec Women), formed in 1966 as a follow-up to the celebration of women’s enfranchisement in the province. First Nations, Metis, and Inuit women organized to press for their rights, including successful action against the Indian Act. One sexist provision not only took Indigenous status from a woman who married a non-status man and from her children, but gave status to anyone who married her brother. Women’s equality is constitutionally guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982). In 1988, a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of Canada decriminalized abortion. Canadian divorce laws were modernized in 1969—divorce had been previously illegal in Quebec and Newfoundland—and legal grounds were no longer limited to adultery.

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Canadian feminist scholars in the 1970s began to criticize the assumption that women’s domestic labor lacked value and was no more than ‘‘a labor of love.’’ They have been instrumental in developing feminist analysis of women’s work, including recognizing ‘‘social reproduction’’—the involvement of women not only in physically reproducing society by bearing children, but also in making society and capitalism possible through their ongoing domestic and mothering labor. The current daycare movement in Canada owes a great deal to this analysis, but feminist folklorists have also been extensively influenced by it. The First Nations are the historically primary group in Canada. Though the first established colonies in what would later become Canada were those of the French and English, other Europeans visited and formed temporary or seasonal associations with the land and sea. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Vikings formed settlements in the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland at what is now L’Anse Aux Meadows; Portuguese and other Europeans have been fishing the Grand Banks for centuries. The First Peoples of Canada were, and are, culturally and linguistically diverse—coastal, mountain, prairie, woodland, and tundra cultures flourished before European settlement began in earnest in the seventeenth century. In many Aboriginal cultures, women had positions of power and respect. Iroquois women were responsible for selecting or recalling all leaders and could veto any decision they felt would be against the interests of the community. Although the popular vision of Native people is that they were the colonists’ adversaries, many women became trading partners and ‘‘country wives’’ of the French and English settlers. Women were instrumental in the cultural transfers between Europeans and Indigenous people, and they were frequently responsible for the Europeans’ very survival (Welsh 1991). Few Canadian folklorists have studied First Nations traditions, for two primary reasons. First, each of Canada’s academic Folklore programs was developed—although each has, of course, pursued other directions during its history—as a mode for valorizing its own group or regional culture— Newfoundland at Memorial University; Quebec/French Canada at l’universit e Laval; French Ontario at l’universit e de Sudbury; and Ukrainian at the University of Alberta. Second, the major national institution responsible for collecting and preserving Canadian traditional and popular culture, at the Canadian Museum of Civilisation (CMC), has, since 1970, maintained a mandate to study Canadian multicultural roots, explicitly not including English, French, or First Nations cultures, which are under the aegis of other CMC divisions. French language and traditional culture have been two of the mainstays of Quebec and French Canada’s cultural distinctiveness (along with Roman Catholicism before the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, which led to the development of a more progressive society). Knowledge of traditional culture has historically been crucial for Quebecois, Acadians, Franco-Manitobans, and other French groups and territories within Canada, existing, as they do, as islands of French language and civilization in an English-speaking sea. For French people, the English word ‘‘folklore’’ has negative implications, even beyond those with which it is associated elsewhere. Calling something

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folklorique has connotations of obscurity and datedness, but ‘‘folklore’’ is also fundamentally an English word. Even its British 1846 coiner William J. Thoms called ‘‘folklore’’ ‘‘a good Saxon compound.’’ To those for whom an affiliation with the English language can have implications that are politically but also culturally abhorrent, a word with folklore’s genealogy holds no attraction. The preferred term for the discipline in Quebec and French Canada, ‘‘Ethnology,’’ has different intellectual orientations from the study of folklore in English Canada. More influenced by paradigms from History, Ethnology has always shown a greater concern than has American folkloristics with tracing antecedents as well as contemporary cultural manifestations. Ethnologists maintain a political cultural project which, if not directly separatist, argues for the distinctiveness of Quebec and francophone society. British people colonized most of what is now Canada, although manifestations of British culture vary from region to region. Considerable influence on traditional culture comes from the areas’ resource bases: fishing, farming, lumbering, and mining in the Atlantic Provinces of New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island; farming, lumbering, mining, and transportation in Ontario and Quebec; farming, mining, and transportation in the prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan; farming, mining, transportation, and fishing in British Columbia; and mining, fishing, and hunting in the northern areas of Nunavut, Yukon, and Northwest Territories. Each area has also developed distinctive urban cultures. Both English and French cultures developed historical national symbols personified by women. For the English, she is Laura Secord, reputed to have walked through the backwoods of Ontario, leading her cow so that she would have an alibi if questioned by American soldiers, to warn British troops of an impending American attack during the war of 1812. A Canadian candy company capitalized on this domesticized image for its name and logo, featuring a beautiful, extremely feminine young woman clad in white ruffles. For the French, she is fourteen-year-old Madeleine de Vercheres who, disguised as a soldier, led the defense of her family’s fort near Montreal against an Iroquois attack in 1692. Her own account suggests that with only her younger brother and two frightened soldiers to assist her, she successfully held off a siege, but opened the gates to save another family, to let in the domestic animals, and to retrieve the laundry. Further maintaining her femininity, when French reinforcements arrived, she surrendered the fort to them. More recently, the Dionne quintuplets, Franco-Ontarians born in 1934, engaged the imaginations of both French and English Canadians. Indeed, Annette, Emilie, Yvonne, Cecile, and Marie aroused worldwide attention as the first quintuplets to survive infancy. They were the subject of three Hollywood movies, but as children endured both public and private exploitation, as well as the hardship of being taken away from their parents. In March 1998, the Ontario government paid four million dollars to the three surviving sisters to compensate for nine years they spent on display in a tourist theme park.

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A literary figure who has made her way into regional consciousness in the Maritime provinces, Evangeline is the 1841 fictional creation of American author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Separated from her lover on the deportation of the Acadians by the victorious English, beginning in 1755, Evangeline was reunited with him only at the end of their lives. But Canada comprises many other cultures, and the term ‘‘multiculturalism’’ has different meanings than in the United States. It can refer to Canada’s ethnic and cultural heterogeneity, to the ideal of equality and mutual respect among all groups, but most importantly to federal and provincial government policies proclaimed in the 1970s and 1980s, as the Canadian Multiculturalism Act says, ‘‘to recognize all Canadians as full and equal participants in Canadian society.’’ This relatively recent political imperative was foreshadowed by the actions of women from a variety of cultural groups. African Canadian women, for example, formed local grassroots organizations. Windsor, Ontario’s ‘‘Hour-A-Day Study Club,’’ created during the 1930s, engaged in political action against discrimination and segregation nationally and internationally and encouraged young people in education. Nova Scotia’s African United Baptist Church women similarly acted as educators and activists, provided social services where those furnished by the state were inadequate, and developed the tradition of self-reliance and self-help among African Nova Scotians. Most histories of Canadian Folklore/Ethnology cite academically trained men such as Marius Barbeau and W. Roy Mackenzie as the originators of the discipline and the study of traditional culture in Canada. Yet in both French and English scholarly traditions, women were their contemporaries, and sometimes even their precursors in collecting, publishing, and disseminating cultural texts, beliefs, and practices. The Canadian tradition of folklore/ ethnology collecting in most ethnic groups and provinces has not only involved many women, but has also maintained a tendency for individuals to study their own cultures. Where the American paradigm of folklore scholarship has historically privileged collection from others, that is, people of European origin collecting from African-origin, Aboriginal, or nonEnglish-speaking groups both at home and abroad, Canadian folklore/ ethnology scholarship anticipated contemporary critiques of these practices. Its perspective is almost invariably that of the self, that is, attempting to understand one’s culture on its own terms. The first Folklore/Ethnology program in Canada was founded at l’universit e Laval in 1944 by Luc Lacourciere. Madeleine Doyon-Ferland was secretary of the Archives de folklore from that date. She began teaching courses immediately, and by 1947 was listed as a professor in the program. She researched and taught games, dance, life passages, and calendar customs, but her primary work was in the area of costume. A second female professor, the internationally reputed Elli K€ ong€as-Maranda, was appointed in 1977 to an Ethnology position. Since then, Jocelyne Mathieu (theory, methods, material culture, custom, domestic space, and traditional dress), Lucille Guilbert (traditional narrative and ethnic communities), and Anne-Marie Desdouits (folksong and life-cycle rituals) have held regular faculty positions.

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In 1947, the first Canadian doctoral dissertation in Folklore, written by Sister Marie-Ursule Sanschagrin, was accepted. Although many of Lacourciere’s women students, such as folktale scholars Margaret Low, Helene Bernier, and Nancy Schmitz, studied conventional major genres, others, including DoyonFerland, developed new fields and genres. They include Simonne Voyer (dance), Sister Jeanne-d’Arc Daigle (comptines enfantines—children’s rhymes), Lauraine Leger (sanctions populaires—communal sanctions/social control), and Sister Marie-Ursule (traditional village life). While scholarship in the major genres of folk literature tended to be dominated by male folklorists, exceptions included Sister Catherine Jolicoeur, who studied Acadian legends, and Genevieve Massignon, who studied Acadian language and oral literature. More recently, Martine Roberge has been involved in the Laboratoire d’ethnologie urbaine (Urban Ethnology Laboratory) and is working on public dissemination of the collections of the Archives de folklore. Madeleine Pastinelli focuses her research on the Internet and virtual communities. Perhaps the most innovative scholar ever to emerge from Laval, Vivian Labrie (who currently directs the Collectif pour un Qu ebec sans pauvret e [Collective for a Quebec without poverty]) used her studies of folktales as a fulcrum for her activism in literacy and social justice. For example, she takes the tasks and helpers in traditional folktales as models for illuminating bureaucratic cultures, both the barriers and the networking necessary to breach them. Folktale interpretation in her workshops on literacy and social action give participants common reference points for converging disparate experiences. Laval-trained and other scholars—including Charlotte Cormier, Vivian Labrie, Marielle Cormier-Boudreau, and Nancy Schmitz—also conducted extensive research in Acadian French communities in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Many were affiliated with the Centre des etudes acadiennes (Center of Acadian Studies) at l’universit e de Moncton in New Brunswick. Perhaps the best-known Acadian writer, Antonine Maillet, studied folklore, which informed the fiction for which she is well known in both Canada and France. Elsewhere in French Canada, the Folklore Department at l’universit e de Sudbury was formed in 1981, but courses have been taught there since 1975. In 1994, it became the d epartement de folklore et ethnologie de l’Am erique francaise (Department of Folklore and Ethnology of French America). Several women have taught there, including Lucie Beaupre and Lise Fournier. Women affiliated with Sudbury’s Centre Franco-Ontarien de Folklore include Anne-Marie Poulin and Olga Beaulieu. In English Canada, women were among the first to write accounts of life in the colonies. From the early to mid-nineteenth century, the best known are Anna Jameson, Catherine Parr Traill, and Susanna Moodie. Each discussed the unfamiliar customs and practices they encountered, frankly expressing their often negative opinions of them. Women collectors, most discussing their own local cultures and traditions, dominated twentiethcentury Canadian folklore practice. In the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and to a lesser extent in New Brunswick, Helen Creighton collected folksongs, folktales, beliefs, games, verse, customs, and other genres, which she published in books and

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articles, as well as on record albums. Catholic nun Mary L. Fraser (Mother St. Thomas of the Angels) published material she collected for her doctoral dissertation. Americans Elizabeth Bristol Greenleaf and Grace Yarrow Mansfield collected and published Newfoundland traditional songs. Englishwoman Maud Karpeles collected mainly British songs in Newfoundland in 1929 and 1930. The Folklore Department at Memorial University was formed in 1962 by Herbert Halpert. It has been extensively dominated by American- and British-born males throughout its history. Its first female tenure-track faculty member, Diane Goldstein, was hired in 1986. Its second (and only other still remaining) female faculty member, Diane Tye, hired in 1995, was the first Canadian-born, tenure-track appointment. (Newfoundlander faculty members Larry Small and Wilf Wareham were both born before 1949, when Newfoundland joined Canadian confederation, and do not consider themselves Canadian-born.) However, many women, either as affiliates of the department or as independent scholars, have published important works. For example, collaboration between traditional singer Anita Best and linguist Genevieve Lehr resulted in an excellent song collection. Although less well-known, women’s traditional cultural collecting has also proceeded in Western Canada. Barbara Cass-Beggs in the 1960s, and Marie-Louise Perron with Martin Thibault and Simonne Verville in the 1980s published Saskatchewan song collections. At the University of Alberta, folklorist Bohdan Medwidsky taught courses in Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian folklore and folklife. He was instrumental in the formation of the Huculak Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, currently held by Andriy Nahachewsky. Their PhD student Natalia Shostak graduated in 2001 and has conducted research on women’s culture from traditional foodways to ritual practices. Marius Barbeau originated the collecting of traditional culture at the National Museum of Man—now the CMC. In 1966, his successor, Carmen Roy, a Sorbonne-trained Quebecoise, took over the folklore division of the museum, which became the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies in 1970, renamed Cultural Studies in 1999. Roy continued Barbeau’s tradition of collecting widely across Canadian provinces and ethnic groups, but her vision was arguably broader. She initiated more experimental studies, focusing on multiculturalism as experienced in Canada rather than on historic theories of traditional culture. Ethnomusicologist Carmelle Begin joined the staff in 1976, served as Acting Chief (1992–1994), and then as Curator in Charge from 1994 until 2002. A distinctive aspect of the work of some Canadian women scholars has been their dissemination through venues other than scholarly books and articles alone. Louise Manny in New Brunswick published several sound recordings, and Helen Creighton did programming for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), assisted with several National Film Board (NFB) projects, and wrote journalistic articles. Edith Fowke, who received a faculty appointment at York University in 1971, worked independently of the academic scene for much of her career. She began presenting commercial recordings of folksongs on CBC radio during the 1950s and 1960s, and

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published several compilations. She conducted fieldwork in Ontario and published two scholarly books as well as numerous recordings. Fowke’s collaboration with traditional singer LaRena Clark resulted in recordings as well as a book. But not all of Fowke’s work was in folksong. Her two collections of children’s traditional culture enjoyed considerable popular success. Carole Carpenter wrote the first nationally focused history of Folklore/ Ethnology in Canada, and Janet McNaughton has also written extensively on Canadian Folklore/Ethnology historiography. But explicitly feminist and women-centered work is relatively new to Canadian Folklore/Ethnology. Nevertheless, these perspectives have produced a great deal of extremely valuable material. Work by feminists and by Canadian women folklorists can be found in Ethnologies (formerly Canadian Folklore canadien [CFC]), the journal of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada. The first specifically conceived as women-centred and feminist was a special issue ‘‘Femmes et traditions/ Women and Tradition,’’ edited by Laval’s Jocelyne Mathieu. Her introduction speaks of women’s contradictory roles in tradition. As procreators, women ensure the continuity of life and the passing on of culture, but as figures definitionally excluded from the patriarchal order, women are transgressors against tradition, history, and the continuity of repression. Her inclusive vision, ‘‘Bonne lecture a toutes et tous’’ (‘‘Happy reading to all’’—using first the female and then the male forms), gently addresses the French language’s insistence that even one male reader requires the use of the male form. Attention to the spoken and the unspoken pervades the issue. Perhaps its most important individual article is Laurel Doucette’s feminist critique of the underdevelopment of Folklore Studies in Canada showing how prevailing intellectual constructs have impaired full participation by women ethnologists. The most significant feminist and women-centered work to appear so far in Canada is Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, coedited by Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye. Issues of a number of national and international journals, including the Journal of Canadian Studies and the Journal of American Folklore contain articles by and about Canadian women and feminism. But not all feminist and women-centered work on Canadian traditional and popular culture has been published in written and recorded formats. Filmmakers Alanis Abomsawin and Christine Welsh have produced documentary and dramatized representations of Aboriginal women’s historical and contemporary lives and culture. Feminist Canadian Folklore/Ethnology work tends to be bilingual—French and English—because of specific and deliberate efforts by participants. Most communications from French first-language people are published in French, and from English first-language people in English. Rarely are translations available; Canadian feminist folklorists try to work together, respecting each others’ mother tongues, but recognizing the limitations in each others’ second-language competence. In addition, the work tends to be collective and collaborative and seeks to incorporate the voices of faculty, students, museum and archive workers, and other interested people. Finally, feminist folkloristics in Canada is interdisciplinary: only eleven of the twenty contributors

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to the edited collection by Greenhill and Tye had their latest degrees in Folklore/Ethnology. There are too few folklorists/ethnologists in Canada, and even fewer willing to be associated with feminist work. However, interdisciplinarity has been valuable in offering critical perspectives, alternatives to mainstream thinking, and multiple points of view. See also: Activism; Divorce; Fieldwork; Folklore Studies Association of Canada; Literature; Multiculturalism; Suffrage Movement; Women Folklorists; Women’s Work. References: Burt, Sandra, Lorraine Code, and Lindsay Dorney, eds. Changing Patterns: Women in Canada. Second edition. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993; Carty, Linda, ed. And Still We Rise: Feminist Political Mobilizing in Contemporary Canada. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1993; Castellano, Marlene et al., eds. ‘‘Special Issue: Native Women.’’ Canadian Woman Studies 10, nos. 2–3 (1989); Doucette, Laurel. ‘‘Voices Not Our Own.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 15, no. 2 (1993): 119–138; Fowke, Edith, and Carole H. Carpenter. A Bibliography of Canadian Folklore in English. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981; Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘Radical? Feminist? Nationalist? The Canadian Paradox of Edith Fowke.’’ Folklore Historian 20 (2003): 22–33; Greenhill, Pauline, and Diane Tye. ‘‘Critiques from the Margin: Women and Folklore in English Canada.’’ In Canada: Theoretical Discourse, eds. Terry Goldie, Carmen Lambert, and Rowland Lorimer, 167–186. Montreal: Association for Canadian Studies, 1994; ———, eds. Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997; Greenhill, Pauline, and Peter Narvaez, eds. ‘‘Special Issue: Folklore in Canada.’’ Journal of American Folklore 115, no. 456 (2002): 116–292; Mathieu, Jocelyne, ed. ‘‘Special Issue: Femmes et traditions/Women and Tradition.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien 15, no. 2 (1993): 5–181; Obomsawin, Alanis, dir. Film. Mother of Many Children. National Film Board of Canada, 1977; Parr, Joy, and Mark Rosenfeld, eds. Gender and History in Canada. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996; Rebick, Judy. Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2005; Valaskakis, Gail Guthrie. ‘‘Sacajawea and her sisters: Images and native women.’’ Canadian Journal of Native Education, vol. 23, no. 1 (1999): 117–135; Welsh, Christine. ‘‘Voices of the Grandmothers: Reclaiming a Metis Heritage.’’ Canadian Literature 131 (1991): 15–24; Welsh, Christine, prod. Women in the Shadows. National Film Board of Canada, 1991; ———, prod. and dir. Keepers of the Fire. National Film Board of Canada, 1994; ———, prod. and dir. The Story of the Coast Salish Knitters. Prairie Girl Films/National Film Board of Canada, 2000.

Pauline Greenhill Region: Caribbean Geographically, the Caribbean is a region of islands in the Americas bordered by a range of contiguous coasts between southern North America and northwestern South America in the Caribbean Sea. The area consists of a ring of reefs and islands, including the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Cayman Islands, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Lucia, the Grenadines, Tobago and Barbados, Haiti, St. Kitts, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, the coast of Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana (Cayenne). Certain indigenous foods and other natural resources are common to the Caribbean and West Africa, the region from which the Caribbean’s majority population originates, allowing for the easy continuation of foodways and herbal aspects of folk healing. Women are usually responsible for food preparation; hence, they are the tradition-bearers of the region’s foodways.

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The most popular foods consumed by the region’s people are any combination of plantains, beans, tuber roots like yucca and malanga, fish, rice, and also rum due to the history of sugarcane cultivation in the region. Women also play large roles as herbalists, especially in the context of traditional religious practices that combine West African, European, and Native American (Taı´no), pharmacology. A Caribbean curandera (female folk healer) may use natural elements borrowed from cultural sources, such as tobacco smoke from Native American beliefs, coconut water from African influences, and local herbs like yerba buena, or mint, from European folk medicine, in their remedies. For example, Cuban and Puerto Rican Santerı´a priestesses, known as Iyalorishas, provide healing through the ritual cleansing of the body with herbs and ritual objects. These practices have been carried to the Caribbean diaspora in the United States and Canada by immigrants from this region. The region has a long history of colonization, including institutionalized slavery, by Western Europeans. Consequently, the languages present in the Spanish, French, British, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish West Indies reflect complex historical legacies. The creolization of the languages found in the Caribbean—bozal in Cuba, for instance—reflects the interplay of many different ethnic populations living close together, including both cultural mergings and clashes between European, African, Native American, and Asian populations. The region is especially rich in verbal folklore, most of which is transmitted in vernacular, creole languages. Recently, an interest in creating and expressing national literatures in oral creole forms has emerged in popular textual forms. Maryse Conde (1979), who writes about Guadeloupe; Jamaica Kincaid, who writes about Antigua (1986); Edwidge Danticat, who writes about Haiti (1995); Julia Alvarez, who writes about the Dominican Republic (1994); Esmeralda Santiago, who writes about Puerto Rico (1993); and Cristina Garcia, who writes about Cuba (1993) are only a few examples of novelists who enlist regional folklore in their texts in order to communicate a sense of Caribbean identity. In remembering ‘‘home’’ for North American audiences, these Caribbean authors provide examples of how women are understood as strong culturebearers for their families, both in the islands and in the Caribbean diaspora. The characters of Celia and Dolores in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban present literary portraits of Cuban women, one on the island and the other in the United States. Both women possess a stubborn sense of self that is directly related to the notion of Cuba as home after the revolution of 1959. Their characterizations in Garcia’s novel typify the tendency of Caribbean authors to employ the region’s folklore as an essential component in female expressions of cultural nostalgia. The trope of the mother as tradition-bearer, or alternatively in some cases, as the denier of home culture, is frequently used by Caribbean women writers to negotiate and/or represent cultural conflicts that arise from the migration experience in the postcolonial context of nation-building in the Caribbean. Much of the fiction coming from the Caribbean diaspora in the United States uses the Caribbean as a location in memory, and especially favors the mode of description known as ‘‘tropicalization,’’ the crafting of an imaginary

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mindscape that describes the region in terms of characteristics that include, but are not limited to, the vibrancy of cultural traditions, the lushness of vegetation, descriptions of the sea, and the poverty of the people. Because folklore consists of sets of signifiers—music, proverbs, foodways, and religion— that point to place and community on various levels both etic (viewed from outside) and emic (viewed from inside), representations of folklore forms are a method by which tropicalization is envisioned and invoked. The manner in which women in and of the Caribbean are described, for example, as priestesses of Afro Diasporic religions, as dancers, in the image of the mixed-race mulata, in music, poetry, literature, ritual, and performance, all indicate that the body of the Caribbean woman is a site for locating images of sexuality, motherhood, nationalism, and the islands themselves. The metonymic use of women’s bodies in these ways operates to ensure both easy recognition of cultural forms and the reading of those forms as representations of a kind of generalized Caribbean identity. Examples of this process as expressed by Puerto Rican music are aptly described by ethnomusicologist Ruth Glasser in My Music Is My Flag (1995). Glasser relates how Puerto Ricans create community both in New York and on the island through their enjoyment of music that reflects a nostalgic love of Puerto Rico. Indeed, in many instances, the island’s tropicality—its heat, sweetness, and other nuturing aspects—is often personified as a woman, a lover, a queen, or a mother in popular lamentations that recall a sense of home. One of the ways in which the folklore of the Caribbean has been explored by women is through the study of folk religions stemming from the African diaspora. Folklorists Elsie Clews Parsons (1918) and Zora Neale Hurston (1938) explored Caribbean religious traditions in the early twentieth century. Filmmaker Maya Deren made her pioneering study, Divine Horsemen (1953), both as ethnography and as a (posthumously edited) film to document some of the practices and beliefs of Haiti’s Vodoun religious systems. Cuban novelist and ethnologist, Lydia Cabrera, undertook serious studies of Afro Cuban religions, including Santerı´a, Espiritismo, and Palo, from the 1950s until her death in the 1994; her most famous work is El Monte Igbo Finda Ewe Orisha. Vititi Nfinde (1968) documents the religion of African descendants in Mantazas, Cuba, during the prerevolutionary era. Women folklorists following in Cabrera’s footsteps include Isabel Castellanos (1988) and Natalia Bolivar (1993), both of whom (the former from the Cuban diaspora in the U.S., the latter from Cuba) specialize in the ethnology of Afro Cuban traditions. International resources for women involved with Caribbean identity and creative expression include the Association of Caribbean Women Writers (ACWW), and the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA). Both organizations hold regular conferences and sponsor research and creative writing by their members. See also: Curandera; Foodways; Herbs; Saints; Sexuality. References: Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994; Aparicio, Frances R., and Susana Chavez-Silverman, eds. Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1997; Arostegui Bolivar, Natalia. Los Orishas en Cuba. New York: Libros

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Sin Fronteras, 1993; Cabrera, Lydia. El Monte Igbo Finda Ewe Orisha: Vititi Nfinde. Miami: Colecci on de Chicheruk u en el exilio, Ediciones Universal, 1968; Castellanos, Isabel, and Jorge Castellanos. Cultura afrocubana: el negro en Cuba, 3 vols. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1988; Conde, Maryse. La parole des femmes: essai sur des romanci eres des Antilles de langue francaise. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1979; Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Soho Press, 1995; Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1953; Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993; Glasser, Ruth. My Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917–1940 (Latinos in American Society & Culture). Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997; Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938; Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: New American Library, 1986; Otero, Solimar. ‘‘El sistema de la salud y el bienestar en la religi on de la santerı´a cubana,’’ Revista de Investigaciones Folcl oricas, vol. 21 (2006): 144–158 Parsons, Elsie Clews. Folk-Tales of Andros Island, Bahamas. Lancaster, PA, and New York: American Folklore Society, 1918; Santiago, Esmeralda. When I was Puerto Rican. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993.

Solimar Otero Region: Central America A narrow stretch of land bridging the North and South American continents and including the countries of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, Central America has historically exhibited great cultural diversity. Unfortunately, little material on Central American women’s folklore exists in the English language. Until recently, most folklorists and anthropologists have focused on the Mayan world of southern Mexico and northern Central America. An exception is Mary W. Helms’ Middle America: A Culture History of Heartland and Frontiers, which provides a general introduction to the area from prehistory to 1970. In this work, Helms predicts that Central America’s structural inequalities will lead to dire consequences for the next generation. And indeed, during the 1980s, extreme government repression, revolution, and counterrevolution in Central America brought new attention to the region as a whole. A new narrative form, the testimonial, emerged in the 1980s which publicized women’s (as well as men’s) experiences of conflict. Perhaps the most  An Indian Woman in widely read, Rigoberta Mench u’s I, Rigoberta Menchu: Guatemala, tells the story of a Mayan woman’s political activism. (Details of Mench u’s tale have since been challenged by anthropologist David Stoll, but the general picture of government repression Mench u describes was verified by the 1994 Guatemala Truth Commission.) Violent conflict provoked massive flight from the region, and many immigrants found new homes in the United States. By 1990, Central Americans constituted about 15 percent of the U.S. Latino population, most having arrived in the previous decade. While conflict diminished in the 1990s, economic stagnation resulted in continuing immigration from Central America to the United States. Large numbers of Central Americans now live in Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and Chicago, as well as in rural areas across the country, where they form part of an emerging Latino culture.

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The Pacific and Atlantic sides of Central America developed in particularly distinctive ways, making cultural generalizations difficult. Pre-Columbian groups on the Pacific side as far as Costa Rica represent the southernmost reaches of cultures originating in Mexico, while the eastern coastal areas as far north as Honduras were populated by migrants from lowland South America. For roughly a thousand years, the Mayan civilization and its monumental cities flourished in what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and northern Honduras. By the time the Spaniards arrived in the 1500s, however, the Mayan empire had collapsed, most of its city-states having already been abandoned. During the colonial period (1520s to early 1820s), Spanish became the official language of Central America, and Catholicism the official religion; syncretic cultural forms began to flourish. Indigenous communities, for instance, sponsored religious festivals to various Catholic saints, but associated with Indigenous deities. The Spanish also brought enslaved Africans to Central America, introducing yet another set of cultural influences. The coastal areas bordering the Caribbean provided havens for escaped slaves and pirates. Here, English was the colonial language, and areas including modern Belize and the Nicaraguan Mosquitia were under British political control for centuries. The marimba, now an instrument associated with Guatemalan and Nicaraguan folk music, is an African contribution to Central American arts and culture. As already mentioned, the Mayan region of Central America has received the most attention from anthropologists and folklorists. This focus initially reflected a romantic attraction to what was understood to be the remains of a pre-Columbian empire. In addition to inscriptions on ancient monuments, two written sources for Mayan mythology survived the Spanish Conquest: the Popol Vuh (‘‘Council Book’’ or ‘‘Book of the Community’’) and the Books of Chilam Balam. The Popol Vuh lays out the cosmology of the ancient Mayans and includes the story of how the first man and woman were made, not from Earth as in the Christian tradition, but from corn, the staple of the Central American diet. Debate continues over whether the ancient Mayan society valued women any more than did the subsequent Spanish colonial culture. Some evidence exists that women’s and men’s roles complementary. For example, the pantheon of the gods included pairs of male-female divinities. These divinities were represented on Earth by human political leaders or priests. However, the male leader’s advisor or counterpart, was, according to chroniclers, a male transvestite, tempering the view of gender equality. In addition, the high value placed on warfare—an occupation prohibited to women—suggests that gender relations were asymmetrical. Anthropologists also have studied highland Mexican and Guatemalan ‘‘closed-corporate communities,’’ Indigenous villages that elaborated and maintained strong ethnic markers in language, social structure, ritual, dress, and foodways during the nineteenth century by isolating themselves from the modernizing nations of which they were a part. This defensive tactic took on a gendered dimension, as Indigenous women particularly were entrusted with maintaining cultural traditions. Well into the twentieth century, Mayan women were less likely than Mayan men to speak Spanish or to

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interact with community outsiders. A large body of work investigates Guatemalan women’s textile patterns as coded forms of cultural identity, including Janet Berlo’s article in Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes: An Anthology (1996). Linda Cordell’s Chilies to Chocolate (1992) provides general information on Mayan and Central American women’s foodways. Beliefs in witchcraft, though influenced by the Catholic religion, retain an Indigenous core that can be traced to pre-Columbian Aztec and Mayan mythology. Nagualism, the belief that certain people can turn themselves into animals, is widespread. Therefore, if one encounters a peculiar animal when one is out at night, that animal is understood to be a real person, usually female, who, through magical incantations, has shed her human form and adopted the body of a monkey, pig, or dog for malicious purposes. This belief can have serious negative consequences for women, however. In a recent court case in rural Guatemala, a man defended himself for chopping up his wife with a machete by claiming that she had taken the form of an animal at night and was therefore not his wife but an evil impostor. The Segua (also called Cegua in Nicaragua or Skeleton Woman in Chiapas) is also a real person who has either vomited up her soul or shed her skin and flesh in order to transform herself. Usually, she leaves her flesh in a tray, where her husband sometimes finds it and intentionally or unwittingly salts it so that she cannot resume her former shape. Today, debates about the Segua revolve not around her existence but around whether the figure is truly a transformed person or simply a woman dressed up to scare her husband. Cihua means woman in the Aztec Nahuatl language, and this figure may be linked to the Aztec Goddess Cihuacoatl, the woman with the serpent skirt, Quetzalcoatl’s consort, who is both the progenitor and consumer of humans. Other female supernatural creatures include La Llorona, La Taconuda, La Mocuana, and La Tulevieja. La Llorona is an abandoned woman who either kills her children and then repents her action or has them torn from her by a man who kills them, typically by drowning. Thus, from a woman’s perspective, she seems to be both a warning to women and a sad reflection on the reality of abandonment in cultures where men are often irresponsible about paternity. La Mocuana, which may be a New World transformation of a Moorish legend from Spain, is a woman who falls in love with an enemy and is walled up alive by her father. In contrast to these rather pitiful figures, the Segua is fearsome. She specifically victimizes men who wander around late at night alone and usually inebriated. She attracts them with her lovely form. Entranced, they follow her into graveyards or wild places, where they become lost and disoriented. When she finally has them where she wants them, she turns on them, revealing a gruesome face: a skull or a horsehead. The fright the men experience can lead to high fever, insanity, and even death. To protect themselves, they turn their clothing inside out or scatter mustard seeds, which distracts the Segua into trying to gather them. The Taconuda (sometimes called La Sirena in Mexico or La Tulevieja in Costa Rica) is in Nicaragua a tall, stylish White woman (as opposed to a Native woman) who wears heeled shoes that make a distinctive click as she walks down the road. She also entices men to follow her.

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In her study of Zapotec witch tales, Dana Everts-Boem has pointed out that women’s stories about witches show greater sympathy and understanding for the witch than do men’s tales. Ethelyn Orso views the Segua and Tulevieja traditions in Costa Rica as means for women to exert control over men’s behavior. Some think that the Segua is a materialization of male guilt, or at least an expression of men’s ambivalence about their own practices of drinking and womanizing, for, while the prevailing norms of sexist masculinity (machismo) require that men demonstrate sexual prowess, their erotic liaisons create tension in their relationships with their wives and children. Although tales of La Llorona have been widely disseminated and studied in the United States, research has yet to be done on the retention or transformation of witchcraft beliefs among Central American immigrants. Using women’s bodies to symbolize a community and its values is a common cultural practice throughout the world. Three articles in Beauty Queens on the Global Stage (1995) examine this practice in Central America. Carlota McAllister questions mestizo-sponsored representations of Mayan women in Guatemala in ‘‘Authenticity and Guatemala’s Maya Queen’’; Richard Wilk considers concepts of beauty among the African-descended people of Belize in ‘‘Connections and Contradictions: From the Crooked Tree Cashew Queen to Miss World Belize’’; and Katherine Borland untangles the partisan politics of a Nicaraguan competition in ‘‘The India Bonita of Monimb o: The Politics of Ethnic Identity in the New Nicaragua.’’ The 1980s brought profound changes both to the Central American region and to cultural research in the area. Government repression, revolution, and counterrevolution engulfed the populations of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, while Honduras and, to a lesser degree, Costa Rica, became staging grounds for U.S.-backed counterinsurgency efforts. Some Indigenous communities were at the forefront of popular resistance to government oppression, while others were caught in the crossfire between warring groups. Women assumed prominent roles in the resistance movements that developed, and even spearheaded protest groups that demanded their governments investigate all-too-common murders and disappearances. Cultural ethnographers found it impossible to ignore the larger social forces affecting the individuals and communities with whom they traditionally worked. In Nicaragua, the 1979 Sandinista revolution initially opened a space for social and ideological reconstruction, but machismo remained a strong, conservative cultural force. Journalist Margaret Randall provides two collections of interviews, Sandino’s Daughters (1981) and Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (1994) that document women’s involvement in the revolution and the obstacles they later faced in a society, government, and party that continued to disregard women’s issues. Roger Lancaster provides a good analysis of machismo as a continuing obstacle to Nicaraguan social and political development in his 1995 article ‘‘‘That We Should All Turn Queer?’: Homosexual Stigma in the Making of Manhood and the Breaking of a Revolution in Nicaragua.’’ Florence E. Babb provides an ethnography of urban women’s lives and struggles in the 1990s in After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua (2001).

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Women’s life experiences also formed a popular subject for students of El Salvador and Honduras. Writer Claribel Alegrı´a provides the story of Salvadoran revolutionary women in her book They Won’t Take Me Alive (1987). And ethnographer Medea Benjamin provides a working woman’s life story from Honduras in Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart: The Story of Elvia Alvarado (reprinted 1989). Central American political conflicts in the 1980s provoked mass migration to the United States. Those circumstances have been dramatically rendered in the 1984 feature film, El Norte, directed by Gregory Navas. The story follows a brother and sister as they flee government violence in their Guatemala Aboriginal community, make their way across Mexico, and ultimately struggle against exploitation, poverty, and loneliness in Los Angeles. A few recent works have provided scholarly documentation of the Central American immigrant experience and of North American solidarity groups that assisted them. In the early 1980s, the sanctuary movement represented a coming together of religious and political activists to provide safe havens for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees whom the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization service (now part of the Department of Homeland Security and known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) refused to regard as at risk. William Westerman (1998) has written about the testimonial as a new folk narrative form that developed within the context of the sanctuary movement, and Susan Bibler-Cohen (2000) has written a booklength ethnography that follows Salvadoran men and women over a decadelong process of suing for political asylum. Generally, however, Central American immigrants are subsumed within the more inclusive Latino label, a tendency that reflects the immigrant experience. In their new neighborhoods and workplaces, Central Americans come into contact with Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans, and South Americans, as well as with recent immigrants from Asia and the Black Caribbean. Festival traditions from local towns are replaced in the immigrant community by those celebrated at the national level at home or by new ‘‘pan-Latino’’ holidays featuring Latin American popular music. The Virgin of Guadalupe, originally the patron saint of Mexico, has become the patron of all Latin America, and is increasingly venerated by non-Mexican immigrants. Likewise, cultural studies of Central Americans in the United States tend to involve larger projects on recent Latino or Hispanic immigration. Examples of such studies include Katherine Borland’s 2001 compilation of life histories of Central American, Mexican, and Caribbean immigrants (female and male) to rural Delaware, and Olivia Cadaval’s 1998 study of the Latino Festival in Washington, D.C., which became the means for a Latino community with a substantial Central American presence to represent itself in a new environment. The particular folkloric contributions of Central American immigrants in the United States have yet to be recorded, but one thing is clear: Central American women are refashioning themselves and their communities after the violent transformations of the 1980s. See also: Beauty; Coding; Folk Belief; Immigration; La Llorona, Legend, Supernatural; Politics; Violence; Virgin of Guadalupe; Witchcraft, Historical.

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References: Alegrı´a, Claribel. They Won’t Take Me Alive: Salvadoran Women in Struggle for National Liberation. Trans. Amanda Hopkinson. London: The Women’s Press, 1987; Ballerino Cohen, Colleen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje, eds. Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. New York: Routledge, 1995; Benjamin, Medea, trans. and ed. Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart: The Story of Elvia Alvarado. New York: HarperCollins, 1989; Bibler Coutin, Susan. Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000; Borland, Katherine. Creating Community: Hispanic Migration to Rural Delaware. Wilmington, DE: Delaware Heritage Commission, 2001; Cadaval, Olivia. Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation’s Capital: The Latino Festival. New York: Garland, 1998; Cordell, Linda S., ed. Chilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992; Everts-Boem, Dana. ‘‘‘She was Born to be Powerful’: The Witch and the Virgin in Isthmus Zapotec Belief Narratives.’’ In Women and Religious Ritual, ed. Lesley A. Northrup, 19–36. Washington, DC: The Pastoral Press, 1993; Helms, Mary W. Middle America: A Culture History of Heartland and Frontiers. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975; Lancaster, Roger N. ‘‘‘That We Should All Turn Queer?’: Homosexual Stigma in the Making of Manhood and the Breaking of a Revolution in Nicaragua.’’ In Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World, eds. Richard G. Parker and John H. Gagnon, 135–156. New York: Routledge, 1995; Mench u, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta  An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso, 1984; Orso, Ethelyn G. Menchu: ‘‘Folklore as a Means of Getting Even.’’ Southern Folklore 47 (1990), 249–60; Randall, Margaret. Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1981; ———. Sandino’s Daughters Revisited: Feminism in Nicaragua. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994; Schevill, Margot Blum, Janet Catherine Berlo, and Edward Dwyer, eds. Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes: An Anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996; Westerman, William. ‘‘Central American Refugee Testimonies and Performed Life Histories.’’ In Oral History Reader, eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 224–34. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Katherine Borland Region: Central Asia Although the idea of Central Asia as a distinct area of the world with its nomadic shepherds, settled farmers, and city dwellers was introduced in 1843 by the geographer Alexander von Humboldt, the borders of Central Asia are still subject to multiple definitions. From geopolitical and cultural perspectives, the region includes Xinjiang, the Tibetan Plateau, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Northern Iran, Eastern Pakistan, the Punjab of India, and five former Soviet republics—Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. This vast region contains the most vibrant part of the great Silk Road, the name given in 1877 by German scholar Ferdinand von Richthofen to the ancient trade caravan roads that ran from East Asia to the Mediterranean. Alternatively, the region may be defined by the ethnicities of its peoples, mainly Turkic, Iranian, and Mongolian. Women in Central Asian cultures have taken roles as diverse as wedding performers and shamans. Numerous female goddesses watch over their lives, and traditionally women have supported each other in their domestic and public roles. Present-day nomadic groups—Buryats, Kalmyks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Mongols, and Tibetans, to name a few—and sedentarized nomads like the Karakalpaks, for example, have numerous folkways, subscribe to varying

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religions, and speak different languages. At root, however, they fall into only two distinct linguistic groups: Turkic and Mongolian, and this distinction resonates throughout nomadic culture. The agricultural regions of Central Asia (Ferghana Valley, for instance), which closely resemble California’s inland valleys, were among the earliest farming areas in the history of humankind. Today, the land is used largely for the cultivation of cotton, the so-called ‘‘white gold’’ of the region. Central Asia is home to numerous forms of ethnic and cultural hybridization. It has nomadic and sedentary peoples, mountain, valley, and city dwellers. The most striking differences occur between the cultural attributes of urban and rural Central Asia. Islamic influences are historically stronger in its sedentary southern regions, populated predominantly by citydwellers of mainly Iranian origin, in contrast to the northeast regions, with strong animist-shamanist influences that are more typical for the steppe area with its rural herding people of mainly Turko-Mongol origin. The strict separation of men’s and women’s social events is more typical of the settled peoples than for the nomads. The kaleidoscope of Central Asian cultures can be classified also by religion. Buddhists include Mongols, Buryats, Khakas, Tibet, Kalmyks, and Tuvinians. Islamic peoples of Sunni denomination are Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmens, Uighurs, Kyrgyzs, and small Ismailits enclaves in the Pamir Mountains region of Tajikistan. In the mythology of Turkic peoples of Central Asia, there are two especially important deities: Jer-Su, god of earth-water, and Umai, goddess of women’s nature and fertility. Umai is the wife of Tengri, the supreme preIslamic god of heaven. She is the spirit-keeper of children; midwives address her during childbirth. Just after her wedding, a young Kazakh married woman puts butter into the hearth of her mother-in-law and calls upon Umai, saying, ‘‘The fire-mother, the butter-mother, have mercy upon me!’’ Today, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, the Tengri-Umai Art Gallery and Festival are named after Jer-Su and Umai. The Turkic Umai can be compared to the Mongolian Ot— the goddess of marriage and the Earth as well as the ‘‘queen of fire.’’ For the whole region, the division between women’s and men’s cultures is particularly significant. In general, this difference represents the inside world where women are responsible for recreating and preserving cultural structures within communities; and beyond, the outside world and the interactions of men. The major social roles of women are childbearing and transmission of cultural values, religion, and ethnic identity to the next generation. For women, social status and prestige depend strictly on their function and give them significant power within the community. The gendering of everyday duties and performances can be explained in part by the fact that women’s festivities have been served by female performers only. In the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, such female entertainers were called sazanda. The majority were Bukharan Jews. In the Khorezm region of northwest Uzbekistan, such wedding entertainers were known as khalfa. They were from genealogically modest families and were often physically handicapped. In general, wedding parties have been and still are the most popular venue for Central Asian women’s music-making.

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In the past, professional female lamenters in the region were specialists. They knew the funeral rite with its sung dirges (called agy [plural agylar] among Turkmen, zhoktau among Kazakhs). But practically all women used to sing lullabies (alla among Tajiks, khuva-khuv among Turkmen). There are specific women’s folksongs like the Turkmen lele timed to the spring season when tulips (lele) appear. Traditionally, arranged marriages are prevalent for Central Asian women. The bride’s dowry is her lifelong possession, inheritable only by her children. The dowry includes a complete set of clothing, household items, and (among the nomads) her own tent (yurt) and herds of sheep, horses, and camels. The amount and value of a woman’s dowry depends on the social class and wealth of the families involved. Nowadays, it may include a car and housing. From the time of her engagement, the bride-to-be moves into a mythological time and space full of danger from different spirits. Fear of the evil eye, evil words, and evil deeds command very careful arrangements of every step in the process of transporting her from the patronage of her own family’s ancestors and spirits to her future home with its own ancestors and spirits. The community of women takes full responsibility for this rite of passage from girlhood into womanhood, teaching her as a new member of their society not only practical but also mythological knowledge and experience. Every element of the wedding ceremony—the special dress, set of jewelry and amulets; mores and rituals; the day and time of the ceremony; first contact with the in-laws; and introducing the bride to the fire of the new hearth—and the entire period before the birth of her first child is a fascinating drama for all involved. Concerns about a woman’s fertility and the safety of her pregnancy bring a full array of rituals. They include food restrictions (pregnant women should not eat camel meat or particular parts of sheep, yet their other food caprices should be obeyed); a requirement to stay away from death ceremonies; and avoiding some ordinary work activities (such as bringing water from the river after dusk or participating in digging channels). Aside from the logical explanation of keeping pregnant women free from heavy labor, another more mythological concept prevails in the community. From their perspective, caring about pregnant women is supported and strengthened by the fear of her anger and curse. She is particularly powerful because her unique position between life and death makes her closer to the spirits and gods. Some peoples have a special celebration in honor of a pregnant woman (known as zharys kazan among Kazakhs). Goddesses of fertility (among nomads, Umai; among settled peoples, Bibi [Mother] Fathima) are thought to be present during childbirth and to support the new mother. At the same time, however, evil spirits or witches are trying to steal the newborn soul. The placenta is extremely significant, and should be carefully stored (dried out in order to be used as a remedy later on) or buried accompanied by percussion. The baby’s first forty days are crucial because s/he is in the process of moving into the world of living things. During that time, the most important rituals symbolize transporting the child from the womb of the mother to the womb of the cradle.

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For instance, under the pillow or mattress would be put a bow, arrow, or knife for boys, or a mirror and spindle for girls. The highest function of women is to preserve this world and to create and maintain peace. They shape their own world by organizing a living space where everyone can feel safe and protected. They decorate houses and tents because the adorned dwelling is the symbol of its security. They populate this living space with living beings, but women’s fertility also exerts influence upon plants and livestock. As shown in the Mongolian film, The Story of the Weeping Camel (2004), for example, a productive young married woman cares for a mother camel during and after her difficult birthing experience to ensure harmony in the world. The birth of sons is considered preferable for number of reasons. Unlike girls, who leave home upon marriage, sons remain at their natal domicile and participate in hard manual labor, defend the house if necessary in a war, and care for aged parents. Taking into account the higher death rate among boys and warriors and the shorter duration of men’s life in general, the significance of male children is understandable. Hence, great social merit accrues to the mother who has boys. After the birth of several sons, the mother’s social status rises; ultimately, she reaches the highest position in a matriarchy, that of the crone or aged wise woman. These respected women conduct all economic and political business within the family, but they do so through their husbands. Such a woman may not only teach her daughters and granddaughters how to weave, sew, cook, treat guests, and so on, but she also obtains more general power over her children and grandchildren, handing down to them her life experience along with religious knowledge. Uzbek otines provide good examples of such respected women. They are female experts in religion and ritual and hold honorary positions not only in their families, but also in the Muslim community at large, where they serve at the same level as mullahs whose task is to preach the faith. In Turkestan and Bukhara, they teach Qur’an recitation, prayer, and literacy to girls and women. Though they do not receive money for their work, they are given traditional gifts by individuals for special prayers and blessings. During the Soviet period, an otin either became a teacher in the secular state system or a practitioner of communally necessary but publicly derided religious functions in the gendered world of Central Asian Islamic piety. In traditional societies, every woman coexists in a mutually supported group of other women. These groups consist of women of various generations who back up their social activity with gossip and news about community events. All information is discussed and considered in detail by all the women. Tradition thus takes the place of psychotherapy as a mode for externalizing problems and concerns, helping participants avoid many conflicts in everyday life. Traditional life in women’s culture presupposes the exchange of information through storytelling. In order to resolve a concrete situation or a problem, women draw upon mythological, historical, and religious instances, as well as on fairy tales and examples from their own experiences. Women also weave their everyday lives into artistic linens and poetic rugs. For every

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item, they choose the necessary genre pattern; it may be a fairy tale for entertainment and moral lessons for children, or an epic love story for adolescents and teenagers. Thus, possession of folklore and especially the knowledge of folk poetics has an enormous place in women’s education. Even their everyday language is deeply saturated with proverbs and traditional sayings. A woman’s ability to compose a bride’s laments while parting with family, to create lullabies for children, and to frame funeral dirges for deceased parents serve her as self-expression and demonstrate her wisdom, knowledge, and cultural competence. Poetic genres also include the aitys, public competitions in poetic improvisation popular among the nomads, and, in settled communities (limited to the ‘‘women’s half’’ of the house), women’s instrumental music-making, often with the dutar, a two-stringed lute. Women’s musical abilities are highly prized and the source of much prestige. In the past, women were excellent healers, specialists along with shamans in plant and food therapies, massage, and other branches of folk medicine, including bone-setting. Among Mongols, Buryats, Tibetans, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, the mountain Tajiks, the Sayan-Altai and Tuva peoples, to name a few, female shamans, known under various names, cared for the fire in the camp and made sacrifices to the fire of the clan for the sake of its prosperity and health. A daughter-in-law of Genghis Khan was such a woman. Generally speaking, women of high status (including great shamans) were well-known in the Central Asian past, especially among the nomads. Tajik women used to be the hostesses of the hearth’s fire, the alou; the kindling of the hearth was their exclusive duty. Russian anthropologists believe that sacralization of the fire became specifically part of women’s religion within Central Asian Islam. Among Central Asian nomadic peoples, women and men were almost equal in public entertainments, even wrestling, but especially in artistic contests like aitys. The life of Sara Tastanbekqyzy (1878–1916), a great Kazakh akyn (poet, musician, and improviser) provides an excellent example. As a young competitor, she recounted her own verbal duel with the legendary akyn, Birzhan-sal Kozhagulov (1831–1897). By custom, the defeated contestant recites from memory the entire poetic fight, and even to lose to such a master was a great honor. Their contest became the plot for the 1946 opera Birzhan and Sara by Mukan Tulebaev (1913–1960). Central Asia boasts an astonishing number of outstanding women performers. Among them are Dina Nurpeisova (1861–1955) from western Kazakhstan, a glorious dombra-player and composer of the kyui (solo instrumental poems). Akhmetkyzy Akkyzdyn (1897–1986) was another prominent female kyuishi from Central Kazakhstan. Maira (Magira) Shamshutdinova (1896–1926) was an outstanding Kazakh singer and author of songs. Kazakh female singers who conquered the opera stage include Kulash Bayseitova (1912–1957), Roza Baglanova (b. 1922), Roza Jamanova (b. 1928), Bibigil Tulegenova (b. 1929), and Roza Rymbaeva (b. 1957), as well as such renowned traditional epic singers of South Kazakhstan as Shamshat Tulepova (1929–2002) and Elmira Zhanabergenova (b. 1970), the author of numerous songs in the traditional epic style. Today, Zhadyra

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Amanova, a Kazakh woman who plays the kobyz, traditionally a men’s instrument of shamanic origin, is famous in the region, as are its female Uzbek poets, including the performers known as Zulfiya, Uvaysi, and Nodirabegim. Nowadays, women play even greater roles in Central Asian society. They are counted among the region’s most famous poets (such as Akushtap Bakhtigereeva, Mariam Hakimjanova, Tursimkhan Abdrakhmanova, Fariza Ungarsinova, Marfuga Aitkhojina, Kuliash Akhmetova, Gulnar Salikbaeva, Gulrukhsor Sofieva, Tovshan Esenova, and Nadezhda Lushnikova), writers, composers (the most prominent are Gaziza Zhubanova [1927–1993] of Kazakhstan and Zarrina Mirshakar [b. 1947] of Tajikistan), artists, actors, journalists, teachers, and scholars. In the field of women’s art and folklore study, several dozen excellent PhD dissertations have been successfully defended by Central Asian women. Especially in the field of ethnography and folkloristics, these describe and analyze certain themes of traditional life that are approachable by and accessible only to women. The effects of Soviet gender politics resounds strongly in Central Asia, particularly in cities and towns, where, among Indigenous populations, men and women typically occupied separate social spaces. The Russification and sovietization of the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia led to women’s participation in new forms of the arts, in which they achieved high acclaim. These artists include celebrated Tajik singers of Bukharan Jewish descent such as Rena Galibova (1915–1995), popular Uzbek female singers like Yulduz Uzmanova, a superstar whose fame began in 1991 when she won in the First Voice of Asia Festival, and Munadjat Yulchieva (b. 1960), whose first name means ‘‘prayer’’ or ‘‘invocation’’; she is a brilliant performer of Uzbek folk and classic songs whose voice quality and range have been compared to that of Aretha Franklin. Sevara Nazarkhan, in her twenties, is another admired Uzbek singer, songwriter and musician. These women have changed the traditional masculine image of Uzbek music in the West and at home. All are reminders that female singers and instrumentalists traditionally epitomized high culture in the region. Most importantly, they show how the successful fusion of the traditional and the modern helps Central Asian women make bold transitions onto the international music scene. An expert in the Mongolian traditional long song known as urtyn duu, Namjiliin Norovbanzad (1931–2001) is regarded as the greatest Mongol singer of the twentieth century. Popular singer Salamat Sadikova (b. 1956) represents the modern voice of Kyrgyzstan, working in a new fusion of tradition and modernity. Many have CDs, video clips, and online blogs. Since the political and economic collapse of the USSR, women have mastered new branches of business, trade, and the arts. The region’s burgeoning market mentality and the growth of its business life have brought enormous challenges to the women of Central Asia. But they have taken up the task, and their courageous voices are becoming stronger and louder. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Festival; Folk Music and Folksong; Folk Poetry; Foodways; Lament; Marriage; Pregnancy; Ritual; Rugmaking; Storytelling; Weaving; Wedding.

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References: Acar, Feride, and Ay+e Gu†nes-Ayata, eds. Gender and Identity Construction: Women of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Turkey. Leiden, Boston, K€ oln: Brill, 2000; Bardic Divas: Women’s Voices in Central Asia. Volume 4 of the 10-volume CDDVD anthology ‘‘Music in Central Asia,’’ coproduced by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2007; Blackwell, Carole. Tradition and Society in Turkmenistan: Gender, Oral Culture and Song. Richmond and Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 2001; Corcoran-Nantes, Yvonne. Lost Voices: Central Asian Women Confronting Transition. London and New York: Zed Books, 2005; Davaa, Byambasuren, and Luigi Falorni, dir. Story of the Weeping Camel, The. National Geographic World Films, 2004; Doi, Mary Masayo. Gender, Gesture, Nation: Dance and Social Change in Uzbekistan. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2002; Fathi, Habiba. ‘‘Otines: The Unknown Women Clerics of Central Asian Islam.’’ Central Asian Survey, vol. 16, no. 1 (1997): 27–43; Goldman, Wendy Z. Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Harris, Colette. Control and Subversion: Gender Relations in Tajikistan. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2004; Kamp, Marianne. The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006; Kleinbach, Russel, and Sarah Amsler. ‘‘Bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan.’’ International Journal of Central Asian Studies 4 (1999): 185–216; Levin, Theodore. The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996; Massel, Gregory. The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia: 1919–1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974; Michaels, Paula Anne. Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Central Asia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003; Munadjat Yulchieva and Ensemble Shavkat Mirzaev. Network/WDR 28.297. 1997; Northrop, Douglas Taylor. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004; Opie, James. Tribal Rugs: Nomadic and Village Weavings from the Near East and Central Asia. Portland, OR: The Tolstoy Press, 1992; Sousek, Svat. A History of Inner Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Turkmenistan: Songs of Bakhshi Women. Inedit/Auvidis W260064. 1995.

Alma Kunanbaeva and Izaly Zemtsovsky Region: East Asia The region known as East Asia comprises the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Macau, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Mongolia, Japan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), and the Republic of Korea (South Korea). Although the peoples of the area hold some cultural traits in common, differences of language, history, religion, and politics are extensive. China, Japan, and the Koreas host significant folk groups, some characterized by ethnicity, that do not adhere to their countries’ mainstream cultures. Confucian philosophy and Buddhism have had marked influence in the region overall. While manifesting differently during varying times and in different locations, both traditions have strongly affected women’s roles in East Asian societies. Scholars speculate that women in the region had more freedom and higher status before the spread of Confucianism, particularly neo-Confucianism. Folk traditions and writings dating from the pre-Confucian period show some evidence that women were considered powerful by virtue of their sexuality and procreative abilities. However, this power was sometimes negatively construed through their susceptibility to pollution—such as

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menstrual blood and body fluids associated with childbirth and the postpartum period. Women appear to have had particularly important roles in Japanese and Korean traditional religions, including shamanism; some maintain pivotal positions to this day, although their numbers have diminished. In China, women may have played less important public religious roles because ancestor worship did not require the services of a spirit medium or shaman for direct contact with the spirit world. As part of their domestic role, Chinese women were charged with maintaining shrines in their homes as well as in other non-public areas. Confucian philosophy originated in the sixth century BCE in China. It spread throughout East Asia, arriving last in Korea as neo-Confucianism in the fifteenth century. Confucian philosophy establishes guidelines for creating a peaceful and ordered society through a strict hierarchy of social relationships and strongly proscribed behaviors. In the ‘‘five great relationships,’’ which direct appropriate relations between women and men, sons and fathers, juniors and elders, and rulers and ruled, women are viewed as wives, daughters, and siblings, and always as subordinate to men. The ideal Confucian woman is devoted to her father, husband, and sons; she is chaste, virtuous, obedient, and soft-spoken. Confucianism views women in general as tending toward pettiness, jealousy, and argumentativeness, and thus forever potentially jeopardizing social and familial harmony. As the Confucian view spread, the legal status of women declined wherever it was adopted. For example, in Korea before the rise of neo-Confucianism, women had inheritance rights equal to men’s, and their lives were noted equally with those of men in genealogical records. Within a century or two after the adoption of neo-Confucianism by the upper class, those rights had disappeared. In Japan, the Civil Code of 1898 established a family system known as the ie, in which the patriarch held authority over the rest of the family. Moreover, after a woman married and entered her husband’s family, control of all her property and exclusive custody of her children were transferred to him. If a husband had sons by a woman other than his wife, they had prior rights of inheritance over his wife’s daughters. Taoist traditions in China were more accepting of women’s power. An important deity adopted into Taoism is the Queen Mother of the West, His Wang Mu. She particularly protects women, but is not associated with children or childbearing. Her status in the Taoist hierarchy suggests respect for a feminine principle associated with qualities other than the ability to reproduce. Taoism also posits that a world in balance is made up of complementary principles, Yin (feminine) and Yang (masculine). Although Taoism, like Buddhism, subtly privileges the masculine principle over the feminine, it can be argued that neither men nor women are inherently more important in Taoism, as both are necessary for a harmonious world. The primary religious tradition of East Asia is Mahayana (‘‘Great Vehicle’’) Buddhism. Its practices, in which women generally hold positions of power and dignity, vary widely throughout the region. Some scholars suggest, however, that Mahayana tradition incorporates ideas inherited from regional culture generally about female pollution, the notion that women are unable to

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control their own sexuality, and the belief that female sexuality poses a threat to male spiritual advancement. Like many other forms of religion, Mahayana Buddhism tends to be suspicious of women as religious actors (Pearlman 2007). Despite traditional and especially neo-Confucian beliefs that claimed chastity and obedience as ideals for women to follow—even to the point in China of regarding rape as consensual unless the woman killed herself or was murdered by her attacker—there are stories of strong and clever women in the region’s folk and popular literature. Hua Mulan was a Chinese warrior who, when her father was conscripted into the army, took his place by disguising herself as a man. Her story began as a ballad and ended up in many forms of popular literature over the centuries, including most recently her appearance as a Disney film heroine in Mulan (1998). Another legendary Chinese heroine, Yang Guifei, was a clever woman who became consort to the emperor in 745 CE. She is still admired by the Chinese because by leaving her first husband and acquitting herself in a politically astute manner, she was able to raise her own family to a position of prominence in the court. In Korea and Japan, special classes of women operated outside male social control of their sexuality by catering to wealthy men as courtesans, and yet did not relinquish social approbation. In Japan, such women were known as geisha, and in Korea as kisang. In both cases, women who were well-educated in specific artistic skills and who served the upper classes were held in esteem. Those who catered to the lower classes, however, had the status of prostitutes. Rituals, folk beliefs, and customs associated with female reproductive capacity—menstrual customs, along with pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum customs—are central to the folklore of women in East Asia. In Japan until the end of the nineteenth century, menstrual taboos were observed by women in rural areas. While they were menstruating, women were obliged to live in a separate place, a hut that belonged to the community; this taboo forced most women to live separately from their families for a time each month. At the end of the nineteenth century, menstruating women gradually stopped spending the night at the menstrual hut but continued to make and eat their meals there. After the custom of using the huts died out, women kept a tatami (a straw mat) in a corner of the house where they ate while menstruating. In Korea, Taegyo, informally described by a contemporary Korean graduate student as ‘‘fetal education,’’ describes traditionally prescribed behaviors for pregnant women to ensure that they have uncomplicated pregnancies and attractive, intelligent babies. Although there are books and guides published about Taegyo in Korea, women customarily learn these rules from their mothers and grandparents, as well as from other experienced female relatives. Pregnant women are encouraged to keep good posture, remain calm, eat specific (often brightly colored) foods and avoid others (like oxtails and feet), and read or write poetry or view art, activities that promote serenity and beautiful thoughts in the mother. After birth, there is a twenty-one-day period of aftercare known as Samchilil; during this time, women are

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supposed to rest, stay warm, eat warm food, avoid showering, and participate in other customs that purport to promote postpartum recovery. It is thought that these practices also help a woman make the transition to motherhood. She is not supposed to be left alone during this period, and female relatives gather to help care for the baby and perform household tasks. This kind of nurturing behavior toward the new mother has obvious practical implications, giving her much-needed rest and providing childcare. In China, there is a traditional system of folk beliefs surrounding pregnancy and birth. Predating the Ch’ing dynasty (1644–1911), but especially prevalent during that period, was a system equivalent to the Korean Taegyo known as t’ai chiao. These customs revolved around the behavior of pregnant women, those people most likely to influence a developing fetus. Women were to avoid strong emotions such as anger and lust in order to avoid damaging the fetus or even causing miscarriage. Pregnancy carried some food restrictions as well, but women did not necessarily comply with them regularly. One rule compelled women to avoid eating strong ginger to prevent their babies from being born with extra fingers or toes. Footbinding (tightly wrapping a girl’s feet to prevent their growth) is a historical practice that many Westerners associate with women’s lives in China. The phenomenon is actually a relatively recent one, practiced by the Han Chinese (206–220 CE); initially, it did not spread significantly beyond that group. During the Sung dynasty (960–1279), and perhaps as early as 930 CE, it became fashionable for upper-class women; the practice was taken up by the lower classes over time. Scholars disagree as to whether foodbinding was primarily an erotic practice—it molded the feet into tiny ‘‘lotus petals’’ or ‘‘golden lilies’’ that men found sexually exciting—or as a way for men to keep their concubines helpless and immobile. Of course, these two functions are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Footbinding, usually begun at age six and extending over a number of years, involved a complex procedure of breaking all but the big toes, then pulling the front of the feet to the heels with an increasingly tight series of bandages. This continued until it produced properly distorted and tiny feet. A woman with bound feet had extremely limited mobility, which made it difficult for her to contribute to work outside the home. The practice was discontinued early in the twentieth century, particularly after the Communist revolution, when women’s work was encouraged. While Chinese scholars and historians uniformly condemn the practice, it should be noted that a family who was less socially affluent could aspire to upward mobility for one of their daughters by binding her feet, thus enabling her to conform to upper-class notions of beauty as an adult. The twentieth century has seen many changes for East Asian women, both in East Asia and in North America. Like all immigrants, East Asian women in North America have adapted and compromised with a new set of social expectations for their gender. Some continue their folk traditions, and others change them, while some are left behind. In The Joy Luck Club (1989), novelist Amy Tan explores the conflict between a generation of immigrant Chinese women who arrived in the United States around World War II and their Chinese American daughters. The book recounts the older

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women’s strength, as well as the compromises they made to raise American daughters. Some Asian American women maintain ties to East Asian culture by perpetuating family traditions, particularly those accompanying rites of passage such as marriage and childbirth. An Asian American woman may choose to have a wedding ceremony, for example, in which she dons a white Western dress and a traditional dress from her own tradition in the same day. She may learn to prepare traditional ethnic cuisine at home, and be expected by her family to make special dishes for its members’ rites of passage. Korean American comedian Margaret Cho explores the conflicting demands of American and Korean cultural expectations for women in her stand-up comedy. Today, Asian American women may be better understood than in the past, but they must still struggle with North American stereotypes of the model minority woman: intelligent and submissive. Reality is far more complex. See also: Gender; Humor; Rape; Religion; Rites of Passage; Women Religious; Women Warriors. References: Furth, Charlotte. ‘‘Concepts of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infancy in Ch’ing Dynasty China.’’ Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 46, no. 1 (February 1987): 7–35; Hunter, Janet. Women and the Labor Market in Japan’s Industrializing Economy: the Textile Industry before the Pacific War. New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003; Kendall, Laurel. The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988; Kendall, Laurel, and Mark Peterson, ed. Korean Women: View from the Inner Room. Cushing, ME: East Rock Press, 1983; Kim, Hee-Jeung K. ‘‘Women between cultures: Experiences in pregnancy and postpartum care.’’ Fieldworking Online. http://www.fieldworking.com/main/hallFame/kim.html (accessed June 21, 2007); Ko, Dorothy, Ja Hyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott, eds. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003; Mann, Susan. ‘‘Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womanhood.’’ The Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 4 (November 2000): 835–862; Pearlman, Bari, dir. Daughters of Wisdom. BTG Productions, 2007. Available at ?http://www.daughtersofwisdom.com/buydvd.html (accessed August 11, 2008); Rosenberger, Nancy. Gambling with Virtue: Japanese Women and the Search for Self in a Changing Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001; Sievers, Sharon. ‘‘Women in East Asia.’’ In Women in Asia: Restoring Women to History, eds. Barbara N. Ramusack and Sharon Sievers, 145–254. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Nathalie Cavasin and Theresa A. Vaughan Region: Eastern Europe The term ‘‘Eastern Europe’’ refers to the post-Soviet region, which encompasses the former Yugoslavia, East Germany, and European Russia. For some, it holds negative connotations of a peasantry untouched by the European Enlightenment and corrupted by Communist rule. But generalizations like these tend to collapse countercurrents, variations, and exceptions. Most groups in it regard themselves as members of northern, central, or southern Europe; only those in Russia, Belarus, and Moldova consider themselves as ‘‘Eastern.’’ The people of Central Europe, Poland, and the Baltic states have maintained values consistent with Enlightenment traditions of Euro America. Those of Belarus are the poorest economically. In such a geographically,

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linguistically, and socially diverse region, women’s roles and traditions are correspondingly varied. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire by the early twentieth century, the Balkans (Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Serbia) inherited both the male heroic epic and the religious conflict between Christianity and Islam. They share with the rest of Europe the dark medieval traditions of religious persecution in their history of scapegoating Pagans, Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and Christian heretics. These traditions find expression in significant silences, black humor, demon and vampire stories, family memorates, and Soviet double-talk jokes reflecting the realities of George Orwell’s dystopia of 1984. All can be considered sites of reinterpretation and change. How gender plays out in folklore performance varies markedly from country to country. The public roles of women are so restricted in the Balkans that women leaders, in Albania for example, are acknowledged not as women, but as permanent sworn virgins, that is, asexual social males. In the generally patriarchal south, men’s societies, like the Romanian calusari mummers, dominate public festivals. In Slavic areas, women were restricted to their roles as mothers and helpmates and often viewed as inferior to men in the public and intellectual spheres. Social evaluations are generally made in terms of sexual attractiveness, or by measuring a woman against the idealized role of the self-sacrificing mother. The importance of women as mothers and ritual leaders in Slavic culture is revealed in a Ukrainian religious legend: God thought that the man should be ruler of the household, while St. Peter thought it should be the woman because she took care of children and rituals. God won the argument by taking St. Peter on a pilgrimage during which he was beaten twice by a Ukrainian woman (collected in 1998 from Evdokiia Krasovs’ka, Cherkasy region, Ukraine). Slavic and Baltic folklore often contains significant, structurally comparable themes and motifs that differ markedly by gender. In the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), part of the strongly patriarchal Hanseatic League, Latvian women nevertheless adopted ritual contests of verbal sparring with in-laws, males, and neighbors to make sly fun of their oppressors. Baltic female magic users and healers outnumber male practitioners; mummers may be of either gender, and even werewolves are of both sexes. Women also retain dominance in public musical performances as vocalists (men serve as instrumentalists) and are active in storytelling. In Eastern European folklore, a distinction is made between those who died normal deaths and those who died young or violently; the spirits of those in the latter category haunt the places of their deaths and are malevolent toward the living. Baltic vampire traditions are recent and weakly developed; however, werewolves, monsters, giants, and devils (personifications of the forces of savage nature) dominate Baltic folklore even today. In Romania and the South Slavic areas, the vampire (strigoi) tradition took an especially sinister turn, generating social fears of unspeakable evil that persist into the present. Because vernacular beliefs and practices continued to develop in the Baltics despite European crusades against Pagans, its folklore concerning divine feminine images and ideas are related to animistic concepts of a detachable

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soul; to the sacred forest where the dead were buried, animating its trees, birds, and animals; and to nature spirits of waters, forests, and swamps. Spirits of wild nature—those believed to exist beyond human order and control—are ambivalent and potentially dangerous. Slavic vila and Baltic lauma are female nature spirits who spin, weave, and determine weather and human fortune. Among Balts, Laime (‘‘Fate’’) became a major goddess. In their daina-songs, she represents the law of nature as affecting humans and animals. Balt orientation to mother cults is shared with the Volga Finns (Cheremiss, Mordvin) and Setu Estonians. The Sea Mother, responsible for its bounty, is the special goddess of the Liv fisherfolk of Latvia. Such strong orientation to non-domesticated female divinity is an exception in most of Europe, which is otherwise dominated by a patriarchal theological paradigm. Older matricentric Indigenous beliefs also survived Christianization. In Lithuania, devotion to a hunting goddess derived from the older, lessdifferentiated Forest Mother developed. In Southern Europe, female nature spirits (vila) became protectors and patrons of heroes, while the polianitsy (‘‘warrior women’’) of the epics reconfigured vila traditions to the concerns of a male-centered, war-like society, perhaps drawing upon Amazon legends now associated with Sarmatian archaeological finds. Recent centuries brought a conflation of Slavic female figures—Moist Mother Earth, Mokosh; the birth goddess Rhozanitsa; the fearsome Baba Iaga; and nature spirits, vila or rusalka—with Christian ones, that is, the Virgin Mary with child and various female saints. St. Paraskovia assists with childbirth and punishes those who spin, weave, or sew on Friday, her sacred day. In Balt tradition, however, the cosmic weaver of life and destiny, Laima, honored by both men and women, is supplicated in the old daina songs still sung by secular and Neo-Pagan Latvians: ‘‘Go before me, Laima. I follow in your footsteps.’’ Beliefs about the ancient powers of Slavic Baba Iaga are revealed in stories about her control over time itself; she is portrayed as the white horse of morning, the red horse of midday, and the black horse of night. She journeys by means of a flying mortar and pestle, suggesting her associations with medicine. The hero must recite a special incantation to gain entrance to her skull-flanked, rotating house that stands on chickens’ legs. Rather than harming the hero, she imparts wisdom to him by setting him a series of tasks concerned with crop planting and harvesting. Images of Slavic rusalkas or mavkas and Baltic laumas (female forest spirits who live in water) suggest the wildness of nature and those aspects of human life considered chaotic in terms of normative social rules, especially unrestrained female sexuality. They climb and sit in trees, sing while combing their loose hair, lure young men, and then tickle them so they drown. They are said to dance circle dances in favored fields to encourage abundant harvests. They make good wives when trapped, but tend to return to the wild, sometimes leaving their husbands alone to care for their children. In patriarchal folklore, they are the unquiet souls of rejected or pregnant-out-of-wedlock girls who have killed themselves by drowning, or are the souls of drowned unbaptized infants. They may be jealous and vengeful, punishing with disease those who offend them.

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The Slavic village witch (ved’ma, plural ved’my) is a medicine woman, herbalist, veterinarian, masseuse, and seer, but non-Slavic witches also possess the power to heal or harm. Except during occasional flare-ups of transnational persecution, village healers are not generally demonized, but they may have an uneasy relationship with the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Their status may be compared with Roma in that they are barely tolerated. As Roma attribute their skill in the craft of fortune-telling or the art of music to God and the saints, so witches, who usually call themselves babki (grandmothers) claim a divine source for their knowledge of herbs, poultices, and charms. Like Western European witches, ved’my may be accused of petty thievery, especially of milk, but learned ved’my, women said to make pacts with the Devil and fly on pokers, are considered more malevolent. It is believed that they must pass on their powers to another or suffer a prolonged and painful death. When they die, they are, like the male upyr’ (vampire), buried at crossroads. Among Slavs, the human body is said to be recycled by Moist Mother Earth, who transforms it into grain, while the soul travels to the Otherworld. A woman wishing to become pregnant ingests grain to create new life inside her body; like the Earth, she is viewed as a conduit for life. A contemporary midwife uses bread to wipe the newborn clean and may bake a kasha to insure the health of the infant. Women are central in Eastern European wedding, agricultural, and funeral rituals. Marriages solemnized among Orthodox Slavs focus on the bride as future mother, and the mothers of the bride and groom act as ritual leaders. Women bake ceremonial breads, greet participants with embroidered towels, and sing songs. The Slavic bride’s mother blesses her with a religious icon as she prepares to leave her natal home, covers her with a shawl, and gives her bread and a tree branch for protection. The bride gives bread to her groom’s mother, asking to be accepted as a child of his house. Women perform important functions for funerals, including washing the body, keeping vigil, lamenting, reading the Psalter, and maintaining the grave. During the Soviet era, when formal religion was banned, women assumed almost all ritual functions in the family sphere. Eastern European embroidery has both aesthetic and apotropaic (evilaverting) functions. Embroidered towels drape or wrap sacred items such as icons, family photos, and wedding bread, and are worn as protective belts. All openings in wedding clothing (neck, sleeves, and hems) are decorated with embroidery; the couple stands on an embroidered towel as they say their vows, their hands tied together with embroidered cloth. Women traditionally foretell the future at the New Year, and practice divination at high summer, usually in the forest, as such rituals are said to affect both crops and people. In addition to regular solstice and equinox calendar rituals, women may make and carry birds made out of dough in spring, and offer thanks to nature with bread in autumn. A woman with many children is believed to be capable of restoring failing crops by pulling a plow around the village. Women are subject to many taboos, especially in connection to pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care. A woman who becomes frightened while pregnant can cause her infant to have an unsightly birthmark, while

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one who weans her child improperly can cause him or her to possess the evil eye. Since the end of the nineteenth century, and especially during and after World War II, North America received many immigrants from Eastern Europe, of which the Jewish experience is most thoroughly documented. Most Jews, similar to other Eastern Europeans, settled in cities—Chicago, New York, Montreal, and Toronto—in part recreating the culture of the shtetl (town or village) with synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, bookstores, kosher meat markets, matzo bakeries, and ritual bathhouses. Intermarriage, wage work in sweatshops and other industrial settings, and opportunities for female education challenged previous Eastern European gender traditions and attracted many to the radical North American workers’ movements of the first part of the twentieth century. A recent documentary film, Letter from Karelia (2004), reconstructs the tragic end of the Finnish revolutionaries and their families who repatriated to the Soviet ‘‘promised land’’ of Karelia in large numbers, only to be purged by Stalin a few years later, leaving almost no trace. It may be said that the Iron Curtain was a relic of the most xenophobic aspects of Eastern European tradition; but its demise was also deeply Eastern European—shifts in population and immigration continue to bring new transformational possibilities to an ever-emergent Eastern Europe. See also: Embroidery; Film; Helpmate; Memorate; Politics; Superstition; Vampire; Wage Work; Wedding; Wicca and Neo-Paganism; Witchcraft, Historical. References: Berdahl, Daphne. Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; Boym, Svetlana. Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994; Brad unas, Elena. ‘‘‘If you kill a snake—the sun will cry’: Folktale Type 425-M, A Study in Oicotype and Folk Belief.’’ Lituanus, vol. 21, no.1 (Spring 1975). http://www.lituanus.org/1975/75_1_01.htm (accessed January 1, 2008); Creed, Gerald W. ‘‘Constituted through Conflict: Images of Community (and Nation) in Bulgarian Rural Ritual.’’ American Anthropologist, vol. 106, no. 1 (2004): 56–70; Crowe, David M. A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia. New York: St. Martins Press, 1994; Draitser, Emil. Making War, Not Love: Gender and Sexuality in Russian Humor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999; Goluboff, Sascha. Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003; Hoppal, Mihaly, and Juha Pentikainen, eds. Uralic Mythology and Folklore. Budapest: Ethnographic Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 1989; Hubbs, Joanna. Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988; Ivanits, Linda. Russian Folk Belief. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989; Johns, Andreas. Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale. Oxford and New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004; Konenenko, Nathalie. ‘‘Strike Now and Ask Questions Later: Witchcraft Stories in Ukraine.’’ Ethnologies, special issue on Wicca/witchcraft, vol. 20, no. 1 (1998): 67–89; ———. ‘‘Widows and Sons: Heroism in Ukrainian Epic.’’ Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. XIV, no. 3/4 (December 1990): 388–414; ———. ‘‘Women as Performers of Oral Literature: A Re-examination of Epic and Lament.’’ In Women Writers in Russian Literature, eds. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene, 17–33. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1994; Kligman, Gail. The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 [1988]; Mulligan, Tom. ‘‘Death rite unnerves Romanian EU bid.’’ BBC News, March 5, 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ europe/3537085.stm; Ryan, W. F. The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of

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Magic and Divination in Russia. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999; Saxberg, Kelly, dir. Letter from Karelia. National Film Board of Canada, 2004; Vikis-Freibergs, Vaira, ed. Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folk Songs. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989; Worobec, Christine. Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001.

Aija Veldre Beldavs and Natalie O. Kononenko Region: Mexico Bordered by the United States to the north, and Belize and Guatemala to the south, Mexico is the third most populous country in the Western Hemisphere, and has provided a very rich field for the study of folklore. Mexico’s inhabitants include many culturally distinct Aboriginal groups, although most Mexicans are considered mestizos, the descendents of both Europeans and Indigenous peoples. Women have played crucial roles in the collection and analysis of Mexican folklore, and there is an extensive ethnographic literature that reveals the importance of mythical and sacred female figures in Mexican cultures. There have been few studies, however, that address the ways in which Mexican women actively create, perform, and appreciate expressive culture. Aboriginal groups populated the Mexican territories many centuries before the Spanish arrived. Between the fourth and tenth centuries, several civilizations lived in an era of splendor, including the Maya and the Zapotec in the southern parts of Mexico, and the Toltec in central Mexico. The best known of the Native civilizations, the Aztec, achieved its height much later, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Aztecs, also known as Mexicas, arrived from the north and settled in 1325 in the area now occupied by Mexico City. When Hernan Cortes led Spanish forces into the area in 1519, he found one of the most powerful, sophisticated, and feared civilizations in the Americas. Codices, pictographic manuscripts by Native authors, as well as oral and written testimonies from the period, provide clues to the place of women in Indigenous and colonial societies. Women participated in everyday life and even acted as rulers of some Indigenous communities. The Aztec religion, for example, possessed a complex pantheon of deities that supported the sociopolitical organization of Aztec civilization, and female figures were an important part of this pantheon. Coatlicue was one of the most important female deities of the Aztecs. She was known as the mother of Huitzilopochtli, the war deity identified with the sun, and whom she conceived when a feather landed on her belly while she was sweeping. Her warrior daughter Coyolxauhqui, identified with the moon, was another powerful god. Coyolxauhqui wanted to kill her mother and incited her 400 brothers, the stars, to help her. Although Huitzilopochtli came to Coatlicue’s defense, Coatlicue was no weakling: a stone representation of her housed in the National Museum of Anthropology and History depicts a monstrous warrior with claws for feet, a necklace of human hearts, and a skirt made of serpents. Elements of Aztec mythology are still present in stories that are told today, including contemporary legends of La Llorona, the wailing woman.

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In the United States, various Chicana writers such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Felicia Luna Lemus and artists such as Yreina Cervantes and Rosa M. have incorporated the figure of La Llorona into their work. Among Aztecs, childbirth was analogous to fighting a war, and women who died while giving birth to their first child were recognized as warriors. The Aztecs believed that such women went to heaven, just as their male counterparts did after dying in war. After four years, the men came back to Earth as hummingbirds; women came back as Cihuateteo, ‘‘divine women’’ who haunted mortals in the night. Another Indigenous woman who has been the subject of legends is La Malinche, also known as Do~ na Marina or Malintzı´n, who aided and served as a translator for the Spanish forces in Mexico. Hernan Cortes describes her in his reports on the Conquest as his ‘‘tongue.’’ For most of the colonial period, La Malinche was remembered as a powerful figure who helped to reconcile opposing cultures. Once Mexico gained independence from Spain, however, popular perceptions of La Malinche began to change. In the twentieth century, she became known as a woman who had betrayed her own race, and those perceived as non-nationalists are sometimes referred to as malinchistas. Feminist historians have reinterpreted La Malinche’s role in the Conquest and found in her a worthy role model whose intercession avoided an even greater genocide of Indigenous people, while writers and artists have made her a venerable subject of poetry and art. The spiritual conquest of Mexico followed soon after its military defeat. The first Spanish friars arrived in Mexico in 1523, and baptized thousands of people. In recording the beliefs and traditions of the people there as part of their efforts to eliminate what they considered idolatry, they became the first ethnographers of the region. Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahag un provided extensive reports on the lives of Indigenous peoples in central Mexico, but he dealt with women’s activities only superficially and stereotypically. Although it is difficult to ascertain the details of women’s lives through the constructs of colonial patriarchal representation, scholars have been able to arrive at some general conclusions about women in pre-Hispanic times. Louise Burkhart (1997) argues that women’s domestic duties were of equal importance to men’s in Mexican society before the Spanish introduced the concept of female subordination. Most of women’s housekeeping activities like sweeping and cooking had important religious meanings as well. According to Indigenous tradition, when a baby was born, she or he received powerful tools, symbolic of what would be necessary for her or his life. Baby girls got small brooms, while baby boys were presented with shields and arrows. The broom, too, was considered a weapon, whose purpose it was to cleanse and reorder the household. Backstrap weaving, employed throughout pre-Hispanic Mexico with continuity in some contemporary Native communities, has also been an important symbolic activity for women. Aztec women received weaving tools when they were born, and were buried with them when they died. Across Mexico, Indigenous weavers made use of a wide range of motifs, forms, dyes, and materials, including cotton and maguey fibers. They wove not

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only to clothe members of their households, but also for sale in the marketplace. Sharisse McCafferty and Geoffrey McCafferty (1996) contend that the practice of weaving was linked to the power of the female gods; it allowed women to assert control over production and become actively involved in the marketplace. James Lockhart (1992) argues that Mesoamerican deities possess specific attributes just as Spanish saints do, a fact that facilitated the conversion of Aboriginal peoples to Christianity. The apparition and acceptance of Our Lady of Guadalupe illustrates some of the ways in which Indigenous and Christian traditions were overlain. Shortly after her appearance to the Aztec Juan Diego at Tepeyac, north of Mexico City, Nahua documents identify the Virgin of Guadalupe as Totlaconantzin or Tonatzin, terms that mean ‘‘our precious mother’’ and once referred to an Aztec goddess. Spanish friars also instituted religious festivals and dramas, many of which continue to be celebrated. Cofradı´as were lay brotherhoods, founded first by Spanish clerics and later by lay people who participated in the organization of these activities. According to Lockhart, at least half the members of the cofradı´as were female. Early in the seventeenth century, women started to occupy important roles in the cofradı´as. Convents and religious schools were common in colonial cities. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a nun famous for her erudition, as demonstrated in her letters and poetry. Although Indigenous women were denied access to religious life until 1724 (when the first convent for Native women opened), they were allowed to work as servants in convents during the early colonial period. Within the convents, Spanish women instructed Native women in the use of European ingredients and cooking techniques, while the nuns learned and made use of indigenous foods, such as tortillas and tamales, made from ground corn. According to popular legend, these types of exchanges in the colonial convent produced foods such as chiles en nogada, stuffed peppers with a nutmeg sauce, and mole poblano, a tasty red chile sauce poured over poultry that combines European and indigenous spices. During the War for Independence in Mexico in 1821, women took on new roles. A Scottish woman, Frances Erskine (later the Marquesa Calder on de la Barca), visited Mexico for two years and wrote extensively about her experiences. She recorded many observations on the roles and activities of women, including their participation in the war; her work foreshadowed the ways in which the Mexican elite later celebrated the female heroes of the Independence and portrayed all women as mothers of the nation. One dimension of the national period that has received critical attention from folklorists is the series of conflicts in the Borderlands, which have their origins in the 1846 war between the United States and Mexico over control of territories that today include parts of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. People who claim Mexican heritage continue to reside throughout these areas, which scholars include as part of ‘‘greater’’ Mexico. Americo Paredes, the United States’ first Latino recipient of a PhD in Folklore, documented conflicts in south Texas. In his studies published in the 1950s and 1960s, he relied especially on the

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corrido, a ballad that commemorates past events. Paredes argued that the Mexican corrido form, which became most popular during the Mexican Revolution, originated in the conflicts on the border. Women folklorists who have documented Borderland traditions include Gloria Anzald ua, Jovita Gonzalez de Mireles, Fermina de la Garza, and Elena Zamora O’Shea; those associated with the folklore of the American Southwest include Cleofas Jaramillo, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert, Aurora Lucero-White Lea, and Nina Otero-Warren. After thirty years of dictatorship under Porfirio Dı´az, the Mexican Revolution erupted in 1910, and a ten-year-long armed conflict ensued between different factions for control of the national government. Women participated extensively in the revolution as soldaderas (soldiers), becoming part of Mexico’s national consciousness through newspaper accounts, photographs, and corridos. Marı´a Herrera-Sobek (1990) features a number of corridos about valiant soldaderas, including one in honor of Petra Herrera, who led revolutionary soldiers into a fray against Porfirian forces in Torre on, Coahuila, in 1911: ‘‘Even through she was taken prisoner, she doesn’t surrender or give up’’ (Herrera-Sobek 1990: 93). Although men composed and sang corridos, this corrido and others about famous soldaderas provide a remarkable counterpoint to the border corridos, which mostly celebrated the heroics of men. During these periods of conflict, in which new folkloric expressions developed, a tradition of studying and writing about folklore also began to emerge. In 1906, Nicolas Le on became director of Ethnology at Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology, and initiated folklore studies based on British models. He advocated adaptation of the English word ‘‘folklore’’ (foclor) into Spanish usage. Usage of the term took hold in some circles in the 1920s, by which time various segments of Mexican society were developing an interest in the folklore and cultures of rural communities; meanwhile, North American scholars like Robert Redfield, with the assistance of his wife, Margaret Park Redfield, began long-term ethnographic research in several Mexican communities. Although the term ‘‘foclor’’ is not commonly used in Mexican Spanish today, the term ‘‘folkl orico’’ is widely employed, and is associated almost exclusively with rural, traditional dance and its elements, including music and costumes. As in other places, the term ‘‘folklore’’ has been superseded by use of the term ‘‘tradiciones populares,’’ folk traditions. Mexican interest in folklore arose in connection with four interrelated developments: the ongoing consolidation of the nation-state; expansion of commercial interests; artistic movements; and the growth of anthropological and archaeological programs. All depended on a new appreciation of the traditions of Native peoples and campesinos (‘‘rural folk’’), especially their festivals, music, dances, costumes, and crafts. During the 1920s, the first major exhibit of ‘‘popular’’ or folk art was held in Mexico City, and Mexico’s first professional folklorist, Ruben Campos, produced collections of rural folklore commissioned by the ministry of education. These efforts cultivated picturesque images of peasants, which served the construction of a national identity and the development of a tourist industry. While women figured

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prominently at many levels of production in these different emblems of national heritage, they were stereotypically portrayed as preservers of tradition and guardians of the family. In the 1930s, several journals were published which gave attention to folklore in one form or another. An especially important one was Mexican Folkways, a project of the North American writer Frances Toor. This journal (published in English) involved the collaboration of many well-known Mexicans of the era, including the muralist Diego Rivera, and was intended to appeal to North American audiences to promote tourism in Mexico. Toor compiled many of the findings published in the journal into her comprehensive book on Mexican traditions entitled A Treasury of Mexican Folklore (1947). The 1930s also marked the start of educational programs and professional societies dedicated to folklore. Vicente Mendoza and his wife, Virginia Rodrı´guez Rivera, helped to develop courses in Folklore at the National University, where Mendoza was a professor in the school of music. The two scholars collaborated extensively, publishing numerous books and studies of Mexican folklore; they established the Folkloric Society of Mexico in 1938, and edited an annual journal published under its auspices until 1956. Mendoza and Rodrı´guez Rivera trained a number of women who conducted and published studies on festivals, dance, and music, although very few of them pursued academic careers. After 1940, Mexico entered an era of political stability and economic growth, its so-called golden age. The efforts of Campos, Mendoza, and Rodrı´guez Rivera, among others, provided the groundwork for the formation of the Ballet Folkl orico, initiated by Amalia Hernandez in 1952, and dedicated to the study and staging of traditional dances by professionally trained performers. It very successfully used these folkloric displays to represent Mexico to audiences at home and around the world. The most famous of the folkloric dances is the jarabe tapatı´o, Mexico’s national dance. Like most dances in the ballet’s repertoire, it involves men and women dancing together. For the jarabe tapatı´o, men dressed in charro outfits (much like those worn by mariachi performers), and women wore the costume of chinas poblanas, peasant or servant girls from the state of Puebla. While women participated in the production of these displays at many levels, their roles were recognized only through patriarchal forms of nationalism, which formed the basis of most cultural projects during the postrevolutionary golden age. Women also facilitated the promotion of Mexican nationalism through their contributions to cookbooks, developing a distinct cuisine that was central to middle-class Mexican national identity. Some important elements of this cuisine were, of course, tortillas, tamales, and moles. Recent studies of folklore in greater Mexico have uncovered the roles of women in Mexican cultural practices and identities, and have documented women’s increasing involvement in traditionally male dominated folkloric forms, such as mariachi ensembles, charreadas (‘‘rodeos’’), and woodcarving. Many appear in Chicana Traditions (2002), an anthology edited by Norma E. Cant u and Olga Najera-Ramı´rez.

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Larissa Lomnitz Adler (1977) highlights the important roles that women played in the survival of families in the shantytowns of Mexico City; and in an important work published in Spanish, Lourdes Arizpe (1975) documented the lives of Indigenous women who made their livelihoods from selling dolls and other crafts on the streets of Mexican cities. These studies and others provide a basis for appreciating the scope of women’s contributions—both old and new—to folklore creation in Mexico and Greater Mexico. Areas in which women’s contributions have been recognized and studied include midwifery and healing traditions, religious devotions, festivals and celebrations, domestic production, including important items for festivals like costumes and foods and, to a growing extent, crafts for sale on the global market. There are a number of important studies of Mexican women’s life histories, including Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman (2003) and Norma Iglesias Prieto’s Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora (1997), which focuses on the lives of women factory workers in Tijuana. As parteras (midwives), women have been able to exercise authority, emphasizing their responsibilities as guardians of fertility and their traditional links to female spiritual figures. The role of the partera is not limited to assisting in the delivery of infants, but includes aiding women with conception or contraception and treating children for a range of maladies, including mal de ojo (evil eye), susto (an illness brought about by a sudden fright or shock), and caı´da de mollera (fallen fontanelle, a condition occurring in newborns that is attributed to spiritual causes). Parteras in Native communities are sometimes responsible for fertility and birth rituals, like the burying of the umbilical cord and placenta. Women’s roles as curanderas (‘‘folk healers’’) are well-recorded in the ethnographic literature on Mexico, which suggests that women have been providers of traditional medicine since before the Conquest, although their status, especially as an acceptable medical resource for men, has varied over time. Curanderas recognize the sources of herbal and practical medicine, but they also make use of many spiritual remedies. Women’s involvement in spiritual healing is consistent with their growing roles in a variety of religious movements in which healing often plays an important part. These include spiritism, Pentecostalism, and a range of Catholic options, including the Catholic Charismatic Movement. Ruth Behar, for example, describes how Esperanza, the subject of her study, experienced redemption through a form of spiritism dedicated to the revolutionary hero Pancho Villa. By participating in these religions, women often engage in and practice new forms of verbal art, such as testimonial narratives, which are an important element in these religious movements. Women’s roles in Mexico’s most emblematic and complex folkloric expression, the religious festival, are not widely appreciated. Festivals often incorporate dances and dramas, which employ a range of costumes, foods, religious ceremonies, and processional performances, as well as other genres of folklore. Women have crucial supportive roles as producers of costumes and foods, as Olga Najera-Ramı´rez has documented in La Fiesta de los Tastoanes (1997), the first book-length study of a festival in Mexico. The festival of los tastoanes (‘‘indigenous nobles’’) features one of the many

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kinds of reenactments of the Conquest and evangelization of the Native peoples found throughout Mexico. Women, often relegated to the tasks of cooking and preparing the festival site, are, however, sometimes allowed limited festival roles as dancers or actors, such as those who dance in matachines troupes, participate in Guadalupana societies, and appear in traditional Christmas shepherd’s plays known as pastorelas or los pastores. Home altars are an important permanent feature of many Mexican homes, and are generally created and maintained by women. They also make significant contributions to El Dia de los Muertos (‘‘the Day of the Dead’’) festivities, which take place on All Souls’ and All Saints Days (November 1 and November 2, respectively) and feature altars in commemoration of loved ones who have died. Women are responsible for manufacturing skulls made of sugar and the bright crepe paper flowers and papel picado (cut paper designs) that adorn the altars. As many Mexican rural communities have begun to depend on folk art for their livelihoods, a few scholars have begun to document more fully women’s roles in the production of folk art for market. Women participate in the production of woven materials of different kinds, and in making ceramics, although men are also involved in both of these activities. In Teotitlan, a Zapotec village in the southern state of Oaxaca, both men and women weave zarapes (‘‘blankets’’) from wool on treadle looms. Although the use of wool and treadle looms is traceable to European influences, the Teotitlan weaving tradition has roots in the pre-Hispanic period. Josefina Aguilar and her sisters of Ocotlan, Oaxaca, have become internationally recognized folk artists, and are featured in Lois Wasserspring’s Oaxacan Ceramics: Traditional Folk Art by Oaxacan Women (2000). Their works include embellished pots and bowls, and figures of different sizes, including those of mermaids, virgins, damas de la noche (prostitutes), and the painter Frida Kahlo. While their knowledge of ceramics and sources of artistic inspiration are rooted in oral tradition, their products are adapted to a global market. The inclusion of women weavers of rebozos (intricately woven silk shawls) and women ceramicists like those of the Castillo and the Aguilar families in the exhibit Masters of Tradition and in the exhibit catalog (2000) indicates that women traditional artists are being recognized. Women are also involved in the production and sale of other folk arts, including miniatures woven from palm leaves and dolls crafted in the images of Native women, for sale in national and global markets. Scholars do not yet fully understand the consequences of the increasing commercialization of rural women’s skills and products. As Lynn Stephen shows (1991), the entry of Teotitlan women into larger markets may create new opportunities for some, but in other cases, it may make the social and gender hierarchies within rural communities even more rigid. Although numerous scholars have conducted research on Mexican folk narratives, including some renowned pioneers in Folklore Studies like Franz Boas and Elsie Clews Parsons, much of their work provided little insight into the contexts in which the stories were told or details about the people from whom the stories were collected. Perhaps the first North American scholar to provide this kind of information was Stanley Robe, in his

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Mexican Tales and Legends from Los Altos (1970), based on research in the state of Jalisco. He collected a number of stories from women, although he fails to note how their gender might have influenced their storytelling. Brenda Rosenbaum’s detailed study of gender in a Mayan village in the southern state of Chiapas (1993) describes how gender ideology is challenged and sustained through folk narratives and other practices. Her study is an example of a feminist ethnography of Mexican Mayan communities of the kind that anthropologist June Nash (1985) has also pursued. Women’s contributions to Mexican music are not well recognized in Mexico, and less so in North America, although scholars such as Yolanda Broyles Gonzalez have begun to study the composers, singers, and performers of canci on ranchera. Ruben Campos (1928), in his studies of music, dance, and costume in the central state of Michoacan, found that women often sing traditional songs, participate in certain festivals as singers as well as dancers, and sometimes play musical instruments. More recently, ethnomusicologist Henrietta Yurchenco (1997) describes how professional women’s groups have made use of traditional Michoacana repertoire and styles. In the United States and Mexico, women are now incorporated into many mariachi ensembles or have formed all-women bands. Alicia Marı´a Gonzalez (1981) confirms that the making of traditional Mexican breads in panaderı´as (bakeries) has been perceived as exclusively the domain of men, despite the fact that women often play important roles as owners or co-owners of bakeries and learn how to make breads. Although Guadalupe Castillo from Brownsville, Texas, does not regularly participate in the making of bread, she runs a panaderı´a, the business she inherited from her father, and defends Mexican bread-making traditions from local supermarket chains and others who would corrupt them. In this way, she can permit some corrections to the existing ethnographic literature by illustrating not only the relevance of Mexican traditions in the United States, but also the direct ways in which women have played crucial roles in traditions that were once considered male domains. See also: Altar, Home; Ballad; Curandera; Death; Evil Eye; Festival; Folk Costume; Folk Dance; Folk Medicine; Foodways; La Llorona; Midwifery; Paper Folding and Papercutting; Pottery; Processional Performance; Virgin of Guadalupe; Weaving. References: Anzald ua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Second Edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999; Arizpe, Lourdes. Indı´genas en la ciudad de M exico: el caso de las Marı´as. Mexico: Secretarı´a de Educaci on P ublica, 1975; Behar, Ruth. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. Second edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003; Burkhart, Louise. ‘‘Mexica Women on the Home Front.’’ In Indian Women of Early Mexico, eds. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, 25–54. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997; Campos, Ruben. El folklore y  la musica mexicana: Investigaci on acerca de la cultura musical en M exico. Mexico: Talleres Graficos de la Naci on, 1928; Cant u, Norma E., and Olga Najera-Ramı´rez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Carmichael, Elizabeth, and Chloe Sayer. The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991; Clendinnen, Inga. Aztecs: An Interpretation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991; Flechsing, Katrin. Miniature Crafts and Their Makers: Palm Weaving in a Mexican Town. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004; Gonzalez, Alicia Marı´a. ‘‘Guess How Doughnuts are Made.’’ In ‘‘And

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Other Neighborly Names’’: Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore, eds. Richard Bauman and Roger Abrahams, 104–122. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981; Herrera-Sobek, Marı´a. The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Iglesias Prieto, Norma. Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora: Life Histories of Women Workers in Tijuana. Trans. Michael Stone. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997; Lockhart, James. The Nahuas After the Conquest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992; Lomnitz, Larissa Adler. Networks and Marginality: Life in a Mexican Shantytown. Trans. Cinna Lomnitz. New York: Academic Press, 1977; McCafferty, Sharisse, and Geoffrey McCafferty. ‘‘Spinning and Weaving as Female Gender Identity in Post-Classic Mexico.’’ In Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes, eds. Margot Schevill, Janet Catherine Berlo, and Edward Dwyer, 19–44. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996; Najera-Ramı´rez, Olga. La Fiesta de los Tastoanes: Critical Encounters in Mexican Festival Performance. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997; Napolitano, Valentina. Migration, Mujercitas, and Medicine Men: Living in Urban Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Nash, June. In the Eyes of the Ancestors: Belief and Behavior in a Maya Community. Reprint edition. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1985; Paredes, Americo. Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, ed. Richard Bauman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993; Pilcher, Jeffrey. ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998; Redfield, Robert. The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941; Robe, Stanley. Mexican Tales and Legends from Los Altos. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970; Rosenbaum, Brenda. With Our Heads Bowed: The Dynamics of Gender in a Maya Community. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany, 1993; Stephen, Lynn. Zapotec Women. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991; Toor, Frances. A Treasury of Mexican Folkways. New York: Crown Publishers, 1947; Trotter, Robert, and Juan Antonio Chavira. Curanderismo: Mexican-American Folk Healing. Second edition. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997; Wasserspring, Lois. Oaxacan Ceramics: Traditional Folk Art by Oaxacan Women. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000; Yurchenco, Henrietta. ‘‘Estilos de ejecuci on en la m usica indı´gena mexicana.’’ In Sabidurı´a Popular, ed. Arturo Chamorro, 153–164. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacan, 1997.

Ethan Sharp and M onica Dı´az Region: Middle East Traditionally defined as the region that runs from North Africa to Afghanistan, the Middle East includes not only Arab lands, but also the countries of Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey. Predominantly Muslim, the area also hosts Christian, Kurdish, Jewish, and Druze cultures. Various conflicts and the forces of globalization have led to the creation of Arab and Muslim diasporic communities throughout the modern world, most notably in Europe and North America. As people of Middle Eastern descent have migrated north and west, their culture and folklore have followed. Most studies of Middle Eastern women’s cultures available in English focus on the more open and Western-friendly nations of North Africa, especially Egypt. Exceptions, such as Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik (1969) are rare, but anthologies of collected studies and writings in translation, such as Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie’s Women in the Muslim World (1978) and Fernea’s Women and the Family in the Middle East (1985), are available to the non-Arabist. The late twentieth century up to the present has also seen the publication of more memoirs and other

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personal-experience narratives of Arab and Arab American women, such as Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass (1994) and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Language of Baklava (2005). Such writings reveal some aspects of West Asian women’s folklore. Much research on women’s lives in the Middle East, however, centers on sociopolitical issues, only tangentially touching on traditional lore and folk customs. Indiana University Press’ new Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2005) is a prime example. As the official publication of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, it provides valuable insights into the lives of West Asian women; it also furnishes much-needed context for the study of women’s folklore in the region. Similarly, feminist anthologies such as Opening the Gates, edited by Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (1990), show how modernity and Western-style feminism have changed the lives of women. In the postcolonial Middle East, folkloristic study is still relatively new as a discipline due to the perceived stigma of folk traditions among societies trying to modernize and participate in the global economy. Ironically, women’s traditional crafts remain an important source of family income, especially in rural areas, as Guity Nashat and Judith Tucker (1999) note. Jordan’s American-born Queen Noor found a means to empower rural women and stimulate Jordan’s economy by facilitating the marketing and sales of traditional embroidered goods. Palestinian, Israeli, Egyptian, and Lebanese women also market their traditionally made wares. In families and villages where genders are often segregated, embroidery is an art form that can be practiced communally and across generations in the family harem. Women gather in the family home or compound and embroider garments and pillow covers which then can be passed on to an intermediary for sale or sold by the women themselves. Although embroidery is one of the more prevalent folk arts among Middle Eastern women, beadwork, pottery, weaving, and other textile crafts also continue their rich heritage into the present day, particularly in rural and lower-income areas. In Iran, the predominant women’s craft remains carpet-weaving, often practiced by young girls whose fingers are smaller and more nimble than those of their elders. Traditionally, carpets, blankets, and other goods were woven for household use only, but since the nineteenth century, more goods have been handmade for sale and export. Women used to spin and dye the wool as well as weave it, but the availability of pre-dyed yarns has undercut this part of the customary process. Women’s folk traditions perpetuate themselves primarily within extended families. Fatima Mernissi (1994) provides one view of the harem, which, as she explains, bears little resemblance to Western notions of harems based on medieval sultan’s courts and Orientalist writings. The harem, as it is understood in the Middle East, refers to the women and children of an extended family; they often live under one roof, or, in the case of wealthier families, in a group of homes sharing a courtyard or other common areas. In these communal spaces and family groups, women pass on knowledge and practice of traditional customs, arts, and beliefs. When a woman marries into a family, she will not only take her own family lore with her, but will also learn that of her husband’s female relatives.

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The harem of Mernissi’s Moroccan youth provided performance space for storytelling and discussions about dreams. Because mothers often dream of different lives beyond the walls of the family compound, women’s stories have been traditionally fantasy-laden. Indeed, Alf Layla wa-Layla, or The Thousand and One Nights, has often been disparaged in the Middle East as ‘‘stories for women and children.’’ The Tunisian lullabies in Fernea and Basima Bezirgan’s Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak (1977) also reveal the fanciful dreams that mothers harbor for their children. Guity Neshat and Judith E. Tucker argue convincingly that the more secluded the women, the more fantasies their stories contain (1999). ^ at, ^ or fantasy tales, also have been historically considered less imKhuraf portant than qisas, or truthful, serious stories. Thus, women’s stories have been less often collected and far less often studied than have works in the epic and Qur’anic traditions. Hassan el-Shamy’s study of women storytellers in Egypt (1999) has added significantly to the corpus of Egyptian women’s tales available in English translation. His informants report having learned their tales from older female relatives; while fantasy predominates, the stories El-Shamy collected revolve around family relationships and are designed to edify and entertain a listening audience composed primarily of family members. Along with many other Arab American writers, Frances Khirallah Noble (2000) identifies her sittee (grandmother) as a primary source of her own knowledge of Arab stories. Women’s oral narrative and poetic traditions have altered somewhat with the changing status of women in the Middle East. As more women have entered the workforce, their stories have become more realistic and have come to resemble to a greater degree those of men. For the most part women are still the family storytellers in Middle Eastern families, be they Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. But the topics of their stories have shifted, and women’s heroism is no longer limited to the more passive variety of Scheherazade, who saved the lives of Muslim women by enchanting her husband with stories. Legends of the Palestinian intifada, for example, now include tales of mothers protecting their children and standing up to Israeli soldiers. Joseph Ginat shows gossip to be another traditional verbal genre that bridges the gap between traditional and modern cultures in the Middle East (1982). Both men and women gossip, yet women, with broader social networks and contexts for sharing stories and information, use gossip as a means of social control. During cemetery visits, shopping trips, and reunions with relatives, women control the amount and kind of information they pass on, embellishing and entertaining along the way, enabling them to have a measure of control over local politics, even though they do not directly participate. Customary vow-taking also has made its way into women’s folk practice in modern Middle Eastern societies. Both rural and urban women and those of many religious beliefs participate in the taking and fulfilling of vows. Whereas once a woman might pray for fertility or a happy marriage, now vows include wishes for a child to successfully finish high school or to pass an important exam. Mona Mikhail, in her study of women’s literature and

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culture (2004), describes vows as simple as the lighting of a candle in a church, as laborious as washing the floor of a shrine with rose water, or as expensive as providing food for a village. Primarily a women’s belief tradition, vow-taking thus transcends social and religious affiliation. Wedding rituals, even in urban areas, often reveal traces of traditional practice. Mikhail describes weddings in Egypt at which a bride sucks on a lump of sugar so that her marriage will be ‘‘sweet,’’ or stands in a basin of water filled with greenery to ensure her fertility. In North Africa, henna art is practiced as a prenuptial rite; the bride may have her hands and forearms lavishly decorated to celebrate her marriage. Wedding celebrations remain segregated by gender in many cases; women’s gatherings include feasting, dancing, and singing. Mothers, aunts, and grandmothers retain primary responsibility for the rearing and acculturation of children. Thus, many family traditions, no matter how patriarchal, are perpetuated by women, including both female and male circumcision. The former is performed by women exclusively. While seldom officially sanctioned, female circumcision is still practiced among Muslim women in Africa, as well as in the North American diaspora. Health professionals and feminists who failed to prevent the practice have worked instead to provide sterile instruments and education so as to make the procedure at least less dangerous. Women also play major roles in male circumcision rites, from planning the event to singing blessings. Ginat describes several cases in which the father of a male child was not even present for the ritual. Through these roles, women share responsibility for the sexual mores of the family and for family honor. Women also play leading roles in the healing varieties of folk medicine. In Egypt, the zar ceremony is believed to have originated with the Amhara people of Ethiopia. In modern Cairo, a woman may pursue Western-style psychotherapy to ease emotional distress and perform a zar ritual at the same time to rid herself of any djinn (demons) that may be afflicting her. Women serve as the repositories of healing formulas, both verbal and practical. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea (1969) writes of Um Khalil in the Iraqi village of El Nahra on whom the local women depended for charms and healing medicines to combat everything from physical sicknesses to the evil eye. Traditional healers such as Um Khalil are prominent citizens of many rural areas throughout the Middle East, but such practices are not limited to villages. Diana Abu-Jaber (2005) recalls an incident in her childhood when she almost got frostbite while skating in upstate New York. Her Jordanian father immediately called his older sister in Jordan for a remedy for his daughter’s numb, blue feet. As is the case in many regions, the folklore of the Middle East evinces major differences between urban and rural areas and between formally educated and non-formally educated families. That which is defined strictly as folklore persists with greater prominence in rural areas, where the majority of residents have little formal education. However, with rising interest in heritage and ethnic identity, urban, educated folk are beginning to consciously hold on to some of the uniquely Middle Eastern traditions of their ancestors. At the same time, many types of folklore, particularly the verbal

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and customary genres, persist in the Middle Eastern diaspora of North America and Europe. Middle Eastern women’s folklore—perhaps because it is so deeply rooted in family heritage—serves as a means of holding on to one’s ethnic identity. Through volumes such as Joanna Kadi’s Food for Our Grandmothers (1994), Arab American women can pay homage to their traditions while preserving them for their own daughters. See also: Beadwork; Embroidery; Evil Eye; Female Genital Cutting; Folk Art; Folk Belief; Folk Medicine; Gossip; Henna Art/Mehndi; Lullaby; Politics; Pottery; Rugmaking; Storytelling; Weaving; Wedding. References: Abu-Jaber, Diana. The Language of Baklava. New York: Pantheon, 2005; Abu-Lughod, Lila. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Badran, Margot, and Miriam Cooke, eds. Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Beck, Lois, and Nikki Keddie, eds. Women in the Muslim World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978; el-Shamy, Hasan M. Tales Arab Women Tell and the Behavioral Patterns They Portray. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock. Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village. New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1969; ———, ed. Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985; Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock, and Basima Bezirgan, eds. Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977; Ginat, Joseph. Women in Muslim Rural Society: Status and Role in Family and Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982; Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. http://www.amews.org/ jmews.html (accessed August 8, 2008); Kadi, Joanna, ed. Food For Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists. Boston: South End Press, 1994; Kanaana, Sharif. ‘‘Women in the Legends of the Intifada. In Palestinian Women of Gaza and the West Bank, ed. Suha Sabbagh, 114–135. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998; Mernissi, Fatima. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of an Arabian Girlhood. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1994; Mikhail, Mona N. Seen and Heard: A Century of Arab Women in Literature and Culture. Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2004; Nashat, Guity, and Judith E. Tucker. Women the Middle East and North Africa: Restoring Women to History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Noble, Frances Khirallah. The Situe Stories. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000; Noor, Queen. Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life. New York: Miramax, 2003; Webber, Sabra. ‘‘Women’s Folk Narratives and Social Change.’’ In Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change, ed. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, 310–316. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

Bonnie D. Irwin Region: Pacific Islands The Pacific Islands are a widely dispersed group of islands, atolls, and archipelagos in the South Pacific extending from either side of the equator. Pacific peoples were great navigators, enabling them to migrate and colonize the region, creating a web of cultural diversity rich in languages, artifacts, and social customs. The standard ethnological and territorial divisions, Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, are expedient categories rather than a reflection of the complex heterogeneous societies of the area. Polynesia, meaning ‘‘many islands,’’ occupies the eastern half of the South Pacific bounded by Hawai’i, Easter Island, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Tonga, and Samoa. Melanesia, denoting ‘‘dark’’ islands (another term bestowed by the

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French explorer, d’Urville), includes Papua New Guinea and island clusters like the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Fiji is more culturally aligned with Polynesian Tonga than with its Melanesian affiliates. The ‘‘little islands,’’ Micronesia, superficially parallel Polynesian culture but diverge from it due to a tremendous variety of languages and types of social and political organization. Autocratic chiefs of royal lineage and priests have historically dominated Polynesian social hierarchies. Powerful women, whose status often outranked male relatives, could either inherit pre-eminent positions or exert their influence indirectly through their husbands, sons, or brothers. Micronesian aristocratic structure and ranking were elaborate and competitive, making it difficult to generalize about women’s political roles. In Melanesia, leaders maintained their positions through skills refined and perfected by continual adjustments of control and authority, not necessarily via inherited roles. Melanesian society was invariably gender-segregated, with women’s power concentrated in areas other than governance. Women’s folkloristics in the region explores the field of relations among genders, between the sacred and the mundane, in different arenas of ritual practice, and between independent and interdependent spheres of culturally expressive action. For example, Melanesian graded societies (where rank is contingent on increased wealth) tend to ritually and spatially segregate the sexes in the performance of rites and the creation of ceremonial paraphernalia (masks, instruments, costumes, insignia, etc.). Each domain operates as a separate center of power for men and women. Polynesian women’s roles intersect or complement men’s celebratory activities, creating interdependent relations; that is, prescribed yet interrelated genderbased ritual actions. Mana wahine is the Maori term for ‘‘women’s dignity.’’ This concept is central to Polynesian women’s creative expressiveness, which transforms the everyday into the numinous and connects the natural world with the spiritual. Women as gatherers of plants and artists, who convert plant material into artifacts (primarily fiber arts and ornaments), are agents linking the secular to the sacred through creative practice, ritual action, and ceremonial presence, and are manifest in the spiritual and aesthetic aspects of the final cultural object. Origin myths offer a rationale for how gender relations evolved. According to Maori legend, the first ancestors, Ranginui or Rangi, the sky (male), and Papatuanuku or Papa, the Earth (female), were locked in an eternal embrace until their children, gods of the forests, the sea, the wind, who lay crushed between these great entities, forced them apart. The history of the world’s creation becomes the story of their separation, releasing, as it did, the energy that fuels the eternal round of generation and regeneration, determining the characteristic behavior (tikanga) of their descendants, including humans, other life forms, and natural phenomena. Variants of this myth about creator gods and ancestral spirits are found throughout the Pacific. The theme of divinity and the need to balance the spiritual with the physical is expressed in the two notions of tapu and mana, also pan-Pacific concepts. Both men and women possess mana, the power and authority received from their ancestors. Tapu connotes ‘‘sacred’’ or ‘‘subject to religious restrictions.’’ This idea is countered by the concept of noa, connoting

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‘‘secular’’ and ‘‘profane,’’ as well as ‘‘safe.’’ Females belong to the Earth, papa, and so are essentially noa, as is food. Males are inherently tapu, given their gendered association with the sky gods, as is carving, bound by certain ritual prohibitions to protect artists, patrons, and the community from supernatural injury. The presence of anything noa spiritually contaminates carvings; therefore, women and food are not allowed near objects being carved. A newly constructed house is tapu and must be blessed, that is, made noa, safe for use. The blessing ritual involves a noble woman with mana crossing the threshold. Her power and particular sacredness offset the building’s tapu. Similar rituals are still enacted today for buildings or art and ethnological exhibition openings, where the space and many of the objects on display are tapu. Polynesian belief systems depend upon the subtle interplay of tapu and noa. The performances of men and women in the sacred ritual precincts (marae in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Tahiti, malae elsewhere) complement each other by integrating these two states of being. Rites alternate between a woman’s welcome and mourning cry, karanga, with a warrior’s aggressive challenge to visitors, haka, followed by male orations reinforced by women’s waiata, brief song-poems, culminating with music and chants. Throughout the Pacific, gift exchanges are traditionally expressed in acts of hospitality, such as giving food and prestige items like barkcloth, woven mats, shell ornaments, etc. Barkcloth, commonly known as tapa (kapa in Hawai’i), is mainly created by women, who continue to adapt and innovate—and even revive—designs and techniques to suit changing conditions. The exceptions are Papua New Guinea, the Marquesas Islands, and Easter Island, where male strength is considered necessary for pounding fibers into cloth. In these cases, men have their own gender-specific motifs for ritual objects, including masks, ancestor figures, and loincloths. In Samoa and Fiji, finely woven mats are produced only by women, as are the sacred cloaks of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Hawai’i. Each step of the transmutation of plant fiber through the weaving process into a highly crafted aesthetic artifact is accompanied by ritual and prayer acknowledging the sacred, tapu, with its potency as well as its prohibitions. The neotraditional arts of Polynesian tifaifai and Hawaiian quilting combine European fabric techniques with vestiges of barkcloth construction. In the United States and Canada, diasporic groups of Pacific peoples live in communities in San Diego, San Franciso, Seattle, Vancouver, Utah, and Oklahoma. These enclaves of transnational Pacific Island societies maintain links with their homelands through telecommunications networks, travel, and the long-distance preservation of cultural traditions. Women’s craft cooperatives are instrumental in creating self-sustaining community projects that teach and transmit skills in traditional practices, such as fiber arts (barkcloth, weaving, basketry, and plaiting). As important cultural displays of ethnicity, they alter Indigenous art forms and generate new aesthetic responses through the acculturation of available materials, like recycled colorful plastic bags and strips for creating hats and baskets, or muslin, paper, and synthetic fibers to replace barkcloth. In the tradition of their migratory

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ancestors, the work of these Pacific women exemplifies the breadth of women’s creative expressiveness and inventiveness as culture-bearers through both time and space. See also: Basketmaking; Gender; Material Culture; Quiltmaking; Ritual; Weaving. References: Macpherson, Cluny, and others. Tangata O Te Moana Nui: The Evolving Identities of Pacific Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press Ltd., 2001; Neich, Roger, and Mick Pendergrast. Pacific Tapa. Auckland, NZ: David Bateman, Ltd., 1997; Oliver, Douglas L. Oceania: The Native Cultures of Australia and the Pacific Islands. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989; Orbell, Margaret. A Concise Encyclopedia of Maori Myth and Legend. Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury University Press, 1998; Weiner, Annette B. ‘‘Inalienable Wealth.’’ American Ethnologist, vol. 12, no. 2 (1985): 210–227.

Suzanne P. MacAulay

Region: South America The southern part of the Western Hemisphere, the continent of South America, is generally recognized as extending south from Panama to Tierra del Fuego; it is bordered on the west and east by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and includes the islands of the Caribbean and those off its coasts, such as Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands in the Pacific and the Falkland Islands in the Atlantic. The region, comprised of twelve nation-states of various sizes, and three territories, reveals the legacy of colonization by Western European nations from the sixteenth century to the present through the languages spoken there: Portuguese, French, Spanish, Dutch, and English. Although women’s folklore has been ever-present in South American folklore research, its equally ubiquitous female folklorists rarely have been included in discussions of the field. Folklorist Stith Thompson traveled to South America in 1947 to learn about its folklore institutions and to establish new ones. He summarized his findings in a 1948 article published in the Journal of American Folklore. This ‘‘seminal’’ article mentions not a single woman, nor does it reference any scholarship on women’s traditions. In a subsequent essay, however, Thompson wrote of return visits to South America and made some references to women: ‘‘I found very little folklore work being carried on in British Guiana, though one woman from a remote country district came into Georgetown and showed me a large collection of songs she had collected’’ (1961: 393). Note that this individual does not merit being named. Thompson cited the work of Ildefonoso Pereda Valdez, who specialized in Afro Latino folklore, and his unnamed wife, who ‘‘had collected many of what we would call tall tales’’ (ibid.). Thompson also mentioned that while he was in Argentina, he lectured ‘‘a class of sixty women who [were] studying folklore in a teachers college’’ (395). While they have remained largely absent and unnamed in the discourse of academic folkloristics, women scholars played crucial roles in the collection, analysis, and scholarly study of folklore. They provided the impetus— and did much of their work—to establish many of South America’s Folklore Societies, associations, and institutes of Ethnography. Their efforts remain

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largely unacknowledged. Similarly, although some research has been done on the region’s various folklore genres—especially on material culture, music, and myth—much of that scholarship remains in original Indigenous languages and is little known by folklorists in North America. Most of the research that has been translated into English has been done by outsiders— Europeans and North Americans—and includes scant research on the contributions of women scholars or Indigenous peoples. In recent years, although more research has focused on women’s particular production of traditional expressive culture, it is often dictated by proximity and limited to areas of particular interest to U.S. folklorists, such as studies of huipiles (colorful woven women’s blouses) and other Mayan weaving traditions. Eli Barta’s collection of essays, Crafting Gender: Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean (2003), includes work on women in Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, but of the ten chapters, four are about women in Mexico. Among those whose scholarship is both feminist and is not focused on Mexico is Argentinean Isabel Aretz, whose work in Venezuela goes beyond the collecting of material to explore the uses of oral traditional storytelling by women to resist patriarchal power (1986). Mary J. Weismantel offers a good example of a U.S. scholar’s work on Indigenous South Americans, in this case in Ecuador. In Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (2001), Weismantel explores the popular and sometimes controversial image of La Chola, a street-smart, mixed-race woman who appears in jokes, tales, and even in television commercials. Isabel Artez was instrumental in establishing the Instituto Interamericano de Etmusicologı´a y Folklore (now known as the Venezuelan Folklore Institute) in 1949, a regional project sponsored by the Organization of American States. A Chilean teacher and scholar, Pepita Turina was one of the founders of the Asociaci on Folkl orica Chilena in 1943, along with other notable women writers and scholars of the era, including Carlota Andree, Marı´a Luisa Sep ulveda, Camila Bari de Za~ nartu, and Emilia Garnham. Bari de Za~ nartu’s work on Bolivian dance, Sepulveda’s study of Chilean traditions, and Emilia Garnham’s work on dance and music remain significant in the field. South America’s populations, like those in the countries of North America (Central America, Mexico, the United States, and Canada), comprise many culturally distinct Indigenous groups, as well as mestizos, that is, the descendents of a historical hybridity of European, Asian, African, and Indigenous peoples. Not surprisingly, the folklore and expressive cultures of South America reflect this Mestizaje (‘‘mestizo-ness’’), the unique folklife of distinct and hybrid groups. The expressive culture of Afro Latinas/os in Brazil and Paraguay, for example, remains firmly rooted in the cultures of the African diaspora. For many centuries before the European conquest of South America, many important and significant civilizations thrived in the area. Among the most prominent were the Inca (in parts of present-day Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina), the Guaranı´ (in parts of Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia), the Quechua (Andean descendants of the Inca), the Aymara (in the Andes and Altiplano regions), and the Tahino

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(a Caribbean people); each group has provided scholars with a rich source of study. Anthropologists, ethnographers, and folklorists since the nineteenth century have written about South America’s cultural practices. Curandismo—a body of beliefs about healing—is an aspect of South American folklife that has been fairly well researched. The curandera (‘‘folk healer’’) appears in literature and in imagery of traditional cultures across the Americas. While the bruja (‘‘witch’’) is generally associated with the curandera, there is a distinct difference in the types of ‘‘work’’ they perform in their communities. Both enlist plant and mineral elements in their preparations, but for different purposes: the bruja’s work is generally perceived as destructive to individual and social harmony, while the curandera’s facilitates and promotes it. Women artisans, whose handcrafts are highly valued locally and are now marketed transnationally, have transformed the role of the region’s folk artists, especially weavers. The most common kind of weaving, backstrap weaving, has offered Indigenous people across the Americas a venue for reaching markets beyond their local communities. Guatemala’s Mayan weavers, for example, have modified some of their designs to cater to non-local buyers. While men are traditionally charged with weaving blankets and other household textiles, women are responsible for creating huipiles, the blouses worn by women throughout the Andes. Traditionally, their motifs and colors identified their wearers (and weavers) as members of a particular community. Today, with the proliferation of markets for their products, especially huipiles, women have formed cooperative groups to help them meet the demands of consumers in the United States and Europe. Despite such changes in urban centers, traditional weaving is still practiced in the countryside, where, as Sharisse McCafferty and Geoffrey McCafferty (1996) argue, its symbolic significance remains unchanged. According to Maya Quiche mythology, Ixchel, the Moon Goddess and consort of Itzaman the Sun God, is the patron of weaving. She is usually depicted as seated in profile, with one end of her loom tied to a tree and the other around her waist. For Mayan weavers, the art of weaving is a direct connection to this deity, who now offers women some economic autonomy as they became agents of their own exchanges in the market economy. In some cases, as in all societies, South American folk art is also a vehicle for voicing political positions. Panamanian molas (reverse-applique embroidered cloth made by Kuna women) and Chilean arpilleras (three-dimensional applique collages), for example, found markets in the United States and Europe during the political upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s; these textiles often carried political messages in their scenes of war as a feature of everyday life. Women also produce and sell various handicrafts such as lace and pottery, often at government-sponsored museums and artesanı´as (art vendors) that offer folk crafts and artifacts to tourists. In Bolivia, for example, the Museo Nacional de Etnografı´a y Folklore offers exhibits and cultural programs under the auspices of the Banco Central de Bolivia. While not focused on women, Lucy Davies and Mo Fini’s 1995 book, Arts and Crafts of South America, explores the traditional arts and crafts— including jewelry, pottery, and textiles—of a variety of Indigenous groups

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throughout South America. Due to globalization, many heretofore unknown women folk artists, such as Guatemalan weaver Sabina Ramı´rez, are now presenting their art in venues in the United States, and folklorists and ethnographers like Dolores Juliano are receiving recognition for their contributions to the field of Folklore. See also: Curandera; Fashion; Folklife; Pottery; Weaving; Women Folklorists. References: Bari de Za~ nartu, Camila. Canciones, Escenas del Coloniaje. Danzas indias y criollas. Reconstrucciones del folklore de Chile y del altiplano de Bolivia. Santiago de Chile: La Ilustraci on, 1929; Barros, Raquel y Danneman, Manuel. ‘‘Los problemas de la investigaci on del folklore musical chileno.’’ Revista musical chilena 56 (2002): 105–119. http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script¼sci_arttext&pid¼S0716-27902002005600015& lng¼es&nrm¼iso (accessed December 15, 2007); Bartra, Eli. Crafting Gender: Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003; Colonelli, Cristina Argenton. Bibliografia do folclore brasileiro. S~ao Paulo: Conselho Estadual de Artes e Ci^encias Humanas, 1979; Dannemann Rothstein, Manuel. Bibliografia del folklore chileno, 1952–1965. Austin, Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Oral History. Austin: University of Texas, 1970; Davies, Lucy, and Mo Fini. Arts and Crafts of South America. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995; Dufourcq, Lucila. Noticias Relacionadas con el Folklore de Lebu. Tirada ap. de los Anales de la Facultad de Filosofı´a y Educaci on. Secc. Filologı´a, 225–294. Santiago: Prensas de la U. de Chile, 1943; Garnham, Emilia. La Importancia de la Danza Folkl orica. Santiago: Talleres Graficos de La Naci on, 1945; Hendrickson, Carol. Weaving Identities: Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemala Town. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995; Henrı´quez Rojas, Patricia. Por qu e bailando?: estudio de los bailes religiosos del Norte Grande de Chile. Santiago: Printext, 1996; Juliano, Marı´a Dolores. ‘‘Las mujeres y el folklore: el laberinto de los mensajes disfrazados.’’ Cuadernos de etnologı´a y etnografı´a de Navarra, vol. 21, no. 53 (1989): 33–42; ———. ‘‘Cultura y exclusi on: Pol emica te orica.’’ Quaderns de l’Institut Catala Antropologia 19 (2003): 55–67; Loyola, Margot. Bailes de tierra en Chile. Valparaı´so: Pontificia Universidad Cat olica de Valparaı´so, 2004; Moreno Uribe, E. A. ‘‘Isabel Aretz: memoria del folklore.’’ El Mundo, May 15, 2002. http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id¼396379 (accessed August 11, 2008); Ramirez, Sabina. Lecture at the Museo Alameda. San Antonio, TX, October 7, 2007; Sep ulveda, M. Luisa. Cancionero Chileno. Canciones y Tonadas Chilenas del siglo XIX (por canto y guitarra). Santiago: Casa Amarilla, 1943; ———. Cancionero Chileno. Tonadas chilenas antiguas. Santiago: Casa Amarilla, 1943; Thompson, Stith. ‘‘Folklore in South America.’’ The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 61, no. 241 (July–September 1948): 256–260; ———. ‘‘Visits to South American Folklorists.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 74, no. 294 (October–Decemeber 1961): 391–397; Vidal, Gurpegui Javier. ‘‘Algunas Reflexiones a Proposito de la obra de Dolores Juliano.’’ http://www.fedicaria. org/miembros/fedAragon/0001/3_acerca_d_juliano.pdf.

Norma E. Cantu Region: Southeast Asia Southeast Asia encompasses eleven nations: Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Most of its peoples live in lowland areas in small agrarian villages; its largest cities are Jakarta, Indonesia; Bangkok, Thailand; Singapore; Manila, Philippines; and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Southeast Asia has great diversity of cultures, histories, religions, languages, and ethnicities. Various forms of animism are practiced among its more isolated peoples; however, their proximity to early Chinese and Indian cultures deeply

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influenced those of the region prior to European colonization, by which time several great civilizations (for example, Khmer and Malay) had already developed. Islamic cultural influences spread rapidly, but were later largely obscured by the European presence, which spread throughout Southeast Asia; only Thailand remained free of European occupation during the colonial era. A wide range of cultural patterns is evident in the legends, myths, beliefs, arts, and customs of the area, where women’s folkways continue to play important roles in family and community life. Southeast Asian women are commonly in charge of household finances and often become traders. Half of the informal merchants in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, and Vietnam are women; they also comprise an important segment of the workforce in the region’s gardens and rice fields. Many inherit wealth (and noble titles) in equal measure with their brothers. The youngest daughter usually inherits the family house, since she is expected to care for her parents in their old age. Most Southeast Asian women retain control of their own wealth after marriage, and mothers generally pass down ancestral lands to their daughters. They are expected to handle the household finances, save money, increase the family’s wealth, and watch over family resources. Additionally, they may save ‘‘secret money’’ for their children. In traditional Southeast Asia, it is customary for the birth of girls and boys to be welcomed equally, but baby girls are especially celebrated because brideprice traditions make them less of a financial burden at maturity than boys. In some places, it is said that to be complete, a family must have children of both sexes, and a family may adopt a child of the missing sex to complete the family. In Central Java, for example, childless couples usually adopt a child from a relative who has many children. Girls are typically desired because, in the long run, their cultural training makes them more useful to the household than boys. Traditional attitudes and gender roles changed during the colonial period due to Western cultural influences, and today many believe that they are more favorable for Southeast Asian men and boys than for women and girls; however, it can be argued that Southeast Asian women still enjoy relatively high status. Things are somewhat different, however, in majority-Buddhist Southeast Asian societies. Theravada Buddhism, for example, regards women as spiritually inferior to men. Men are considered more patient, with the implication that they are more capable than are women to renounce worldly interests to pursue spiritual goals. Women’s involvement in economic activities is regarded as disadvantagous by Buddhists, who devalue economic activities in general; instead, the highest goal is sought through meritorious action and the accumulation of merit (called bun in Thai, Laotian, and Burmese; punna in written Pali). A man’s major merit-making act is his ordination as a member of the sangha (‘‘community of monastic practioners’’), which is perceived as a flight from the world and especially from sexual relationships. Only men can become monks, and most do, at least for brief periods. Women, however, must hope to be reborn as men in some future life to accumulate this highest form of merit. A woman’s primary merit-making act is giving birth to a son destined for ordination. She may also accumulate bun by

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attending temple services, preparing and giving offerings, and feeding monks. However, women’s primary social and spiritual value is recognized in their roles as mothers and wives. Any physical contact between monks and women, even their mothers and sisters, is prohibited. A basic pattern in Southeast Asian traditional culture entails that women are linked with fertility, nurturance, and attachment; men are associated with supramundane power and detachment. Even women with jobs and careers are regarded primarily as homemakers. Girls are educated both at home and at school for domestic activities, that is, running households, cooking, cleaning, birthing and rearing children, taking care of their husbands, and producing and processing food. In Southeast Asian art, it is common to find women sitting at their looms working on textiles. It is also frequent in paintings that women are presented as bare-breasted, ostensibly a reflection of the typical practice of breastfeeding in the region. Economically privileged women generally believe it is not proper for women to work outside the home, since waged mothers must sacrifice time deemed better spent caring for their children. Upper-class women may join homeoriented women’s clubs centered on sewing, knitting, gardening, or cooking. In other words, a Southeast Asian woman’s social standing is based on whether or not she is married, if she has children, the status of her parents before marriage, the status of her husband after marriage, and whether or not she behaves as expected. Women may gain greater influence in their communities after they have children; the social mobility of unmarried women is more limited. Proper manners for women usually involve the traditional virtues of chastity, faithfulness, modesty, and obedience; it is said that they must speak softly, walk lightly, and be well-mannered at all times. If a woman fails to behave in the traditional ways assigned to her, she will eventually come into conflict with both men and other women; among Khmers, for example, to act in defiance of traditional folkways means that a person is no longer Khmer, and thus no longer fully human. In Malay, people believe that if a woman is unfaithful to her husband, even in thought, or if she tries to dominate him or offends him, especially during pregnancy, she will suffer difficult labor and birth. They also believe that divorce can prevent a pregnant woman from successfully delivering her baby. Two well-known legendary birth demons in Southeast Asia are penanggalan and langsuir or pontianak. Langsuir, a vampire-like creature, took on her demon form as a result of dying in childbirth, an indicator that she was not really a woman in the first place as she failed in the task of delivering her child. Penanggalan is a woman who studied magic with a demon who taught her how to detach her head from her body in order to fly around and suck the blood of women in labor. Once human women, these demons of legend were condemned as unfaithful or disobedient wives, or because they were unable to accomplish the tasks their cultures and communities expected of them. They are believed dangerous only to women, especially during labor, when they feed on the mother’s blood and her babies. Southeast Asians have many deep traditions concerning courtship, weddings, and marriage. Heterosexual courtship usually begins with the blessing

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of the girl’s parents, but in some cases, it may be initiated by the courting couple themselves. The young man then informs his parents about his feelings for his intended wife. His parents visit the young woman’s parents to show their respect, and to discuss dowry and wedding dates if both families agree that the couple’s marriage is acceptable. Their wedding is followed by the couple’s decision about where they will live. In the past, arranged marriage was the regional norm; parents of young children made betrothal agreements which ensured that some sort of distance was maintained between the matched pair prior to their wedding day. Arranged marriages are less common today. However, girls are usually watched carefully by their parents before marriage to ensure that they do not engage in any premarital sexual behaviors while they gain knowledge and learn the manners and skills considered appropriate for a good wife and mother. In some countries, men are also expected to arrive at their wedding as virgins; no family wants its daughters to marry sexually promiscuous men. In other families, although female chastity and virginity before marriage are strongly encouraged, there are no traditional rules or customs in place to regulate women’s sexual behavior once they are courting or engaged. Southeast Asian folklore offers contradictory images of women: in some locales, women are portrayed as powerless and defenseless, in others, they are strong and capable. For example, a Vietnamese folksong compares a girl to ‘‘a piece of red silk fluttering in the market not knowing to whom it will be sold.’’ Another depicts women as ‘‘drops of rain’’—‘‘purely by chance some will fall on luxurious palaces while others on muddy rice fields.’’ Women in these examples have little capacity for work; the only jobs they need to have or should be able to perform are those in service to men. However, some oral traditions reveal profound respect for the feminine side of life. In Vietnamese myth, for example, many gods are female, including the goddesses of fire, water, and carpentry; twelve female deities are responsible for the shaping and functioning of human bodies. There are many stories relating to women’s daring capabilities, such as being strong enough to kill. Mother Au Co married a dragon, mothered 100 sons, and took half of them to mountainous regions where she taught them to grow crops and weave cloth; the Trung Sisters fiercely led revolutions against the Chinese. Legends of female Southeast Asian warriors are notable today because such women were highly respected. On an island not far from Luzon, for example, it is said that there lived a blind Filipina warrior with her bodyguards. Her tale recounts how no adversary could make it past her guards to engage her in battle, and how the one man who did never laid a finger on her. Another legend tells of Princess Urduja, who refused to marry any man who was not a warrior, or who was no way inferior to herself. And in Thailand and Java, the king was reputed to be guarded by women warriors who were better trained than their male counterparts. Southeast Asian history and legend also record the exploits of powerful women in the region’s political institutions, such as Burma’s Shi Saw Bu, a fifteenth-century queen of the Mon at Pegu, and of the Indonesian women sultans of precolonial Aceh. Material culture also implicates women’s positions in Southeast Asia. Textiles play a significant role in many beliefs and customs in Southeast Asia.

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Patterns on textiles carry meanings. In some areas, notably in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, women wear patterns that indicate their marital status. Certain patterns are regarded dangerous to weave, and only women considered mentally and physically mature can safely create them. Colors of fabrics also indicate social status. For example, red clothing indicates the noble status of the woman who wears it. As with all cultural groups, the folklore of South and Southeast Asian people undergoes change as its tradition-bearers migrate. For example, many Hmong—a minority ethnic group of Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and southern China—migrated to the United States following the U.S.-Vietnam War, settling mainly in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Before the war, their long history and rich folk traditions were transmitted across generations in legends and ritual ceremonies that reflected a world in which women and men shared the tasks of raising domesticated animals and farming food crops. However, during the Vietnam War, Hmong society gradually developed a cash economy in which men became more important than women as actors in the marketplace, thus lowering women’s social and family prestige and increasing their dependency on men. After the war, many Hmong first escaped to refugee camps in Thailand, then to refugee camps in the United States, Australia, France, and Germany, where their folkways changed significantly due to contact with European and North American cultures. For example, compared with Hmong women in Australia, Hmong women in the United States became more Christianized. Many Hmong women have shifted their primary focus from agriculture to traditional crafts such as sewing, weaving, and embroidery; today in the United States, many are educated and employed outside the home, earning as much as half of their household income; many have become increasingly active as community leaders, politicians, and academics. North American ideas about choice in marriage and personal freedom especially have contributed to greater independence for Hmong women and girls than was the case in Southeast Asia; today, women are finding new venues—including journals, novels, and plays—for expressing resistance to traditional identities and constructing new ones. See also: Breastfeeding; Brideprice; Chastity; Childbirth and Childrearing; Courtship; Dowry; Folk Belief; Folk Music and Folksong; Folklore About Women; Folktale; Foodways; Housekeeping; Legend, Supernatural; Marriage; Weaving; Wedding; Women’s Clubs; Women Warriors. References: Atkinson, Jane, and Shelly Errington. Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990; Cha, Dia. ‘‘Hmong and Lao Refugee Women: Reflections of a Hmong-American Woman Anthropologist.’’ Hmong Studies Journal, vol. 6 (2005): 1–35; Chen, Lai Nam. Images of Southeast Asia in Children’s Fiction. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981; Chey, Elizabeth. ‘‘The Status of Khmer Women.’’ n.d. http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/women.htm (accessed January 15, 2007); ColorQ World: Interracial interactions between people of color. ‘‘Warriors: Asian Women in Asian society.’’ 2002. http://www.colorq.org/Articles/2002/asianwarriors.htm (accessed January 15, 2007); Cong Huyen Ton Nu Nha Trang. ‘‘Women in Vietnamese Folklore.’’ 2000 [1992]. http://www.geocities.com/chtn_nhatrang/women.html (accessed August 11, 2008); Ebihara, May. ‘‘Gender Symbolism and Culture Change: Viewing the Virtuous Woman in the Khmer Story ‘Mea Yoeng’’’. In Cambodian Culture Since 1975:

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Homeland and Exile, eds. Carol A. Mortland and Judy Ledgerwood, 119–128. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994; Esterik, Penny Van. Women of Southeast Asia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996 [1982]; Julien, Roberta. ‘‘I love driving’’: Alternative constructions of Hmong femininity in the West.’’ Race, Gender & Class, vol. 5, no. 2 (1998): 30–53; Ledgerwood, Judy. ‘‘Women in Cambodian Society,’’ n.d. http://www.seasite.niu.edu/khmer/Ledgerwood/women.htm (accessed January 15, 2007); Thitathan, Siraporn. ‘‘Different Family Roles, Different Interpretations of Thai - ang Anh. ‘‘The ^an, D Folktales.’’ Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 48, no. 1 (1989): 5–20; Tu Waiting Rock.’’ 1997–2005. http://perso.limsi.fr/dang/webvn/eattente.htm _ (accessed January 15, 2007); ———. ‘‘The Woman of Nam Xu’o’ng.’’ 1997–2005. http://perso.limsi. fr/dang/webvn/emistake.htm (accessed January 15, 2007); Van, Dang Nghiem. ‘‘The Flood Myth and the Origin Of Ethnic Groups In Southeast Asia.’’ Journal of American Folklore 106 (Summer 1993): 304–337.

Jian Anna Xiong and Weidong Cheng Region: Sub-Saharan Africa The large land mass south of the Sahara Desert on which about 80 percent of all Africans live is termed sub-Saharan Africa, while the region bordering the Mediterranean Sea is generally called North Africa. This division of the African continent, the second largest on Earth, is largely based on non-African perceptions that the peoples and cultures of North Africa are predominantly ethnically and culturally Arab or Berber, while the peoples and cultures of sub-Saharan Africa (called ‘‘the Dark Continent’’ by nineteenth-century Europeans) are properly identified as ‘‘Black African.’’ North Africa has been long associated (and even integrated) by its history and geography with the Mediterannean region and the Middle East (Western Asia). Sub-Saharan Africa, however, had little contact with the rest of the world before the colonial era, beginning in the fifteenth century with Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Spanish voyagers who explored its coastal regions. Dutch settlers founded the Cape Colony in southern Africa in 1652; their descendants, known as Boers (today’s Afrikaners), ceded Capetown to Britain in 1814. By 1880, Leopold II of Belgium, having commissioned surveys of the region by the Welsh explorer Henry Stanley, had declared himself sovereign of Congo, a vast area in central Africa. Europeans began to carve out colonies throughout the entire sub-Saharan region. The colonial period, largely undone by indigenous African independence movements, is said to have ended in the 1960s. With few exceptions (South Africa, Nigeria, and Mauritius), sub-Saharan Africa is today one of the poorest, least industrially developed areas in the world. The region includes fifty nations: Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria, Togo, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Benin, Niger, Senegal, Saint Helena, C^ ote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde in West Africa; Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Malawi, Burundi, Rwanda, Comoros, Reunion, Kenya, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Madagascar in East Africa; Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland, and South Africa in southern Africa; and Angola, Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equitorial Guinea, Gabon, S~ao Tome,

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and the Principe in Central Africa. Its primary diasporas include peoples of African descent in Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean. Sub-Saharan Africa is tropical, except for the high inland and the southern part of South Africa. Within 10 degrees of the equator, the area’s climate seldom varies and is generally hot and rainy. The creative expressions of those of sub-Saharan Africa are a complex blend of media, each of which offers a unique perspective and communicates much about the culture of the region. These creative expressions include the arts, handicraft, music, dance, film, oral and written literatures, and other aspects of culture that enrich life in each community in subSaharan Africa; they have influenced societies wherever peoples of African descent have settled. There are many distinctive cultural areas, some in small regions, but others widespread, particularly those associated with the Bantu linguistic group. The major language family native to sub-Saharan Africa is the Bantu, belonging to the Niger-Congo group. The Bantu language family is the most widespread language family in Africa, with about 310 million speakers. The Bantu comprise more than 400 ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa, from Cameroon to South Africa, united by their common language family and, many cases, the same customs. Among the Bantu langauges are Swahili, Bukusu, Kikuyu, and Luganga (spoken in eastern and central Africa); Shona, Sesotho, Zulu, Xhosa, and Swazi (spoken in southern Africa); and Abanyom (spoken in the Cross River State of Nigeria). Before the Europeans colonized many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Bantu were not territorially minded, but rather group-related. As long as sufficient land was available, they had a very vague conception of borders, which were generally based on natural features such as rivers and mountains. In the past, the food acquisition of the Bantu was mainly limited to agriculture and hunting. Women usually were responsible for agriculture, while men did the hunting. Their diet consisted of corn, meat (mostly beef), vegetables, and milk. The Bantu have a number of taboos related to the consumption of meat. For example, the meat of dogs, apes, crocodiles, and snakes could not be eaten. Likewise, it was considered wrong to eat the meat of certain birds, like owls, crows, and vultures. The Bantu lived in two different types of dwellings: the beehive hut, a circular structure made out of long poles and covered with grass, and the cone and cylinder hut, in which a cylindrical wall was formed out of vertical posts sealed with mud and cow dung. The roof was built with poles tied together. The floor of both types of hut was made of compressed Earth or mud cement. All Bantu tribes commonly have clear separation between the tasks of the women and those of the men. Throughout the region, whether the societies have been matrilineal or patrilineal, women’s sociocultural position and economic status have depended largely upon marriage and childrearing. In sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora, from the past to the present, domestic work has been almost exclusively performed by women. Even professional women usually do most of the housework and childcare. Women also participate in farming and other production, as well as in trading, yet they

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have been traditionally treated as second-class citizens. Young, unmarried women are expected to be submissive and obedient to their fathers, and married women to their husbands. Homosexuality is taboo and illegal in most African countries, and is often condemned as ‘‘un-African.’’ Lesbians generally consider it safer to keep their orientation to themselves, except in South Africa, where gay marriage was approved by the General Assembly by a vote of 230 to 41 in 2006 (Nullis). Fanny Ann Eddy, founder of the Sierra Leone Lesbian and Gay Alliance in Freetown, addressed the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 2004; she was raped and murdered by her former employer a few months afterward. In 2007, inspired by Eddy’s activism, a first-generation Senagalese lesbian in Chicago, Selly Thiam, made None on Record in 2007, an ongoing audio documentary project exploring the lives of queer Africans; the title refers to the absence of any word for queer people in the Yoruba (Nigeria) lexicon. One strategy that women use to help themselves and each other is to form associations, fellowships, organizations, and support groups. These include development organizations, along with intellectual, cultural, religious, professional, political, and business collectivities. Women of every ethnic, cultural, and religious background, and from all social and economic statuses are encouraged to join. Their objectives include pressing for women’s emancipation and social development; raising consciousness concerning problems affecting women, such as sexism, discrimination, domestic violence, forced marriage, and the lack of social equality; fighting with their male counterparts for equal opportunities in politics, education, and the economy; empowering women through education; providing welfare and social services to women in crises; and winning supporters and voters for female political candidates, and for male candidates who significantly represent the interests of women. Professional societies organize seminars, conferences, and workshops at the local, national, and international levels in the spirit of women’s solidarity to identify and discuss problems confronting women, and to plan strategies to solve them. Despite their social and political marginalization, women have historically shown both creativity and resourcefulness, and a few have gained national and international renown. Women in sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora have spoken for centuries in an unbroken chain of verbal art, offering insight into feminine images, conditions, and experiences. Traditional tales, legends, lullabies, love songs, laments, praise poems, and dirges are some of the many oral genres that women compose and perform. Women instruct children through traditional tales. They sing to accompany their domestic chores, and their songs often communicate their most intimate feelings and concerns. At funeral ceremonies, women are the most frequent singers; they mourn and eulogize the dead through their songs. Like oral artists, women writers have portrayed their cultures. In their novels, poems, and plays, they speak about concerns such as the obstacles to their emancipation, development, and progress. Some provide feminist critiques of marriage and family life, analyzing and questioning the pressure placed on women to marry and produce (male) children, and problematizing

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polygamy. Among these women writers are Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou from the United States; Carrie M. Best and Rozena Maart from Canada; Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa of Nigeria; Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana; Mariama Ba of Senegal; and Bessie Head from South Africa. Some notable women in sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora were warrior-queens or powerful political figures such as Queen Amina of Zaria, Nzingha Mbande of Angola, and Yaa Asantewa of Ghana. Others, like Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru of Kenya and Madam Nwanyeruwa Ojim of Nigeria actively resisted British colonial oppression. Today, many women in subSaharan Africa and the diaspora are lawyers, medical doctors, engineers, accountants, university lecturers, pilots, and administrators. Women play religious roles, either as leaders in their societies or as spirit media. Even when they do not hold office, women may exercise power through their roles as priestesses, herbalists, diviners, and midwives. Many regional religions acknowledge the importance of the female life force as a significant component of their theologies. Clay figurines presumed to be archaic goddess representations suggest the worship of female deities in Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and West Africa. These include goddesses associated with fertility, motherhood, and healing. Women play a major role in African economies. Farming, trading, craft work, household chores, and family care are carried on simultaneously by most women. On the domestic scene, childbearing, childcare, family care, and domestic chores such as cleaning, collecting water and firewood, and food gathering, processing, preparation, and distribution are almost exclusively done by women. In Nigeria and Kenya, for example, women have traditionally performed most subsistence farming. Today, women are also involved in planting cash crops and in animal husbandry. Women also play a dominant role in trading in rural and urban markets, especially in agriculture. For example, among the Yoruba in southwestern Nigeria, the majority of women are traders; for half, it is their main occupation. Most women, regardless of goods, follow the traditional homemarket-home pattern. That is, they take their commodities to market daily or weekly, sell them, and return home at the end of the day. Some women vend their goods from their homes, especially in Muslim areas. Although trading in markets involves social activity in sub-Saharan Africa, its economic function is paramount. Women play a major role in art production in sub-Saharan Africa. These arts include pottery, cloth-weaving, embroidery, cloth-dyeing, basketweaving, mat-making, calabash-carving and designing, wall-painting, bead-making, leatherwork, and body decoration. Women often produce their arts within the domestic context. Women’s artworks have considerable economic, social, political, and religious value. Many African artifacts exhibited in museums in Europe and North America, including carvings and pottery, were made by women. What women wear can reveal social and cultural details, from ethnicity and religion to marital and economic status. For example, the standard Yoruba women’s outfit, consisting of buba (blouse), iro (skirt), iborun (shawl), and gele (head-tie) not only sets them apart from Senegalese

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women in their boubou (big gown), but also distinguishes them from other Nigerian ethnic groups such as the Hausa, Ibo, and Kalabari. A shawl worn over the right shoulder indicates the wearer is married and is a mother. The more clothes a woman displays, the wealthier and higher in social class she is considered. Women in the same folk group often dress in outfits made from identical fabric. They may be sisters, co-wives, friends, or members of the same market association. Clothing designs and patterns have names that represent feminist ideas like ‘‘Capable Woman,’’ ‘‘If My Husband Goes Out, I Go Out,’’ and ‘‘Mother Africa.’’ Women’s head-ties are handmade in various shapes, and have names such as ‘‘peacock,’’ ‘‘ivory cone,’’ ‘‘paddle your own canoe,’’ and ‘‘loop the slanderer in the head-tie.’’ Neatly arranged or braided hair is much more than a matter of personal choice for women. Tousled hair is a sign of chaos rather than the free-spirited sexiness it connotes in Euro North America. When a girl reaches her teens, she is expected to keep her hair neatly braided. She can choose from variety of traditional and contemporary cornrows, threaded, and braid patterns, with names like ‘‘spider’s web,’’ ‘‘bucket,’’ ‘‘pineapple,’’ ‘‘spiral,’’ ‘‘snake,’’ and ‘‘tortoise.’’ Like women’s outfits, their hairstyles provide social and cultural commentary. For instance, when Nigeria changed from left-hand driving to righthand driving, women wore braided hairdos that represented the new traffic pattern. In sub-Saharan Africa, the institution of marriage is very important. Most women marry at some point in their lives. Traditionally, the only option for a woman has been to be a wife and a mother. A bad marriage is far better than no marriage. Traditionally, many marriages are arranged. Families want to marry their teenaged girls to older or younger men from wealthy or influential families. Today, there are increasing numbers of women who wait to marry at a mature age, and to marry men of their choice. There are three main types of marriages practiced in sub-Saharan Africa, reflecting the three major cultures that have influenced the region: marriage under customary law, in which a man can marry as many wives as he wants and/or can afford; Muslim marriage, in which a man can marry up to four wives; and others, such as Christian marriage, in which a man can have only one wife at a time. Marriage is essentially a union between two families, rather than between two individuals, even among Africans in the diaspora. Because of this tradition, divorce generally cannot be granted until both families have failed in their attempts to reconcile the couple. In matrilineal societies, such as among the Ashanti in Ghana, a woman and her children do not belong to her husband’s family, but instead to her’s. In patrilineal societies, by contrast, a married woman becomes a member of her husband’s extended family, as do their children. A man and a woman who intend to marry must first become formally engaged. Engagement is regarded as a binding act as well as a forerunner of marriage. Traditionally, the items given to the bride for her engagement include clothes and foodstuffs. Before marriage, the groom or his family must pay a brideprice. Its value is determined by the social and economic status of her family in the community, her educational level, and whether the society she is from is patrilineal or matrilineal. A woman’s brideprice is

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relatively higher in a patrilineal society than in a matrilineal one because the woman’s family will lose her services and she will produce children for the man’s family to ensure its continuity. The need for a woman to have children is traditionally a very high priority in sub-Saharan Africa. A woman’s respect and prestige in society are primarily determined by her motherhood, and, in some cases, by the sex of her children. The more children a woman has, the greater the respect she receives. The glorification of motherhood puts considerable pressure on young women to get married and have children. In a patrilineal society, a woman must continue bearing children until she gives birth to a boy to ensure the survival of her husband’s family name; otherwise, she will be divorced, or her husband will marry another woman with the hope of having male children with his new wife. In matrilineal societies, girls and boys are equally valued; the main concern is not so much about male versus female children but with the fact that the wife’s family will inherit her children and property. A tradition in patrilineal societies is the inheritance of a widow by her deceased husband’s male relative. If she refuses to remarry into the same family, she is expected to return the brideprice paid at her marriage. In addition, because property accumulated during the marriage belongs to his family, many women avoid having joint ventures and owning property with their husbands for fear of losing everything if their husbands die. Where female circumcision is practiced in sub-Saharan Africa, it is seen as a puberty initiation rite meant to usher young girls into womanhood. Girls are taught to believe that in order to be ideal women in their societies, they must undergo this painful and dangerous ritual. For example, they are told that if they are circumcised, they will be able to avoid having premarital sex and will not encounter difficulties conceiving when they wed. As in its Caribbean and African American diasporas, in sub-Saharan Africa, where breastfeeding is widespread and traditionally lasts about two years, tall, large-boned, and full-figured women are considered to be the most sexually attractive and to have the greatest childbearing potential. African women sometimes use their sexual and procreative roles in power plays. Some utilize sexual symbolism to protest or resist threats to themselves. For example, in the Women’s War of 1929, Nigerian women protested men’s right to interfere in women’s economic power, and their own obligations as wives and mothers, by challenging officials to impregnate each of them, drawing upon an Indigenous technique to humiliate men. In 1922, Kenyan women exposed their buttocks at a public protest against colonial officials to symbolically challenge their male counterparts to behave more bravely. Women also use domestic and sexual relationships as a means of obtaining resources and access to opportunities and for fulfilling their social and economic ambitions. See also: Brideprice; Childbirth and Childrearing; Female Genital Cutting; Folk Costume; Hair; Lesbian Folklore; Marriage; Women Warriors. References: Berger, Iris, and E. Frances White. Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999; Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the

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Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000; Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa. Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression. London: Zed Press, 1983; Dolpyhne, Florence Abena. The Emancipation of Women: An African Perspective. Accra: Ghana University Press, 1991; Hay, Margaret Jean, and Sharon Stichter, eds. African Women South of the Sahara. London and New York: Longman, 1987; Hodgson, Dorothy L., and Sherly A. McCurdy, eds. ‘‘Wicked’’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa. Cape Town: David Philip, 2001; Holloway, Karla F. C. Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992; Ityavyar, Dennis A., and Stella N. Obiajunwa. The State and Women in Nigeria. Jos, Nigeria: Jos University Press, 1992; James, Valentine Udoh, and James S. Etim, eds. The Feminization of Development Processes in Africa: Current and Future Perspectives. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999; Nullis, Clare. ‘‘Gay Marriage Endorsed in South Africa.’’ Associated Press, November 15, 2006; Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara. Re-Creating Ourselves: African Women & Critical Transformations. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc., 1994; Rice, LaVon. ‘‘Queer Africa.’’ Colorlines (May/June 2007): 38–42; Rosander, Eva Evers, ed. Transforming Female Identities: Women Organizational Forms in West Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1997; Schapera, I. The Bantu Speaking Tribes of South Africa. London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1959; Spiro, Heather M. The Fifth World: Women’s Rural Activities and Time Budgets in Nigeria. Occasional Paper No. 19. London: Department of Geography, Queen Mary College, University of London, 1981; Stichter, Sharon B., and Jane L. Parpart, eds. Patriarchy and Class: African Women in the Home and the Workforce. Boulder, CO, and London: Westview Press, 1988; Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn, and Andrea Benton Rushing, eds. Women in Africa and the African Diaspora: A Reader. Second edition. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1996; Wallace, Ann, ed. Daughters of the Sun, Women of the Moon: Poetry by Black Canadian Women. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990.

Zainab Jerret Region: United States The United States of America is a federation of fifty states, fourteen territories, and one federal district. Situated in the economic North, the borders of its forty-eight contiguous states are Canada (north), Mexico (south), the Atlantic Ocean (east), and the Pacific Ocean (west). The states of Alaska (northwest of Canada) and Hawaii (in the Pacific), plus U.S. territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, and Washington, District of Columbia, make up the rest of its geographical area. An ethnically diverse liberal democracy, the United States has the largest national economy in the world. Its traditional culture is a congeries of the multitude of groups that make up its population, from First Nations peoples to early and latter-day Europeans and Africans to more recent immigrants. U.S. women’s folklore and folklife is as diverse as its people. American women have given birth to babies, sung ballads, lullabies, and torch songs, quilted for beauty and for everyday use, served as midwives and healers, homesteaded land and herded cattle, recited nursery rhymes, governed states, and campaigned for social justice. All of these experiences and many more constitute the foundations of a women’s folklore in the United States. Through the communicative genres of folklore (story, song, ritual, and art), American women have passed on their experiences, provided a record of their struggles and achievements, and expressed their creativity. Moreover, folklore about women disseminates information, true or false, exaggerated

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or devalued. Some familiar examples include legends about the historical Pocahontas and Calamity Jane, the woman pioneer and her parallel sister, the prostitute, the heroic Harriet Tubman, and the ghostly La Llorona. Although male scholars dominated the field of folklore for almost a century after the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) was established in 1888, notable exceptions include Martha Beckwith, who published ‘‘Signs and Superstitions Collected from American College Girls’’ in JAF in 1923, and Elsie Clews Parsons (1874–1941), who published widely on Pueblo women. A focused effort to study women’s folklore began to coalesce, however, in the mid-1970s. At the University of Texas, foundational scholarly efforts gave shape to the emerging feminist movement in Folklore, including the first book to address the subject, Claire Farrer’s edited volume, Women and Folklore (1975). At the time, a group of graduate students in the Texas Folklore Program founded Folklore Feminists’ Communication with Rosan Jordan and Frank de Caro. Subsequently, de Caro published a comprehensive bibliographic survey (1983), and he and Jordan wrote an article for Signs on women and folklore (1986). Since then, the scholarship dealing with folklore of and about American women has increased significantly, taking into consideration region, ethnicity, and image; genre and symbolic forms; role and ritual; repertoire; and folklore in literature. Folklore links people to a place and to others, and the term ‘‘region’’ distinguishes one recognized area from another. ‘‘Ethnicity’’ identifies specific cultural groups. Region and ethnicity provide the bases for many folklore studies, but few scholars documented women’s folklore until recently. The region defined by the Ozark Mountains, for example, has been the subject of intense scrutiny by folklorists, but little attention was paid to women until the late twentieth century, when a few scholars began to document women’s beliefs and practices concerning pregnancy, childbirth, and other domestic practices. Women musicians have been prominent in the old-time music tradition of the Ozarks, but have been overlooked by folklorists but for a few exceptions. However, their vital role is documented in Holly Hobbs’ 2003 film Women of Old-time Music: Tradition and Change in the Missouri Ozarks. Region and ethnicity are often linked, though not always. For example, the term ‘‘Chicana’’ developed in the Southwest, but it can apply to women of Mexican descent wherever they reside. A comprehensive view of Chi~ cana folklore includes coming-of-age rituals (such as the quinceanera), religious folk practices, and singers like Lydia Mendoza from Texas and the tragically murdered young Selena. These topics and related others were captured in Chicana Traditions (2002), a collection of essays edited by Norma Cant u and Olga Najera-Ramı´rez, who address an especially salient issue for folkloristics: the relationship between continuity and change. NajeraRamı´rez discusses, for example, the introduction of La Escaramuza Charra, young female riders, into charreada (previously all-male Mexican rodeo) in the United States with a theory of continuity and change, an issue relevant to all immigrants, but especially so to women. Images influence gender roles and folklore, and vice versa. They occur in both verbal and visual forms and all forms of popular culture, and shift

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easily from one form to another (narrative to static art to films), subtly transforming in meaning. Images that convey a sense of region have had a powerful impact on folklore and gender roles in the American West. The challenges that faced women who migrated from east to west in the nineteenth century brought about modifications to the images of women then held by both women and men. As Beverly Stoeltje argues, the ‘‘helpmate’’ image, for example, one that combined the civilizing influence of the ‘‘refined lady’’ with the strength and initiative of the ‘‘backwoods belle,’’ emerged as dominant symbol of ideal femininity—even if experience contradicted it (1975). Three female images from Mexico remain influential in the culture of Mexican Americans in the southwest, each of which has generated a prodigious amount of scholarship by Chicana scholars. The Virgin of Guadalupe (Tecuauhtlacuepeuh) represents the Virgin Mary and motherhood, but sustains links to precolonial Indigenous culture as well as to Spanish Catholicism. La Malinche, a historical multilingual Native woman who assisted the Spanish in conquering Mexico, has long been defined by male writers as a traitor to her people, but feminist scholars, recognizing that she had been raped and enslaved, have repositioned her image to represent the negotiations one must undertake to survive as a Latina in White America. Most elusive is La Llorona, the image of a transgressive ghostly female figure who appears narratively in difficult circumstances, wailing, in search of her lost children. She, too, has been revisioned and now can be understood to represent female resistance to oppression and issues of loss. Like most pervasive symbolic images, Pocahontas captures the extraordinary and transforms it into the familiar so that it can circulate widely. The story of the young Aboriginal woman who saved the life of Captain John Smith at the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, as recorded by him in the fifteenth century, and who later married Englishman John Rolfe, has circulated through ballads, stories, paintings, murals, plays, and a Walt Disney Company animated film with accompanying consumer goods. Her widespread popularity rests on the exploitation of Pocahontas as an emblem of reciprocity between colonizer and colonized; according to Rayna Green, the Pocahontas image unites rather than divides Indigenous peoples and their conquerors, but other interpretations are possible. Having been constructed by male European folklorists in the nineteenth century, conventional folklore genres are often male gendered and may be inadequate for the study of women’s folklore. Consequently, the search for women’s folklore turns to women’s conversation and life histories, songs, and anecdotes—genres that often circulate especially among women—and others that have been ignored in favor of male-oriented lore. Violence is often depicted through specific narrative forms. One popular genre of folksong that illustrates the vulnerability of women in romantic and domestic relationships is a category of ballad known as ‘‘murdered-girl ballads,’’ narrative songs based on actual events in which young women are murdered by their lovers or husbands (Laws: 191–210). Anne Cohen’s 1973 study of the origins and transmission of one such event in Kentucky in 1896 compares balladry and newspaper writing as related genres of

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folklore. Of special interest in the early twenty-first century are popular female songwriters and ballad singers who encourage women to defend themselves against domestic abuse. The Dixie Chicks’ popular song ‘‘Goodbye Earl’’ is an example. Women communicate their fears and hopes, joys and sadness, and especially their unanswered questions when they talk about sex and their bodies, childbirth and children, men, other women, and varying topics. In some Mexican American women’s narratives, for example, a common theme is the ‘‘vaginal serpent,’’ an image that expresses deep fears and anxieties about sex and the body. But not all speech is storytelling; speech can also be used for its performance value, as it is in the African American genre known as ‘‘signifyin’’’ or ‘‘playing the dozens,’’ in which the speaker’s ability to use poetic forms as insults and to send social messages indirectly is highly prized. Although signifyin’ has largely been associated with male speakers, women, too, use speech poetically and strategically, especially in negotiating relations with men. A strategy that characterizes both heterosexual and lesbian Euro American women’s oral performances, material creations, and routines of everyday life has been labeled ‘‘coding’’ because it allows for the expression of disturbing or subversive ideas that would not be permissible if stated overtly. Genres of folklore are learned early in life, along with gender roles. Not surprisingly, then, girls’ folklore provides a rich vein for the study of women’s roles as they are explored through handclaps, ring games, songs, and other conversational genres, all of which take on variations as they are adapted by ethnic groups and performed over time and in different contexts. Myth and legends derived from ancient Greek and Roman cultures permeate the body of narratives familiar to Euro Americans; these portray gender relations and characterize women in ways commensurate with their roles in ancient patriarchal social systems. Anthropologist Marta Weigle (1982) provides full texts and many interpretations of Greek and Native American myths that emphasize girls and women’s images, in the main as conceived by men. Studies conducted by American scholars familiar with both folkloristics and classical studies are still rare, however, Adrienne Mayor, trained in both disciplines, brings them together, along with archaeology, in her study of ancient fossils interpreted in ancient Mediterranean legendry as the bones of giants. As important as narrative are material forms considered domestic or decorative arts. Quilts, for example, are forms of folk art serving both aesthetic and social purposes. In the past, a young American woman would make quilts for her dowry; a new baby was greeted with a baby quilt. In the twenty-first century, quilts may also represent a marriage or a family’s heritage, or honor a person or a category of individuals; the NAMES Project Foundation’s AIDS Memorial Quilt is an example of the latter. The popular practice of quilting has spread across America’s ethnicities, classes, and local cultures, demonstrating wide variations in style, meaning, and aesthetic. Every group maintains and perpetuates gender roles considered important for the group to function. Nevertheless, the performance of those roles may exhibit wide variation, and changes may be introduced—easily or

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through struggle. Not surprisingly, the enduring subjects of pregnancy and childbirth are sources of a great body of women’s folklore. Beliefs, ritual practices, and narratives address morning sickness, labor and birthing, breastfeeding, and toilet training; nursery rhymes and lullabies are also transmitted informally by women from generation to generation. The large body of knowledge and opinion shared among women on these subjects constitutes the folklore of motherhood. Euro American feminist anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd (1992) argues that, in the United States, pregnancy and childbirth operate as female rites of passage. Among other American groups, more formal initiation rites may serve the ritual passage to adulthood. Claire Farrer (1994) describes a Mescalero Apache girls’ puberty ceremony of several days involving enormous exertion on the part of the initiates and the participation of religious specialists who sing them into adulthood. The Pueblo peoples of Arizona and New Mexico (Zuni, Laguna, Hopi, and Tewa) also conduct elaborate rituals in support of the performance of female roles. Early folklorist Elsie Clews Parsons documented and interpreted Pueblo myths and rituals associated with initiation, marriage, birth, infancy, the demands of heterosexual relationships, and the ‘‘man-woman’’ (‘‘two-spirit’’) role in which a man assumed the role of a woman; her comprehensive set of essays was edited and republished in 1991 by Barbara Babcock. Women are increasingly assuming the role of preacher or religious leader in some Protestant denominations in the United States. Feeling called to preach, some women in the Pentecostal religion, for example, have claimed a space for themselves in a role designated for men—despite strong criticism, as Elaine Lawless (1988) shows in a study of their life stories. Women healers represent another role to which religious practitioners often experience a calling. Native American medicine women, Mexican American women healers (curanderas), and midwives in many cultures possess specialized knowledge and share a common purpose through healing. The roles of women in public rituals and festivals reveal possibilities not apparent in everyday life. A woman may wear a particular costume to reflect her group’s identity, or she may exhibit the image of the ideal woman in her community, as is the case in beauty contests. Alternatively, festival events may create spaces for women who do not conform to the dominant female role. Rodeo cowgirls, for example, have struggled throughout the twentieth century, with some success, to keep their places as competitors in rodeo events; the competitive woman riding a horse does not represent the image of the ideal wife and mother. Catholic Sicilian women in Texas, however, eagerly fulfill their assigned role in the annual St. Joseph’s Day feast honoring the Holy Family, for which they create grand altars to present food, the binding element of the feast. Kay Turner and Suzanne Seriff offer a feminist analysis of the ritual, explaining that the feast is a symbol of the life and labor of women; their offering of food as a gift to the Holy Family weds religious belief to the ideology of reproduction and sacralizes women’s caretaking of the earthly family. Some women have successfully introduced change to a defined role. Helen Cordero, the Pueblo ceramics artist who created the ‘‘Storyteller’’

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dolls so popular among consumers today, is such a woman. According to Barbara Babcock (1993), Cordero reinvented a moribund Cochiti tradition of figurative pottery, thereby engendering a revolution in Pueblo ceramics. Although Pueblo women have been potters for centuries, in the past, the trading, distribution, and marketing of potteries was the domain of men. Cordero’s revival of figurative pottery has enabled women potters to reshape their roles as well as their pottery and to gain economic and communicative control over their work. Studies that concentrate on one woman’s performance of folklore, fully exploring her repertoire in the social context in which she performs, reveal that a singer might also be a practicing midwife, teacher, fiddler, storyteller, or spiritual leader. Characteristically, repertoire studies follow the method of reflexive ethnography, acknowledging and emphasizing the involvement of the researcher with her subject. The focus on the repertoire of an individual woman permits folklorists to comprehend the relationships between performer, performance, and community. For example, in her reconstruction of Mary Fowler’s life story from her diary, her poetry, and other historical documents, as well as interviews with her descendants, Margaret Brady explores the life of a late-nineteenth-century Mormon polygamous wife, mother of eight children, midwife/healer, and folk poet in rural Utah. Brady emphasizes the discourses through which we come to know Fowler as well as her multiple areas of expertise. Fowler emerges as a woman who reared children, attended births, nursed the sick, lectured other women on motherhood, health, and religion, and expressed her belief in community through writing and teaching until her death in 1920. Narratives constitute the repertoires of two women of northern New Mexico, both named Guadalupe. Their legends of saints and witches and tales of magic were recorded by Lorin Brown and Bright Lynn as part of the New Mexico Federal Writers Project of the 1920s and early 1940s: Guadalupe Baca de Gallegos of Las Vegas and Guadalupe Martinez of Cordova are the subjects of Marta Weigle’s repertoire study, Two Guadalupes. Singers and their songs have attracted the attention of more than a few American folklorists. Almeda Riddle of Arkansas, popularly known as ‘‘Granny Riddle,’’ epitomizes the ballad singer of the Euro American folksong tradition. The murdered-girl ballad, ‘‘The Oxford Girl,’’ is included in Roger Abrahams’ 1970 study, which presents Riddle as ‘‘a person who has virtually lived her life in song’’ (150). Although an individual woman generally identifies herself with a particular performance role, she often has more than one talent. Like Granny Riddle, Bessie Eldreth of North Carolina defined herself primarily as a singer, but she also had a large repertoire of narratives involving visits from spiritual entities. Patricia Sawin documents how Eldreth reached into the hidden recesses of her experience to comment on her society’s dirty secrets, its gender double standard, men’s sanctioned control over women, and the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. Folklore and literature are intimately related, as the term ‘‘oral literature’’— used by literary folklorists to designate verbal folklore forms—reflects. A rich source of women’s folklore and of folklore about women is fiction

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by women writers whose subject is their own society. Zora Neale Hurston, an African American, studied at Columbia University in New York with pioneering American anthropologist Franz Boas. Dorothy Scarborough, a Euro American born in Texas, earned her PhD at Columbia University and then taught there. Both published folklore studies, but are better known for their fiction. Scarborough published her first folklore work, On the Trail of Negro Folksong (1925), based on her extensive fieldwork. Also in 1925, she published a novel, The Wind (produced as a film in 1928), featuring a young heroine newly arrived in frontier West Texas forced to struggle with oppressive gender relations. Hurston published her book-length folklore study, Mules and Men, based on fieldwork in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, in 1935. In 1937, she published the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Since its recent re-discovery by literary scholars and writers, it has been reissued and is widely read in American literature classes. The heroine of Hurston’s novel also struggles with conventional gender relations and eventually finds her own voice. Both writers depicted difficult gender relations and the power of patriarchal forces in their lives with extraordinarily sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of the specific societies they portrayed—Hurston of early twentieth-century southern rural African American culture and Scarborough of late-nineteenth-century Euro American culture on the western frontier. A wide variety of folkloristic and literary strategies characterize the women writers of the late twentieth century who incorporated folklore in their work. For the Native American writer, Leslie Marmon Silko, storytelling itself provides a frame that allows her to present ancient stories of the Southwest as contemporary events, fusing the past and the present in the same text. In Storyteller (1981), she tells the stories of Yellow Woman (Irriaku), and others, characterized by frightening encounters, magical knowledge, and surprising resolutions. Native author Louise Erdrich also writes powerful novels that emphasize women’s experiences, incorporating myth and other genres of lore employed by Native American groups in the northern United States. Fiction benefits from material forms of folklore as well. Alice Walker features quilts as symbolic vehicles in her story, ‘‘Everyday Use’’ (1967), in which she reveals the contradictions of tradition. Walker creates two very different sisters from a southern African American family, one an urbane and stylish woman who wants the family quilts to hang on her wall, and the other, her uneducated sister, scarred from a fire and promised the quilts as her dowry. The story masterfully reveals the multiple meanings captured by the concept of tradition when viewed in the context of social relationships. Like quilts, traditional American folktales contain more interpretive potential than meets the eye. Buried within them are deep secrets, long histories, and sexual intrigues. Prominent among these are tales of courageous women, which, in the hands of gifted storytellers like Eudora Welty, are retrieved from the folktale repertoire for modern readers. For example, using the tale of the robber bridegroom in her novel of the same name set in nineteenth-century Mississippi (1942), Welty weaves their stories together with themes from Cinderella, Snow White, and other European

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folktales. Contrasting fantasy with black magic, and juxtaposing folklore, southern history, and legendary figures, she creates a young bride who pursues her mysterious bandit lover through life-threatening encounters. Giving center stage to folklore topics such as jump-rope rhymes, the evil eye, and pick-up lines boys deliver to girls, Sandra Cisneros’ feminist stories in The House on Mango Street (1984) identify the obstacles women face in Mexican American culture. Her character, Esperanza, learns about highheeled shoes, but also about marriage that abuses and imprisons the woman who relegates her authority to a man. In the title story from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), Cisneros transforms the image of La Llorona from the wailing ghostly figure, enlisting it to liberate a young mother from her abusive husband. Increasingly, American feminist folklorists have drawn attention to the interrelationships between folklore, fiction, art, and everyday life. Folklore studies conducted from a woman’s perspective and women’s folklorein-fiction constitute a rich body of work, demonstrating that women and women’s folklore are central to all of the societies in the United States. As this centrality has been increasingly recognized by mainstream folkloristics, methods and models of folklore research and those of creative writing are expanding to acknowledge the roles, images, genres, and repertoires of women, their struggles, and accomplishments. See also: Altar, Home; American Folklore Society, Women’s Section; Ballad; Beauty Contest; Childbirth and Childrearing; Coding; Cowgirl; Ethnicity; Festival; First Nations of North America; Folk Costume; Folk Music and Folksong; Folk Poetry; Folklore Feminists Communication; Helpmate; Initiation; La Llorona; Marriage; Material Culture; Politics; Pottery; Pregnancy; Quiltmaking; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Tradition; Tradition-Bearer; Vaginal Serpent; Virgin of Guadalupe; Violence; Yellow Woman/Irriaku Stories. References: Abrahams, Roger D. A Singer and Her Songs: Almeda Riddle’s Book of Ballads. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970; Abrams, Ann Uhry. The Pilgrims and Pocahontas. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999; Babcock, Barbara, ed. Pueblo Mothers and Children: Essays by Elsie Clews Parsons, 1915–1924. Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City Press, 1992; ———. ‘‘‘At Home, No Womens are Storytellers’: Potteries, Stories, and Politics in Cochiti Pueblo.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 221–248. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Beckwith, Martha. ‘‘Signs and Superstitions Collected from American College Girls.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 36, no. 139 (January–March 1923): 1–15; Brady, Margaret. Mormon Healer and Folk Poet. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000; Cohen, Anne B. Poor Pearl, Poor Girl!: The Murdered-Girl Stereotype in Ballad and Newspaper. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1975; Cant u, Norma, and Olga Najera-Ramı´rez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; De Caro, Francis A. Women and Folklore: A Bibliographic Survey. Westport, CT: Greeenwood Press, 1983; Farrer, Claire R., ed. Women and Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975; ———. Thunder Rides a Black Horse: Mescalero Apaches and the Mythic Present. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1994; Green, Rayna. ‘‘The Pocahontas Perplex.’’ Massachusetts Review 16 (1975): 698–714; Hollis, Susan Tower, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, eds. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Jordan, Rosan A., and F. A. de Caro. ‘‘Women and the Study of Folklore.’’ Signs: Women in Culture and Society, vol. 11, no. 3 (1986): 500– 518; Jordan, Rosan A., and Susan J. Kalcik, eds. Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture.

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Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Laws, G. Malcolm, Jr. Native American Balladry. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964; Lofaro, Michael. Davy Crockett’s Riproarious Shemales and Sentimental Sisters. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2001; Radner, Joan Newlon, ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Sawin, Patricia. Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth Through Her Songs and Stories. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004; Stoeltje, Beverly J. ‘‘‘Bow-Legged Bastard: A Manner of Speaking’: Speech Behavior of a Black Woman.’’ Folklore Annual of the University Folklore Association, 4 & 5 (1972–1973): 152–178; ———. ‘‘‘A Helpmate for Man Indeed’: The Image of the Frontier Woman.’’ In Women and Folklore: Images and Genres, ed. Claire R. Farrer, 25–41. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1975; ———. ‘‘Gender Representations in Performance: The Cowgirl and the Hostess.’’ Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 25, no. 3 (1988): 219–241; Turner, Kay, and Suzanne Seriff. ‘‘‘Giving an Altar to St. Joseph’: A Feminist Perspective on a Patronal Feast.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 89–117. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Weigle, Marta. Spiders and Spinsters: Women and Mythology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982; ———. Two Guadalupes: Hispanic Legends and Magic Tales from Northern New Mexico. Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City Press, 1987; Welty, Eudora. The Robber Bridegroom. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1942.

Beverly J. Stoeltje Region: Western Europe In everyday North American usage, ‘‘Western Europe’’ usually refers to those nations west of the Cold War era Eastern Bloc, including Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Greece, Italy, Malta, Wales, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, England, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. The United Nations’ current ‘‘Western European and Others Group’’ also includes Turkey, but for folklorists considering traditional cultures, Turkey is generally seen as part of the Middle East. Longterm shifts in geopolitical boundaries, as well as the establishment of the European Economic Community post-1992, have resulted in frequent changes in the term’s use, and within Europe today, it is more common to designate those parts of the continent that touch the Atlantic Ocean, including islands and dependencies, as ‘‘Western.’’ Western Europe is the region where Folklore and Folklife Studies first developed as an intellectual pursuit and an academic discipline. Europeans were originally the subject’s main object of enquiry, unlike Anthropology, which first considered the peoples of Europe’s colonies from European perspectives. One might, then, expect to find an extensive literature on the folklore of Western Europe as a whole and on the folklore of Western European women in particular. But the development of folkloristics in the region, as Giuseppe Cocchiara, Regina Bendix, Hermann Bausinger, and others have discussed, occurred largely within the context of developing European nationalisms in the nineteenth century. Studies that examine traditions and customs in local contexts and those that consider very broad historic/geographic contexts within transnational regions are more common than scholarship framed as ‘‘Western European.’’ Finally, because of the

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diversity of languages in this part of the continent, most folklore scholarship is published in languages other than English. Europe as a whole has a population of nearly 400 million people speaking more than twenty languages. Its geographic area stretches from the northern polar regions to the Mediterranean in the south, and from Asia’s borders on the east to the North Atlantic Ocean in the west. This huge continent has diverse traditions, material cultures, historical experiences, regional customs, and official attitudes toward folk cultures. Modern Western Europe is densely populated, with many significant urban areas. Its history of migrations, conquests, and reapportionments over many centuries has led to significant ethnic diversity in most of its nations, a fact that has profoundly affected the study of folklore in the region. Some early antiquarians and folklorists, such as the Swiss writer J. J. Bachofen, attempted to imagine the shape of past societies and the role of women in prehistory based on tantalizing but very partial clues from archeology, linguistics, and the study of widespread folk traditions assumed to be ‘‘survivals’’ from a remote proto-European past. Their methods influenced several generations of social theorists. Bachofen posited that prehistoric matriarchies were the bases for the development of culture, a theory that influenced many later studies, including some popular works with scholarly undercurrents that describe broad patterns and trends in European culture over time, particularly regarding the role of women and the history of religion. Some scholarship that offers detailed explorations of the purported evidence for these ideas, such as in the work of Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, has entered feminist discourse and popular women’s literature, where it remains influential, if sometimes controversial. More recently, however, attention has focused on local folk cultures, and on cultural change, offering well-grounded, but more limited, comparative results. Attention to specific genres of folklore associated with public ritual, traditional narrative, vernacular architecture, storytelling, childbirth, gender roles, foodways, and women’s crafts, along with examinations of the history of folkloristics, have characterized much recent folklore scholarship in Western Europe. Some of this work is ethnographic, presented in journal articles, monographs, and regional collections, but some is presented in other genres, including in films, at festivals and exhibitions, and in archives, novels, and short stories. European scholarship’s history, filled as it is with Romantic-nationalist ideologies, has in the past privileged the nation-state, or the linguistically bounded ethnic group seeking nationhood, as its primary unit of analysis. In contrast, archeologist Barry Cunliffe proposes that the central diachronic (through time) common denominator that sensibly delineates Western Europe is its common experience of ‘‘facing the sea.’’ That is, the cultures of this region, which use the Atlantic litorral for resources, travel, and trade, are extensively affected by the ocean’s ecology. However, like many other theories of cultural history, Cunliffe’s assumes the primary value of spheres of activity most often associated with men, and so provides an insecure basis for talking about women’s folk culture in especially meaningful ways. It is perhaps more useful to think about the region’s cultures not in terms of

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nation-states, but instead as a congeries of cultures within shifting geopolitical boundaries and varied ecologies, linguistically and otherwise linked, that reveal the influences of ancient and modern empires, trade routes, religious allegiances, and modes of subsistence. These factors, in turn, reveal the cultural flows and stoppages influenced by such contexts, as well as by the wars, vectors of disease, and temporary boundaries that sometimes halt, reverse, or confuse such flows. Prehistoric Europe was a region of generally low population density. It was largely rural and characterized by small, dispersed settlements with primarily local social and political organization. During the Roman Empire, it experienced the rapid development of larger, nucleated settlements and cities. Thus, a pattern of urban concentrations of power and wealth, dependent on rural peripheries that supplied raw materials, anticipated the development of modern state configurations. Folklorists within Europe have generally concerned themselves with the cultural consequences of these shifting patterns and the ways in which they influenced the dynamic ebb and flow of institutionalized and vernacular cultures, particularly in looking at peasant cultures and the disempowered. They have also asked questions about the extent to which it is possible or useful to explore the origins of historic and modern folk cultures in the rather opaque prehistory of Europe by charting the spread of particular customs and beliefs. Their work has been closely tied to the development of Anthropology and Ethnology. By contrast, work on European folklore by North American folklorists has often been linked to attempts to explain the origins and meanings of North American customs. They have mainly sought to understand diasporic traditions that reemerged in changed forms in the so-called ‘‘New World’’ to which so many Europeans have immigrated, bringing their cultures and traditions with them. For example, Giovanna del Negro, who grew up in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, returned to her mother’s natal village in Italy to conduct fieldwork. But North American folklorists should exercise caution about approaching the study of European folklore through predominantly English-language sources; reliance upon such sources alone isolates them from the most important traditions of scholarship in Western Europe. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scholars developed folklore and folklife studies in aid of new nation-states, which were seeking validation in often romanticized quests for coherent origin myths, distinctive identities, and particular nationalist ideologies. Though Western Europe was never ethnically or religiously homogenous, attempts to instill a sense of national identity through folklore continue to thrive there, despite the fact that, since World War II, the region is more culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse than ever before. In most countries, women were treated in law as subordinate to men until the twentieth century. Women’s suffrage—the right to vote—has been common only since the 1940s. It is more recently still that opportunities for full participation in higher education were made widely available to Western European women. Increasingly significant numbers of women have been in the forefront of social, economic, scientific, and political progress and reform. Yet women may still constitute the most significant pool of

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tradition-bearers for folk culture, carrying many of the traditions of folk medicine alongside modern scientific medicine, performing musical and narrative traditions, preserving family and community customs, and preparing both everyday food and seasonal feasts, among other traditional activities. Western European scholarship historically has treated folklore as part of a class-based complex of customs, practices, and beliefs. Stringent attention has been paid to the remnants of traditional rural peasant cultures in particular. While in recent years, folklorists have turned to urban folk cultures, to the lore of higher-status groups and networks, and conducted more studies of individual tradition-bearers, there is little developed literature that considers women’s folk culture within a general Western European context. The brief sampling of recent work in English offered here is in no way exhaustive or representative, but merely suggests some directions current folklore research is taking. The problems associated with understanding the genre of folk belief have been of considerable interest to Western European women folklorists. Gillian Bennett, an English scholar of traditional narrative, and particularly of contemporary legend and belief tales, has extensively explored contemporary supernatural belief in Britain. Her studies of modern women and their narrations in group and individual contexts have been influential internationally. Scottish folklorist Marion Bowman’s work on belief focuses on vernacular religious practices, including those of the contemporary communities of NeoPagan practitioners in Britain, some of whom ground their thinking in early folklore scholarship on primitive religion and matriarchy. Continuing interest in traditional genres such as witchcraft belief and accusations and fairy lore has led folklorists to produce gender-sensitive and/or consciously feminist studies. In Denmark for instance, Timothy Tangherlini’s work is an example of scholarship on the interrelationship of ‘‘cunning folk’’ and ‘‘witches’’ (both could be female or male); it has parallels to work being conducted elsewhere in Europe. Tangherlini claims that ‘‘While cunning folk were generally considered an economic asset, protecting as they did both the health of people and animals, witches were considered to be an economic liability . . . Accusations of witchcraft could be tactically deployed as a move in escalating antagonisms directed at a particular individual’’ (Tangherlini: 296). That is, while those who had the support of the community were likely to be termed ‘‘cunning folk,’’ those who did not were ‘‘witches.’’ Angela Bourke links fairy traditions with local and colonial Irish history, and with sexism and patriarchy, in her study of an attractive and economically successful woman who found herself in difficulty because she failed to meet her family’s and her culture’s expectations about women’s subordination to men. Bourke points out that Bridget Cleary’s use of fairy traditions initially offered her some power over others who sought to control her. Eventually, however, it led to her death at the hands of her husband, whose own fairy beliefs compelled him to murder her in the belief that she was a changeling and not his wife. Welsh writer Hilda Vaughan develops a contemporary version of the legend of the Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach, a fairy story reset in her novel Iron and Gold. Irish folklorist Eilis ni Duibhne combines

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scholarly writing with novels and short stories that treat the same topics very successfully and also comment on the methods and ideas of folklore collectors. Other narrative traditions have attracted attention as well. Folklorist Marisa Rey-Henningsen, for example, explores Galician (northwestern Spanish) folktales. Enlisting traditional tales along with historical and legal documents, she found evidence for the early presence of matriarchy and matriarchal values in Galician culture. Her fieldwork in Spain, including her participant-observation of weddings and interviews with women, suggests that a women-centered society continues to thrive in the region. Women storytellers have been centrally involved in Western Europe’s many and varied narrative traditions. The stories told by the nomadic Sami people (the majority of whom live in Norway, with smaller communities in Russia, Finland, and Sweden) were generally considered ‘‘inauthentic,’’ presumed to be ‘‘loans’’ from other cultures permanently living in the areas through which they travelled. But research on two Indigenous Sami folktaleand legend-tellers—Berit Anne Blind (b. 1904), interviewed by Ann Helene Bolstad Skjelbred, and her older sister Ellen Utsi, whose tales were collected by scholar Just Knud Qvigstad—shows how a ‘‘neglected narrative tradition’’ (Skjelbred: 47) can be better illuminated by close comparative study. Feminist studies of national epics, such as the Finnish Kalevala, offer insights into the uses and misuses of female characters in epics based on traditional narratives. But where some historical traditions seem not to recognize women and their skills, the Icelandic medieval sagas, for example, demonstrate how ‘‘women as well as men gained and bestowed honor by performing verbally’’ (Borovsky: 6). Still, for the most part, women in these texts operate within the domestic realm, leaving the official, public world to men. In Finnish medieval ballads, warnings ‘‘against falling in love or becoming involved with foreign men’’ (Rank: 299) also adhere to traditional gender role-making. But even in male-dominated performance genres, like the telling of Gascon tall tales in southwestern France, women are by no means absent. Indeed, ‘‘like their male counterparts, women narrators continue to represent animal and human sexuality’’ (Mark: 504). Yet no single discourse by a woman can be identified in the texts. Even maleventriloquized women’s voices are absent from them, despite the fact that some stories involve female characters. Women scholars were crucial to the earliest European folktale collectors, such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who collected folktales from across Germany. Women tellers constituted some of the Grimms’ most prolific sources. Thus, it is less than surprising that feminist scholars have recently begun to reinterpret those stories, locating women-centered and feminist notions within their texts. For example, Jack Zipes’ recent analysis of the tale ‘‘Rumpelstiltskin’’ (originally told to the Grimms by Dortchen Wild) points out that, although male scholars have usually glossed that figure ‘‘as a helper . . . he is obviously a blackmailer and oppressor’’ (Zipes: 43), Zipes argues that the tale offers a metaphor about the changing nature of women’s work. Just as the male Rumpelstiltskin, not the female hero of the tale, becomes the spinner of straw into gold, so the tale itself ‘‘marked the end

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of an important aspect of female productivity [that is, spinning] as . . . important to the maintenance of civilization’’ (ibid.: 58). Spinning and textile production are traditional cultural processes addressed by folklorist Betty Messenger. Foregrounding narrative and song, she conducted contextually sophisticated, ethnographically informed, historical research on the Ulster (northern Irish) linen industry, in which many women (as well as men) worked. Her scholarship is now seen on both sides of the Atlantic as an exemplary study in both content and methodology. Women’s occupational traditions have attracted other scholars of Western Europe. Historic studies indicate that women in Belgium moved into the traditionally masculine field of coal mining in the nineteenth century. Rather than being resented by their coworkers as interlopers, ‘‘Belgian women miners were gradually assimilated to the young country’s developing national identity’’ (Hilden: 414). Indeed, owners in many other industries lined up ‘‘women’s work in industry with some form of ‘traditional’ women’s work . . . to arm themselves against the criticism that they were tearing women from their homes and exploiting them’’ (ibid.: 434). Folklorist Barbro Klein’s consideration of homecrafts addresses more conventionally feminine forms of domestic labor. She credits scholarly work in this area to ‘‘a handful of highly accomplished, now retired, women, such as Ingrid Bergman, Sofia Danielson, and Gertrud Grenander-Nyberg, who have all been employed at the cultural historical museums [of Sweden]’’ (Klein: 172). Klein also critically assesses the prodigious work of Lilli Zickerman who, in 1899, formed the Swedish Home Craft Association, which, with early folklife museums, was ‘‘part of a reform movement aimed to preserve and develop a Swedish craft industry’’ (ibid.: 173). Women’s participation in popular forms of social resistance is also a topic that has long intrigued scholars. The justly famous studies of charivari and rough music by historians Natalie Zemon Davis and E. P. Thompson, among many others, show how not only women, but also men dressed as women, participated in demonstrations and protests against unjust or unpopular persons and/or actions. As they did in so many locations, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century popular protests in the Netherlands incorporated large numbers of women. ‘‘[W]omen became the driving force behind . . . street disturbances’’ (Dekker: 341). Historian Rudolf Dekker argues that women’s centrality can be explained by the all-important role of neighborhood networks in the social foundation of protest movements, in part because the reason for the peoples’ unrest so often involved food, specifically bread. Around Europe, increased attention to women’s folk cultures over the past forty years has led to positive revisions of exhibits in galleries and ethnological museums, such as the Norwegian Voss Folkemuseum, the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in Ireland, and the National History Museum at St. Fagans in Wales. This development is also reflected in a recent increase in folklore research publications, which in many cases support such exhibits. See also: Folk Belief; Folktale; Material Culture; Matriarchy; Myth Studies; Occupational Folklore; Spinning; Storytelling; Tradition-Bearer; Wage Work; Wicca and Neo-Paganism; Women’s Work.

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References: Bachofen, J. J. Myth, Religion, and Mother Right. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Reissue edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992 [1861]; Bausinger, Hermann. Folk Culture in a World of Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990; Bendix, Regina In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997; Bennett, Gillian. Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987; Borovsky, Zoe. ‘‘Never in Public: Women and Performance in Old Norse Literature.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 112, no. 443 (1999): 6–39; Bourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story. New York: Penguin Books, 2001; Bowman, Marion. ‘‘Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, Heart Chakra of Planet Earth: Localisation and Globalisation in Glastonbury.’’ Numen, vol. 52, no. 2 (2005): 157–190; Cocchiara, Giuseppe. The History of Folklore in Europe. Trans. John N. McDaniel. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981; Cunliffe, Barry. Facing the Ocean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975; Dekker, Rudolf M. ‘‘Women in Revolt: Popular Protest and its Social Basis in Holland in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.’’ Theory and Society 16 (1987): 337–362; Del Negro, Giovanna P., and Harris M. Berger. ‘‘Character Divination and Kinetic Sculpture in the Central Italian Passeggiata (Ritual Promenade): Interpretive Frameworks and Expressive Practices from a Body-Centered Perspective.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 114, no. 451 (Winter 2001): 5–19; Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989; Hilden, Patricia J. ‘‘The Rhetoric and Iconography of Reform: Women Coal-Miners in Belgium, 1840–1914.’’ The Historical Journal, vol. 32, no. 2 (1991): 411–436; Klein, Barbro. ‘‘The Moral Content of Tradition: Homecraft, Ethnology, and Swedish Life in the Twentieth Century.’’ Western Folklore 59 (Spring 2000): 171–195; Mark, Vera. ‘‘Women and Text in Gascon Tall Tales.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 100, no. 398 (October 1987): 504–527; Messenger, Betty. Picking Up the Linen Threads. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978; Ni Duibhne, Eilis. Midwife to the Fairies. Dublin: Attic Press, 2001; Rank, Inkeri. ‘‘The Foreigner and the Finnish Maiden: A Theme in the Finnish Medieval Ballad.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 40, no. 4 (October 1981): 299–314; ReyHenningsen, Marisa. The World of the Ploughwoman: Folklore and Reality in Matriarchal Northwest Spain. Helsinki: Folklore Fellows Communications, no. 254, 1994; Sawin, Patricia E. ‘‘L€ onnrot’s Brainchildren: The Representation of Women in Finland’s Kalevala.’’ Journal of Folklore Research 25 (1988): 187–218; Skjelbred, Ann Helene Bolstad. ‘‘‘These Stories Will Not Lead You To Heaven’: An Encounter with Two Sami Narrators.’’ Folklore 112 (2001): 47–63; Tangherlini, Timothy R. ‘‘’How Do You Know She’s a Witch?’: Witches, Cunning Folk, and Competition in Denmark.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 59, no. 3/4. (Summer–Autumn 2000): 279–303; Thompson, E. P. Customs In Common. New York: The New Press, 1993; Vaughan, Hilda. Iron and Gold. Aberystwyth: Honno Ltd. (Welsh Women’s Press), 2002; Zipes, Jack. ‘‘Spinning With Fate: Rumpelstilskin and the Decline of Female Productivity.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1993): 43–60.

Teri Brewer and Pauline Greenhill Rhymes Rhymes created and used by girls in early nineteenth-century Europe, Australia, and North America were generally associated with singing games and dramatic play activities. Extensively recorded in England, Scotland, and Ireland by Lady Alice B. Gomme (1894–1898), in the United States by William Wells Newell (1883), and in New Zealand by Brian Sutton-Smith (1982), they often related to courtship and marriage, and were employed in circle games, line games, winding games, and couple games. Rhymes typically sung include ‘‘Oranges and Lemons,’’ ‘‘Poor Sally is a-Weeping,’’ ‘‘Drop the Handkerchief,’’ and ‘‘When I was a Lady.’’

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The last of these has elements in common with a widely known rhyme type known as the Suzie saga, described in 2001 by French folklorist Andy Arleo. Older versions generally began with the words, ‘‘When I was a lady, it was hey, oh, this way, this way, this way . . .’’ They continue, When When When When When

I got married . . . I got a baby . . . my baby cried . . . I got a bustle . . . my bustle fell . . .

This formula is comparable with more recent Suzie saga rhymes, which explore anticipated rites of passage for girls and women: When When When When When When

Suzie Suzie Suzie Suzie Suzie Suzie

was was was was was was

a a a a a a

baby . . . toddler . . . schoolgirl . . . teenager . . . mother . . . grandmother . . .

and conclude with her death in some versions, with her afterlife in others. Arleo notes that in two English variants, pregnancy precedes marriage, whereas in the American versions, pregnancy generally follows marriage. Only one rhyme found by Arleo mentions Suzie taking up a career—she becomes a teacher. Research by Janice Ackerley (2004: 46) found only two Australian variants that have Suzie working—as a typist and as a stripper. By the mid-1900s, the gentle singing games and dramatic play rhymes of the past were replaced by rhymes associated with more intense physical activities: hand-clapping, jumping (skipping) rope, hopscotch, and ball bouncing. Rhythm and rhyme were equally important in the creation of verses that accompany the folkloric activities of the street and playground. They are essentially the property of children, their creators. In this respect, girls act both as conservators of tradition and as innovators; their rhymes reflect changing social conditions while drawing on past customs and traditions. Sutton-Smith, a folklorist and developmental psychologist, suggests that girls acquire consciousness of their future roles earlier than do boys, and that many of their rhymes explore the available possibilities. However, girls are reacting against many rhymes’ previously coy undertones, using rhymes instead to recontextualize male dominance and assert their own versions of power. For example, a well-known verse recited as My boyfriend gave My boyfriend gave My boyfriend gave To kiss behind the

me an apple me a pear me fifty cents stair

has been in recent years extended to include the lines: I made him do the washing I made him do the floor I made him clean the baby’s bum In 1994 (Ackerley 2004: 36)

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Folklorist Elizabeth Grudgeon (1993) writes that rhymes are a safe way to deal with taboo subjects, enabling girls, especially between the ages ten and thirteen, to explore dangerous adult themes while still remaining children; declarations of sexual knowing, however veiled, create status within a girl’s peer group. According to Australian folklorist June Factor (1988), girls have as extensive a repertoire of vulgar and abusive rituals as the toughest boys, but while boys’ taboo-related rhymes tend to be direct and even boldly offensive, girls’ rhymes are more intimate and subversive, as evidenced by this popular jump-rope rhyme: Cinderella dressed in yella Went upstairs to meet her fella By mistake she kissed a snake And ended up with a bellyache

Intergender teasing also features in many girls’ rhymes. For example, a popular New Zealand hand-clapping rhyme, ‘‘Under the Bambushes,’’ usually ends with the words, Girls are sexy Made out of Pepsi

or Boys are rotten Made out of cotton

or Boys are spastic Made out of plastic

At a time in their lives when they are comparatively powerless, rhymes are means by which young girls can experience a sense of control, express their concerns, and comment on social realities; in nonsense rhymes, they can turn the conventional world upside down. My name is Andy Pandy sugar and candy Mum’s gone crazy Dad’s had a baby Do me a favor Get lost!

Through rhymes, girls undermine the advertising power of the weightloss industry, for example, along with stereotypes of ‘‘the perfect woman.’’ I must, I must increase my bust ’Cos then, ’cos then I can attract men And get a job, a job, working as a blob at Jenny Craig, Jenny Craig So they can all catch my plague, my plague And get fat, get fat, so what do you think of that!

Girls use their rhymes practically to keep the rhythm in their hand-clapping and jump-rope activities, as well as to comment on and experiment with the

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boundaries of their everyday experiences. The links between past child-play traditions and contemporary girlhood become evident when researchers examine both the texts and subtexts of rhymes. See also: Diet Culture; Girls’ Folklore; Hand-Clapping Games; Jump-Rope Rhymes; Pregnancy; Rites of Passage; Sexuality; Text; Tradition-Bearer. References: Ackerley, Janice. ‘‘Gender differences in the folklore play of children in primary school playgrounds.’’ Play and Folklore 44 (November 2003): 1-15.; ———. ‘‘Gender issues in the playground rhymes of New Zealand children: 1993–2003.’’ Children’s Folklore Review, vol. 26 (2003–2004): 7–62; Arleo, Andy. ‘‘The saga of Susie: the dynamics of an international handclapping game.’’ In Play Today in the Primary School Playground: Life, Learning, and Creativity, eds. Julia C. Bishop and Mavis Curtis, 115– 132. Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2001; Factor, June. Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children’s Folklore in Australia. Victoria: Viking Penguin Australia, 1988; Gomme, Alice B. The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2 vols. Reprint edition. London: Peter Smith, 1964 [1894–1998]; Grugeon, Elizabeth. ‘‘Gender implications of children’s playground culture.’’ In Gender and Ethnicity in Schools: Ethnographic Accounts, eds. Peter Woods and Martyn Hammersley, 11– 33. London: Routledge, 1993; Newell, W. W. Games and Songs of American Children. Second edition. New York: Dover Publications, 1963 [1883]; Sutton-Smith, Brian. A History of Children’s Play: New Zealand, 1840–1950. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

Janice Ackerley Riddle The riddle is a form of narrative play that may assume many different forms, but it consists basically of an enigmatic statement (often in the form of a question) that yields an unexpected but clever answer. Most riddles are performed orally, and typically are shared in riddling sessions, in which the riddler tries to outwit the other members of the group. Although riddling sessions in contemporary North America occur most frequently among children as a form of competition and entertainment, they have also taken place in other cultures among adults (sometimes with children present) for purposes of instruction, socialization, and the testing of wits. In these situations, the riddles told by women frequently differ from the riddles told by men—as is also the case with jokes, proverbs, and other forms of oral folklore. Because riddling often operates on many levels of meaning, and may conclude with answers that are covert if not also subversive, it has long been a form of expressive culture that is popular among women—particularly when they are otherwise excluded from positions of power and authority. For instance, in many parts of Europe from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, riddling was sometimes used by young women to test the intelligence and astuteness of their prospective suitors. If the men were able to answer the riddles that were posed to them, they might be rewarded with marriage; otherwise they might be dismissed. Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature provides many instances of folktales in which women—both royal and common—use riddling sessions to demonstrate their own cunning and acuity (see motifs H530 to H899).

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In more contemporary settings, riddles might be used by women to connect with each other while also testing the boundaries of polite discourse. For instance, Francesca Mancini, an Italian immigrant in Montreal, told this riddle to Giovanna Del Negro (2003: 104): ‘‘All women have one underneath. Some have it whole, some have it broken. Some have it dirty and some have it clean. And not more than four fingers.’’ Thinking that the riddle referred to female genitalia and sexuality, Del Negro was relieved to learn that the answer was simply ‘‘the hem of a suit.’’ She observed that this type of riddling serves at least three purposes: to give women greater autonomy and control over their own bodies by discreetly raising a taboo topic; to provide instruction for the listener while also demonstrating the verbal and metaphorical skills of the riddler; and to form an intimate bond between the two women. ‘‘I felt that by sharing her riddles with me Francesca was allowing me to enter a sort of private female world’’ (106). See also: Coding; Courtship; Girls’ Folklore; Humor; Joke; Sexuality; Tradition-Bearer; Women’s Folklore. References: Abrahams, Roger D., and Alan Dundes. ‘‘Riddles.’’ In Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard M. Dorson, 129–143. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972; de Caro, Frank A. ‘‘Riddles and Proverbs.’’ In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, ed. Elliot Oring, 175–197. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1986; Del Negro, Giovanna. Looking through my Mother’s Eyes: Life Stories of Nine Italian Immigrant Women in Canada. Toronto: Guernica, 2003; K€ ong€as Maranda, Elli, ed. Riddles and Riddling. Special issue of Journal of American Folklore, vol. 89, no. 352 (1976): 127–265; McDowell, John Holmes. Children’s Riddling. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979; Roemer, Danielle M. ‘‘Riddles.’’ In Children’s Folklore: A Source Book, eds. Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon, 161–192. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995.

James I. Deutsch

Rites of Passage Rites of passage are ritualized events marking a person’s movement—singularly or as part of a group—from one stage of life or state of being to another. They are practiced in some form by all human cultures, and commonly include ‘‘ceremonies of birth, childhood, social puberty, betrothal, marriage, pregnancy, fatherhood, initiation into religious societies, and funerals’’ (van Gennep: 30). Particularly in contemporary European and North American societies, a rite of passage need not be formalized, but may be any action or event that initiates a person into a new socially recognized status or state of being. Thus, both an elaborate wedding ceremony and a farewell meeting at a local bar to share drinks with a coworker who is taking a new job may be considered rites of passage. Each rite of passage consists of three distinct, sequenced phases: separation, liminality, and reintegration. In the first, the separation phase, individuals formally abandon their old social status and prepare to enter a transitional state. In some rites of passage, this may include physical separation from the community. For example, at most Euro North American heterosexual weddings, tradition enjoins that the bride and groom not see each

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other on the day of the event, and that each be sequestered with their own family and friends until the formal wedding ceremony begins. During the liminal period, individuals are ‘‘betwixt and between’’ (Turner 1969); that is, no longer having their previous status or social position, but not yet having attained the new one. During this period, ritual subjects may receive instruction in their new role, successfully complete a test or tests, undergo an ordeal, or otherwise symbolically dwell in a transitional state for a time. At weddings, for example, the ceremony itself may incorporate religious teachings and conventional language, including vows to one another that the initiates make in the presence of the officiant in front of the couple’s community: before the ceremony, they were individuals, but following the ceremony, they will function as a social couple. In the reintegration phase, individuals formally take on their new status— usually signaled by a new name or other social designation—and are reincorporated into the community in their new social position. Thus, weddings often close with the couple and community joining for socializing together in a further event (such as a reception) that marks them as ‘‘wife’’ and ‘‘husband,’’ a married couple. Modern rites of passage may not contain the formal three-phase process expected in the most traditional forms. In some tribal puberty rites, for example, a peer group leaves the community together, often to a location previously unknown to them; the group is then educated and tried through a series of ordeals, and finally returns triumphantly to the village or town where the new adults are welcomed in a formal ceremony. But for contemporary North American young women, a rite of passage into adulthood may be as simple as moving the tassel on a graduation cap from one side to another during high school commencement exercises, or at menarche (first menses or period), using a sanitary pad or tampon for the first time. Indeed, many current rites of passage may more appropriately be termed customs, or customs of passage, as they do not follow the tripartite structure of the most formalized rituals. Yet despite the modern tendency toward abbreviated rites of passage and the trend toward reintegration without formal phases of separation and liminality, many rites of passage in the modern world help people move through the life cycle and note and celebrate their changes in status. Many women experience initiation into groups. For example, first-year college students, engineers, and members of sororities often undergo various forms of hazing. Initiations into male-only groups often include ritual feminizing of the initiants, such as forcing them to wear cosmetics or bras. However, with increasing feminist critique, and the wider participation of women in professions and groups to which they were hitherto excluded, many of the obscene, gross, and heterosexist elements of these transition rituals have been toned down or outlawed by their sponsoring organizations. Life-cycle rituals are the most common and obvious rites of passage. Women undergo some of the same rites of passage as men do, but some rituals are unique to females; shared aspects of the life cycle are sometimes marked differently for female and male subjects. At birth, many cultures recognize and accept the new baby into the community through a ritual,

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sometimes tied to religion. In Catholic Christianity, baptism occurs in infancy, and the baptismal, or christening, ceremonies for boys and girls are identical. In contemporary Judaism, however, it has become common to hold a special naming ceremony for a girl soon after her birth. This ritual parallels the briss or circumcision ceremony held for a boy eight days after his birth. In some cultures, a girl child may receive jewelry, have her ears pierced, or receive some other outward sign of her gender at her birth or naming ceremony. The tendency in North America and other parts of the global North has been to adopt a series of customs and rites of passage that prolong the transition from childhood to adulthood. Thus, an adolescent girl will not have a single ceremony but a series of events that mark her transition to adulthood. The stages she experiences might typically include menarche, first bra, wearing makeup for the first time, obtaining a driver’s license, first romantic relationship, first kiss, first sexual experience, graduation from high school, purchasing a first alcoholic drink, and so on. Some of these experiences are unique to girls, and some are not. Additionally, depending upon religious affiliation and/or ethnic group, she may undergo other rites of passage that mark her transition to adulthood. A Muslim girl may start wearing a hijab or headcovering. A Jewish girl may have a bat mitzvah or ceremonial reading of the Torah akin to a boy’s bar mitzvah. A Christian girl may confirm her faith or heed an altar-call to baptism. A Latina might ~ have a quinceanera which both confirms her Catholic faith and marks her eligibility to begin dating. An Apache girl may have a sunrise ceremony; other First Nations have their own adolescent ceremonies for girls. Girls from the upper economic classes in the United States and Canada may have a coming-out party, after which they become debutantes, eligible to participate as adults in society. Since the 1980s, a movement among African Americans has created coming-of-age rituals for youth that strengthen pride and emphasize responsibility. African and Middle Eastern girls may participate in events designed to replace the traditional but controversial practice of female genital cutting, which may have once marked the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Marriage is a rite of passage that not all women choose, but which is commonly experienced by most. Its associated customs vary widely, but typically include a period during which a couple has agreed to marry, or their parents have consented to have their union. A wedding ceremony formally joins the couple, accompanied in North America by legal recognition of the union. In some locations, same-sex marriages are permitted, but where they are illegal, a lesbian couple may hold a public event to mark their commitment. Some women choose to remain single or in stable longterm relationships without marrying, and they may choose to develop a unique ceremony that publicly marks their status. In Euro North America, a woman typically wears a diamond ring to signal her engagement, holds parties or ‘‘showers’’ where she receives gifts to help her establish a new home, then marries in an often-elaborate ceremony that involves donning a fancy white dress, choosing women friends and relatives to stand with her, displaying flowers, and holding a party or reception

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following a religious marriage ceremony. Additionally, an African American couple may ‘‘jump the broom’’ to close their wedding ritual. An East Asian bride may wear traditional wedding dress, red or multicolored, in place of or in addition to a Western-style white dress. A Lithuanian bride may choose the traditional handmade multicolor dress and be ‘‘capped,’’ or receive a cap from an older woman to signal that she is now married. There are as many variations as there are different ethnic groups, families, and other folk groups to enact them. After her wedding, a married woman must assume adult roles, such as having holiday celebrations at her home instead of her mother’s, giving presents to children at holidays rather than receiving them, or feeding her family instead of being fed herself. As activist scholar Frances Kai-Hwa Wang notes, ‘‘You know you’ve become an adult when you buy your first twenty-five-pound sack of rice.’’ For most women, pregnancy and childbirth mark a significant passage into adulthood and a permanent change in status to motherhood. These life-cycle experiences mark a woman as having moved up a generation; in addition to being someone’s child, she is now someone’s mother. This is equally true for women who physically give birth and for those who adopt. In both cases, baby shower gifts are typically given by her friends and relatives to help her to prepare materially for the arrival. The birth itself may be a time when family and friends gather to await the news of a safe delivery or to participate as helpers in the birth itself. For the woman, the birth may be a highly anticipated and prepared-for event that serves as a true rite of passage in that it crucially involves a liminal period and an ordeal that tests her strength and courage. In Birth as an American Rite of Passage (2003), Robbie Davis-Floyd examines the changes in birthing traditions that took place in the twentieth century. She asserts that the birthing model current in Euro North America takes power away from women and places it in the hands of doctors and machines, thus initiating women (and newborns) into the world of technology of which they are symbolically and actually parts. Though divorce is underrecognized as a rite of passage in folklore scholarship, in North America, some women so consider it. Divorce may positively mark a woman as both sexually experienced and sexually free, or it may, more negatively, signal an imminent downturn in her social status and financial affairs. Like a wedding, the divorce process usually involves legal elements: abandoning a previous social condition (actually legally termed ‘‘separation’’); awaiting the judgment of a divorce court, during which time the woman is ‘‘betwixt and between,’’ being neither married nor unmarried; and her receipt of the final legal decree by which she is reintegrated into the ranks of single women. But many divorcees also choose to ritually celebrate their new status by, for example, holding a divorce party, or marking the event with a tattoo. The aging and eventual death of a woman’s parents also moves her up generationally. Their deaths often occur during her middle age, concurrent with other transitions in the life cycle. Sometimes referred to as the ‘‘sandwich generation,’’ a woman of middle years may be caring for both children and aging parents. She experiences menopause, or the gradual

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cessation of the menses that marked her initial transition into adulthood. In North America, this transition from the childbearing years used to be kept private, as an often unwelcome sign of aging. However, there has been an increasing tendency to celebrate, or at least to talk openly, about this life phase. Indeed, some women welcome the end of their reproductive years for the sexual freedom it affords them, among other reasons. While no standard ritual exists to mark this passage, it is now not uncommon for individuals and groups to develop new rites for this time. For example, every three years the American Folklore Society (AFS) Women’s Section holds a croning ceremony for section members who have passed the age of fifty. Many members of the AFS attend this much-anticipated event, marked (among other characteristics) by humor, traditional cheers, and gifts for the new crones. In many societies, their transition to the elder generation also means increased status and freedom for women, who have raised their children and acquired enough life experience to be considered wise. For some, this period might mean the opportunity to pursue for the first time, and with abandon, a career or avocation. For others, it may simply involve the added responsibilities of elder care and/or grandmothering. Death is the final passage for everyone. Ritual preparations may include a distribution of property and assets that a woman has acquired through her lifetime and the passing on of her wisdom, recipes, or heirlooms. In North America, rituals surrounding death are fairly uniform and are influenced both by religious customs and the funeral industry. Generally, traditions such as loud wailing, refusal to embalm, funeral pyres, or interment without a commercial coffin on land not designated for burials do not fit the acceptable model and are frowned up or even illegal. Still, family and ethnic traditions persist, if in modified form. In New Orleans, the tradition of joyful celebration and band music is maintained by many. Irish and families of other groups may hold wakes in which the person’s life is celebrated over food and drink. Jewish families sit shiva, remembering the dead and comforting each other while others provide their food. Mexican and Ukrainian families may choose to visit a loved one’s gravesite with decorations and food, consuming a meal with the deceased. Muslims, Hindus, Hmong, and other groups may reject embalming in favor of the quick burial or cremation typical in their cultures. See also: Adoption; Bat Mitzvah; Body Modification and Adornment; Childbirth and Childrearing; Cosmetics; Croning; Death; Divorce; Elder Care; Engagement; Female Genital Cutting; Folk Custom; Grandmother; Initiation; Menarche Stories; Menopause; Menstruation; ~ Quinceanera; Ritual; Sorority Folklore; Tradition; Wedding. References: Adams, Abigail E. ‘‘Dyke to Dyke: Ritual Reproduction at a U.S. Men’s Military College.’’ Anthropology Today, vol. 9, no. 5 (1993): 3–6; Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003; Dryburgh, Heather. ‘‘Work Hard, Play Hard: Women and Professionalization in Engineering-Adapting to the Culture.’’ Gender and Society, vol. 13, no. 5 (1999): 664– 682; Matrix, Sidney Eve, and Pauline Greenhill, eds. ‘‘Special Issue: Wedding Realities/Les noces en vrai.’’ Ethnologies, vol. 28, no. 2 (2006): 5–211; Moen, Elizabeth. ‘‘The Sexual Politics of Female Circumcision.’’ n.d. http://www.etext.org/Politics/Progressive.

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Sociologists/authors/Moen.Elizabeth/The-sexual-politics-of-female-circumcision.EMoen (accessed December 23, 2007); Nelson, Pamela B. ‘‘Reviving Rites of Passage in America.’’ The Balch Institute. n.d. http://www2.hsp.org/exhibits/Balchpercent20exhibits/ rites/reviving.html (accessed December 23, 2007); Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977 [1969]; Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960 [1909]; Wang, Frances Kai-Hwa. ‘‘Asian American Rites of Passage: You know you’ve become an adult when . . .’’ IMDiversity.com. n.d. http://www.imdiversity.com/Villages/Asian/family_lifestyle_traditions/archives/wang_ rites_of_passage.asp (accessed July 2, 2007); Warfield-Coppack, Nsenga. ‘‘The Rites of Passage Movement: A Resurgence of African-Centered Practices for Socializing African American Youth.’’ Journal of Negro Education, vol. 61, no. 4 (Autumn 1992): 471–482; Zeitlin, Steven. ‘‘The Life Cycle: Folk Customs of Passage.’’ The Balch Institute. n.d. http://www2.hsp.org/exhibits/Balchpercent20exhibits/rites/lifecycle.html (accessed July 3, 2007).

Theresa A. Vaughan Ritual Rituals are patterned, repetitive, and symbolic enactments of cultural beliefs or values. Most often, rituals work to enhance social cohesion—to make participants feel that, more than individuals, they are part of a group that shares ideas and beliefs. Usually, rituals’ primary purpose is to align an individual’s beliefs with those of the collective. The more a belief system is enacted through ritual, the stronger it becomes, and vice versa. A common misconception in industrialized societies holds that ritual goes on only in ‘‘primitive’’ cultures, and that in modern, technologically developed locations, citizens benefiting from scientific enlightenment lead deritualized lives. Yet throughout history, all human cultures, including those of Euro North Americans, use rituals to deal with the mystery and unpredictability of the natural, social, and cosmic realms. From a feminist perspective, analysis of rituals offers insight into the construction of gender, sexuality, and social hierarchies in social settings. Rituals also reflect the rights and obligations of gendered social actors. Ritual practices and discourses can encode social difference, privilege, and power, as well as express individual and group responses to the nature, meanings, and effects of difference, privilege, and power as they are performed within societies. Feminist studies have highlighted ritual’s complexity and myriad cultural roles. Among the most significant to the lives of women are its uses in engendering belief; maintaining religious vitality; establishing and reinforcing family traditions; enhancing courage; effecting healing; and transforming individual consciousness, often in order align it with group values—those of the wider society or countercultural groups therein. Twelve characteristics are integral to the roles of ritual in cultural life. (1) Ritual’s messages are symbolic. (2) Ritual is embedded in a cognitive matrix (belief system). (3) Ritual’s forms often include rhythmic repetition and redundancy. (4) Ritual performances are framed, set apart from ordinary time and space; they are ordered and formal. (5) Ritual performances establish a sense of inviolability and inevitability. (6) Rituals often include literal

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performance; acting, stylization, and staging give them drama. (7) Rituals intensify toward a climax that heightens their affective (emotional) impact. (8) Ritual cognitively transforms its participants from individuals into believers, adherents, patriots, and so on. (9) Ritual often uses cognitive simplification, rendering complex ideas more straightforward or unitary. (10) Rituals can help individuals under stress cope with difficult situations or experiences. (11) Rituals often work to preserve the status quo in a given society. (12) Paradoxically, rituals can also facilitate social change. Not every ritual does each of these things equally, or has each characteristic in equal amounts. Ritual works through symbols: objects, ideas, or actions loaded with cultural meaning. Symbols are multivocal; that is, many meanings can be assembled and expressed in each. For example, the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor can simultaneously convey U.S. patriotism, the openness of America to immigrants and cultural diversity, the tribulations suffered by arrivals at Ellis Island or by immigrants generally, America’s historical friendship with France, the power of a goddess-like figure, and the strength of women. Because ritual works through symbols, its process is fundamentally experiential, as is the learning it engenders. This form of learning is extremely powerful. Didactic instruction (explicit teaching) can be intellectually rejected or easily forgotten, but experiential learning habituates the individual to specific patterns of behavior and response, and is much longer-lasting. Thus, in contemporary society, as in the past, women’s skills, trades, and crafts, from needlework to cooking, from traditional healing to high-tech surgery, have been taught experientially through apprenticeship. Because symbolic messages are physically and emotionally experienced rather than intellectually analyzed, ritual participants are often unconscious of the powerful symbolic messages they are receiving. For example, Robbie Davis-Floyd analyzed obstetrical procedures, such as the routine use of intravenous drug delivery (IV) and electronic fetal monitoring, as rituals conveying core values of American society to birthing women. The IV is the symbolic umbilical cord to the hospital, communicating to the laboring woman the powerful message that she is now dependent on the institution for her life. Likewise, the electronic fetal monitor (to which nowadays nearly all laboring women in North America are attached by means of two large belts around their bellies) emphasizes the cultural supremacy of science and technology; the laboring woman seems dependent on the machine. One woman Davis-Floyd interviewed said, ‘‘As soon as I got hooked up to the monitor, all everyone did was stare at it. Pretty soon I got the feeling that it was having the baby, not me’’ (107). This example shows how an individual’s experiences of messages conveyed by a powerful symbol can partially or fully align her cognitive system around them. Rituals are not arbitrary—they emerge from within a group’s belief system. Each symbolic message that a given ritual sends manifests an underlying cultural belief or value. Sometimes these are made explicit, but quite often they are unconsciously held. Ritual’s primary purpose is to symbolically enact and thereby to transmit a group’s belief system into the psyches of its participants, aligning their individual beliefs and values with those of the group.

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Because a culture’s belief system is enacted through rituals, anthropologists have often focused on interpreting rituals as a primary way into understanding a culture. For example, Victor Turner describes the initiation rite of the Ndembu people of northwestern Zambia, Nkang, performed for a girl once her breasts start to develop. The initiate is wrapped in a blanket and laid at the foot of a mudyi sapling, a tree that exudes a milky white sap when its bark is scratched. The location of this rite at the foot of the ‘‘milk tree’’ has multiple symbolic meanings in Ndembu life. It invokes breast milk and breastfeeding of the ‘‘dependent’’ initiate, the significant social tie of child to mother, the importance of matriliny—the backbone of Ndembu social organization—and, at its highest level of abstraction, the unity and continuity of Ndembu society (Turner 1969, 21). For maximum effectiveness, a ritual concentrates on sending one basic set of messages, which it will rhythmically repeat in different forms. What is reiterated in ritual can include the occasion for its performance (as in a ceremony enacted every year at the same time); its content (as in a chant); the content’s form and structure (as in a church ceremony), or any combination of these. Redundancy enhances ritual’s communicative efficiency; the Mayan woman who, during birthing, hears her midwife chant over and over the names of the saints and goddesses who watch over laboring women, is not likely to forget them (Paul). In ritual events, precise order matters, and the feeling is formal. Participants must pay special attention to body movements and appropriate behavior, as in church or at a formal dinner. Formality is enhanced when the ritual is concretely framed—physically set apart from the everyday, in a special building or marked space. For example, in Wiccan ritual practice, adherents try to meet outdoors and gather in a circle that is ideally nine feet in diameter. The circumference may be demarcated by a rope or small rocks and lit with candles oriented to the four cardinal directions. An altar may be placed at the center of the circle or at its northern node. Wiccan rituals begin with a ‘‘casting of the circle’’ (outlining and purifying it) and the lighting of candles. This sacred space confines healing energy until it is ritually broken and the participants part ways (http://www.religioustolerance.org). Anthropologists Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff (1977) suggest that ritual’s insistence on repetition and order evokes perpetual cosmic processes, metaphorically implying that the belief system enacted has the same permanence and legitimacy as the cosmos. Rhythmicity has long been recognized as a key feature of transition rituals (rites of passage) that carry an individual or group from one social state or status to another. Rhythmic, repetitive stimuli (especially in safe, relaxed settings) coordinate emotional, cognitive, and motor processes and synchronize them among the various ritual participants. This process, called ‘‘entrainment,’’ may be experienced as a loss of self-consciousness, a feeling of flow. Ritual entrainment can lead to transpersonal bonding, a sense of the unity and oneness of the group, as in for example the collective and polyphonic ritual funeral wailing practices of Warao women in Venezuela. According to Charles Briggs (929–930), their sometimes melodic, sometimes percussive expressions of grief and crying occur over many hours in a

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demonstration of women’s individual and group interpretive and social power through collective lamenting. These polyphonic and intertextual musical and poetic crying performances construct and comprise social relationships of power and create connections among women. The exaggerated precision and careful adherence to form and pattern that set ritual apart from more casual modes of social interaction establish an atmosphere that feels inviolate and an order that seems inevitable. Most Euro North Americans would find it difficult to imagine, for example, stopping a graduation ceremony, interrupting the Pledge of Allegiance, or standing up in the middle of a church service to argue with the minister. Precise performance of ritual gives humans the feeling of setting cosmic gears into motion—an inviolable process that inevitably moves the individual through danger to safety. Thus, ritual enhances courage. At contemporary Euro North American bridal showers, for example, female kin and friends provide gifts and activities from the humorous (edible lingerie) to the practical (The I Hate to Cook Book). Part mockery, part instruction, these rituals help the bride prepare for marital duties and expectations. The night before a Hindu wedding, female family and friends might attend a mehndi (henna art) party at the bride’s home, where, surrounded by women, the bride’s hands and body are adorned with henna paintings while guests eat, dance, and sing for her. On the night before her wedding, a Swahili bride in Kenya is similarly entertained by the hypnotic and erotic dancing of female kin and friends while she prepares for the next day’s ceremonies. In each of these woman-centered, female community-building rituals, women come together playfully, rhythmically, to titillate, educate, distract, and prepare the bride-to-be to have courage in the face of whatever awaits her in marriage. This courage-enhancing role played by ritual is evident even in cultural greeting rituals (in North America, generally, ‘‘Hello, how are you?’’ ‘‘Fine, thank you. And you?’’). Although such standardized performances may appear trite or insincere to the analytical intellect, they nevertheless perform an important service. The rhythmicity of greeting rituals facilitates rapid entrainment of bodily rhythms, generating a sense of comfort and security. For example, when a stranger stops a Euro North American on the street, she may react with fear. But if the stranger is courteous and polite— if he performs greeting rituals that are known and familiar—her fear will usually subside. Through skillful use of these rituals, the stranger demonstrates that he shares her cultural universe. This metaphorically suggests that he abides by the cultural rules and is therefore safe to interact with. The recipient of these behaviors may then relax and experience friendly, open feelings toward the stranger (for better or worse, because correct ritual performance does not guarantee honesty; ritual can easily be manipulated for sinister ends). In this capacity, ritual greases the wheels of social interaction. It is the symbolic form through which trust between strangers can be established quickly. A major part of ritual’s job is to imbue participants with a strong sense of the value, validity, and importance of the belief being enacted. Thus, ritual must also work to preclude challenges to that system. Ritual can be high

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drama. Its performers must often stage it like a play that intensifies toward a climax. The more dramatic ritual is, the more effectively it engages the emotions. These qualities enable ritual to command the attention of participants and audience, while at the same time serving to deflect questioning and/or the presentation of alternative points of view. Those who manipulate and control ritual are powerful performers, from traditional shamans to Adolf Hitler to Jerry Falwell. They need both command of the belief system being enacted, and dramatic, often charismatic, flair. Their effectiveness rests on their ability to entrain groups, to reorder divergent individual cognition around the symbolic matrix they represent. The survival of many tribal cultures often depends in large part on the ability of their shamans to dramatically and inspirationally perform the rituals that enact and thus perpetuate their unique cultural values and beliefs. When a shaman dies without transmitting this cultural lore to apprentices, her culture is on its way to extinction, or at to least profound alteration. (Shamans have traditionally been thought of as male, but in The Woman in the Shaman’s Body, Barbara Tedlock reveals the long-hidden female roots of this ancient form of religion and medicine and the powerful roles played by female shamans in many contemporary societies.) Belief follows emotion. In general, people are far more likely to remember events and to absorb the lessons imparted by them if they carry an emotional charge. Ritual generates that charge—it focuses the emotions on the symbolic messages it presents. This focusing process is enhanced by the rhythmic repetition of the ritual’s messages, which will often intensify toward a climax. If the ritual is successful, belief will be generated though trust in the ritual experience; and because of the emotions associated with that belief, neither the experience nor the belief will be forgotten. In the eastern Sierra Madres of Chihuahua, Mexico, for example, the only  time the Raram uri women are asked to dance ritually is in yumari healing ceremonies. Y umari dances and songs are performed to heal people, animals, and the land. In the dance, women move in a constant iwı´ (circle) around two male singers and chanters who dance in the middle. ‘‘The songs ask that the land be nourished and that the land will nourish the people. The land is nourished by the result of the ceremony which brings rain’’ (Salmon: 1,328). The iwı´ represents the land’s fertility. Women’s participation in this rhythmic ritual performance reinforces to both dancers and observers the importance of women and their fertility to the health of the community and cognitively reintegrates the physical connection between the health of the people and their natural landscape. The emotional affect generated by ritual can do much more than generate belief. An ecstatic state occurs when physical, emotional, and intellectual experiences of the symbolic messages become one. It may be very brief, experienced only as goose bumps popping out on a young female television viewer’s arms as she watches a crying new Miss America inherit her crown and sash from the reigning queen and take her first walk down the runway, now the heavily commercialized symbol and narrowly defined ideal of Euro North American feminine beauty and achievement. The effect may happen only once during the ritual, or it may be repeated at numerous focal points.

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Or it may be prolonged, as in meditation and religious trance or dance. In any case, the ecstatic sensation becomes experientially associated by ritual participants with the belief system enacted in the ritual. In Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, zar is an ecstatic dance ritual involving mostly women. This cathartic and therapeutic movement and trance form functions for women in these cultures as psychotherapy functions in North American cultural settings (El Guindy and Schmais). Zar dancing and possession provide a means for sharing knowledge and charitable society. In Drawing Down the Moon, Margot Adler (164) provides an example from the Wiccan context: As Glenna began the opening conjuration of the ritual, a silence fell over the circle. Through the castings and chargings of the circle, through the invocation of the Goddess, it grew, and as Albion and Loik and Joaquin Murietta hammered out a dancing rhythm on their drums, as we whirled in a double sunwise ring, that silence swelled into waves of unseen lightness, flooding our circle, washing about our shoulders, breaking over our heads. Afterwards we wandered about the gardens, laughing and clowning, drunk on the very air itself, babbling to each other: it worked!

This ritually induced experience of ecstasy is one of the most powerfully emotion-filled experiences available to humans. Once they experience this state, they are likely to want more; and this desire can be a powerful incentive to begin regular attendance at the ritual events that induce this feeling. Their rhythmic repetition, evocative style, and precise manipulation of symbols and sensory stimuli enable collective rituals to focus the emotions of participants on the calculated intensification of their messages. Ritual generates intense emotion in humans, even ecstasy, and intense emotion, in turn, generates belief. Transformation for ritual participants can be both mental and physical. It can be external in the eyes of society, and/or internal in the psyche of the participant. Some kind of transformation can be said to occur in all types of ritual. Even a ritual handshake opens a previously non-existent channel of communication between two individuals. But ritual’s true potential for transformation goes much deeper, entailing profound possibilities for individual interior change. Deep transformation occurs when the symbolic messages of ritual fuse with individual emotion and belief, and the individual’s entire cognitive structure reorganizes around the newly internalized symbolic complex. Although this process may sound final, it is not. As most religious adherents know from experience, belief waxes and wanes, and must be continually reinforced through ritual if it is to retain a significant role in shaping individual cognition and behavior. Each time a person attends a religious service or a political rally, she can experience this process anew, diving deeper into the symbolic constellations of belief in the religious or political system. The most profoundly transformative of all rituals are initiatory rites of passage that convey an individual from one social state or status to another and religious indoctrinations. Such rituals break down the belief system of the initiate, then rebuild it around the beliefs and values of the group; in other words, they generate a conversion experience. Whether the

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individual is converted to Islam or Christianity, or initiated into the army or into a sorority, the process is very much the same. Cognitive breakdown is achieved by some combination of hazing (the imposition of physical and mental hardships), strange-making (making the known and familiar suddenly seem unknown and unfamiliar), and symbolic inversion (metaphorically turning things upside down or inside out, so that the high is brought low, and the low is raised high, and the world in general is thrown into confusion). This purposive breakdown of their belief systems leaves initiates profoundly open to new learning and to the construction of new categories of knowledge and understanding. Any symbolic messages conveyed to an initiate during this opening process can thus be imprinted on her psyche as deeply, ‘‘as a seal impresses wax’’ (Turner, The Ritual Process: 238–239). Once broken down, their cognitive structures can then be rebuilt around the beliefs, values, and approved behaviors of the group. Such religious conversions can evolve slowly, over years of repeated exposure to a given set of beliefs, or they can happen very quickly. For example, in the rite of passage of ‘‘rushing’’ (attempting to join a sorority), the pledge’s (initiate’s) normal patterns of action and thought are turned topsy-turvy. First, she is made strange to herself by wearing a certain article or color of clothing or jewelry during the duration of the rush. Constant hazing (being handcuffed to other pledges for a day, being insulted or made the butt of jokes, ordered to perform repetitive chores for sorority members, having to crawl up and down stairs, rising to address sorority members or whenever one’s name is called, being deprived of sleep or sleeping in cold or scary places, being ordered to consume alcohol and perform embarrassing acts in front of fraternity houses or in other public places) break down the individual’s cognitive structure and create camaraderie among new pledges. Through repetitive and highly symbolic rituals (such as carrying a plant everywhere and keeping it alive throughout the rush), her physical habits and patterns of thought are reorganized into alignment with the basic values, beliefs, and practices of the sorority. In any culture, ritual participants will differ in intellectual ability and cognitive structure. Ritual must work collectively; that is, it must overcome the problem of difference by reducing its participants, at least temporarily, to the same cognitive level. An individual thus reduced tends to see the world in terms of black and white, interpreting others as either with her or against her (as, for example, in fundamentalist religious thought). This either/or thinking does not allow for options or alternative views. A single ritual structure, then, becomes sufficient to communicate social norms and values to a wide variety of individuals. Thus, religious rituals such as the Catholic Mass can be deeply convincing to individuals of all levels of cognitive complexity, as were the political rallies of totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany. Even complex thinkers can be reduced by ritual to simple either/or thinking and may not question the symbolic messages they are internalizing. Such cognitive simplification must precede the conceptual reorganization that accompanies psychological transformation. The most common technique employed in ritual to accomplish this end is the rhythmically repetitive bombardment of participants with ritual symbolic messages. Whenever

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danger of degeneration is present, ritual’s critical role is to stabilize individuals under stress by giving them a conceptual handle to hold. When an airplane starts to falter, even those who don’t go to church are likely to pray. The simple act of rhythmically repeating ‘‘Dear Lord, please save us’’ can enable terrified passengers to avoid panic behavior that might increase the likelihood of disaster. Ritual stands as a barrier between clarity and chaos by making reality appear to fit accepted cognitive categories by making the world look the way it ought to. To perform a ritual in the face of chaos is to restore conceptual order. Even a small semblance of order can enable individuals to function under the most challenging conditions. When an earthquake victim sweeps off her front steps as the entire house lies in ruins around her, her behavior is not as irrational as it might appear. The steps represent one ordered cognitive category; cleaning them allows the householder to ground herself in a little piece of the known and the familiar. From that cognitive anchor, she can begin to deal, a little at a time, with the surrounding chaos. Rituals, from prayer, to carefully setting a table, to lighting candles for loved ones in danger, provide their participants with many such cognitive anchors. When belief is not shared, joint action is much more difficult to achieve. Even warring armies often rely on a number of shared beliefs, symbols, and rituals—the Red Cross or Red Crescent of medical facilities, the white flag of truce, and the process of formal surrender. Through explicit enactment, ritual works both to preserve and transmit belief systems, and so becomes an important force in the preservation of the status quo in any society. Those dominating any given social group strive to maintain control over ritual performances. They use ritual’s tremendous power to reinforce both their own importance and that of the belief and value system that sustains them in their positions. Paradoxically, ritual, with all of its insistence on continuity and order, can effect not only individual transformation but also social change. New belief and value systems are most effectively spread through new rituals designed to enact and transmit them. Even when a ritual is performed for the first time, its stylistic similarities with others make it feel tradition-like, thus giving entirely new belief systems the feel and flavor of being well-grounded and sanctioned by ancient practice. Moreover, entrenched belief and value systems are most effectively altered through changes in the rituals which enact them. Indeed, ritual represents one of society’s greatest potentials for the kind of revitalization that comes from internal growth and change in response to different circumstances. See also: Beauty Contest; Childbirth and Childrearing; Engagement; Feminisms; Folk Belief; Henna Art/Mehndi; Immigration; Initiation; Lament; Nature/Culture; Politics; Rites of Passage; Sorority Folklore; Tradition; Wedding; Wicca and Neo-Paganism. References: Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. Second edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986; Briggs, Charles. ‘‘Personal Sentiments and Polyphonic Voices in Warao Women’s Ritual Wailing: Music and Poetics in a Critical and Collective Discourse.’’ American Anthropologist 95 (1993): 929–957; Davis-Floyd, Robbie. Birth as an American Rite of

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Passage. Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004; El Guindy, H., and Schmais C. ‘‘The Zar: An Ancient Dance of Healing.’’ American Journal of Dance Therapy, vol. 16, no. 2 (1994): 107–120; Farrer, Claire R. Living Life’s Circle: Mescalero Apache Cosmovision. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991; Lincoln, Bruce. Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women’s Initiation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981; Moore, Sally Falk, and Barbara Myerhoff, eds. Secular Ritual. Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1977; Paul, Lois. ‘‘Careers of Midwives in a Mayan Community.’’ In Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles, eds. Judith Hoch-Smith and Anita Spring, 129–148. New York: Plenum Press, 1978; Richards, Audrey. Chisungu: A Girl’s Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia. New York: Routledge, 1982; Salmon, Enrique. ‘‘Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship.’’ Ecological Applications, vol. 10, no. 5 (2000): 1,327– 1,332; Turner, Victor W. The Forest Of Symbols. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1967; ———. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.

Robbie Davis-Floyd and Rachel R. Chapman Roadside Crosses Roadside crosses are memorials commemorating fatalities incurred on or near the road, usually consisting of a small wooden or metal cross decorated with floral tributes, religious artifacts (such as holy cards, rosaries, and statuettes), or items in some way indexical of the deceased (including photographs, toys, or sports paraphernalia). The memorialized deaths are often the result of, but are not limited to, automobile collisions. Such crosses are a long-standing element of memorial practice in many countries, regardless of the predominant (predominate) faith of a particular region. Emblematic of the everyday expression of religious belief described by folklorist Leonard Primiano in his conception of ‘‘vernacular religion,’’ roadside crosses are often maintained by women as extensions of domestic space. Seventeenth-century European explorers’ and settlers’ journals contain the earliest written documentation of cross memorialization in North America. Eighteenth-century government officials worried about the possible distraction of such memorials, as do contemporary public highway departments. Mourning relatives and friends counter these arguments today with examples of the educational function served by the crosses. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) chapters have helped institutionalize the practice in various states and Canadian provinces, erecting the memorials through governmental offices. It should be noted, however, that crosses are often constructed in direct contravention of local regulations. Although not restricted in vernacular practice to specific form or content, roadside crosses are often painted white and erected as close to the accident site, or site of death, as possible. Site selection and construction is also affected by civic ordinances regarding public space, regional cultural influences, and personal religious conviction. Maintenance of the memorial often includes upkeep of the surrounding area, such as picking up trash and mowing grass. While not an exclusively female practice, roadside cross memorialization, as a domestication of public space and experience, draws upon traditionally

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female realms of familial duty: cleaning, decorating, and maintaining family and community affiliations through an ‘‘aesthetic of relationship’’ (Turner 1999). Women and men interviewed about roadside cross memorials stress the multiple purposes of each site and their importance as symbols of both the deceased and the community that mourns them. Hence, a high school student’s memorial is decorated with school spirit ribbons, graduation tassels, and miniature musical instruments. A homecoming chrysanthemum taken from the site is not considered stolen property, but an appropriate keepsake of a departed friend. See also: Altar, Home; Death; Folk Art; Folk Belief; Folk Custom; Gender; Graves and Gravemarkers; Lament; Legend, Local; Legend, Religious; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Material Culture; Oral History; Personal-Experience Narrative; Politics; Popular Culture; Public Folklore; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Superstition; Tradition. References: Barrera, Alberto. ‘‘Mexican-American Roadside Crosses in Starr County.’’ In Hecho en Tejas: Texas-Mexican Folk Arts and Crafts, ed. Joe S. Graham, 278–92. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1991; Carpentier, Paul. Les croix de chemin: Audela du signe. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, National Museum of Man, Mercury Series, 1981; Everett, Holly. Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2002; Griffith, James S. Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Primerı´a Alta. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992; Owens, Maida. ‘‘Louisiana Roadside Memorials: Patterns, Influences, and Distribution.’’ Unpublished paper, 1998; Primiano, Leonard. ‘‘Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife.’’ Western Folklore 54 (1995): 37–56; Turner, Kay. 1999. Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999.

Holly Everett Rugmaking Women in North American have a long history of rugmaking. For example, among Aboriginal traditions, it is Navajo (Dine) belief that Spider Woman taught Navajo women to weave. Historical evidence supports that they have been weavers for at least three hundred years. While Navajo women first made clothing like blankets, shirts, dresses, and belts, by the 1890s, traders were successful in persuading them to produce much heavier floor rugs. With increasing contact, these rugs developed new patterns inspired by motifs in ‘‘Oriental’’ carpets, edged with borders that looked attractive under furniture, and made with an expanding variety of yarns and dyes. Rugs crafted from pieces of used clothing or materials have been made by women across North America using a variety of means, including weaving, braiding, hooking, knitting, crocheting, and latching. While rugs were frequently made from textiles, they were not always. Mats were braided from natural fibers, including reeds, rushes, coir (coconut husks), hemp, jute, and corn husks. In the days of sailing in places like Newfoundland, Canada, women painted designs on leftover canvas to create colorful floor coverings. Throughout the nineteenth century, woven-rag carpeting was produced at home and in mills, but after the 1850s, with the widespread availability of jute burlap (used as backing), hooked mats became predominant.

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Women drew their own patterns inspired by everything from flowers and animals to baskets and designs found on floor cloth or Oriental rugs. By the 1870s, stamped burlap rug backs were also available. In the twentieth century, making hooked mats became a cottage industry in the United States and Canada. In 1902, Lucy Thomson founded the Subbekakasheny Industry in Belchertown, Massachusetts, using designs based on Native American motifs. Community enterprises began in other states, including New Hampshire, Maine, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky, and in the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Mat production provided a valuable opportunity for women to contribute financially to their family and community; but, as with the Navajo weaving mentioned above, the marketing of hooked mats often led to changes in design, materials, and construction. When made from familiar family clothing, rag rugs can hold deep personal associations. In fact, some feminist scholars have suggested that rugmaking offered women a means to resist oppression when, for example, they made a rug to be walked on out of an abusive husband’s favorite coat (Radner and Lanser 1993). Certainly rugmaking provided women with a creative outlet and sometimes brought them together to socialize. As with other textile arts, women could be judged on the quality of their products, and, as Gerald Pocius argues, their designs were read and judged likewise. He contends that in Newfoundland, rugs with original designs that reflected a maker’s individuality were displayed in the seldom-used parlor. Communally shared, often rugs with geometrically repetitive patterns were placed in common areas of the house (like the kitchen) to signal a family’s membership in a specific community. See also: Folk Art; Knitting, Material Culture, Needlework, Weaving, Women’s Work. References: Blomberg, Nancy J. Navajo Textiles. Tucson: University of Arizona, 1988; Kopp, Joel and Kate. American Hooked and Sewn Rugs: Folk Art Underfoot. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1984; Pocius, Gerald. ‘‘Hooked Mats in Newfoundland: The Representation of Social Structure in Design.’’ Journal of American Folklore 92 (1979): 273–284; Radner, Joan Newlon, and Susan S. Lanser. ‘‘Strategies of Coding in Women’s Cultures.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 1–30. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Diane Tye Rumor Rumor, simultaneously a process and product of communication, is generally defined as unverified or unofficial information circulating primarily through face-to-face channels but also via print or other media. Like gossip and scandal, rumors are often associated in contemporary society with private rather than public spheres, with sexual and domestic matters, and thus with women. Rumor’s current bad reputation and association with negative untruths is an artifact of Euro North American mistrust of both orally transmitted information and women. The situations in which women communicate can be associated, both negatively and positively, with rumor. For example, women sharing ‘‘house-talk’’—the

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female equivalent of ‘‘shop-talk’’ (Jones: 246)—can informally communicate judgmental information about other women, but they can alternatively use ‘‘bitching’’ (247) to express anger against misogyny, homophobia, and racism. A classically powerful use of rumor by women is the posting of alleged rapists’ names and descriptions in women’s washrooms in bars and on university campuses. Of course, rumor usually is not associated only with women. Among African Americans, for example, situations involving the destruction of Black male bodies are the most prevalent subject for rumors. Yet rumors also circulated in the 1990s that the contraceptive Norplant was a White agent of genocide against Black people, that African American women would be forced to use it, and that those who refused to be implanted would lose their socialwelfare benefits. Others posited that the Liz Claiborne clothing company purposefully designed its clothing to be too small in the hips for Black women; the same rumor circulated about Gloria Vanderbilt clothing. Though the specifics may be questionable, in these cases, the general accuracy of the analysis is noteworthy. It is certainly true that racist elements in mainstream Euro American society fear and hate African Americans, and use direct as well as economic violence against them. Further, only a very limited number of products—including clothing—are designed with the needs and wants of populations other than the White middle and upper class in mind. Rumor can offer discourse in opposition to hegemonic authority structures and a means of social resistance for the disenfranchised. Thus, rumors circulate about ‘‘lipstick girls’’ and ‘‘fallen women’’ as deliberate vectors of AIDS transmission, for example, in attempts by Indonesians authorities to eliminate ‘‘indigenous people from the resource-rich’’ province [of Papua]’’ (Butt: 412). While these kinds of strategies misogynistically blame victims of colonization—in this case, women and sex workers—for the spread of the disease, they offer an analysis of power structures that is otherwise compelling. Because rumors are related to truth, status, power, authority, topics of high social concern, and ambiguous situations, they are extremely useful tools for examining culture. Racial and ethnic conflict, the consequences of migration and globalization, corporate malfeasance, and government corruption are significant themes in contemporary rumor scholarship. See also: Ethnicity; Folk Belief; Gossip; Race; Scandal. References: Butt, Leslie. ‘‘‘Lipstick Girls’ and ‘Fallen Women’: AIDS and Conspiratorial Thinking in Papua, Indonesia.’’ Cultural Anthropology, vol. 20, no. 2 (2000): 412– 444; Fine, Gary Alan, Veronique Campion-Vincent, and Chip Heath, eds. Rumor Mills: The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend. New Brunswick: AldineTransaction, 2005; Jones, Deborah. ‘‘Gossip: Notes on Women’s Oral Culture.’’ In The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader, ed. Deborah Cameron, 242–250. London: Routledge, 1993; Turner, Patricia A. I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Pauline Greenhill

S Saints Saints are those who hold favored religious status by virtue of having lived exemplary lives. Saints can be endowed with the power to perform miracles because of their innate holiness, special relationship with the divine, or individual divine nature. Most religions have saints’ legends, and saints can be venerated or worshipped, depending upon the religious tradition. Nearly all religions recognize female saints, and the worship/veneration of saints (of any gender) by women believers comprises a significant aspect of folk belief. Within the Christian tradition, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches all venerate female saints, although their definitions of and procedures for sainthood vary. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes as saints women who are mothers (sometimes literally, sometimes as founders of religious orders), virgins, and/or martyrs. Some, like Saint Wilgefortis, who miraculously grew a beard to avoid marriage and was crucified by her father in revenge, offer examples of particular interest in contemporary culture for their instantiation of modern concepts like transgender or androgyny. Others, like St. Maria Goretti, who chose death over rape but forgave her rapist-murderer, seem to represent outmoded values, such as that it is better to die than to lose one’s virginity before marriage. Mary, the mother of Jesus, holds special status among most Christians as the only woman to be conceived without sin (thus combining virgin and mother) in order that she might be worthy to bear the son of God incarnate. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Cult of the Virgin was vital to both folk and ecclesiastical Catholicism. Both women and men venerated Mary, asking for her intercession on their behalf in problems and crises. Women were expected to emulate Mary as the ideal mother—loving, kind, and obedient to the will of God. Her special role in Roman Catholicism continues to the present day; however, feminist scholars have pointed to the Catholic Church’s impossibly polarized view of women as either obedient, all-loving, meek, chaste saints, or as willful, fickle, brash, sexual sinners embodied by, for example, Eve and Mary Magdalene. Of the Roman Catholic Communion of Saints, only three women out of a total of thirty-three have been designated ‘‘Doctors of the Church,’’ that is, as

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holding special status for achieving eminent learning, leadership, and sanctity. Spain’s Teresa of Avila, a writer, mystic, and monastic reformer who founded sixteen convents, was the first to be elevated to the position. Catherine of Siena, the second, was a writer known for her extended periods of fasting, during which she lived on only the Blessed Sacrament (consecrated wafers believed by Catholics to be the transubstantiated body of Christ). France’s Therese de Lisieux, the most recent female saint, canonized in 1914 and a popular subject of devotion in North America, demonstrated not only chaste spirituality but also ultrafemininity in suggesting that the smallest, most modest deeds, like scattering flowers, could be holy expressions of the love of God. Women saints are known even outside the religious context for their particular achievements or qualities. For example, in fifteenth-century France, Joan of Arc, wearing masculine clothing and carrying armor, led an army against the English with whom her country was at war, asserting that voices from God directed her to do so. Initially successful, she raised the siege of Orleans and was wounded in battle, but was eventually captured and tried for heresy. Though she displayed remarkable piety, presence of mind, and intellect, she was found guilty and burned at the stake. A trial of nullification found her not guilty of heresy some twenty-five years later, but she was not canonized— made a saint—by the Catholic Church until 1920. Multiply depicted in popular culture, St. Joan is one of many women warriors in history and folklore. Women’s devotion to saints includes celebrating saint’s days—sometimes the feast of a local or patron saint or that of their namesake—and placing statues or creating home altars. Communities of women sometimes fashion elaborate group altars and display events to commemorate and venerate their favored saint. The Catholic Church distinguishes veneration from worship, as only God can be worshipped. Saints, mere humans who enjoy a special relationship with God, cannot be worshipped—idolized or revered as divine objects in themselves—but only venerated, emulated as examples to others. Within folk Catholicism, however, this distinction may fade, particularly when church-sanctioned saints combine with Indigenous religious beliefs. An excellent example of such a saints’ tradition can be found in the practices of Santeria. The African goddesses Yemoja, Oya, and Oshun have survived throughout the lives of female and male devotees in North America for centuries in various creolized and syncretic—mixed from original and new sources, previously disparate—Yoruba and Christian spiritual practices. The Yoruba ethnic group of what is now Nigeria in West Africa was brought to the Americas during the Maafa (the African slave trade). They continued their spiritual traditions under the pretext of Christianity, but with belief systems conceptualized by Catholicism, Native American mythology, and spiritism. Hence, the Yoruba pantheon became infused with other religious practices in the Americas. Further, Yoruba folklore and mythology describe how the orisha (known as loa in Haiti, gods and goddesses who function in ways similar to Catholic saints) became identified by their particular human attributes and supernatural feats. These divine spirits once lived on Earth as human beings and earned historical significance as kings, queens, high priests, and high priestesses because they maintained exceptional accomplishments and communal contributions.

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The orisha, like saints, are emissaries of Oludumare (Almighty God), creator of heaven and Earth, from whom they originated, along with a multitude of spiritual deities and ancestral spirits. God is not worshipped directly by human beings, but is approached by virtue of the wishes and instructions of deities and ancestors contacted through divination and prayer. Divination is restricted to women and men initiated into the Yoruba priesthood. Mythology, folklore, music, ritual ecstatic dance, codified language, folk arts, and sacrifices allegorically communicate, adhere, invoke, appease, and offer thanks for blessings received from Oludumare. Saints are also found in the religious traditions of other major world religions. For example, Islam recognizes a number of women saints, particularly from the early days of Islamic history and especially within the mystic Sufi tradition. One of the most popular female Sufi saints from Sunni hagiography (biographies of the lives of saints) is Rabi’a. Born in approximately 717 CE in Basra, she devoted her life to the loss of self and submission to the will of Allah. She remained celibate throughout her life in order to consecrate all her energy to Allah. An early biographer of Rabi’a, Farid al-Din ‘Attar, recorded many legends about her life. He indicates that she was poor and that miracles occurred at the time of her birth. While modern scholars may disagree about her significance for doctrinal Islam, the legends about her life situate her as an example of what a poor woman can accomplish if she gives her life totally to Allah. Rabi’a is considered one of the most important Sufi saints of any gender. Muslim women may make pilgrimages to her tomb or to those of local saints as part of their religious practices. Traditionally, adherents to Mormonism and Puritanism (including Calvinism) refer to themselves as saints, indicating their status as members of God’s chosen people, predestined to enter heaven at death if they remain true to their faith. Saints also flourish in Asian religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism. Buddhist women saints include those who have achieved enlightenment, sometimes in a single lifetime; great teachers of the dharma; or founders of monasteries for women. Within the Tibetan Buddhist (Vajrayana) tradition, female saints and teachers have been active from the time of the Buddha— for example, Venerable Bhikshuni Mahaprajapati Gautama, the Buddha’s aunt, who founded the first women’s monastery (to the modern day), Jetsun Kushok Chimey Luding Rinpoche, and others. Buddhist traditions— especially the Mahayana and Vajrayana—also incorporate the fully enlightened bodhisattva, the saint (male or female) who helps to guide others on the path to enlightenment. The Hindu tradition recognizes many women saints. Hinduism considers that the god/goddesses have both male and female characteristics. Accordingly, women can manifest divine characteristics, although their role in traditional Hindu society is often quite circumscribed. Women saints in Hinduism take many forms—some are great gurus (teachers), some led exemplary lives. But two very different Hindu saint traditions are exemplified by the sati/suttee and the women saints of the Bhakti era. A sati/suttee is a woman venerated locally for her complete dedication to her husband, seen as a religious duty in Hinduism. A sati/suttee carries that

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devotion to the last possible measure—if her husband dies before she does, she ritually commits suicide by throwing herself on his funeral pyre. These women are remembered locally, often for generations, as saints. This practice, outlawed during the British colonial administration, still continues occasionally to this day. Contemporary historians question whether all of these women’s suicides were voluntary, but in religious practice, they are venerated as holy. In a very different tradition, some women saints of the Bhakti movement refused to worship their human husbands as gods, instead remaining unmarried and choosing a god-husband instead. Living women saints are frequently consulted by Hindu women (and men) about problems and religious concerns. Some, such as Mata Amritanandamayi, known as ‘‘Amma,’’ have such a reputation for a divine presence that they may be sought out simply for that presence or healing touch. See also: Altar, Home; Folk Belief; Legend, Religious; Muslim Women’s Folklore; Virgin, Cult of the; Women Religious; Women Warriors. References: Dharma Fellowship of His Holiness Gyalwa Karmapa. ‘‘Women Buddhas: A Short List of Female Saints, Teachers and Practitioners in Tibetan Buddhism.’’ n.d. http://www.dharmafellowship.org/library/essays/women-buddhas.htm (accessed June 18, 2007); Peach, Lucinda Joy, ed. Women and World Religions. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002; Richards, Dona. ‘‘The Implications of African-American Spirituality.’’ In African Culture: Rhythms of Unity, eds. Molefi Kete Asante and Kariamu Welsh Asante, 207–231. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc., 1990; Sharma, Arvind, ed. Women Saints in World Religions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000; Smith, Margaret. ‘‘Rabi’a the Mystic and Her Fellow Saints in Islam.’’ In Women and World Religions, ed. Lucinda Joy Peach, 271–278. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002; Turner, Kay. Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999; Turner, Kay, and Suzanne Seriff. ‘‘Giving an Altar to St. Joseph’’: A Feminist Perspective on a Patronal Feast.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 98–117. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.

Benita J. Brown and Theresa A. Vaughan Sampler A sampler is a piece of needlework containing examples of stitches, patterns, and sometimes geometric or pictorial motifs and alphabetic writings. The needlework sampler and its production, however, have significantly changed in form and function over the five centuries of documented practice in Europe and North America. The word ‘‘sampler’’ came into English by way of the Old French essamplaire, which in turn is rooted in the older Latin exemplum, meaning ‘‘example’’ or ‘‘pattern.’’ John Palsgrave’s 1530 dictionary included an entry for sampler, ‘‘Exampler for a woman to worke by, exemple’’ (Oxford English Dictionary). The earliest European and English samplers were records of patterns, stitched reference works for the mistress of the house to consult as she planned embroidered decorations for clothing and household textiles. Stitches were practiced, patterns invented or changed, and color combinations explored—all to serve as permanent records for future projects.

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In the sixteenth century, professional male embroiderers stitched samples of clothing ornamentation for wealthy prospective customers, including the court. In England, these embroideries also were called samplers. By the mid-seventeenth century, both the form and function of samplers had begun to change. The haphazard arrangement of stitches and patterns on the sampler-as-memorandum gave way to organized groupings of patterns and motifs and the addition of alphabets, all worked in a limited range of stitches. Gradually, names and other personal expressions were sewn into the sampler cloth as well. These changes resulted from the fact that sampler-making had been adopted as an activity for schoolgirls. The sampler was now a record of accomplishment executed by a young novice rather than a resource tool stitched by an experienced needlewoman. Samplers crossed the Atlantic in the ships that carried colonists to North America; surviving examples confirm that the practice was continued in the New World. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, some colonial schoolmistresses had developed individual and distinctive sampler styles that variously included borders, repetitions of alphabets, poetic verses, and pictorial scenes. In newspaper notices, teachers often listed samplers with reading and plain sewing as the subjects they offered. Unlike samplers of the previous century, these schoolgirl accomplishments were prized by their families. Framed and prominently displayed in the public room of the house, the sampler proclaimed to friends and suitors alike that a girl of marriageable age (and perhaps also a decent dowry) was ready to be courted. As the scope of girlhood education became more academic after the American Revolutionary War, the sampler was relegated to an extracurricular subject. By the 1830s, it was dropped from the curricula of most schools and academies. But by the mid-1800s, the sampler was revived as an adult pastime through the numerous charted patterns published in women’s magazines. In the early twentieth century, the colonial revival gave impetus to the production of commercially printed sampler patterns that evoked their historic counterparts. At the same time, artists skilled with the needle took the opportunity to express contemporary social and political themes in samplers of their own design. The second half of the twentieth century saw a revival in sampler-making by women of all ages. Today’s embroiderer has a wealth of printed patterns and needlework kits from which to choose, including accurate reproductions of historic pieces. Other samplers commemorate or celebrate specific people and events. See also: Embroidery; Magazines, Women’s and Girls’; Needlework; Sewing. References: Arnold, Janet. Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d. Leeds: W. S. Maney and Son, 1988; Browne, Clare, and Jennifer Wearden. Samplers from the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: V & A Publications, 1999; Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Second edition. 1992; Peabody-Essex Museum. Painted with Thread: The Art of American Embroidery. Salem, MA: Peabody-Essex Museum, 2001; Ring, Betty. Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1650–1850. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Kathleen Staples

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Scandal Scandal is damage done to a person’s reputation by the discovery and subsequent public announcement of her or his act or acts deemed in violation of normative social expectations, propriety, or morality. Throughout history and in every society, women have had to be mindful of their reputations, their social and sexual associations, how they run their homes, and how they act in public. What they say, to whom, and with what intonation are all factors that determine women’s status or loss of it, and the higher their status, the more precipitous may be their fall. Any kind of disparagement of a woman’s ‘‘good name’’ or ‘‘good image,’’ whether whispered behind closed doors, bruited about in the neighborhood, or published in a tabloid newspaper, can be detrimental to her future and the future of her family’s social standing. A woman’s behavior is almost invariably perceived as a reflection of the character of both her husband and of the parents who raised her; thus, social censure for improprieties can be very severe and farreaching, even if, as in the case of rape, she has done nothing wrong. Scandal serves the social purpose of creating in-group solidarity by identifying and marking members who are no longer considered deserving of full membership. Ostracism may be temporary if it can be annulled by subsequent good acts; or it may be permanent, resulting in disgrace or even death. But generally speaking, scandal is especially effective when it is implemented by a group against non-members, not when it is used inside the group. In seventeenth-century Europe, a woman speaking out of turn was deemed unseemly and would be reproached for it. In eighteenth-century America, police used public shaming as a kind of ‘‘purity control’’ (Weeks 1981: 84). A woman caught in a scandalous situation was publicly humiliated and reprimanded for the good of the whole society. It may not have been her act itself that people really felt warranted punishment; instead it was crucial that the image of ‘‘womanly virtue’’ remain intact. When women advocated for the opportunity to attend college, the notion was scandalous; it was believed that an educated woman would be neglectful of her familial responsibilities, putting herself ahead of her family. When a scandal involves the transgression of sexual norms, it is nearly always women who suffer most. In most places in the world, if a girl or woman is known to have been raped or molested, the resulting scandal is against her and her family’s virtue, regardless of how people may feel about her aggressor; in some West Asian and Southeast Asian societies in particular, she may be killed by her male relatives to protect their honor (Muslim Women’s League). Religious groups fear scandal because it causes them to lose the moral high ground, threatening their ability to proscribe incorrect behaviors; if a woman’s loss of virtue is perceived as a crime against religion, she is especially endangered. Fear of scandal is the major factor contributing to women’s silence about sex crimes, which is, in turn, the primary reason for so many incidents of post-traumatic stress disorder in their victims. Pregnancy in an unmarried woman—especially in the past, but also in many sectors of contemporary North American society today—is considered especially scandalous. She may have been sent away, sometimes to live

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under appalling conditions (as depicted in the 2002 film, The Magdelene Sisters), sometimes to live with relatives, or to hide her condition by leaving the country if her family was sufficiently affluent. Upon giving birth, she generally gave up the child for adoption immediately, and the incident was never discussed; middle-class families, especially, did everything possible to maintain the illusion of respectability. Some scandals are worse than others, and not all of them destroy women. Some acts of impropriety become scandalous precisely because they involve high-status persons or celebrities, those who are supposed to be ‘‘better than us’’ and therefore given less latitude in public opinion. England’s Prince Charles’ 1993 amorous telephone conversation with Camilla Parker Bowles while he was still married to Princess Diana was intercepted by a tabloid paper and discussed relentlessly in the world’s media for months; it was a scandal against married sexual propriety, good taste, and the British crown. Yet Charles’ reputation seems to have suffered less from it than has Parker Bowles’. On the other hand, when the pop singers Milli Vanilli were revealed to be lip-synching, they were vilified for years and stripped of their 1990 Grammy award; Rob Pilatus died in disgrace of a drug overdose in 1998 at the age of thirty-two. But by 2005, when pop singer Ashlee Simpson was discovered fraudulently lip-synching on national television—a scandal against her fans’ expectations—there were expressions of outrage against her handlers, but the practice had become so widespread that her career may yet survive, and possibly flourish in its wake. See also: Borden, Lizzie; Childbirth and Childrearing; Folk Group; Rape; Sexuality. References: Finnegan, Frances. Do Penance or Perish: Magdalen Asylums in Ireland. New edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 [2001]; Gilman, Lisa. Experience, Narrative, and Silencing: Exploring the Concealment of Sexual Violence. Master’s thesis, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1996; Gluckman, Max. ‘‘Gossip and Scandal.’’ Current Anthropology 4 (1963): 307–315; Mankiller, Wilma, Gwendolyn Mink, Marya Navarro, Barbara Smith, and Gloria Steinem, eds. The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998; Mullen, Peter, writer and director. The Magdalene Sisters. Distributed by Miramax Films, 2002; Muslim Women’s League, ‘‘Position Paper on Honor Killings.’’ n.d. http://www.islamawareness.net/HonourKilling/ mwl.html (accessed August 11, 2008); Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. New York: Longman Group, 1981.

Claire Dodd Scrapbooks Scrapbooking is the act of putting photos and memorabilia into blank books for safekeeping and easy presentation. They are, for all intents and purposes, tactile personal-experience narratives, somewhere between quilts and diaries or memoirs. While currently very popular for archiving photographs, scrapbooking can be traced back to the 1600s, well before the invention of photography in 1839. The word ‘‘scrapbook’’ may come from the scraps of fabric kept inside the books, from the common practice of using brightly colored wallpaper for the covers of homemade books, or from the brightly colored papers used for their pages.

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Early scrapbooks were generally blank books in which the keeper wrote quotations and poems. There is also evidence that other types of material— scraps of printed matter, cards, and colorful pictures—were placed in these early books. They became known as ‘‘commonplace books,’’ a term used by philosopher John Locke in his New Methods of Making Common Place Books. A closely related form, the ‘‘friendship book,’’ became popular in the 1700s. This was a book in which young women would collect signatures, poems, and other writing by friends, as well as dried flowers, locks of hair, and other mementos of shared friendship. Another variation was the Granger Book, commercially produced by William Granger, with blank pages. Granger also wrote a manual on how to keep these books. Scrapbooking was popular in North America in the late 1800s and into the 1900s, peaking, along with journals, in the 1920s. This hobby, although today associated largely with women, was also popular with men during this period. Mark Twain produced a large number a scrapbooks, some of which were available for purchase through the Montgomery Ward catalog. Falling out of favor in the mid-1900s, scrapbooking started becoming popular again in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, and is currently a multimillion dollar industry. Some modern scrapbookers attribute the scrapbook’s resurgence in popularity to the dramatic rise of interest in family genealogy that took place after the 1976 publication of the novel Roots by Alex Haley. Baby books and life books, the latter encouraged for adoptive parents to create for their children, represent another incarnation of this phenomenon. Today’s scrapbooks are a combination of journals, old-style scrapbooks, and photo albums that were popular from the 1940s. There are many companies, stores, Web sites, books, and magazines devoted to selling scrapbooking supplies. They offer suggestions for page layout and interesting twists on presenting photographs and keeping memorabilia. The current rise in the popularity of scrapbooks emphasizes the necessity of using archival-quality supplies that will not fade, break, or become brittle over time. An interesting aspect of scrapbooking is that it is very frequently a social activity. Women gather together at events called ‘‘crops,’’ so-called because the cropping of photos for placement in scrapbooks is one of the main activities. They share ideas, plans, and supplies with each other while spending time away from the interruptions of children and family. Many women who participate find the social aspect of scrapbooking as important as the creation of the book itself. Crops range from small informal gatherings of a few women to large organized events of all-day scrapbooking, with vendors selling supplies, door prizes, and awards for the most creative pages. See also: Autograph Book; Crafting; Paperfolding and Papercutting; Personal-Experience Narrative, Piecework; Rites of Passage; Storytelling. References: Gernes, Todd Steven. Recasting the Culture of Ephemera: Young Women’s Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. PhD diss., Brown University, 1992; Real Women Scrap. http://www.realwomenscrap.com/index2.php (accessed August 11, 2008)

Theresa A. Vaughan

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Self-Help Self-help includes books, workshops, media presentations, and support groups that introduce people to new attitudes and practices that are expected to lead them to more satisfying and more effective lives. The topic of self-help is of interest to folklorists because it foregrounds personal and collective values, because it is tied as a movement and process to traditions of communal interaction and self-education, and because some of the products and interactive groups associated with self-help activities clearly draw upon folkloric processes and traditional genres of expression. While there are many workshops, books, and motivational conferences that address business or legal self-help, health and weight loss, childcare, career advice, addictions, and aging, the most extensively covered topic by far is psychological self-improvement and the successful management of personal relationships. Self-help books have become increasingly popular since the 1960s, and some psychologists use self-help books in the process of treatment, a practice called bibliotherapy. Nevertheless, self-help books have received some pointed critiques, starting perhaps most seriously with a 1992 book by Wendy Kaminer titled I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional, a play on the title of Thomas Harris’s 1973 classic, I’m OK—You’re OK. Kaminer argued that self-help books and the recovery movement reflect a too-ready capitulation to authority and to claims of victimization. On the other hand, some authors who have studied self-help books have lauded them as sources of inspiration and practical instruction. Tom Butler-Bowdon, in his book 50 Self-Help Classics (2003), offers his own summaries and positive assessments of authors ranging from Marcus Aurelius and the Bible to Wayne Dyer, Phil McGraw, and Marianne Williamson. Self-help books and associated support groups provide rich sources for research into processes of self-education, traditional values, and individual paths toward a personal philosophy. Skimming through self-help books, folklorists are treated to an abundance of stories, proverbial expressions, and clearly articulated folk ideas in the context of popular texts aimed at literate adults. As a part of the study of women’s folklore and folklife in particular, an examination of self-help books lends support to an understanding of gender-based responsibility for personal relationships, a clear sense of the hegemony that often dictates how women and men are expected to behave, and an abiding ambiguity, at least in American culture, about whether traditional patriarchal values should be challenged or maintained. While many of the authors of self-help books are men with MDs or PhDs, a large number of successful authors are women, many with PhDs as well. Self-help books also represent a popular expressive possibility for writers who choose to base their publications on personal experience, however, rather than on research in an academic discipline. In that respect, the most lauded self-help authors are those who know how to tie a good story to a valuable personal insight. See also: Diet Culture; Folk Medicine; Gender; Proverbs; Storytelling; Tradition. References: Dolby, Sandra K. Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005; Santrock, John W., Ann M. Minnett, and

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Barbara D. Campbell. The Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books. New York: Guilford Press, 1994; Simonds, Wendy. Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading Between the Lines. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Sandra K. Dolby Sewing Sewing, mending, and knitting fall within the range of everyday, practical, or necessary needlework; sewing is for the most part utilitarian in nature. It involves cutting out and stitching items such as underwear, everyday clothing, sheets, towels, and bed linens using relatively simple back, whip, cross, and running stitches, as well as mending worn items of clothing or linen. Sewing, mending, and remaking garments, and making sheets, towels, and other linens were regular components of household work done or overseen by women throughout most of the world; until recent times, almost all women were expected to master the skills of sewing and mending, and many were expected to learn the arts of refined needlework. Sewing by hand originated more than 20,000 years ago; true needles with eyes (versus awls used for punching holes in fiber or skin) have been found in European sites of the Solutrean phase of the Upper Paleolithic period. Early needles were made of splinters of bone and could have been fashioned by women. The introduction of metal needles in the fourth millennium BC—the earliest examples, found at Tepe Yahya in Iran, are copper alloy—probably resulted in needle manufacture becoming the sole province of men. Women, however, continued until the nineteenth century to be the chief producers of yarn and thread, and, until late medieval times, were the primary producers of woven textiles. The vast majority of women sewed in the home, for themselves, and for their families, producing ‘‘flatwork’’—linens, shirts, nightshirts, petticoats, and perhaps their own dresses—though those who could afford to hired seamstresses to do such work. While for some, home sewing was a chore, women often took great pride in making shirts for their husbands and sons and in keeping clothing wearable by turning cuffs, patching or mending tears, and letting out or taking in seams, as well as in darning holes in socks and stockings, some of which they may themselves have knitted. Wherever women found themselves, whether it be in a new household upon marriage, as a migrant in new town or city or even a new country, or following their husbands to military postings or new places of employment, they were expected to bring with them the useful skills of sewing and home dressmaking. Wives of army officers in the American West in the nineteenth century, for instance, relied upon the company of other women for support and for sharing information about fashions, patterns, and cutting and sewing techniques. Sewing bees and special occasions helped lighten the burden, but sewing was hard, never-ending work. Army women shared much the same experiences as their sisters elsewhere when they could not turn to professional seamstresses or purchase ready-made clothing for themselves and their families, for until late in the nineteenth century, home dressmaking tended to be confined to fairly simple garments. Women

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of humble means could not afford the fabrics required to produce fashionable garments or the tools—scissors or shears—required for elaborate cutting out of material. Home sewing done by women, and even work done by seamstresses, has always been distinct from tailoring. The latter involves the production of men’s trousers, waistcoats, and coats, as well as heavy outer garments for women; tailors were usually men, and, with few exceptions, tailor shops were the domain of males. Seamstresses produced shirts for men and bodices and dresses for women; dressmakers often went to the homes of the women for whom they sewed and did not maintain a separate business premises. Until recent times, for boys and men there was a different clothing code or protocol: manhood was equated with consumption of ready-made and tailor-made clothing, and femininity with home sewing. These differential protocols underscored the divide between male tailoring and female dressmaking. With few and notable exceptions, women were discouraged from becoming tailors and were not expected to produce major elements of men’s clothing. Unwaged needlework and sewing within the home are among the domestic tasks deemed part of the household economy, but women also found pleasure and satisfaction in making utilitarian and non-utilitarian items or goods for sale, for charity, or as gifts. Many women sewed for a network of neighbors or workmates for money, or took in sewing as paid piecework. Taking in sewing as piecework might have supplemented a family’s income, but it seldom permitted a single woman to support herself. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even professional seamstresses who sought to avoid the horror of sweatshops by working at home often had difficulty making ends meet, especially in cities where there was not enough work to go around. The invention of the sewing machine in the late eighteenth century and its mass-production in the 1850s revolutionized both the ready-to-wear clothing industry and home sewing; initially, few households could afford a sewing machine, and industrial production of ready-to-wear clothing seemed likely to render sewing at home obsolete. Sewing-machine manufacturers, aware of the potential profit to be had from selling their machines to home sewers as well as to factories and sweatshops, promoted the sewing machine as an extension of feminine domesticity, and home dressmaking as a desirable feminine accomplishment. The introduction and eventual massmarketing of paper patterns for cutting out the elements of women’s dresses, as well as men’s and children’s clothing, to be stitched together using a sewing machine, encouraged women to attempt to produce fashionable clothing at home. Sewing-machine producers marketed their products most cleverly, allowing women to try out the machine in the home for a small initial deposit and then to pay for it in installments over time. By the late nineteenth century, sewing machines were common items in both middleclass and working-class American households, and, while they enabled many women to earn money using their skills at sewing, they were viewed not as machines but as home appliances associated with domesticity and femininity rather than with the industrialized, sweatshop realm of factory-produced,

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ready-made clothing. See also: Embroidery; Knitting; Needlework; Women’s Work. References: Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. New York: Norton, 1994; Bausum, Dolores. Threading Time: A Cultural History of Threadwork. Fort Worth, TX: TCU Press, 2001; Burman, Barbara, ed. The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking. Oxford: Berg, 1999; Cooper, Grace Rogers. The Sewing Machine: Its Invention and Development. Second edition. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976; Miller, Marla. The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006; Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Knopf, 2001.

Mary C. Beaudry

Sex Determination Sex determination refers to practices designed to predict whether a fetus in utero is male or female. Despite the advent of medical technologies like amniocentesis and ultrasound, traditional methods remain appealing. A woman’s belly shape is believed to signify fetal sex: if she’s ‘‘carrying low,’’ it will be a boy; ‘‘carrying high’’ indicates a girl. The phase of the moon during conception may predict a child’s sex, or parental behavior prior to and during pregnancy may affect it. While in the past, midwives were usually considered experts on such matters, today, women often refer to online articles and books based on folk knowledge. Sex-determination tests administered by friends and family members are a popular part of traditional North American baby showers. In the ring test, the mother-to-be ties her wedding ring to a string or a strand of her hair; someone holds it above her belly. If it swings from side to side, she should expect a boy; if it swings from breast to crotch, a girl is coming. In a variant, the ring is held above the pregnant woman’s hand: circular motion predicts a boy; back-and-forth movement predicts a girl. However, in Kentucky and North Carolina, circular motion indicates a girl, and back-and-forth a boy. Needle divination can be performed before conception. A needle is dangled above a woman’s hand or head; if it moves in circles, she will have a boy, and if it travels side-to-side, she will have a girl. Other simple tests measure the father’s weight gain during the pregnancy, an increase or decrease in an expectant mother’s hair growth, breast size, mood swings, and complexion. If she develops a poor complexion, a girl is expected because the fetus is ‘‘drawing’’ the mother’s beauty. The Drano test is highly discouraged by doctors and midwives because the requisite blend of the woman’s urine and the plumbing cleanser creates fumes that are dangerous to both mother and fetus. Nevertheless, some women employ it on the advice of women’s magazines, Web sites, and pregnancy books. If the mixture produces a green color or does not bubble, a girl will be born; a bubbling or brown hue predicts a boy. Parents’ behavior before conception can also ensure a certain outcome. A woman wanting a girl may eat chocolate; if she desires a boy, she eats red meat. To have a boy, the woman should lie down after sex; for a girl, she

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should take the superior position. Conception on odd days of the month will produce boys, and on even days, girls. One of the most popular, and purportedly the most accurate, of the traditional predictive tools is the Chinese conception chart, allegedly found in a royal tomb near Beijing. It uses a woman’s age at conception, crossing it with the month of conception; if the mother’s age is odd and the month even, the child will be a boy; if both are odd or even, the child will be a girl. David Glenn’s review of work on the persistent preference in Chinese and Indian cultures to carry boys to term cites the Chinese Book of Songs, believed to date from 1000–700 BCE. It offers this advice to new parents: When a son is born Let him sleep on the bed, Clothe him with fine clothes. And give him jade to play with . . . When a daughter is born, Let her sleep on the ground, Wrap her in common wrappings, And give her broken tiles for playthings (quoted in Glenn 2004).

Reasons for the persistence of preference for boys and the exact numbers of terminated pregnancies involving girls have been debated since the early 1990s, when economist Amartya Sen called attention to the ‘‘missing women’’ phenomenon. ‘‘By some social scientists’ measure, more than 100 million females are now missing from the populations of India and China’’ (Glenn 2004). See also: Divination Practices; Gender; Pregnancy. References: ‘‘Boy or Girl?: Sex Selection Techniques for Everyone before Pregnancy.’’ n.d. http://pregnancy.about.com/od/boyorgirl/p/girlorboy.htm (accessed August 11, 2008)); Childbirth.org. ‘‘Will your baby be a girl or a boy?’’ 2004. http://www.childbirth. org/articles/boyorgirl.html (accessed August 11, 2008); Glenn, David. ‘‘A Dangerous Surplus of Sons?’’ Chronicle of Higher Education. April 30, 2004. http://chronicle.com/ free/v50/i34/34a01401.htm (accessed August 11, 2008); Mikkelson, Barbara, and David Snopes. Snopes.com. ‘‘Drano Test.’’ n.d. http://www.snopes.com/pregnant/drano.htm (accessed August 11, 2008); Smith, Graig W. Common Pregnancy Myths: Fact or Folklore? Cincinnati, OH: Woodview Publishing, 1998; Von Raffler-Engel, Walburga. Perceptions of the Unborn Across Cultures of the World. Seattle: Hogrefe & Huber, 1994.

Tamara Robbins-Anderson Sexism Sexism involves beliefs and practices showing bias and/or discrimination against women and girls. Sexist discourses presume men’s superiority over women. Though sexism isn’t exclusively held nor maintained by men, it almost always targets women because it is exercised within social relations in which women, by virtue of their sex/gender, rarely hold power over men. Misogyny—the hatred and fear of women essential to sexism—maintains, polices, and reinforces the differences, boundaries, and binaries separating women and men. The term sexism developed in analogy to the term racism—discourse that presumes the superiority of White-identified persons over those of Color.

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And just as racism primarily oppresses people of Color, but problematically implicates all others, sexism mainly oppresses women, but problematically implicates men. For example, in Euro North America, sexism subjects women to economic, social, and physical violence, but it also renders men emotionally incompetent and physically devitalized. However, the problem is far more complex than ‘‘women can’t get equal pay; men can’t cry.’’ The United Nations’ Population Fund released its ‘‘State of the World Population 2000’’ in September 2000 (http://www.cnn.com), citing the many ways in which sexism affects the global economy and environmental stability. Stan Bernstein, a senior research adviser with the fund, is quoted as saying that continuing discrimination against women constitutes ‘‘a massive violation of human rights that takes various forms around the globe,’’ going on to say, ‘‘We know what needs to be done, and we need to commit ourselves to do the action. There are not going to be too many second chances.’’ Sexism combines with racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, and other superiority-presuming discourses in ways that affect each individual’s position within hegemony—discourses of power—in extremely complex ways. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader penned a satiric article in 1983 (1998) imagining that English encodes binaries of race instead of binaries of sex/gender. It shows by example the extent to which unacknowledged sexist presumptions pervade the language (also see Russ 1983 and 2000). Sexism is rendered invisible when it draws upon taken-for-granted assumptions, such as one that posits that all doctors are male and all nurses female. However, some instances of deeply ingrained sexism are easier to recognize than others. Sexist discourses in Euro North American cultures are based on three principles. First, they exclude women—making them invisible or leaving them out; second, they take heterosexual male experience as the norm, presuming women’s experience as different or irrelevant; and third, they treat women and girls in demeaning or insulting ways, especially in comparison with men and boys. Women are excluded by means of ‘‘secret gender.’’ For example, the word ‘‘person,’’ now seen as a quintessentially gender-neutral term, was interpreted in Canadian legal and political discourse to mean ‘‘men’’ until the British Privy Council declared in 1929 that such a reading was incorrect; women are also persons. Sexist exclusion manifests in scholarship that fails to include the experiences and knowledge of women. For example, though the term ‘‘history’’ is etymologically related to the term ‘‘story’’ (histoire, ‘‘inquiry’’) and the English ‘‘his’’ is linguistically coincidental, in practical terms, historians have, until very recently, told only ‘‘his story,’’ leading feminists to coin the term ‘‘herstory’’ to draw attention to this deficiency. Some theorists describe women and other marginalized groups as muted, noting that they may literally lack a form or structure in which to express their experience. For example, the very term ‘‘sexism’’ was unavailable to Betty Friedan in 1963 when she wrote The Feminine Mystique, and she instead referred to ‘‘the problem that has no name.’’ Similarly, ‘‘sexual harassment’’ also dates from the 1960s; however, the practice unquestionably preceded the term. But sexism in language goes even deeper, constraining our thinking and theorizing by prescribing not only terms, but also forms and structures of

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expression. Hence, women began to create new communicative forms, like consciousness-raising group, and to validate older forms and genres such as oral history, oral storytelling, quilting circles, book clubs, and the like. Relatively uncontroversially sexist are words such as ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘he’’ when used in situations in which women are presumed to be included. The problem is that they do not actually include everybody; they retain their gender specificity. No anthropology textbook, for example, ever announces that ‘‘man is a mammal, which means that he breast-feeds his young.’’ The sexist non-inclusiveness of male terms is clear in French, which prescribes the male plural third person ils if there is even one man in a group; one million women and one man would be ils rather than elles. Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, ‘‘I want to ask one question. Why didn’t I recognize my mother?’’ ‘‘You gave the wrong answer,’’ said the Sphinx. ‘‘But that was what made everything possible,’’ said Oedipus. ‘‘No,’’ she said. ‘‘When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn’t say anything about woman.’’ ‘‘When you say Man,’’ said Oedipus, ‘‘you include women too. Everyone knows that.’’ She said, ‘‘That’s what you think.’’ (Rukyser 1978)

As Muriel Rukyser’s oft-quoted prose poem, ‘‘Myth,’’ establishes, the presumption of male normativity, in which men and their knowledge define everyone, renders women and their wisdom an exception. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, folklore scholarship practiced male normativity by describing ‘‘culture’’ when researchers observed and/or interviewed only men. Similarly, employers who assume their workers will be available unconditionally and at all times fail to provide alternatives for fathers, or to recognize the normative employment patterns of women, who are expected to take time off for childbearing and childcare. Sexism is present when words for women describe them as consumables (‘‘tart,’’ ‘‘honey,’’ ‘‘cookie,’’ and ‘‘dish’’), as animals (‘‘fox,’’ ‘‘cow,’’ ‘‘chick,’’ and ‘‘pussy’’), or as dismembered body parts (‘‘tits and ass’’) (Bassein 1984). There are parallel body-part descriptions of women and men in vernacular English, but almost always the male term is less pejorative (compare the connotations of ‘‘prick’’ with those of ‘‘cunt’’). Similarly, other apparently paired terms often maintain disparate implications. Consider master/mistress: a master is a person in control of the situation; a mistress is a person who has sex with the man in control. Sexism requires a distinction between married and unmarried women (‘‘Mrs.’’ and ‘‘Miss’’), where the apparent parallel makes a distinction of age only (‘‘Master,’’ now archaic, and ‘‘Mr.’’). Feminist attempts to remedy the latter problem have frequently resulted in only more sexism. The term ‘‘Ms.,’’ intended as a replacement for both ‘‘Miss’’ and ‘‘Mrs.,’’ is now often interpreted to indicate a divorced woman and/or man-hater. Inappropriate references include both genders’ use of the phrase ‘‘the girls’’ to refer to secretaries, regardless of their age, and of the

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normatively collective word ‘‘guys’’ to refer to groups of women or girls. Such sexist habits generalize seamlessly into mainstream media, for example, in its tendency to obsess about women’s appearance, for example, in relentless descriptions of female politicians’ hair and clothing while focusing primarily on male politicians’ platforms and opinions. So pervasive is sexism in North American society that psychologists have developed a ‘‘schedule of sexist events,’’ measuring sexist discrimination, including being sexually harassed; being treated unfairly by family members and spouses/ partners; being treated unfairly by teachers and professors; being called sexist names such as ‘‘bitch’’ or ‘‘chick’’; being discriminated against by strangers (e.g. who ignore one’s presence, fail to yield space, or behave in a hostile manner); being discriminated against by institutions such as banks and schools in loans, scholarships, and admittance; being discriminated against by neighbors; being perceived as ‘‘aggressive’’ or ‘‘uppity’’ for normal, assertive behavior; and being discriminated against at work in salaries, promotions, tenure, and assignments, as well as by one’s colleagues and coworkers (Klonoff and Landrine 1995).

Note that this list presumes a female norm. The authors underline that ‘‘sexist events . . . are negative events (stressors) that happen to women, because they are women’’ (ibid.). This American measure of sexist experience holds for women of Color, students, and non-academic women alike. Unsurprisingly, the authors found that higher social class and/or education do not shield women from sexist discrimination; White privilege, however, often does. Klonoff and Landrine’s work shows that women of Color experience more sexist degradation, and more sexism in close relationships, than do White women (ibid.). See also: Consciousness Raising; Nursing; Oral History; Quiltmaking; Race; Storytelling; Violence; Wage Work. References: Bassein, Beth Ann. Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984; Hofstadter, Douglas and Deborah Cameron, ed. ‘‘A Person Paper on Purity in Language.’’ In The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader, second edition, 141–148. London: Routledge, 1998; Klonoff, Elizabeth A., and Hope Landrine. ‘‘The Schedule of Sexist Events: A Measure of Lifetime and Recent Sexist Discrimination in Women’s Lives.’’ Psychology of Women Quarterly 19 (1995): 439–472; CNN.com. ‘‘U.N. Report: Women’s unequal treatment hurts economies: Worldwide abuse ‘a massive violation of human rights.’’’ September 20, 2000. http:// archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/09/20/un.population.report/ (accessed December 31, 2004); Rukeyser, Muriel. ‘‘Myth.’’ In The Collected Poems, 498. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978; Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983; ———. The Female Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000 [1975].

Pauline Greenhill and Liz Locke

Sexuality Many facets of sexuality, a central cultural and biological concern, are explored in folklore, linked with anatomy, procreation, companionship, or pleasure. Folklore provides information on sexual activity—how to attract it, avoid it, or take pleasure from it; its consequences and risks; and what

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behavior is acceptable and what is not. Children’s games provide the first hints at later activity, jokes give information on the physical aspects of sexual appeal as well as on what people actually do (or are imagined to do), and legends deliver warnings about unacceptable behavior, including dire punishments. Folklore maintains a delicate balance, preparing girls to fulfill their presumed eventual sociobiological role as mothers while ensuring their virginity until the proper time. Folklore emphasizes heterosexual pairing, including sexual activity (or its results), from an early stage, as exemplified by these jump-rope rhymes: Susie and Johnny sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Susie with a baby carriage. Cinderella dressed in yellow, went upstairs to kiss her fellow. By mistake she kissed a snake, came downstairs with a bellyache. How many doctors did it take?

As girls near adolescence, they begin practicing skills for future sexual activity. A common feature at slumber parties is for girls to practice kissing—doorknobs, pillows, or each other—and role-playing seduction scenes in which the girl demurely submits to a kiss without shying away. Training in kissing is often extended at early boy-girl parties in games such as ‘‘Spin-the-Bottle’’ and variations of ‘‘Seven Minutes in Heaven,’’ which involves boys and girls being sent one pair at a time into a closet for a set period that they are expected to spend kissing. In addition to these early preparations for presumably heterosexual activity, folklore serves to control women’s sexual behavior in other ways, in part through perpetuating the belief that women are not as interested in sex as are men, and in part through presenting the cultural expectation that women should remain virgins until marriage. Adolescents may be caught out with trick questions: a girl who answers no to the question, ‘‘Do you know what virgins eat for breakfast?’’ suggests she is no longer a virgin; the boy who responds to ‘‘Did you know that one of the first signs of impotence is [mumbled] deafness?’’ with ‘‘What?’’ only to have ‘‘Deafness!’’ shouted at him, is suggesting that he suffers from erectile dysfunction. These expectations appear again in images of the sexually repressed ‘‘old maid’’ versus the socially active ‘‘bachelor,’’ and the prudish (or unacceptably sexually interested) ‘‘little old lady’’ versus the ‘‘dirty old man.’’ The use of a single proverb in two different ways demonstrates contrasting expectations. ‘‘Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’’ is often used to argue to a woman that if she is sexually active before marriage, she will never receive commitment from the man, and is also used to encourage a man to avoid committing to marriage as long as he is getting sex. Although most groups in the United States do not apply virginity tests either before the wedding or after (by checking the nuptial bed), one may still hear comments of disapprobation when a bride known (or conjectured) no longer to be a virgin wears white. Because the definition of virginity is often focused on vaginal intercourse, girls and young women may consider themselves virgins despite engaging in anal or oral sex. Folklore about sexuality reflects

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both societal and cultural pressure to maintain virginity until marriage and the reality that women do engage in nonmarital sexual activity. Puberty, when girls are experiencing major changes in their bodies and trying to understand what these changes mean, provides a focal point for folklore. Not only are there beliefs about menstruation and new rules to learn about grooming and hygiene, there is also folklore about how to make oneself more sexually appealing (such as, eat a lemon a day to have a smaller waist; eat chicken gizzards/peanut butter/green candies to increase breast size). Folklore teaches women what is not sexually appealing through jokes at the expense of unacceptable women, often representing an enemy or rival group (‘‘What’s the difference between an Iraqi woman and a catfish? One has whiskers and stinks; the other lives in the water’’; ‘‘What do the basketball team and the Purdue cheerleaders have in common? Each has four periods before the showers’’). Folklore also teaches about the dangers of sexual activity. One of the earliest warnings is against masturbation. A common teenage legend tells of a girl who masturbates with a hot dog (or a carrot or a soda bottle), which gets stuck in her vagina; either she is forced to tell her parents and go to the emergency room for its removal or she becomes infected, with fatal consequences. This legend serves both as a warning and as a tool for norming behavior. Frequently, the legend is reported about a specific girl who, whether viewed as a ‘‘slut,’’ an unattractive ‘‘loner,’’ or even too popular, exists outside of the acceptable range. Girls who are targeted with this legend are often tormented with it throughout high school and even into college if any of their hometown classmates attend the same school, providing a lesson even more powerful than the legend itself and with more lasting effect than the warnings given to boys about hairy palms and blindness. A concept underlying the motif of the stuck hot dog is the vagina infinita, the vagina with infinite space in which objects can be lost. Girls with little concept of their own bodies share stories about losing tampons or inserting multiple (two to five) tampons, which eventually cause discomfort, get stuck, and become infected, and stories about cheerleaders who, when they leap up in a split, accidentally release a handful of rings that fall from their vaginas. Pregnancy, as one of the potential consequences of sexual activity, accrues many beliefs about both the variety of events that will incur it and the contraceptive acts that will prevent it. Most often transmitted by girls are beliefs that emphasize avoiding contact with boys: that one can become pregnant from kissing, sitting on a boy’s lap, sitting on a toilet seat, swimming in a pool or sitting in a hot tub where a boy has been (or has masturbated), dancing too close to a boy, touching too close in wet bathing suits, being touched by sperm anywhere on the body, and from oral sex. Beliefs about how one can avoid pregnancy—usually prescriptions for worry-free intercourse—are often claimed by men as well as women and generally neglect the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases. Such prescriptions include having intercourse standing up, in a shower, for the first time, during the girl’s period, while jumping up and down, urinating, or sneezing, as well as beliefs that a woman cannot become pregnant if she does not have an orgasm, if she holds her breath when the man ejaculates, if she is

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breastfeeding, or if she douches immediately after intercourse (especially with Coca-Cola or vinegar). Beliefs that a woman cannot get pregnant if raped (her body ‘‘shuts down’’) or when committing adultery (her body rejects as foreign bodies any sperm other than her husband’s) can play roles well beyond (mis)education about pregnancy prevention. For example, the former belief has been used to argue against abortion rights/funding for women who have been raped. Beliefs about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), another potential consequence of sexual activity, often omit the sexual aspects, as in the beliefs about contracting STDs from toilet seats. Legends, though they may warn of non-sexual means of transmission (such as contracting herpes from a roommate’s damp washcloth or being infected by HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) from needles stuck in coin slots or theater seats or attached to gasoline pump handles), often warn against sexual activity, especially with strangers. ‘‘Welcome to the Wonderful World of AIDS’’ legends involve one-time heterosexual intercourse with a stranger, followed by the delivery of the message (in a tiny gift-wrapped coffin or in red lipstick on a mirror) that gives the legend its name. The male/female variation of the victim-protagonist illuminates the differing societal gender norms of sexual behavior: the man as victim has a one-night stand with a beautiful woman he picks up at a bar; the woman has sex after a romantic courtship by a handsome and sexually undemanding man. While these legends were widespread for many years (especially in the first half of the 1990s), they now seem to have been supplanted by stories about non-sexual transmission of HIV, suggesting that sexual transmission of HIV has become a less important focus for adolescents and young adults. The folk legends warn about an almost non-existent problem (no cases of secreted HIV-tainted needles have been reported) instead of focusing on the real dangers of sexual transmission. The threat of STDs as a way of controlling women’s sexuality, rather than as a potentially useful warning to practice safe sex, can be seen in the legends about women who attend a club with male strippers, thereby violating prescribed gender roles that allow men to be the viewers of women as sexual objects. A woman (and the occasional gay man) is punished by crabs (pubic lice) that leap from the stripper’s crotch into her eye, causing an infection that results in (if she is young) her parents finding out and grounding her, or being humiliated simply by having to go to the doctor who asks what she has been doing. Although men may also be punished for looking at the opposite sex, their offense generally involves further transgression—the man who catches pubic lice from a female stripper has also enjoyed a lap dance or a peeping Tom who has invaded someone’s privacy. When it comes to sexuality, women are much more likely than men to be punished just for looking. Another way in which women are warned against sexual activity is through legends that show the dangers of female sexual desire, which in turn leads to loss of control. For example, there is the girl who masturbates by using her bedpost, but becomes too excited, slips, and impales herself. Another girl is found impaled on a gearshift after her date has slipped her Spanish fly or some other aphrodisiac and then left her alone in the car for too long. Another girl, after ingesting Ecstasy (a hallucinogenic drug to

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which aphrodisiacal properties are attributed), disrobes and masturbates in the middle of the room at a party. Alcohol is recognized in folklore as a significant contributor to loss of control, though not necessarily as a contributor to female desire. It appears in the belief that a woman who is drunk when she is raped is ‘‘asking for it,’’ or in more fully drawn legends. For example, one legend tells of a girl who, attending a fraternity party with her brother, drunkenly wanders off to find a toilet. When he eventually looks for her, he comes across a line of men outside a bedroom door. He is told that a girl has passed out, that they are each taking a turn, and that he should join them. Since he is the last in line, when he is done he turns the girl face-up, revealing the victim to be his sister. This legend, which generally circulates during the last years of high school or the first of college, is told to men as a lesson about rape (that every woman is somebody’s relative or, at least, that one should check a woman’s identity before raping her); it is told to women as a warning both against drinking too much and about the dangers of frat parties. The danger of drinking is further expanded with warnings about carefully guarding one’s drink, never leaving it unattended or letting it pass through someone else’s hand, lest it be spiked with the ‘‘date-rape’’ drug Rohypnol (‘‘roofies’’), which causes both unconsciousness and amnesia. The warnings about (real) Rohypnol have become so common that legendry has strengthened them by telling of a stronger (fictitious) drug, Progesterex, which causes not only unconsciousness and amnesia but also permanent sterility. One sexual practice viewed with some ambivalence in legendry is oral sex. While much folklore makes it clear that this is an activity men want performed on them, legends told in high schools and colleges across the country demonstrate the unacceptability of fellatio. In one, in a biology class after the teacher has described the high glucose content of semen, a girl blurts out the question of why then it tastes so salty; in another, in biology lab when they are examining mouth swabs under a microscope, a girl finds something odd swimming in her sample, which the teacher proclaims to be sperm. In both cases, the girls, suddenly realizing what has been revealed about them, run from the room (and sometimes permanently leave the school) in embarrassment and humiliation. Having proof of any sexual activity disclosed publicly may be damaging to high school girls, but fellatio seems to be particularly bad. There are also legends about a cheerleader who has serviced the entire football or basketball team and, falling ill from all the ingested semen, has to be rushed to the hospital, where her humiliation is made public. An analogous legend is told primarily about male rock stars who have to be rushed from the stage to have their stomachs pumped to remove the huge quantities of semen they have ingested, but here their humiliation is in the revelation that they were sexual with (many) other men, reflecting societal homophobia rather than a condemnation of sexual activity. More recent accounts involving a female rock star reestablish the problem as one of female promiscuity. Cunnilingus results in even more dire consequences for women. In one legend, a woman decides to spice up her sex life by putting tuna fish in her vagina for her boyfriend to lick out. They have a delightful evening, but

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several days later, plagued by pain and odd odors, she goes to the doctor. It turns out that the boyfriend did not get all the tuna fish, on which maggots have grown and are now eating through the woman’s insides. The woman is punished not only for taking pleasure from oral sex but also for having taken control of her sex life by initiating and experimenting. (In none of these cases is the man punished for his participation.) In another legend, in which the woman takes yet greater control, excluding the man altogether, a woman surprises the friends and relatives who are hiding in her house to give her a surprise party. She has just called her dog to enjoy a treat, when the friends jump out and turn on the lights, revealing her naked with peanut butter spread on her crotch. She is so embarrassed that she moves to another town. The legend’s inherent criticisms of women seeking sexual pleasure have expanded to focus on the career woman and on bestiality. Bestiality when engaged in by men can seem almost expected when portrayed in jokes about shepherds and agriculture students or stories about fraternities using goats in their initiations, but appears far more shocking and unacceptable when reported of women. However, even apart from the bestiality aspect, cunnilingus seems far less acceptable than fellatio, according to the legendry about both practices. This may tie in with the greater pleasure being presumably for the receiver rather than the giver and with the cultural attitudes that sex is more important for men and that men’s needs/pleasure take precedence. The legends about girls embarrassed in biology class by fellatio seem almost gentle and innocent (although such public humiliation might be viewed as the ultimate punishment for teenagers) in comparison with legendry’s punishment of women for enjoying cunnilingus. Although legendry may reject oral sex, the reality is that people do engage in it and, therefore, women share folk recipes on how to make it better. This is not surprising given that folklore, particularly jokes, attribute bad smells and tastes to women’s vulvas. College students report that women should partake of pineapple juice, peach schnapps, kiwis, and fruits and vegetables in general in order to make their genitals taste better; men need to eat green leafy vegetables to make their semen taste good; and both men and women should avoid meat. Jokes have played a major role in perpetuating the image of women as sexual objects. One of the tasks of the feminist movement in the 1970s was to make both men and women more aware of the harm of the attitudes they were spreading via jokes (hence the stereotype of feminists having ‘‘no sense of humor’’). The portrayal of women as being good only for sex emerged in the more focused but safer form of blonde jokes, wherein blondes, as standins for all women, are presented as not only stupid, but highly sexual (‘‘How does a blonde turn on the light after sex? She opens the car door’’; ‘‘Why do blondes wear panties? To keep their ankles warm’’). However, this is not to say that the worst kinds of woman-as-sexual-object jokes have disappeared (‘‘What’s the difference between a blonde and a toilet bowl? A toilet bowl doesn’t follow you around for six months after you use it’’; ‘‘What’s the definition of a woman? A life-support system for a pussy’’). Aside from reducing a woman to her genitals, these kinds of jokes also show that any sort of woman will suffice for sexual pleasure in private, though not for public bragging

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(‘‘What’s the hardest thing about eating a vegetable? Getting her back in the wheelchair’’; ‘‘What do fat girls and mopeds have in common? They’re fun to ride until somebody sees you on one’’). Jokes are often the preferred medium for characterizing the sexuality or sexual practices of a group of women: the farmer’s daughter, cheerleaders, and sorority girls are all loose (‘‘What’s a sorority girl’s mating call? I’m so-o-o-o drunk!’’); Southern girls from states other than the joketeller’s are incestuous (‘‘What does a girl from Alabama say before having sex? Watch out Daddy, you’re gonna crush my cigarettes’’; ‘‘How can you tell if a girl is a virgin in West Virginia? If she can run faster than her brothers’’); Jewish American Princesses are frigid or do it only for material gain (‘‘How do you know when a JAP has an orgasm? She drops her nail file’’; ‘‘What is Jewish foreplay? Twenty minutes of begging’’). Married women, having caught their man, are commonly depicted (with their frequent headaches) in folklore as being no longer interested in sex (‘‘Why is a bride smiling as she walks out of the church after her wedding? Because that’s the last blow job she’ll ever have to give’’; ‘‘What’s the difference between your wife and your job? After five years your job will still suck’’; ‘‘What’s it called when a woman is paralyzed from the waist down? Marriage’’). Older women may be presented as sexually active (or at least willing), but their aging bodies are shown as unappealing (‘‘Do you know what a seventy-five-year-old woman has between her tits? Her belly button’’; ‘‘What does an eighty-year-old woman taste like? Depends [brand of adult diapers]’’; ‘‘What do you give an eightyyear-old woman for her birthday? Mikey; he’ll eat anything’’ [references a widely quoted cereal advertisement]). Folklore about lesbian sexuality often focuses on how to ‘‘cure’’ them (all they need is a good man, the same cure as for frigidity) and on how they ‘‘do it.’’ The latter topic is often handled through jokes (‘‘What do you call a lesbian dinosaur? A lickalotapus’’; ‘‘What did one lesbian frog say to the other? Gee, we do taste like chicken’’; ‘‘What is a lesbian with fat fingers called? Well-hung’’). There are occasionally other forms of exoteric folklore such as the belief that a woman who becomes a lesbian loses weight, possibly because of the alleged increase in and less passive nature of sexual activity. The insider lesbian jokes may focus on sexual activity or on the tendency of lesbians to become involved very quickly in relationships (‘‘What does a lesbian take on a first date? Her cats and a U-Haul’’). There is a great variety of practical advice and beliefs concerned with sexual activity. In addition to folklore about what makes women more sexually appealing and stereotyped assertions about sexuality (‘‘Red on the head, fire in the hole/fire in the bed’’; ‘‘The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice’’), there is also folklore that helps women assess men. For example, there are the beliefs about gauging the size of a man’s penis by his shoe size, nose, or hand span. Young women have reported the belief that when shaving the bikini line, one should not shave off all one’s pubic hair: if a man prefers the pubic area completely shaved, it means he is a pedophile. Other kinds of advice range from the teenager’s wishful belief that sex clears up acne to the postmenopausal woman’s determined assertion, supported by research, ‘‘Use it or lose it.’’ Both might share with friends advice

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on lubricants—vaseline for seemingly impossibly enormous tampons or various oils for vaginal dryness. The use of lubricants has led to jokes about the couple who, in the dark, accidentally reach for a tube of glue, or the joke about the wedding-night prankster, a dentist who is a friend of the groom, who puts Novacaine in the K-Y jelly (a well-known lubricant). These and related jokes provide an indirect education as to the mechanics and processes of actual sexual activity. Menstruation is often presented as a barrier to sexual activity, whether because it spreads disease, saps men’s energies, or is just ‘‘too gross.’’ Women are reported as claiming they are having their periods in order to deter both husbands and rapists. On the other hand, sex—specifically, achieving orgasm—is frequently recommended by individuals and in women’s health literature as a way to relieve menstrual cramps. Moreover, a man who will persist, even with cunnilingus, to earn his ‘‘red wings,’’ is seen as particularly sexually daring and accomplished. Often, folklore about women’s sexuality is not about any sexual pleasure the women might derive but rather about how it relates to men. Whether it is folklore’s joking advice to ‘‘good girls’’ to keep a dime between their knees, or the legends strippers share about one of their colleagues who was carried off to a better life by marriage to a rich man, women’s sexuality is often defined by men—whether real, potential, or absent. See also: Aphrodisiac; Chastity; Humor; Joke; Legend; Legend, Urban; Lesbian Folklore; Menstruation; Pregnancy; Rape; Riddle; Sexism; Vagina Dentata; Vaginal Serpent; Virginity. References: Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981; Fine, Gary Alan. Manufacturing Tales: Sex and Money in Contemporary Legends. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992; Goldstein, Diane. 1992. ‘‘Welcome to the mainland, welcome to the World of AIDS: Cultural viability, localization, and contemporary legend.’’ Contemporary Legend 2 (1992): 23–40; ———. Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004; Green, Rayna. ‘‘Magnolias Grow in Dirt: The Bawdy Lore of Southern Women.’’ Southern Exposure 4 (1977): 29–33; Whatley, Mariamne H., and Elissa R. Henken. Did You Hear about the Girl Who . . . ?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, and Human Sexuality. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Elissa R. Henken and Mariamne H. Whatley

Sister Sisters are female siblings, but the metaphor of sisterhood extends to friendships or other specially marked relationships between individuals, and sometimes to all women. The actual connections between sisters of all types, and between sisters and brothers of all kinds, vary widely, as do their expressions in traditional and popular culture. Family relationships are often tragic in British traditional ballads, and sisters participate in the mayhem as both perpetrators and victims. In ‘‘The Twa [Two] Sisters,’’ female siblings are rivals for a man’s affection. When the jealous older sister finds that she is not the man’s choice, she murders the younger by throwing her into a river. Relationships between sisters and

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brothers are not much happier. In ‘‘The Bonnie Banks O Fordie,’’ a robber unknowingly murders two of his three sisters. When the youngest tells him that her brother, the robber, will avenge them, he realizes their relationship and commits suicide. As in the previous examples, in most European traditional folklore forms, the younger or youngest sister takes a pivotal role. In the Grimm folktale ‘‘Fitcher’s Bird,’’ for instance, the youngest sister tricks the sorcerer Fitcher, who has murdered her two older sisters. She reassembles their body parts and revives them. She escapes Fitcher’s house disguised in honey and feathers, having first sent home a basket of gold also containing her sisters and leaving a decorated skull in the window as her avatar. She calls her brothers, who lock the sorcerer and his cronies inside his house and set it on fire, killing them all. More familiar tales like ‘‘Cinderella’’ set up a rivalry between a sister and her stepsisters, again for the attentions of a man; but sister and brother relations tend to be more positive. In the well-known tale of ‘‘Hansel and Gretel,’’ siblings join forces to kill a witch who wants to cook and eat them. In ‘‘The Juniper Tree,’’ a stepsister saves her brother, who was murdered by her mother (his stepmother) and served to his father in a stew, by gathering his bones together and burying them beneath a juniper tree. They magically transform into a bird, which punishes the stepmother by dropping a millstone on her, and rewards the father and sister with gifts. After transforming back into a human boy, the brother, along with his stepsister and father, celebrate their new family unit with a meal. In many cultures, the actual name ‘‘sister’’ is invoked traditionally to create and reconfirm close ties between women, and close but non-sexual relations between women and men. Thus, sisterhood has been a focus of feminist analysis, from the friendships of nineteenth-century British and American women to the utopian ideal of a worldwide sisterhood of all women. Communicative practices like the exchanges of letters, greeting cards, telephone calls, and e-mails, as well as face-to-face meetings and ‘‘girls’ nights out’’ to consciousness-raising sessions are fundamental to the creation and maintenance of both formal and informal sororal relationships. More formalized relationships also invoke the idea of sisterhood, from sororities on university campuses to communities of women religious like Catholic nuns, who call one another (and are called by others) ‘‘sister.’’ Sisters who are blood kin usually have close, if ambivalent, relationships. But in the folk music revival, sisters, who have been positive influences upon one another and their brothers, often perform and record together. Sister singers include American revival performers Joan Baez and Mimi Farina. Sister and brother revivalists include Scots Archie Fisher and his sisters Ray Fisher and Cilla Fisher. And when non-kin British revivalists Maddy Prior and June Tabor made an album together, they called it Silly Sisters. For groups of women who are marginalized in mainstream society, calling one another ‘‘sister’’ has been powerful. Aretha Franklin’s 1985 duet with the Eurythmics, ‘‘Sisters are Doin’ It for Themselves’’ (Who’s Zoomin’ Who?, Arista Records) has become a touchstone for women in hip-hop and rhythm and blues, particularly performers such as Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill, whose unapologetically sex-positive music has been labelled ‘‘neo-soul.’’

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But after celebrating ‘‘coming out of the kitchen,’’ ‘‘the conscious liberation of the female state,’’ and the fact that ‘‘we got doctors, lawyers, politicians, too,’’ the song concludes with the claim that ‘‘we ain’t makin’ plans’’ because love between a man and a woman is still of paramount importance. As late as the mid-1980s, Franklin felt the need to assuage patriarchal fears that strong solidarity among women could threaten normative heterosexual relationships. Today, the song frequently references women politicians who are, in fact, making plans—to get elected to offices at the local and national level by using their power and wealth to centralize women’s concerns and make their voices heard. Meanwhile, First Nations women and African American women have actively debated whether their relationships with their White feminist sisters should be equally or less important than those with their First Nations or African American brothers. Women and men in the labor union movement address each other as ‘‘Sister’’ and ‘‘Brother,’’ emphasising their common cause. Many cities and towns in North America have ‘‘sister cities,’’ that is, economic and cultural partnerships with municipalities in other regions. Sister Cities International, a ‘‘global citizen diplomacy network,’’ works to foster understanding, support, and cooperation—traditional hallmarks of ideal sisterhood—between communities that would otherwise likely never interact; Norman, Oklahoma, for example, has sister cities in France, Japan, and Mexico. See also: Ballad; Consciousness Raising; Family Folklore; Folk Poetry; Folktale; HipHop Culture/Rap; Women Religious; Women’s Friendship Groups. References: Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986; Burdine, Lucille, and William B. McCarthy. ‘‘Sister Singers.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 49, no. 4 (1990): 406–417; Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Five volumes. Reprint edition. New York: Dover Publications, 1985 [1882–1898]; DeRogatis. Jim. ‘‘Young sisters are doing it for themselves.’’ April 12, 2002. http://www.jimdero.com/News2002/April12NeoSoul.htm (accessed December 24, 2007); Handler, Lisa. ‘‘In the Fraternal Sisterhood: Sororities as Gender Strategy.’’ Gender and Society, vol. 19, no 2 (April 1995): 236–255; hooks, bell. ‘‘Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women.’’ Feminist Review 23 (Summer 1986): 125–138; Liswood, Laura. ‘‘Sisters are Doing It for Themselves.’’ Huffington Post, July 2, 2007. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-liswood/sisters-are-doing-itfor_b_54693.html (accessed December 24, 2007); Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. ‘‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.’’ Signs, vol. 1, no. 1 (1975): 1–29; Zipes, Jack, ed. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Third edition. New York: Bantam Books, 2002.

Pauline Greenhill and Liz Locke Sleeping Beauty Sleeping Beauty is a traditional folktale, well-known in North America through a multitude of oral, written, filmed, and other media versions. It focuses on a conflict between a beautiful young woman and her stepdaughter. In most versions, a frog announces the birth of a much-desired daughter of the king. A fairy who has not been invited to the birth celebration or christening curses the princess to die of a wound from a spindle, but another fairy changes it to a 100-year sleep. The evil wish is fulfilled as the

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maiden and castle dwellers fall into slumber. A near-impenetrable thorn hedge grows around the castle. After 100 years, a prince breaks through the hedge—often with the aid of a crone who provides him with scissors— and awakens the princess with a kiss. The end result is a happy marriage. The story has been interpreted from many very different perspectives. Feminist theorist Karen Rowe locates Sleeping Beauty within a broader corpus of fairy tales, which ‘‘by punishing exhibitions of female force . . . admonish’’ members of the tale’s audience holding similar thoughts (1979: 247–48). Folktale scholar Jack Zipes perceives a moral tale in which the heroine, ‘‘the ideal aristocratic lady’’ with the ‘‘temper of an angel’’ attains husband and family due to patience (Zipes 1988: 285). He credits the Brothers Grimm with creating the version of the tale that froze, becoming a ‘‘bourgeois myth about the proper way males save . . . comatose women’’ (ibid.: 287). Psychologist Bruno Bettleheim posits that the tale’s 100-year sleep reflects the period of youthful pause, when the world seems to be moving and near-adults are not yet allowed to participate. Thus, elements of the tale may assume Freudian symbolism: ‘‘circular staircase (sexual experiences), locked room (female sexual organs), and turning the key in the lock (intercourse)’’ (de Vos and Altmann 1999: 282). Karen E. Rowe sees the tale’s single ‘‘socially acceptable resolution’’ for a woman as a dramatized ‘‘archetypical female dilemma,’’ where curiosity and freedom of choice are only socially acceptable when they lead to marriage (1979: 286). Emancipatory feminist critics ‘‘have reacted against the lessons that the Grimms’ or Disney’s fairy tales teach, but they do not usually react against their didactic potential or use’’ in culture (Joosen 2005: 130). Many feminist retellings have been published; some simply reverse traditional gender roles (for example, with the princess saving the prince), while others rework the story more fully to add feminist themes. See also: Folktale; Marriage. References: Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1976; de Vos, Gail, and Anna E. Altman. New Tales for Old: Folktales as Literary Fictions for Young Adults. Englewood, CO: Teacher Ideas Press, 1999; Joosen, Vanessa. ‘‘Fairy-tale Retellings between Art and Pedagogy.’’ Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 36, no. 2 (2005): 129–39; Rowe, Karen E. ‘‘Feminism and Fairy Tales.’’ Women’s Studies 6 (1979): 237–57; Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York: Methuen, 1988.

Rachel Gholson Sorority Folklore Sororities (‘‘sisterhoods’’)—women-only campus societies—formed in the United States beginning in the mid-1800s as women’s presence on university campuses grew despite resistance from traditionally male academic culture. Like men’s fraternities (‘‘brotherhoods’’), these groups, originally called ‘‘women’s fraternities,’’ incorporated ceremonies and rituals through which they cultivated solidarity and community. The earliest Greek societies— so-called because of their use of the Greek alphabet as the source for their names—for women were Kappa Alpha Theta and Kappa Kappa Gamma, both founded in 1870. A few years later, three organizations were established at

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Syracuse University in New York—Gamma Phi Beta, Alpha Phi, and Alpha Gamma Delta—which became the first to name themselves ‘‘sororities’’ and refer to their members as ‘‘sisters.’’ Today, thousands of sorority chapters exist across the United States and Canada, many affiliated with national organizations. These groups include ethnicity-based sororities such as Alpha Kappa Alpha (African American), Lambda Theta Alpha (Latina American), and Alpha Psi Omega (First Nations). In the 1980s and 1990s, after several alcohol-related crimes and deaths brought significant negative public attention to Greek life, nervous universities increased their efforts to prevent abusive hazing rituals (initiation practices involving harassment and sometimes violence). Today, official antihazing policies prohibit sororities from any activities that distinguish pledges (potential initiates) from full members. Chapters may now be punished for practices previously seen as benign. While hazing traditions survive inside sorority walls, current anxieties have led to the sanitization of many of the grueling initiations for which Greek societies had earned disrepute. Sorority rituals and traditions are shrouded in secrecy and tightly guarded. Thus, fieldwork on sorority culture has been limited. However, Indiana University students in 1995 collected examples of ‘‘Greeklore’’ at their institution, which boasts a rich sorority culture of nineteen chapters on campus. Initiation rituals recorded by the students involved included ‘‘pledging,’’ through which new members join the sorority; scavenger hunts; ‘‘shrieking’’ (borrowed from a 1970s phenomenon known as ‘‘streaking,’’ running naked through a public place), in which pledges introduce themselves to the campus fraternities by running through them dressed in outlandish garb and singing at the top of their lungs; candlelight circles, in which sisters reveal intimate sentiments to the group; ‘‘toilet times’’ designated for the exchange of gossip, jokes, riddles, proverbial expressions, and other lore; ‘‘birthday signs’’ with pictures, jokes, and sayings decorating houses to mark a sister’s twenty-first birthday (whereupon she gains full adult legal status in the United States); and the bonding of generations of ‘‘mothers,’’ ‘‘grandmothers,’’ and ‘‘great-grandmothers,’’ mentoring members who form and sustain relationships among pledges in the sorority. With a few exceptions, folklorists and ethnographers have been largely inhibited by sorority participants’ fierce loyalty and reticence regarding the confidential practices of their sisters. However, the independent sorority Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi at the University of California at Davis allowed the MTV network to follow its members for the reality television series Sorority Life. An outcry from the twenty-six member groups of the National Panhellenic Conference, which since 1902 has overseen national sororities, denounced the series as sensationalizing and overemphasizing the alcoholdrinking and misbehavior of sorority women. Also controversial was journalist Alexandra Robbins’ expose of an unnamed southern American university. She masqueraded undercover as a sorority pledge, documenting the experiences of her ‘‘sisters,’’ including abusive hazing rituals, eating disorders, binge drinking, sexual promiscuity, and date rape. Her critique of sorority policies and practices provoked enraged debates on numerous Internet sorority discussion boards. Robbins’ research

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methods and ethics, as well as her accuracy in representing sorority culture, were questioned nationwide by women who felt her work perpetuated underserved negative stereotypes and scandalous rumors. See also: Clique; Gender; Initiation; Popular Culture; Scandal; Women’s Friendship Groups. References: Glavan, Joyce. ‘‘Sorority Tradition and Song.’’ Journal of the Ohio Folklore Society, vol. 3, no. 3 (1968): 192–198; ‘‘Greeklore.’’ Folklore of Student Life, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 2005. http://www.indiana.edu/f351jmcd/greeklore. html (accessed December 20, 2007); Handler, Lisa. ‘‘In the Fraternal Sisterhood: Sororities as Gender Strategy.’’ Gender and Society, vol. 19, no. 2 (April 1995): 236–255; Mason, C. ‘‘Sorority Serenading: Its Pretext and Defense.’’ Journal of Folklore and Mythological Studies 1 (1977): 51–52; Robbins, Alexandra. Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities. New York: Hyperion, 2004; Stombler, Mindy, and Patricia Yancey Martin. ‘‘Bringing Women In, Keeping Women Down: Fraternity ‘Little Sister’ Organizations.’’ In Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 23, no. 2 (1994): 150–184; Turk, Diana B. Bound by a Mighty Vow: Sisterhood and Women’s Fraternities, 1870–1920. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Montana Miller Spa Culture The word ‘‘spa,’’ borrowed from the name of a Belgian resort town to describe any facilities for supervised water therapy, has now become a generic term for therapeutic relaxation facilities. Spa culture combines folklore, science, technology, and cultural ideas about nature and authenticity, often in an eclectic setting. Early spas were developed at locations with natural thermal or mineral springs, whose use was sometimes already part of much older healing traditions. The development of what is termed ‘‘hydrotherapy’’ is usually traced to the Romans, who throughout their empire constructed public baths for recreational and therapeutic use. New theories developed with a revival of interest in the sixteenth century with the publication of a book summarizing knowledge of the medical properties of water (Gessner 1553). During this European revival, wealthy men and women organized seasonal retreats to the spas to experience a social and therapeutic regime under medical supervision. After the French revolution, spa culture was further elaborated; by the eighteenth century, it had spread to the middle classes in Europe and America. Spa culture may emphasize folk medical beliefs and practices along with conventional medicine from several traditions, or it may focus on relaxation and beauty therapy. Both types have social, therapeutic, and aesthetic aspects; today, these are largely associated with women. Novelists and other social observers have long noted that spas provide a congenial setting for exploring the gendered workings of social and cultural politics in particular eras and cultures. North American spa culture is linked directly with older traditions via developments in nineteenth-century hydrotherapy, a treatment with a particularly strong female following. During that period, hydrotherapy was associated with resistance to the medicalization of childbirth and with calls for the social and political emancipation of women, ideas that threatened the medical establishment of the antebellum United States, which moved to discredit it. Today, spas are still favored locations for

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women’s solitary and group retreats, to the point that in recent years, marketers have made special efforts to get men reinvolved. In North America, natural-resource-based resorts combined Old-World-style facilities with regionally influenced architecture and treatments. Their models were predominantly Western European; well-known spas like Saratoga Springs in New York, Hot Springs in Arkansas, and Banff in Alberta drew wealthy families for extended seasonal visits by offering them a wide range of organized activities and recreational facilities, as well as treatments at their hot springs. Since World War II, smaller urban ‘‘days spas’’ and ‘‘spa resorts’’ have become popular among the middle classes. Urban day spas use and promote commercially developed hair- and body-care product lines in a comfortable setting, and seldom have any proximity to a natural mineral spring. Many North Americas spas claim to represent various traditions’ understandings of health, healing, recreation, leisure, and spirituality. Native American, Eastern European, Roman, British, Japanese, Arab, Indian Ayurveda, and North African massage traditions, for example, are often imaginatively enhanced and marketed as exotic healing rituals. Spa culture has generated a vocabulary of healing that references Earth, air, fire, and water, and employs natural plant extracts under the supervision of trained specialists. Spas often promise experiences meant to balance, relax, rejuvenate, purify, or transform, making sensory appeals through sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and touch. See also: Beauty; Childbirth and Childrearing; Class; Folk Belief; Folk Medicine; Women’s Movement. References: Armstead, Myra. Lord, Please Don’t Take Me in August: African Americans in Newport and Saratota Springs. Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999; Cayleff, Susan. Wash and Be Healed: The Water Cure Movement and Women’s Health. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987; De Vierville, Jonathan. American Healing Waters. PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1992; Donegan, Jane. Hydropathic Highway to Health: Women and Water-Cure in Antebellum America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986; Gessner, C. De balneis omnia quae extant. Venice: Giunta, 1553; Mackaman, Douglas. Leisure Setting: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; Slyomovics, Susan. ‘‘The Body in Water: American Women in Spa Culture.’’ In Bodylore, ed. Katherine Young, 25– 56. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995; Weisz, George. ‘‘Spas, Mineral Waters, and Hydrological Science in Twentieth Century France.’’ Isis 92 (2001): 451–483.

Teri Brewer Spinning Spinning is the process of drawing short fibers past each other and twisting them to produce a continuous yarn. Plant fibers such as flax, cotton, hemp, jute, ramie, and sisal, or animal hairs such as those from sheep, goats, alpaca, camels, dogs, and rabbits are commonly used. Although we cannot date the first use of the spindle as a spinning tool, we do know that it was the sole instrument for spinning until the spinning wheel—probably invented in India, but alternately attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and Johann J€ urgen—was developed in Europe in the fifteenth century. The upright spindle consists of a shaft or stick notched at the top, and a whorl or disk near the bottom. A spinning wheel is a spindle turned on

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its side and rotated by mechanical means: its horizontal spindle is supported by two uprights, and a cord around the whorl circles a wheel that is turned by hand- or foot-power. There are two basic types of spinning wheel: the high or wool wheel— often referred to as a walking wheel because the spinner has to walk back and forth to spin the yarn—is powered by hand, while the flyer or flax wheel is powered by a foot pedal. With the latter, fiber is spun into yarn and simultaneously wound around a bobbin. This is a much more efficient way to spin as the spinner may remain stationary, using both hands to manipulate the fibers into yarn. From the earliest times, linen thread spun from flax was used for most household weaving. After lengthy processing, the flax fibers are wound around a distaff—a stick or paddle held either in the belt of a spinner using a spindle or fastened to the side of the spinning wheel. The word ‘‘distaff’’ (from Old English dist f, dis meaning a bundle of flax) survives in common usage today as a legal term meaning ‘‘the wife’s side of the family.’’ The term ‘‘spinster,’’ with today’s connotation of an adult, unmarried woman, also comes from the usually feminine occupation of spinning; in Europe and elsewhere, unmarried daughters tended to be a family’s primary spinners (and weavers). Spinning is a virtually continuous task. The amount of yarn needed by a single weaver has been said to require the output of eight spinners. The invention of the fly shuttle in 1733 doubled the speed of weaving, prompting the development of the spinning jenny to increase the production of yarn. With its invention, spinning moved from the home to the factory, where women (who were thought to have more nimble fingers than men) and children (because of their small size) were employed to run the machinery. But hand-spinning has never entirely disappeared, and enjoyed a revival in the late twentieth century among craftspeople who consider handspinning an art form rather than a necessity for the production of clothing and household goods. See also: Weaving; Women’s Work. References: Davenport, Elsie. Your Handspinning. Pacific Grove, CA: Select Books, 1964; Fanin, Allen. Handspinning: Art and Technique. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1970; Irwin, Bobbie. The Spinner’s Companion. Loveland, CO: Interweave Press, 2001; Kroll, Carol. The Whole Craft of Spinning from the Raw Material to the Finished Yarn. New York: Dover, 1981; Raven, Lee. Hands on Spinning. Loveland, CO: Interweave Press, 1987.

Nancy Piatkowski

Spirituals Spirituals are a type of sacred song found in Protestant Christianity. The term’s source is believed to be the following Bible passage: Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual Songs, singing with grace in your hearts unto the Lord (Colossians 3:16).

During the time of legal institutional slavery in North America and afterward, enslaved Africans and their descendents performed a ceremony

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originating in a West African dance ritual, which came to be known as the ‘‘ring shout.’’ While music and rhythm were key elements, the ritual form also involved emotional expressions of shouting, evolving into the religious slave songs popularly known as Negro or African American spirituals. The topics of religious slave songs often concerned finding salvation from a harsh life. A special form of coding of key terms was employed to avoid detection by outsiders of their true meaning. For example, ‘‘Pharaoh’’ and ‘‘the Egyptians’’ signified the slave master or owners, ‘‘the Israelites’’ were the African slaves, and ‘‘bondage’’ was the condition of Black slavery. The spiritual ‘‘Go Down, Moses,’’ for example, is apparently located in historical time, ‘‘When Israel was in Egypt’s land,’’ but its chorus, ‘‘Let my people go’’ implicitly also demands an end to contemporary slavery. The appropriate singing style for such songs is never upbeat, but rather mournful or sad. The form consists of melodies and refrains, four-line stanzas and choruses echoing the manner of African call-and-response singing, hand-clapping, and foot-stamping to keep time to the beat, major and pentatonic scales, and polyrhythms. The work A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors by Richard Allen, African Minister, published in 1801, constituted the first collection of spirituals chosen for worship services by Black churchgoers themselves. Some of the verses found in a later and better-known postbellum work, Slave Songs of the United States (1867), included spirituals from Allen’s hymnal. In 1871, a group of Fisk University students—the Fisk Jubilee Singers— led by George White, sang spirituals on an international tour, and thereby helped to spread their appreciation as an important art form, while simultaneously establishing a tradition of performance that continues to the present. More recently, a number of Black female performers have contributed to the preservation and recognition of spirituals. Examples include opera singer Marian Anderson (1897–1993), gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (1911– 1972); folksinger Odetta (1930– ); Bernice Johnson Reagon (1945– ), a founding member of the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock; and various arrangers and composers, including Eva Jesseye (1895–1992), Lena Johnson McLin (1928– ), Dorothy Rudd Moore (1940– ); Irene Britton Smith (1907–1999); Julia Perry (1924–1979); Margaret Bonds (1913–1972); and Undine Smith Moore (1904–1989). See also: Coding; Folk Music and Folksong; Race; Ritual. References: Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, compilers. Slave Songs of the United States. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1996; Cone, James H. The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991; Higginson, Colonel Thomas Wentworth. ‘‘Negro Spirituals.’’ The Atlantic Monthly, June 1867; Jones, Arthur C. Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993; Kirk-Duggan, Cheryl A. Exorcizing Evil: A Womanist Perspective on the Spirituals. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997; Lovell, John, Jr. Black Song: The Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out. New York: Macmillan, 1972; Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. Third edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997; Walker-Hill, Helen. From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and Their Music. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Martha Swearingen

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Stepmother A stepmother is the wife of a person’s father by another marriage. However, the image of the stepmother is complex. A perennial villain in traditional narratives, the stepmother is often stereotyped as wicked, murderous, jealous, greedy, resentful, competitive, and/or amorous. The ambiguity of the stepmother’s household position challenges cultural notions of family and presents essential questions: How stable is the structure of family? Are we responsible only for the children we ourselves bear? Should a father’s loyalty to his marriage partner take precedence over his love for his children? Many scholars have considered the role of the stepmother in traditional stories. Some suggest that she serves both narrative and psychological purposes: the stepmother provides the impetus for the young female hero to journey into the world; at the same time, she presents the problem that the hero must resolve within the story. It has been argued that tales like ‘‘Cinderella’’ provide a model for women and girls who consider themselves treated unfairly; the hero’s idealized femininity contrasts with the negative characteristics of her stepmother and stepsisters. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim proposed that the wicked stepmother figure provides security for a child by separating the perceived ‘‘good mother’’ who fulfills the child’s wishes from the ‘‘bad’’ one who denies them until the child is ready to integrate these two aspects of the mother. Some feminists counter that such a simplistic interpretation may create more problems than it solves. Negative depictions of stepmothers may be indicators of a misogynous society. Descriptions of stepmothers in both ancient Greek and Roman literatures paint stepmothers as harsh, cruel, and dangerous. European folktales made familiar to North Americans through popular culture such as ‘‘Snow White’’ deeply entrench stereotypes of stepmothers as greedy, coldhearted harridans and witches. Walt Disney, in his representation of folktales like ‘‘Cinderella,’’ portrayed the stepmother not only as wicked on the inside, but as ugly and comical on the outside. Such detrimental stereotypes of the stepmother are further affected by folklorists’ reliance on the standard tools available for the study of traditional narrative, the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index (1961) and Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955– 58), which often acknowledge only the negative actions of stepmothers. Currently about 25 percent of children in the United States and about 12 percent in Canada are stepchildren. More and more, families are ‘‘blended,’’ combining family members from previous relationships. Research has shown that stepmothers continue to have the most negative image of any family member; they are perceived as less affectionate, fair, kind, loving and likeable; and more cruel, hateful, unfair, and unloving than other family members. Many stepmothers struggle with their roles in their stepfamilies, fighting stereotypes that simultaneously assume they cannot feel a mother’s love for their husbands’ children and that demand they be utterly self-sacrificing. A number of organizations for stepparents provide information to blended families; many are accessible through the Internet, and recent attempts, like the movement to establish Stepmother’s Day on the Sunday following Mother’s Day, reflect efforts to change the image and status of stepmothers. See also: Cinderella; Family Folklore; Folktale; Mother’s Folklore.

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References: Bettelheim, Bruno. ‘‘Transformations: the Fantasy of the Wicked Stepmother.’’ In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, ed. Elliott Oring, 178–184. Logan: Utah State University Press 1989; Lundell, Torborg. ‘‘Gender-Related Biases in the Aarne-Thompson Indexes.’’ In Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, 149–164. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986; Steps for Stepmothers. n.d. http://www.stepsforstepmothers.com (accessed July 27, 2006); Stone, Kay F. ‘‘The Misuses of Enchantment: Controversies on the Significance of Fairy Tales.’’ In Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, ed. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik, 125–145. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987; Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairytales and Their Tellers. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994; Watson, Patricia A. Ancient Stepmothers: Myth, Misogyny and Reality. Mnemosyne Supplement 143. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995.

Ruth Olson

Storytelling Storytelling involves the recounting or performance of a narrative about an actual, mythical, or fictitious event. Women tell stories to listeners of all ages to educate, inform, advise, inspire, and entertain. As mothers, schoolteachers, librarians, and tradition-bearers, women encourage storytelling and keep the love of its art and practice alive from generation to generation. Though historically, women told stories mainly in domestic, private contexts, today, women also perform at public events, either as professionals or as enthusiasts. Many now collect, study, and publish books, essays, and articles on stories and storytelling. Storytellers take their narratives from various sources: from real events that happened to them or to other people, from published collections and children’s books, from the oral traditions of their families and communities, and from their own imaginations. A dynamic relationship of reciprocal influence exists between women storytellers and their narratives. That is, women influence the stories they tell, changing their shape and form by putting in their own touches, such as their sentiment, vision, social identity, self-definition, or personal experiences. But stories also influence the tellers themselves by offering them alternative visions of their own lives and experiences. Most women storytellers project feminist images, messages, and theories through the tales they choose and in their performance styles. They frequently tell stories that promote female courage, strength, achievements, dreams, and goals, often dealing with issues such as their struggles for independence and/ or emancipation, and/or their roles and positions in traditional and contemporary cultures. Storytellers may adapt texts from patriarchal cultures that appear anti-feminist, but appropriate them to feminist purposes, either explicitly or implicitly. Explicitly, for example, the triumph of an exploited heroine can show how the oppressed in society can be emancipated and successful in life. Implicitly, a humorous tale about a character who is impatient, harshtongued, or otherwise contrary to a stereotypically nice woman can offer female tellers and audiences opportunities to critique the status quo. Many women use stories to express issues vital to them and their lives. They may portray powerful images of women’s wisdom, courage, diversity,

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and shared experiences. There are stories for all ages celebrating strong women who prevail and triumph using their intelligence, courage, and/or resourcefulness. Women may also tell stories for therapeutic purposes, to help individuals or groups cope with fear, loss, pain, and other challenges. Women use stories to enculturate children, in a non-threatening and entertaining way, to socially and culturally desirable behaviors, helping them to develop creativity as well as language, listening, and literacy skills. Furthermore, when they identify and explain about different stories and their origins, they help children to understand and appreciate not only their own culture but those of others. Storytellers understand that children learn through concrete experiences and often involve them through hand gestures, dance movement, and repeated rhymes and chants. The best storytellers develop an almost instant rapport with their audiences. Their stage presence embodies confidence, assurance, and a sense of readiness to tell their stories. They narrate from their hearts, honestly, openly, and without trying too hard. Whether performing for adults or children, they are confident and relaxed. When the tales are lighthearted, they make the storytelling a fun experience both for themselves and their listeners. When they invoke serious issues, they may move their audience to a high level of emotional engagement. They may use changes of voice, gestures, or move about, acting the parts of the different characters, or they may enlist a more self-effacing performance style, allowing the tale to speak for itself, and the audience members to draw their own mind-pictures. Pauses allow their listeners to keep up with them and digest their stories. Clear voices and effective word use support their style. Patterned phrases may introduce and/or close each story. Storytellers may establish contact with their audiences by gazing around and looking into their eyes. Storytellers may employ different techniques depending on the genre of narrative. For example, almost every teller of a historical legend provides her audience with background information, and those who tell moralistic stories, meant to warn or advise, may use voice patterns, gestures, and facial expressions that underline the point. When a story is mainly for enjoyment and relaxation, the teller may facilitate participation by the audience such as miming and singing. Good storytellers find out in advance about the performance space, seating arrangements, nature and age of audience, noise levels, and purpose of the event. Many list planned selections but have a few backup texts in case they have to divert from their plans or are asked for more tales. They pay attention to applause and comments because those responses suggest whether or not the audience understood or liked the stories. Ideally, complaints from their listeners are treated as constructive criticisms that will inspire them to improve their performances. They may also use various relaxation techniques to warm up their bodies and clear their minds in order to ensure that they do not give in to stage fright. Some find that gentle physical exercises like yoga or tai chi chuan enable them to be more expressive and tranquil. Many women join storytellers’ groups. These are ideal forums in which to find the courage to tell stories in public and to obtain honest and

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encouraging feedback. Some groups organize special events at which members can see and hear many different styles, an experience that can be inspiring to new and seasoned tellers alike. Some watch great storytellers on video, in person, or listen to them on tape to learn new techniques, styles, or texts. Whenever possible, storytellers acknowledge their sources. Professional storytellers carefully research and keep records of the stories they tell using a card file, file folders, a computer database, or an oral memory formula or device. Storytellers from written traditions may list title, author, source, the usual range of time needed for telling, theme, characters, the sequence of events, cultural origin, and age suitability. Good organization helps the teller to locate a particular story easily and quickly. Most women storytellers are not professionals. Some are known only locally—in their families or communities. But many have been brought to the limelight either by scholars who have examined their art and practice or through their performances at public social events such as at festivals and in public libraries. Some women folklorists/scholars who are not storytellers have contributed immensely to the study and promotion of storytelling. Linda Degh studies and writes widely on storytelling as a serious form of artistic expression, and the role of storytelling and storytellers in both traditional and modern societies. Elaine Jahner explores the culture of Native American women through their personal-experience narratives. Karen Baldwin and Margaret R. Yocom study the role of women in family storytelling. Zora Neale Hurston was a vibrant fiction writer, anthropologist-folklorist, and collector of African American stories from the Gulf States from 1927 to 1931— these are hilarious, bittersweet, often saucy folktales, some of which date back to the U.S. Civil War. Rosario S. Morales, a feminist Puerto Rican and American, studies the lives and art of storytellers of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage in the United States. However, many of the scholars who study stories and storytelling are also themselves storytellers. Anne Pellowski is a founding member of the National Storyteller’s League, now renamed the National Story League. While working as a children’s librarian at the New York Public Library, she gained both expertise in storytelling and research interests in storytelling and folklore. Barbara Walker applies her considerable scholarship to respin classic fairy tales, reinterpret folklore, and write original stories that reflect feminist issues. Her work in the mid-1970s with battered women and pregnant teens increased her storytelling reserves. Nancy Schimmel, a storyteller, teacher, and author, has presented three women-focused programs: ‘‘Uppity Women in Folktales,’’ about characters who don’t wait for a prince to rescue them; ‘‘On My Way Running,’’ traditional stories of girls and women who use their physical skills, strength, and endurance; and ‘‘The Women’s West,’’ songs and stories of history and legend, emphasizing women and minorities. Her entertaining, thought-provoking stories present traditional women who are venturesome and competent, and not content to wait around for a hero to rescue them. Linda Goss is a cofounder of ‘‘In the Tradition,’’ a National Black Storytelling Festival and

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Conference, and cofounder and first president of the National Association of Black Storytellers (NABS). Gladys Coggswell, an award-winning, full-time professional storyteller, is one of America’s leading experts in the area of the application of storytelling as an inner healing and violence/substanceabuse prevention strategy. Canadian storytelling scholar Kay F. Stone uses feminist theories and perspectives to explore how and why stories are learned and told, and how they develop in the oral context. She also examines and describes how various performances shape stories as they are told and retold to listeners who consciously and unconsciously influence the texts and styles. Wendy Welch studies and writes about perceptions of women in storytelling, particularly oral narration by professionals. Her scholarly studies also focus on how women tell stories, how they view the material they consciously include in texts, and women’s storytelling performances. Susan Gordon writes about how and why she chooses to tell certain stories, how her audiences respond, and how she reshapes texts and tellings based on what she has learned from her listeners. She also describes how the process of developing her stories has taught her about her own experiences and her use of storytelling in therapeutic contexts. Diane Wolkstein is a distinguished storyteller and teacher and the author of more than twenty books. She is known as a ‘‘storyteller’s storyteller’’ because of her wide range and knowledge of storytelling. Her programs include folk and fairy tales for children and families at schools, libraries, parks, and festivals, and epics and myths for adults at festivals, theaters, museums, and libraries. She is a much sought-after speaker/storyteller for keynotes and celebrations. See also: Feminisms; Festival; Fieldwork; Folk Group; Folklore About Women; Folktale; Gender; Humor; Mothers’ Folklore; Public Folklore; Rhymes; Text; Tradition; Tradition-Bearer; Women Folklorists; Women’s Folklore. References: Barchers, Suzanne I. Wise Women, Folk and Fairy Tales. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1990; Degh, Linda. Narratives in Society: A PerformanceCentered Study of Narration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992; Goss, Linda, and Marian Barnes, eds. Talk That Talk: An Anthology of African American Storytelling. New York: Touchstone Books, 1989; Hurston, Zora Neale. Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States. New York: HarperCollins, 2001; Jordan, Rosan A., and Susan Kalcik, eds. 1985. Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Kavanagh, Afra, ed. Women in Storytelling. Proceedings of the University of Cape Breton’s Third Annual Storytelling Symposium. Sydney, Nova Scotia: University of Cape Breton Press, Inc., 1999; Pellowski, Anne. The World of Storytelling. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1977; Phelps, Ethel Johnston. The Maid Of The North: Feminist Folktales From Around the World. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1982; Ragan, Kathleen. Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998; Simms, Laura. The Gift of Dreams: A Storytelling Kit (book and audiocassette). Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 1997; Stone, Kay. Burning Brightly: New Light on Old Tales Told Today. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1998; ———. The Golden Woman: Dreaming as Art. Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc., 2004; Stone, Merlin. Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood: A Treasury of Goddess and Heroine Lore from Around the World. New York: Beacon Press, 1979; Walker, Barbara G. Feminist Fairy Tales. New York: HarperCollins, 1997; Welch, Wendy. ‘‘Perceptions of Inequality: Women in the Art and Business of Storytelling.’’ In Women in

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Storytelling, ed. Afra Kavanagh, 13–34. Sydney, Nova Scotia: University of Cape Breton Press, 2000; Wolkstein, Diane. Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper Perennial, 1983; ———. Esther’s Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1996; ———. The Glass Mountain. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

Zainab Jerret Suffrage Movement The North American women’s suffrage movement sought and gained women the right to vote. In Canada, women in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta were the first to obtain the provincial franchise in 1916. Over the next six years, the other provinces followed, except Quebec, where conservative religious forces blocked this right until 1940. Women’s suffrage was granted federally in 1918, although First Nations women and men got the vote in only 1960. In the United States, women were granted the vote in some local and state elections before the Nineteenth Amendment’s passage in 1918 and its ratification in 1920, which prohibited discrimination from voting on the basis of sex and thus gave American women the federal franchise. In Mexico, the Revolution of 1910 heralded widespread discussions of women’s rights; however, despite the continuous efforts of many high-status women and men throughout the early twentieth century, Mexican women were not granted full suffrage until 1947. After the Civil War, American women aligned themselves with the campaign against limiting the vote by race, but when it became clear that Black men would attain suffrage long before women, a rift developed in the suffrage movement. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had founded the National Women’s Suffrage Association in 1869, continued to seek universal suffrage for women by campaigning for a federal constitutional amendment; meanwhile, Lucy Stone, who founded the American Woman Suffrage Association, and her colleagues continued to support Black male suffrage federally while campaigning for female suffrage on a stateby-state basis. In 1890, these two organizations merged to become the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Canadian suffrage leagues were allied with farm associations and labor groups as well as the middle classes. Although English Canadian suffragists like Nellie McClung are known across Canada, the movement was multiethnic, including, for example, Icelandic Canadian women in Manitoba. The Women’s Christian Temperance League, with a maternal feminist agenda that aligned women with home and the family, helped make women’s suffrage seem less radical. The last barrier to women’s participation in Parliament fell in 1929 when the British Privy Council declared that women were ‘‘persons’’ and thus could qualify to be appointed to the Senate. Throughout their long crusade, women used various tactics and methods to gain widespread support for their cause. They did so in the face of hostility and dismissal, symbolized by the diminutive, derogatory term ‘‘suffragettes,’’ in spite of their willingness to be jailed and even die for their cause. The struggle helped women develop speaking, lobbying, management, and organizational skills. Prior to suffrage campaigns, women did not usually

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give ‘‘street speeches,’’ nor did they gather and march in the public domain. Images of women wearing suffrage banners and carrying placards have become familiar emblems of the movement. Women also created broadsheets, newspapers, and pamphlets, endeavors which developed women’s writing, editing, and printing skills and enterprises. Annual celebrations on August 26 in the United States and ‘‘Persons Day’’ in Canada in October commemorate the work of women suffragists and continue to reaffirm women’s participation in the political process. In 1893, New Zealand became the first nation to grant full suffrage to women. As of this writing, the only nation with suffrage rights for its citizens that disallows women voting is Saudi Arabia. The struggle for women’s full political, legal, and social equality with men continues. See also: Activism; Feminisms; Politics; Women’s Movement. References: Baker, Jean H., ed. Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; Errington, Jane. ‘‘Pioneers and Suffragists.’’ In Changing Patterns: Women in Canada. Second edition, eds. Sandra Burt, Lorraine Code, and Lindsay Dorney, 59–91. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993; Ward, Morton M. Woman Suffrage in Mexico. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962.

Joanne M. Donovan and Pauline Greenhill Sunbonnet Sue This popular quilt pattern features a girl in a dress and a sunbonnet that usually obscures her face. The character of Sunbonnet Sue was inspired by popular commercial images by Bertha Corbett and by English children’s book illustrator Kate Greenaway. Greenaway’s books were published beginning in 1875, and her work subsequently appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and Ladies Home Journal of Philadelphia. Bertha Corbett, an American, was later known as ‘‘The Mother of the Sunbonnet Babies.’’ Her Greenawayinspired drawings appeared on holiday cards and were then collected into the first of several books, The Sunbonnet Babies in 1900. These idealized figures of bonneted children were wildly popular in the 1920s and 1930s; they experienced a resurgence in the 1970s and early 1980s with toys like Holly Hobbie and Strawberry Shortcake. American quilters picked up the motif almost immediately; the earliest known Sunbonnet Sue quilts date to as early as 1900. Sue usually appears standing in profile, often holding a flower, basket, or broom. Her face is covered by her bonnet, and usually only the forearm and foot are visible. An emblem of domesticity, she still appears today on aprons, potholders, oven mitts, and day-of-the-week dishtowels featuring Sue busy at different household tasks. Sue was soon given a male companion known by varying names, including Overall Andy, Overall Bill, Farmer Boy, and Lil’ Jake. He usually wears overalls and a straw hat while engaging in gender-appropriate rural activities like fishing or farming. The Sunbonnet Sue pattern has lost favor with many of today’s quilters, who often claim the pattern is too simple or repetitive. Less frequently, they criticize the stereotypical women’s work assigned to Sue, or the fact that

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she is faceless. However, some quilters see Sue’s obscured visage as an advantage; any little girl can envision her own face behind the bonnet. Recently, feminist variants of the Sunbonnet Sue pattern have popped up at quilt shows. Two notable examples are ‘‘Scandalous Sunbonnet Sue,’’ created by an Austin, Texas, quilting group, and ‘‘The Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue,’’ made by the Seamsters Union Local #500 in Lawrence, Kansas. The first features nine panels in which Sue skinny-dips, smokes, and appears dressed as a pregnant bride. The second is a twenty-panel quilt in which Sue is depicted hanging herself, overdosing on drugs, being murdered, or otherwise meeting her demise. In these quilts, women may be expressing through ironic and humorous commentary their own ambivalence or even hostility about the traditional female roles that Sunbonnet Sue seems to epitomize. See also: Coding; Magazines, Girls’ and Women’s; Quiltmaking; Women’s Work. References: Hagerman, Betty J. A Meeting of the Sunbonnet Children. Baldwin City, KS: Telegraphics, Inc., 1979; Hinson, Dolores A. The Sunbonnet Family of Quilt Patterns. New York: Arco Publishing, 1983; Pershing, Linda. ‘‘‘She Really Wanted to Be Her Own Woman’: Scandalous Sunbonnet Sue.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 98–125. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Sarah Catlin-Dupuy Superstition Superstitions articulate folk beliefs and/or ideas through verbal, ritual, and/or customary behavior, sometimes including or referencing material objects, experiences, and natural phenomena. Many are intended to avert misfortune or bad luck, or to bring good luck, but they can relate to almost any aspect of life, including domestic tasks, culinary practices, life cycle events, animal and plant husbandry, and folk medicine. When articulated verbally, superstitions present one or more conditions (either signs or causes) and their results. Of particular interest to folklorists is the relationship between the conditions and their results; underlying many superstitions is a system of conscious or unconscious assumptions about cause and effect. Although most people know and often unconsciously perform superstitions, women and non-White, non-industrial groups are commonly misrepresented as more irrational and, hence, more superstitious than are mainstream White, North American men. This perspective has contributed both to the negative connotations of the term and to the historical association of women with demonic witchcraft and other dangerous practices. It also ignores the fact that many high-status men (for example, professional baseball players) have and perform superstitions. Because the term ‘‘superstition’’ both holds negative connotations and lacks broad cross-cultural relevance, many scholars avoid it. Similarly, some also find the designation ‘‘belief’’ problematic because of its questionable validity in contrast with ‘‘knowledge’’ (Mullen 2000). The folkloristics of superstition reflects its nineteenth-century origin and popularity into the 1980s. Most theorizing on the topic was conducted by men, but substantial collecting was done by women, such as Lady Wilde’s nineteenth-century collections of Irish superstitions and Annie Weston Whitney and Caroline

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Canfield Bullock’s Folk-Lore of Maryland. However, even feminist and gender-sensitive analysis tends not to focus upon or use the genre term ‘‘superstition.’’ Folklorist Gillian Bennett (1999), for example, opts instead for what she calls a ‘‘supernaturalist world view’’ with respect to various forms of experiences and practices of death and the supernatural among English women and men. Nevertheless, feminist folklorists have examined women’s beliefs and practices, and collections of superstitions can be a useful source of information about women’s lives. Many superstitions relate to the intimate and domestic realms of life, often gendered as female concerns, including courtship and weddings, pregnancy, money, home, health, medicinal plants, and social relationships. Superstition is not simply interchangeable with folk belief. Most scholars agree that people rarely express beliefs as direct propositions (for example, ‘‘I believe that breaking a mirror will cause me to have seven years of bad luck’’). Though superstitions may indicate folk beliefs, the latter may be articulated in other ways, such as through narratives (especially legends and memorates, which may contain portents of death and other tragedies), funerary and other life cycle customs (such as practices intended to keep the dead from returning as vampires or revenants), and ballads (such as ‘‘The Walled-Up Wife,’’ which describes foundation sacrifices of women to ensure the successful completion of a construction project). Many people familiar with superstitions do not necessarily believe them to be true, and some perform actions associated with them, but not from a position of firm conviction. Most collections fail to address whether the tradition-bearers from whom the lore was collected actually believe the superstitions they describe, and too often they also lack information about the social contexts in which particular examples are expressed, practiced, or performed. According to folklorist Alan Dundes, ‘‘Superstitions are traditional expressions of one or more conditions and one or more results with some of the conditions signs and others causes’’ (Dundes 1961). Structurally, some comprise only a single condition and result, such as ‘‘If a woman gives away her maternity clothes, she will soon have another baby.’’ Others, including those used for divination purposes, like finding out the name or first initial of a future spouse, have multiple conditions and/or results; for example, ‘‘On May first, if you peel an apple without breaking the peelings, and throw it over your right shoulder, the initials of the first name of your ‘fate’ will be formed.’’ Dundes also identified three categories based on the relationship between the condition(s) and the result(s). Sign superstitions predict future events, such as the arrival of visitors, the weather, or marriage. They often exhibit the structure ‘‘If A, then B’’—a single condition, a single result—such as ‘‘If you drop a knife (condition), a stranger is coming (result).’’ Conditions often are celestial, animal, or plant in nature and thus cannot be controlled by human will; when they do involve human activity, they are typically considered unavoidable, as in the accidental dropping of silverware. Magic superstitions, by contrast, suggest a causal relationship between the condition(s) and the result(s). This type of superstition is used for

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production and prescription, rather than for prediction. Typically, there are multiple conditions, which usually include intentional activity: ‘‘If A and B, then C.’’ For example, ‘‘Borrow a drawing knife (condition), place it under the bed of a woman in confinement (condition), and the pains during and after birth will be greatly decreased (result).’’ Collections of superstitions often contain many magic superstitions associated with fertility and childbirth because of their simultaneously significant and uncertain qualities. Conversion superstitions offer a way to change the undesirable predicted outcomes of sign or magic superstitions. Exhibiting the structure ‘‘If A, then B, unless C,’’ C represents an intentional countermeasure that neutralizes a negative outcome or converts evil to good. For example, ‘‘If you break a mirror (condition), you will have seven years of bad luck (result), unless you put the broken pieces under running water (conversion).’’ Again, the issue is control in an often unpredictable world and an optimistic rejection of negative consequences as inevitable. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many scholars viewed superstitions as remnants of beliefs and practices from earlier stages of human development, or as indications of psychological states. One influential example comes from Sir James George Frazer, a Scottish folklorist and anthropologist (1922). His theory of sympathetic magic articulates the underlying logic of many superstitions, the idea that manipulating one object may produce a corresponding effect on the second. Frazer identified two principles involved. Homeopathic magic, also called the law of similarity, suggests that like produces like, and similar objects may affect one another. Mimetic imitation can enact an event or outcome, so that, for example, the cravings of expectant mothers can cause birthmarks on their children that resemble the desired food. Homeopathic magic underlies many superstitions related to folk medicine. In contrast, the law of contagious or contact magic suggests that objects once in contact continue to affect one another, for good or for ill. For example, a woman might wear her happily married mother’s engagement ring to ensure a happy courtship and marriage for herself. Homeopathic magic is more common, but the two principles are sometimes in play simultaneously. For example, in superstitions about a child’s milk teeth, the law of contagion makes proper disposal necessary because a lost tooth could be used to harm the child even after it is no longer in contact with her/him. Further, some traditional methods of disposal involve throwing a tooth lost from the bottom of the mouth onto the roof, and throwing a top tooth to the ground. Drawing on the law of similarity, these actions imitate the proper growth (upward or downward) of the adult teeth. Many collections of superstitions intended for popular audiences are arranged alphabetically by topic. Some, including the Encyclopaedia of Superstitions (Radford, Radford, and Hole 1961), contain extensive theoretical and analytical discussions of the material. Others, including Iona Opie and Moira Tatem’s A Dictionary of Superstitions (1989), which draws on English and Irish literary and scholarly published works, describe the history of particular traditions. American folklorist Wayland D. Hand (1952) developed a classification system for superstitions containing fourteen

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categories. It has been adopted widely by North American folklorists, including Helen Creighton, whose Bluenose Magic: Popular Beliefs and Superstitions in Nova Scotia (1968) was based on it. Alternatively, many collections of superstitions are based on reports from ethnic, occupational, or other groups. Claudia DeLys’ A Treasury of American Superstitions (1997) is a national collection of American superstitions. Important U.S. regional collections include Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘‘Hoodoo in America’’ (1931) and Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from Utah (Cannon, Hand, and Talley 1984). Often, folklorists discuss superstitions within broader considerations of the folklore of a particular group (for example, Burne 1883 and Hurston 1935). Today, folklorists are concerned with questions of performance and the social contexts in which superstitions emerge. Many studies involve control over and fear of women’s sexuality and reproduction; Rosan Jordan’s work (1985) on the Chicano/a idea of the vaginal serpent, for instance, falls into this category. Further, health educator Mariamne Whatley and folklorist Elissa Henken (2000) discuss the role of misinformation in the formation and transmission of ‘‘false beliefs’’ and superstitions about sexuality and reproduction held by American high school and college students, many of which dangerously and directly implicate women, such as the belief that having sex with a virginal girl cures HIV and AIDS. Irish folklorist Angela Bourke (2001), in a case study that combines feminist and postcolonial theorizing with accounts showing various levels of belief, compellingly shows how late-nineteenth-century fairy superstitions in Ireland could be alternately used by and turned against women. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Courtship; Divination Practices; Folk Belief; Folk Medicine; FortuneTeller; Infertility; Magic; Marriage; Pregnancy; Ritual; Sexuality; Vaginal Serpent; Vampire; Walled-Up Wife; Wedding; Witchcraft, Historical. References: Badone, Ellen. ‘‘Death Omens in a Breton Memorate.’’ Folklore, vol. 98, no. 1 (1987): 99–104; Bennett, Gillian. ‘‘Alas, Poor Ghost!’’: Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999; Bourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story. New York: Penguin Books, 2001; Burne, Charlotte. Shropshire Folklore: A Sheaf of Gleanings from the Notebooks of Georgina F. Jackson. London: Trench Trubner, 1883; Cannon, Anthon S., Wayland Debs Hand, and Jeannine Talley. Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from Utah. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984; Creighton, Helen. Bluenose Magic: Popular Beliefs and Superstitions in Nova Scotia. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968; DeLys, Claudia. A Treasury of American Superstitions. New York: Gramercy Books, 1997; Dundes, Alan. ‘‘The Structure of Superstition.’’ Midwest Folklore 11 (1961): 25–33; Frankel, Barbara. Childbirth in the Ghetto: Folk Beliefs of Negro Women in a North Philadelphia Hospital Ward. San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1977; Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. One volume, abridged edition. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1979 [1922]; Hall, James. ‘‘Health-Africa: Traditional Healers Denounce AIDS Superstitions.’’ Global Information Network, Interpress Service, 2002; Hand, Wayland, ed. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1952; Hurston, Zora Neale. ‘‘Hoodoo in America.’’ Journal of American Folklore 64 (1931): 317–417; ———. Mules and Men. Reprint edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978 (1935); Jordan, Rosan A. ‘‘The Vaginal Serpent and Other Themes from Mexican-American Women’s Lore.’’ In Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, eds. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik, 26–44. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

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Press, 1985; Mullen, Patrick B. ‘‘Belief and the American Folk.’’ Journal of American Folklore 113 (2000): 119–143; Opie, Iona Archibald, and Moira Tatem. A Dictionary of Superstitions. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989; Radford, Edwin, Mona A. Radford, and Christina Hole, eds. Encyclopedia of Superstitions. Revised and enlarged edition. London: Hutchinson, 1961; Spiro, Alison M. ‘‘Najar or Bhut—Evil Eye or Ghost Affliction: Gujarati Views about Illness Causation.’’ Anthropology & Medicine, vol. 12, no. 1 (2005): 61–73; Sutton, Maureen. We Didn’t Know Aught: A Study of Sexuality, Superstition, and Death in Women’s Lives in Lincolnshire during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Stamford, Lincolnshire: Paul Watkins, 1992; Whatley, Mariamne H., and Elissa R. Henken. Did You Hear About the Girl Who . . . ?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, and Human Sexuality. New York: New York University Press, 2000; Whitney, Annie Weston, and Caroline Canfield Bullock. Folk-lore from Maryland. New York: American Folklore Society, 1925; Wilde, Lady. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, with Sketches of the Irish Past. London: Chatto & Windus, 1919; Winslow, David J. ‘‘Occupational Superstitions of Negro Prostitutes in an Upstate New York City.’’ New York Folklore Quarterly, vol. 24 (1968): 294–301.

Linda J. Lee and Pauline Greenhill

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T Text A text is a fixed representation of the performed folklore event. As a mere representation, the folklore text is limited in its ability to convey the complexity of live events, which are fluid and allow for multiple perspectives. In contrast, a text is fixed and often privileges a single perspective. Thus, a folkloric text should not be thought as folklore itself, but rather as a shell of the actual event. Although not folklore, texts are essential to the study of folklore because they preserve aspects of oral or kinetic performances that would otherwise leave no record. In this way, texts make possible comparative approaches to expressive culture by allowing records of disparate live events to be analyzed next to one another. In the past, folklorists depended heavily on textualized versions of folklore, especially in studying verbal folklore; at an earlier point in the discipline’s history, their primary scholarly pursuit was, in fact, to trace the diffusion of narratives and to seek the original sources of variant folklore texts. While folklore texts are still useful in the study of folklore, the shortcomings of texts as being sufficient in themselves have been illuminated by the development of folklore performance theory and the closely related concept of ethnography of speaking in the 1970s. Prior to this time, others had noted the inadequacy of texts alone, and Elizabeth Fine, an influential contemporary thinker on the subject, sees early attempts to emphasize context over text in the work of some of the field’s pioneering scholars, especially that of Bronislaw Malinowski, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, Edward Sapir, and Richard Dorson (Fine 1984). However, performance theory has standardized and further explored such positions. As a result, text has increasingly been viewed as dependant on its context for meaning. Furthermore, Jeff Todd Titon notes that performance theory’s movement away from texts resulted in ‘‘a sensitivity to the human exchanges involved in fieldwork, as folklorists did away with the notion that they were merely collecting data’’ (2003). Today, text is still a vital area of study, and the ideal text will contain contextual markers that hint at non-verbal cues, social settings, group interaction,

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and so forth. This extended analytic approach has implications for the study of gender and folklore because it foregrounds issues of identity. On this subject, Margaret Yocom argues, ‘‘When we pay attention to how a game is played, how a quilt is put together, how an interview is conducted, new interpretations of the products and of the roles of women players and creators stand before our eyes’’ (1993: 120). Also, because performance-oriented approaches cover so many types of communication, the definition of texts has expanded in recent years to include not only written documents, but also material culture, rituals, customs, and a variety of cultural manifestations. Almost anything that carries communicative value can be thought of as a text, and can be therefore be studied and analyzed within its performance context. One effect of this wider scope of inquiry is the study of gendered expressive culture that may have been overlooked in the past. See also: Fieldwork; Gender. References: Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. ‘‘Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 59–88; Dolby, Sandra K. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; Fine, Elizabeth C. The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984; Radner, Joan Newlon. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Titon, Jeff Todd. ‘‘Text.’’ In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, ed. Burt Feintuch, 69–98. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003; Yocom, Margaret R. ‘‘Waking Up the Dead: Old Texts and New Critical Directions.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 119– 29. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

David A. Allred Tradition Tradition commonly refers to a particular body of knowledge (traditional knowledge), a way of life (traditional culture), or a type of practice or object (a tradition or traditional art). The implications of the term’s Latin root tradere, ‘‘to give, to deliver, to hand down’’ remain in common usage; tradition is most often understood to be that which is passed from generation to generation, or as the process of handing down traditional knowledge or folklore. While references to the past remain central to common usages of the term, in recent decades, scholars have argued that defining tradition in temporal terms is of limited use. In his 1975 presidential address to the American Folklore Society, Dell Hymes argued that the concept of tradition was central to Folklore Studies, but advocated that it be understood as rooted not in time but in social life and in process, suggesting a shift to the use of the term ‘‘traditionalize.’’ In 1983, historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger gained the attention of folklorists with the study of what they called ‘‘invented traditions,’’ practices that make false claims to longevity and/or continuity that are ‘‘formally instituted,’’ and that ‘‘seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior’’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger: 1). At about the same time, Dan Ben-Amos surveyed the usage of ‘‘tradition’’ as it evolved through the history of the field of Folklore, identifying ‘‘seven strands’’ of usage: tradition as lore, canon, process, mass, culture, language, and performance. Also in 1984, Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin argued that ‘‘the ongoing reconstruction of tradition is a facet of all social life,

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which is not natural but symbolically constituted’’ (Handler and Linnekin: 276). All traditions, they argued, are invented, and therefore ‘‘traditions are neither genuine nor spurious’’ (ibid.: 288). In 1993, Jennifer Fox argued that Johann Gottfried von Herder—the eighteenth-century thinker not only long referred to as the father of Romantic Nationalism but also seen as an early central figure in the development of what became the discipline of Folklore— understood ‘‘the very essence of tradition [as] masculine’’ and patriarchy as the ‘‘natural’’ state of human beings (Fox in Hollis et al.: 34). In addition to theorizing about the scholarly use of the term ‘‘tradition,’’ folklorists, feminists in particular, have developed theories and techniques for the documentation and interpretation of women’s traditions—a complex task. As Amy Shuman points out in her 1993 critique of folklore genre theory, feminist folklorists ‘‘are always faced with the conflicting possibilities of traditional forms as oppressive or liberating’’ (in Hollis et al.: 71). Interpretation has often involved attempts to untangle distinctions between cultural practices that may reinscribe normative gender roles and expectations, and traditions that can be understood as critiques (often coded) of patriarchal traditions. Studies of women’s traditions have focused on shared cultural practices and common knowledge of such practices within communities of women defined by factors as narrow as participation in an art form or occupation, and as wide as shared geographic region, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and even gender. Such studies have not limited their definitions of tradition to practices that are time-honored, but have included those that have become traditionalized, including women’s creation and use of homosocial female spaces, the valuing (or lack thereof) of women’s traditions and traditions stereotyped as female, the movement of women into male-dominated traditions, comparisons between women’s and men’s traditions, and the expression of resistance. Material-culture studies have included the documentation of traditions that are commonly understood to be the domain of women, such as quilting. Studies of textile traditions have focused on such areas as individual and community aesthetics, pattern and variation, materials, and functions. Studies of women’s quilting traditions reveal that quilting materials, patterns, and techniques vary by region and community as well as by personal taste. For instance, while a quilter in rural Saskatchewan insists on using fortrel as her fabric of choice in all of her quilts, participants in a Mennonite quilting tradition would use this synthetic fabric only for everyday quilts (Shantz in Greenhill and Tye). Quilting and other textile traditions have provided women with opportunities to interact with one another in female-dominated spaces. In 1985, Susan Roach pointed out that quilts had been studied exclusively as art objects separated from the contexts of their production and use (Roach in Jordan and Kalcik). Although the coming together of a large group of quilters may make quiltmaking easier and faster, such practical considerations are not the only way to understand the quilting context. Based on her ethnographic analysis of a 1974 quilting bee, Roach concluded that the quilt can be understood ‘‘as a practical household object, as an object or means

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of social interaction and family reaffirmation and continuation, as an art object, and as a vehicle to express cultural beliefs and worldview’’ (Roach in Jordan and Kalcik: 64). Similarly, Joyce Ice discovered through fieldwork with a quilting club in central Texas ‘‘that women value the process as well as the products of quilt-making’’ as they bring work and play together in a group setting that is dominated by women (Ice in Hollis et al.: 174). Because of the association of women with textiles, such traditions have provided women with an instrument for the expression of social and political commentary. Linda Pershing argues that the 1985 creation of a ‘‘ribbon around the Pentagon,’’ sewn together out of fabric panels made by women from across the United States to protest the nuclear arms race, can be understood within a larger tradition in which women have used their needlework to make political statements. Examples of this range from the quilting bee at which Susan B. Anthony made her first speech in favor of women’s rights, to Chilean women’s arpilleras (patchwork appliques) depicting life under the Pinochet regime (Pershing in Hollis et al.: 338–339). Also within this tradition, women have inverted traditional quilt patterns such as ‘‘Sunbonnet Sue,’’ expressing feminist messages ‘‘through a coding process of appropriation and inversion, providing both a ‘safe’ and critical commentary on social and gender-specific norms’’ (Pershing in Radner: 118). Knitting clothing for dolls and teddy bears provided women of Rangeley, Maine, with an outlet to express their values in ‘‘a seemingly trivial but safe form’’ at a time of rapid change in their community (Yocom in Radner: 149). In addition to textiles, material-culture traditions such as pottery also provide women with the means to comment on the world around them. Cochiti Pueblo potter Helen Cordero transformed the traditional ‘‘singing lady’’ figure, an openmouthed female figure holding a bowl or a child, into a male storyteller—a male figure, also open-mouthed, surrounded by children. Barbara Babcock argues that because in Pueblo culture, pottery is a women’s tradition while storytelling is an exclusively male tradition within which men appropriate and perform the female power of fertility, this inversion of the traditional figure is ‘‘a reappropriation of [a woman’s] own symbolic power’’ (Babcock in Radner: 239). The documentation of the oral traditions of women has been an important area of study as well. Feminist folklorists have argued that women and men have separate traditions of telling tall tales (Mark in Hollis, et al.), family storytelling (Baldwin in Jordan and Kalcik), and joke telling (Mitchell in Jordan and Kalcik). Women’s oral traditions often involve the expression of coded resistance, as in the case of Irish women’s lament poetry, through which women express messages of anger and humor as well as warnings to young women (Bourke in Radner). On the other hand, Gail Kligman has interpreted Romanian wedding traditions as a ritual in which women use shouted verse to instruct a bride about her subordinate role in the home of her new mother-in-law. In Kligman’s analysis women reinforce patriarchal social rules as they exert power over other women through the use of this particular genre of verse in the public context of the wedding. Musical traditions such as rap provide an opportunity for Black women to resist traditional gender roles and offer alternatives to images of women as

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delicate and as sex objects. Folklorist Cheryl Keyes (2002) argues that many Black women rappers express explicitly feminist messages about the rap world and about Black women’s oppression more generally. Similarly, mariachi—a musical tradition dominated by men—has provided Chicanas such as Leonor X ochitl Perez with opportunities to move outside the bounds of prescribed gender roles while performing; yet, a glass ceiling remains, keeping women from fully participating in shaping the tradition (Perez in Cant u and Najera-Ramirez). Traditional events, customs, and rituals have also been studied from women’s perspectives as they create and reform traditions. Women successfully made a space for themselves within the male-dominated charreada, or Mexican rodeo, as members of la escaramuza charra (the all-female precision riding team) (Najera-Ramirez in Cant u and Najera-Ramirez). Women once held only supportive roles within the charreada tradition, roles that did not include the performance of equestrian skills. Through their strategic efforts ‘‘to reform rather than eliminate a patriarchal tradition’’ (ibid.: 209), women were first able to exhibit their skills through the inclusion of the escaramuza event in the charreada, and in 1991, gained the right not only to perform but also to compete. Women’s traditions extend to customs such as non-verbal coding strategies. Historically, body rhetoric such as mannerisms and ways of walking, sitting, making eye contact, and smoking have provided members of lesbian communities with the means of identifying other lesbians and ‘‘encouraging group cohesion’’ (Blincoe and Forest: 119). The role of women in the Sicilian American tradition of having an altar to St. Joseph may appear at first glance to be one of acquiescence to a historically patriarchal familial system in which women are subservient to men and the family. Yet, Turner and Seriff argue, this tradition can also be read as a ‘‘communitywide expression of the power of women’s work both within the context of the St. Joseph’s story and the social practice of everyday life’’ (in Hollis et al.; 93). In Mexico and in Mexican communities in the United States, the quincea~ nera is a traditional coming-of-age ritual celebration for young women reaching the age of fifteen. More recently, ~ the cincuentanera has become a traditionalized ritual based on the quinceaera, but one that celebrates the later stages of a woman’s life, after fifty (Cant u in Cant u and Najera-Ramirez). The study of women’s traditions offers important opportunities to learn more about the lives of women in North America. Just as importantly, studying traditions with a gendered lens offers opportunities to continue to learn about tradition. See also: Altar, Home; Coding; Cowgirl; Glass Ceiling; HipHop Culture/Rap; Joke; Lament; Lesbian Folklore; Material Culture; Pottery; ~ Quiltmaking; Quinceanera; Ritual; Storytelling; Wedding; Women’s Folklore; Women’s Work. References: Ben-Amos, Dan. ‘‘The Seven Strands of Tradition: Varieties in Its Meaning in American Folklore Studies.’’ Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 21, nos. 2/3 (1984): 97–131; Blincoe, Deborah, and John Forest, eds. Prejudice and Pride: Lesbian and Gay Traditions in America. Special Issue of New York Folklore, vol. xix, nos. 1/2 (1993); Cant u, Norma E., and Olga Najera-Ramı´rez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Greenhill, Pauline, and Diane

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Tye, eds. Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997; Handler, Richard, and Jocelyn Linnekin. ‘‘Tradition, Genuine or Spurious.’’ Journal of American Folklore 97 (1984): 273–290; Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; Hollis, Susan, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, eds. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Hymes, Dell. ‘‘Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 88, no. 350 (1975): 345–369; Jordan, Rosan A., and Susan J. Kalcik. Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985; Keyes, Cheryl. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002; Kligman, Gail. ‘‘The Rites of Women: Oral Poetry, Ideology, and the Socialization of Peasant Women in Contemporary Romania.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 97, no. 384 (1984): 167–188; Pershing, Linda. ‘‘Peace Work out of Piecework: Feminist Needlework Metaphors and the Ribbon around the Pentagon.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 327–57. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Radner, Joan N., ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Ann Ferrell

Tradition-Bearer A tradition-bearer is a person who carries (or bears) the authentic traditions of a folk group. She or he may carry or perform any traditional folklore genre, such as folktales, jokes, folksongs, quilting, carving, etc. The term ‘‘traditional artist,’’ preferred by cultural and traditional arts organizations (especially for tradition-bearers of folk art, music, and some material-culture traditions), is often used interchangeably with ‘‘tradition-bearer.’’ Some scholars use the terms ‘‘informant,’’ ‘‘narrator,’’ ‘‘cultural consultant,’’ ‘‘field consultant,’’ or ‘‘collaborator’’ to refer to the tradition-bearers from whom they collect folklore. Historically, folklorists have sought to work with key tradition-bearers in a given community, among whom women are frequently the most important, both for folklore forms typically associated with women and for forms held by both men and women. Female tradition-bearers have been significant contributors to narrative collections, and in recent times, folklorists have made numerous studies of individual tradition-bearers. Bengt Holbek’s repertoire analysis of Evald Tang Christiansen’s Danish materials demonstrates that female narrators tell stories about male and female protagonists, while most men tell primarily stories with male protagonists. Dorothea Viehmann was one of the key informants for Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s early nineteenth€ century Kinder- und Hausmarchen, and Agatuzza Messia was one of the principle tradition-bearers for Fiabe, novelle, e racconti popolari Sicilian, (Sicilian folktales, novellas, and stories), Giuseppe Pitre’s 1875 four-volume collection of Sicilian folktales (Pitre 1982). More recently, Asian Indian anthropologist and folklorist Kirin Narayan’s Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (Narayan and Sood 1997) is a collection of narratives told by her collaborator, Urmila Devi Sood. Zsuzanna Palk o, who received the title Master of Folk Art from the Hungarian Communist government in 1954, was Linda Degh’s most important source for her collection of Hungarian folktales (Palk o and Degh 1995).

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Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow distinguished between ‘‘active bearers’’ and ‘‘passive bearers’’ of tradition (von Sydow 1948). An active bearer is usually a skilled performer who tells jokes or folktales, sings folksongs, cooks traditional ethnic dishes, or plays a traditional instrument; she actively transmits the folklore of a particular folk group. A passive bearer is someone who simply observes it and is familiar with it, someone who knows an item of folklore but does not actively transmit it to others. Barre Teolken, for example, reports that after spending many years doing fieldwork with Navajo men, he finally realized that a female relative of his primary informant had a wealth of knowledge regarding Navajo folkways, but because she had shied away from sharing it, he hadn’t looked to her as an informant (Toelken 2004). Refuting earlier superorganic and automigration transmission theories, von Sydow argued that folklore could be transmitted only when one active bearer met another active bearer and performed for that person. In any given community, there are typically only a few active bearers of a particular traditional form, and the majority of the community is composed of passive bearers. As von Sydow makes clear, a particular tradition-bearer may be an active bearer of some traditions, a passive bearer of some traditions, and completely ignorant of others. Thus, a tradition-bearer may be active or passive in regard to a given tradition, depending on whether or not she performs that tradition. See also: Folk Group; Folk Music; Folktale; Storytelling; Tradition; Women’s Folklore. References: Goldstein, Kenneth S. ‘‘On the Application of the Concepts of Active and Inactive Traditions to the Study of Repertory.’’ In Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, eds. A. Paredes and R. Bauman, 80–86. Bloomington, IN: Trickster Press, 1972; Grimm, Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm, and Jack David Zipes. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Third expanded edition. New York: Bantam Books, 2003; Holbek, Bengt. Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Danish Folklore in a European Perspective. Folklore Fellows Communications no. 239. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1987; Narayan, Kirin, and Urmila Devi Sood. Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; Palk o, Zsuzanna, and Linda Degh. Hungarian Folktales: The Art of Zsuzsanna Palk o. World Folktale Library, vol. 2. New York: Garland Publications, 1995; Pitre, Giuseppe. Fiabe, novelle, e racconti popolari siciliani. Four volumes. Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari siciliane, vol. IV–VII. Palermo: Edikronos, 1982 [1875]; Toelken, Barre. ‘‘Beauty Behind Me, Beauty Before Me.’’ Journal of American Folklore vol. 117, no. 466 (Fall 2004): 441–445; von Sydow, C. W. ‘‘On the Spread of Tradition.’’ In Selected Papers on Folklore, ed. L. B dker, 11–18. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Baggers Forlag, 1948.

Linda J. Lee Transgender Folklore Transgendered people come from every race, ethnicity, nation, and culture; the demographic includes transsexuals (pre- and postoperative femaleto-male and male-to female); drag queens and kings (who identify as their birth gender but perform for the public as the opposite gender); fetishistic cross-dressers (people of both genders who generally identify with their birth gender but dress as the opposite gender for personal or sexual reasons); political ‘‘genderqueers’’ (usually young people who retain their birth gender, but project androgynous and deliberately gender-confusing personas

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for personal or political reasons); and those who locate themselves somewhere between male and female. There is some overlap in the transgender and intersex demographics (intersexuals are born with some of the physical characteristics of both males and females), partly because a high percentage of intersexuals apply for sex-change operations as adults. Transgendered people are a diverse and widely misunderstood population. Most people in modern Western society currently see the transgendered population as confusing, mysterious, titillating, sexually perverted, mentally ill, or socially deluded. Individuals who do not fit into the socially gendered roles of their era have always confused and often enraged the rest of their community. This has led to a murder rate of transsexuals in the United States estimated at sixteen times the national average (Kolakowski 1999), sustained by violent individuals whose ideas about gender are threatened by the existence of those who live their lives in the interstices between masculinity and femininity. According to the Gender Public Advocacy Campaign’s (GPAC) 2006 report detailing the murders of people who transgressed normative gender boundaries, a majority of the victims (91 percent of those for whom race was known) were young people of Color. Additionally, the report found that 92 percent were biological males who presented varying degrees of femininity. There are two types of folklore associated with transgendered persons, often separated by a heartbreakingly wide abyss: the stories told about transgendered people by non-trans individuals, and the stories that transgendered people tell each other. Echoes of ancient transgendered lives come down to us in tales of god/desses and mythic figures as diverse as the Greek Dionysos and Athena, the Hindu Shiva, the Anatolian Agdistis, the AfroCaribbean Obatala and Ellegua, and the hermaphroditic medieval European Baphomet. These are figures that mirror modern transgendered individuals surprisingly closely; as living archetypes in the community, they reflect the fact that although medical intervention is a recent phenomenon, transgender existence is not. We also find clear precedents for transsexuality in the histories of the transgendered Roman Gallae priestesses and the hijra priestesses of India. Many (though not all) tribal societies developed special roles for those who preferred to take on opposite-sex roles. Folktales, ballads, and histories tell of women who dressed and lived as men, not only for short periods of time (in order to fight as soldiers, for example), but for their entire lives. Historically, when transgendered people have banded together for support, they compared personal-experience narratives, privately accepting the diversity of their lives while simultaneously attempting to create a homogenous, non-threatening, and socially sympathetic story for public consumption. Today, transgender support groups and political organizations are gaining ground and visibility and becoming better positioned to educate the general population. They are working to correct the idea that transgender is the extreme end of a gay or lesbian continuum—gender preference has little correlation with sexual preference, and transsexuals may consider themselves heterosexual or bisexual, lesbian or gay, before and after transition. They also address questions about how sex-reassignment happens, in what

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contexts, and whether it results from necessity, delusion, or political ‘‘gender treachery’’ (taking on an opposite-gendered role in order to gain social privileges). Decades of outward compliance with the standards and stereotypes of ‘‘gatekeeper’’ mental health professionals have had a dampening influence on the formation and cohesion of transgender culture. Past ‘‘standards of care’’ demanded that newly transitioned transsexuals isolate themselves from anyone who had known them in their former lives, that they create new lives for themselves without ever telling anyone who and what they had once been. Transsexuality was the only mental health condition in which the accepted treatment was that patients lie for the rest of their lives. In spite of this, the most vibrant segment of the transgender demographic (and the one most aware of itself as a genuine subculture) was that of urban male-to-female transsexual and drag queen sex workers. Much of the transgender community’s esoteric folklore was based on the underground lives of transwomen prostitutes, the underclass largely responsible for the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 in New York City, an event now celebrated worldwide as the beginning of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement. One especially obdurate misconception is that few women are transgendered, when, in fact, genetic females are as likely to be transgendered as genetic males. Many transgendered people have become or are becoming women, once lived as women, live as women while not identifying as such, or consider themselves at least partly female. Anecdotally, the number of femaleto-male transsexuals has recently caught up to that of male-to-females in North America, and there are more female-bodied genderqueers. Still, there is much controversy about whether changing one’s body with hormones and surgery is enough to warrant the status of women, or to remove it. As a result, women’s political groups have been generally suspicious of transgender people and slow to incorporate them as allies. Women’s social groups have been even slower. However, increasing numbers of researchers are discovering that the best way to get an objective view of gender is to elicit information about it directly from individuals who have experienced more than one physical and/or social gender. The slow emergence of a transgender perspective may ultimately help to revolutionize how women and men see one another, and themselves. See also: Activism; Ballad; Cross-Dressing; Folktale; Gender; Lesbian and Queer Studies; Personal-Experience Narrative; Politics; Sexuality; Violence. References: Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw. New York: Routledge Press, 1994; Califia, Pat. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997; Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books. 1993; Kaldera, Raven. Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook. Philadelphia: Xlibris Press, 2001; Kolakowski, Vickey. ‘‘Another Transgender Murder.’’ Bay Area Reporter (San Francisco), vol. 29, no. 14 (April 8, 1999): 14; Rubin, Henry. Self-Made Men: Identity, Embodiment, and Transition among Transsexual Men. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003; Tady, Megan. ‘‘Transgender People Face Violence, Obstacles.’’ The New Standard. January 15, 2007. http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/4103 (accessed August 11, 2008); Transgender Petition to the United Nations. http://transgen derunity.blogspot.com (accessed August 11, 2008).

Raven Kaldera

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V Vagina Dentata Latin for ‘‘toothed vagina,’’ the vagina dentata motif (AT F547.1.1) is found in the folklore of cultures all over the world and during different periods of history. The motif presents the image of a vagina with teeth, with several variants emerging from this initial symbol, including the vaginal crab and the vaginal piranha. Images of the dangerous, devouring vagina express male fear of castration during intercourse. The motif appears in Native American mythology in several different cultural groups’ creation stories about women. The narrative usually describes how the first women to appear on Earth had teeth in their vaginas, making it impossible for men to have intercourse with them without being castrated. The men appeal to a culture hero (a mythological figure who teaches a people its lifeways) to create a super-phallus to break off the women’s teeth. He does so and gets the women to have intercourse with him. The teeth break, and the women become ‘‘safe’’ for copulation. The origin of the clitoris is at times attributed to a single remaining tooth. In Indian mythology, the Hindu goddess Kali is often associated with the idea of the terrible mother who devours her children. She is often shown with a necklace of skulls, representing her mastery over death with polyphallic symbolism. The association of castration, death, and sexual pleasure are all fears that the vagina dentata motif addresses in its many forms. In psychoanalytic thought, pioneer Karen Horney explains how a general fear of women, which she calls the ‘‘dread of woman,’’ is a male fear that is projected upon women. In this assertion, she contradicts Sigmund Freud’s idea that women have a naturally castrating nature due to the condition of penis envy, or the desire for a penis. Horney concludes that the notion of penis envy is a male fantasy that justifies misogyny and sexual repression of women (Horney: 351). The motif expresses itself in urban legends and sexual folklore about women. One lasting urban legend that uses the image of the castrating vagina involves an anti-rape device resembling a vagina dentata. Recently, a new variant of the device, called Rapex, developed by a South African inventor,

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Sonette Ehlers, has appeared in Internet folklore. The story is that in 2005, Ehlers invented a female condom lined with barbs and worn in the vagina like a diaphragm. A rapist would have to have the barbs surgically removed. Ehlers is reported on the Internet as saying that she was inspired to invent the device after hearing a victim say, ‘‘If only I had teeth down there.’’ In popular culture, the motif has flourished especially in the genre of horror films; it can be found in the representation of the female shark in Jaws, and in the presentation of the ship and the alien in the film Alien (Creed 1993). In 2002, the adult cartoon South Park cautioned that the females of an alien species were especially dangerous to males: ‘‘The Gelgamek vagina is three feet wide and filled with razor-sharp teeth! Do you really expect us to have sex with them?’’ (South Park #608). The idea of the monstrous feminine, or the grotesque and abjected female body, especially the vagina, and its secretions like blood, are all projected in images about women and death in popular culture and literature. Extensions of this connection between horror, the abject female form, and the devouring feminine in popular culture are also found in increasingly popular images of women as androids, or fembots, to express successful male control of women and their association with the destructive forces of nature. This kind of representation of women and their sexuality as essentially devouring, destructive, and monstrous reaffirms the patriarchal notion that women, in their ‘‘natural’’ state, must be controlled to preserve social order. What is perhaps most unfortunate about these representations of the female body is the manner in which women have internalized these ideas of insatiability and have been forced into self-mortification and the restriction of the female form. The rise of eating disorders in the economic North is especially related to the notion of controlling the dangerous female appetite. In patriarchal societies, a woman in control of her appetites, sexual and otherwise, is a woman who has mastered herself and her potential for destruction. She is now ‘‘safe’’ for others, but remains dangerous to herself. See also: Film; Legend, Urban/Contemporary; Popular Culture; Sexuality. References: Caputi, Jane. Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture. New York: Popular Press, 2004; Carr, P., and W. Gingerich. ‘‘The vagina dentata motif in Nahuatl and Pueblo mythic narratives: A comparative study.’’ In Smoothing the Ground, 187–203. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983; Chagnon, Napoleon A. Yanomamo: The Fierce People. New York: Holt, Reinhardt, & Winston, 1968; Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993; Feminist Mormon Housewives.com. ‘‘‘Vagina Dentata’: Rapex, the anti-rape female condom.’’ Posted May 31, 2007. http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/?p¼1105 (accessed August 11, 2008); Horney, Karen. ‘‘The dread of woman.’’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 8 (1932): 348–360; Jordan, Rosan A. ‘‘Query on vagina dentata anti-rape device.’’ Folklore Feminists Communication 2 (1974): 10; Legman, Gershon. The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1964; Otero, Solimar. ‘‘‘Fearing Our Mothers’: An Overview of the Psychoanalytic Theories Concerning the Vagina Dentata Motif F547.1.1.’’ The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 56, no. 3 (1996): 269–288; South Park #608. ‘‘Red Hot Catholic Love.’’ Aired July 3, 2002, on Comedy Central.

Solimar Otero

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Vaginal Serpent This motif refers to the belief that a snake or another reptile or amphibian enters women’s vaginas, surreptitiously and/or by force. The belief may be the focus for legendary or personal narratives. Though certainly known to men in some contexts, this idea seems particularly to be an aspect of women’s folklore. As a theme, the vaginal serpent seems to be known in a number of cultures, but it has not been widely studied. A number of vaginal serpent narratives have been collected from Mexican American women. In one such story, a vaginal serpent enters a young woman and she appears to be pregnant, thus causing her shame; she is left alone by her family, who return to find that she is dead and that she has given birth to creatures who are devouring her. In another tale, a young woman similarly appears pregnant but is saved by a wise old woman who understands what has actually taken place. In a third story, women who are taking food to their husbands in the fields are whistled at and chased by a serpent, and one who is pregnant and falls behind is actually attacked by the serpent; the baby is born and strangled by the snake. In Mexican tradition, such stories usually feature a chirrionera (snake) or an ajolote (an axolotl, the larval stage of the salamander). The colonial writer Bernardino de Sahag un warns women of the danger of impregnation while swimming in waters inhabited by axolotls. In both African American and Ozark Anglo American tales, women swallow a lizard or some sort of eggs and, like the women from Mexican American tradition, seemingly become pregnant. In an African American narrative, a girl is shamed but the truth is discovered; in an Ozark tale, a woman gives birth to a water moccasin and is never again mentally stable. Thus, the vaginal serpent theme may bear some relation to the belief that humans sometimes inadvertently swallow the eggs or larvae of certain creatures, with various consequences. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story ‘‘The Bosom Serpent’’ (1846) uses that idea, with the serpent that grows inside the body of a character becoming symbolic of moral guilt. The vaginal serpent theme may also bear some relation to the vagina dentata motif, that is, the toothed vagina which detaches penises. And it has some similarity to predominantly male traditions of sexual jocularity in which a snake or other creature appears in a vagina. There is an Ozark folktale in which a young woman gets an eel trapped in her sex organ; it has to be removed through intercourse with the local idiot. And there is an obscene Anglo American folksong, popular in rugby-playing circles, called ‘‘Charlotte the Harlot,’’ about a prostitute with a rattlesnake ‘‘up inside.’’ Whatever the similarities of these related traditions, however, the vaginal serpent theme would seem to be expressive of female fears and anxieties about male sexuality, especially given the fairly obvious phallic symbolism of a snake and the aggressive nature of the serpents that seek to enter vaginas through assault. They may also express, if less directly, anxieties related to pregnancy and childbirth. See also: Assault, Supernatural; Pregnancy; Sexuality; Women’s Folklore.

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References: Jordan, Rosan A. ‘‘The Vaginal Serpent and Other Themes from MexicanAmerican Women’s Lore.’’ In Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, eds. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kaclik, 26–44. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

Rosan A. Jordan Valentine’s Day The origins of Valentine’s Day, celebrated on February 14th as a day of romantic love and courtship, are murky. Although the link is unsubstantiated, its precursor may be Lupercalia, the Roman spring feast of fertility in which, as part of the festivities, men chose a sweetheart by drawing a woman’s name from an urn. Equally unclear are the origins of St. Valentine himself, since there were many early Christians by this name. The day is usually associated with two third-century Christian martyrs who were executed on February 14th: a bishop of that name in Terni, and a priest in Rome. Legends explicitly link St. Valentine to romantic love by describing his defiance of Emperor Claudius II’s ban on marriages, prompted by his belief that married men would be less willing to serve in his army. It is said that one or the other of these Valentines ignored the decree and continued to marry couples; he was eventually arrested, imprisoned, and put to death. Other legends tell of Valentine’s love for the jailor’s daughter, to whom he would write love notes signed, ‘‘From your Valentine.’’ By the Middle Ages, February 14th was believed to be the day that birds chose their mates. The early and widespread activity of drawing lots to choose a valentine prompted young people, especially young women, to connect Valentine’s Day with divination. The exchange of handmade valentines dates from at least the mid-1700s. Commercially manufactured cards were available by 1800 and widely popular by the 1840s. Esther Howland of Worchester, Massachusetts, established a very successful business in the late 1840s as the first large producer of ornate, lace-trimmed valentines in the United States. By 1895, American confectionary manufacturers were capitalizing on market potential by offering candy for sale in special heart-shaped boxes. In his study of the evolution of Valentine’s Day in the United States, Leigh Eric Schmidt (1995) notes that merchants especially linked the holiday with children and women. Advertisements of the 1850s showed women and girls getting valentines from their sweethearts, and these images, along with the production of valentine greetings for children, reinforced what has become a long-standing tradition: the exchange of valentines among schoolchildren. Earlier Valentine’s Day’s observances were simultaneously liberating and restraining for women. Some women used valentines to express their romantic interest and found the anonymous practical jokes sometimes played on Valentine’s Day (in the 1850s and possibly earlier), as well as the anonymous exchange of valentine greetings, freeing in that it allowed them to temporarily step out of their social roles. On the other hand, comic valentines that became popular in the nineteenth century often explicitly targeted unruly women. Their negative satirical message was experienced as a particularly powerful one at the point when the organized struggle for women’s rights was just beginning to emerge.

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Today, Valentine’s Day generates brisk sales of cards, candy, and flowers, and is enthusiastically celebrated by school-age children. New associations continue to develop; for example, the American Heart Association has designated February as ‘‘heart month.’’ See also: Crafting; Joke; Legend, Religious; Paperfolding and Papercutting. References: Cohen, Hennig, and Tristram Potter Coffin, eds. The Folklore of American Holidays. Third edition. Detroit and London: Gale, 1999; Lee, Ruth Webb. A History of Valentines. Wellesley, MA: Lee Publications, 1952; Santino, Jack. All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in America. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994; Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Diane Tye Vampire A vampire is the spirit of a dead person that returns to haunt the living. Although generally imagined as a corporeal entity by North Americans today, the traditional vampires of Eastern Europe and Western Asia could also be disembodied spirits akin to poltergeists. A vampire may or may not drink the blood of its victims. Historically, the vampire figure has had a strong tendency to be male, occasionally accompanied by supernatural females; however, in recent years we see a shift in pop-culture vampire films and literature toward female vampires living alone or with male consorts. In the folklore of many Eastern European countries, vampires usually attack their relatives first, frequently killing them, and continue to assault everyone in the vicinity until they are destroyed, typically by their own family members. Traditional ways of preventing a corpse from becoming a vampire and/or of destroying one once it has risen from its grave include driving a wooden stake (typically ash or hawthorn) through the heart; burning the body and throwing the ashes into running water; decapitation; pinning the body to the ground (usually with a wooden stake); and burying the body upside down. Vampires are said to be generated in a variety of ways, including cases of suicides buried in consecrated ground; violent death; improper burial; disproportionate mourning; being born with a caul (the amniotic sac covering the head of a newborn); or being the seventh son born to a family. However, seventh sons and those born with cauls, along with the sons of vampires and people born on Saturdays, are also said to be most able to recognize vampires and destroy them. Some corporeal vampires are said to come back from the dead to have sexual relations with their partners (typically wives), the result of which is a child born without bones. The vampire has been used in the past as a form of social control insuring that dead bodies are interred properly, that suicide rates are low, and that inappropriate social behaviors are kept to a minimum. However, the vampire figure also has functioned to protect people engaged in illicit activities: there are reports of men who entered the bedrooms of their lovers disguised as vampires for sexual liaisons. Since few living persons can safely interfere with a vampire out of his grave, the ruse succeeded until each was found to be not undead, but rather a visitor from another town.

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It was not until the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897 that the male vampire figure took on a suave appearance and charming manner, qualities persistently associated with the characterization of vampires in literature ever since. Beginning with Stoker, we see a male vampire who preys on helpless, passive women who are seduced by his charms; his bite (usually on the neck) drives them away from their husbands and families, kills them, and/or turns them into vampires. The women he transforms are depicted as extraordinarily cruel and beautiful, like Stoker’s character Lucy who, while wearing her wedding gown, drinks the blood of a child. Stoker’s female vampires are directly contrasted with genteel women who upheld the Victorian standards of his day; while his male vampire might attract little attention from the unwary, his female vampires are true monsters capable of almost any horror. The female vampire is generally strong and violent—a soulless but ‘‘empowered’’ woman—in stark contrast with traditionally imposed concepts of femininity. In recent years, we see more women in vampire films, not as victims, but as vampires themselves. We see evidence of destructive female power in Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned in which the ‘‘mother of all vampires’’ awakes to destroy all men except her consort, the vampire Lestat. In the case of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Darla, the first female character to appear on-screen in the first episode of the television drama, is a helpless-looking blond high school student (like Buffy herself) who quickly reveals herself as a predator rather than prey. The weekly series, unlike the comedic film of the same name that preceded it, was entirely controlled by Whedon, a feminist who used the character of the Slayer to radically reconfigure the roles typically played by women in horror films: by the end of its seven-year run, the metaphor of the blood-sucking vampire was transformed to signify the nature of patriarchy itself. The vampire figure endures in the contemporary imagination for a variety of reasons, among which must be counted the promise of eternal youth and predatory sexual activity without consequences. The vampire’s bloodlust also serves as a powerful metaphor for addiction. In Euro North America, there is a subculture comprised by persons who not only dress and act like vampires, but who consider themselves vampires. Although some do drink blood, many consider themselves psychic, or ‘‘psi vampires’’ who feed from the energy of those around them. With the growth of the Internet, there is more evidence of the existence of these communities through Web sites and Listservs, including codes of conduct, safety advice, locations of havens, and other related topics. See also: Death; Folk Belief; Folk Group; Legend, Supernatural; Lilith; Popular Culture; Superstition. References: Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995; Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988; Darath^ orn and Angarathe. ‘‘Vampire Realm of Darkness.’’ 2000–2001. http://www.vampires.nu (accessed July 1, 2005); Dundes, Alan, ed. The Vampire: A Casebook. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998; Gordon, Joan, and Veronica Hollinger, eds. Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997; Vukanovic, Tatomir P. ‘‘The Vampire.’’ Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 36: 125–133, 37:21–31, 38: 111–118,

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39: 44–55 (1957–1960); Wilcox, Rhonda V., ed. Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.

Andrea Kitta Veiling The covering of a woman’s head, face, or entire body is generally considered a sign of piety and/or modesty. Feminine veiling in Western Christian cultures is most commonly associated with brides and women in religious orders; dating to at least Roman times, veiling for the wedding ceremony has been generally indicative of a woman’s physical modesty, as well as her willingness to submit to the will of her husband and to God. In a parallel tradition, Catholic nuns don veils when they take final vows to signify their status as Brides of Christ. The phrase ‘‘to take the veil’’ refers to a woman becoming a nun. Among nuns who wear the veil, the garment is usually black or brown in color, worn over a white coif held in place with a stiff headband to ensure that the hair remains completely covered, leaving the face visible. Generally speaking, beyond its use in religion, wealthier rural women in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures might have been historically more likely to don the veil than working-class women, who may have found the garments too cumbersome for their daily activities. As is the case with most articles of clothing, costly or inexpensive fabric used in a veil’s manufacture is a signal of economic status. In the modern Middle East and its diasporas, full-body veiling is practiced by some religious Jewish and Muslim women. In Muslim cultures, the veiling of women, known as hijab, finds its authority both in pre-Islamic custom and in the Qur’anic injunction against a women displaying her beauty and/or sexuality. Veils worn in public vary from a loose headscarf to cover the hair to covering the entire body with cloth, as is the case with the Afghan burqah. In North America hijab commonly consists of covering the hair with a loose scarf; however, it may be extended to include a loose garment worn over the entire body, leaving only face and hands visible. Full-body veils like the Afghan burqah or the Iranian chador are designed to stay in place without buttons, snaps, or other closures. In the late twentieth century, veiling became common as a symbol of Islamic resistance to Westernization, particularly after the Iranian revolution of 1979. Full-body veils are large and flowing so as to disguise the shape of a woman’s body, the sight of which (by a man) may be considered as a temptation to sin. A traditional Muslim woman veils when she leaves her home, and in her home while in the presence of men other than husband, father, brothers, or sons. Some orthodox interpretations of Islamic law (sharia) teach that a woman should always dress modestly—if not actually veil herself—even in the presence of women not related to her. Veiling as a modern political statement began in Egypt during the mid-1970s when young women, particularly university students, began wearing hijab in defiance of government attempts to forbid the practice (stemming from its hope of limiting the rising influence and aspirations of militant Islamicists). Academics and professional women especially used the veil to protest against

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Western-influenced secular governments; the practice is similarly controversial in Turkey and other nations not governed by sharia. During the Iranian revolution of 1979, which resulted in the creation of the first modern Islamic state, veiled women took to the streets in support of the ayatollahs (priests) and against Westernizing measures underwritten by the shah (king). Muslim veiling in the late twentieth century is both a political and cultural practice. For some women, the veil is simply a modest form of public dress; for others, veiling indicates cultural pride, historical consciousness, and religious devotion, as well as freedom from wandering male eyes. See also: Beauty; Chastity; Hair; Legend, Religious; Marriage; Muslim Women’s Folklore; Politics; Purdah; Scandal; Sexuality; Wedding; Women Religious. References: El Guindi, Fadwa. Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. Dress, Body, Culture Series. New York: Berg Publishers, 2003 [1999]; Shirazi, Faegheh. The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

Bonnie D. Irwin

Violence Violence against women, including physical, psychological, and social aggression and damage, is a major social problem throughout the world. Women marginalized not only by their sex but also as members of subordinate classes or cultural groups are especially vulnerable. Folklore may justify and reinforce both direct and structural violence against women when it encodes notions of gender and power that subordinate women. However, women use their folkways as a resource in the face of violence. The relationship among women, folklore, and violence can be drawn in three ways. First, folklore may contain cultural knowledge about women and violence. Second, women, who generally have less political access than men, leverage folklore to resist political violence against themselves. Third, women use expressive traditions to work through their experience of violence and to promote individual healing and positive social change. A community’s shared knowledge about violence against women may be expressed in its folklore. Folk sayings, such as ‘‘a husband who does not beat his wife doesn’t love her’’ or ‘‘if a husband does not beat his wife, her liver rots’’ (found in Poland), not only rationalize but actually normalize husbands’ violence against wives. In Britain and North America, the traditional expression ‘‘rule of thumb’’ reflected the idea that a man might beat a wife with a stick no bigger than his thumb. Linguist Deborah Tannen pointed out that derogatory folklore about women talking, such as ‘‘The North Sea will sooner be found wanting in water than a woman be at a loss for words,’’ parallels violent punishments in colonial America, where women were silenced by being strapped to ducking stools and dunked in water, by being gagged, or by applying a cleft stick to their tongue. Women’s folklore may serve to express fear of individual perpetrators or contain warnings and critical information about how to avoid and survive sexual assault. In cultures throughout the world, women sharing traditions such as singing, storytelling, and keening give voice to fear and anger about

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violence. Often, however, when expressed in public, these messages must be coded to protect those who deliver and receive them. Women often work collectively at activities such as quilting or other needlepoint, basketweaving, cooking, and traditional healing. Such gatherings are a traditional form of multi-tasking where women are visibly productive while simultaneously creating opportunities (not visible to others) to give voice to fear and anger about violence. They may share stories that teach lessons about how to avoid violence, and find comfort, affirmation, and strength from the community in the aftermath of violent experience. For African Americans during the violence of slavery, women’s folkways of cooking—seasoning and washing unwanted meats such as animal intestines (chitlins) until they were palatable—and quilting with scraps of fabric were a critical means of survival, resistance, and comfort. Feminist analyses of folklore identify gender-skewed portrayals of violence. In her analysis of the Grimms’ folktales, Ruth Bottingheimer found that the punishments at the end are particularly gruesome for female villains. Barbara Rieti examined Newfoundland folklore about violence against presumed witches, finding vicious folklore, violent symbolic actions (for example, shooting an effigy of a witch), threats of violence, and, in a few cases, direct attacks in the form of cutting (bloodletting). But she also noted kindly attempts to appease witches. In her ethnographic research of abused women in the United States, Elaine Lawless found that myths of femininity as abject and associated with evil, sexuality, and sin provide a cultural justification and context that sustains patterns of violence against women. Women in subordinate groups are doubly marginalized and may use folklore to resist violence against their cultural group and/or sexual violence perpetrated in the context of war and political violence. During the 1970s and 1980s in Chile, lower-middle-class, middle-aged women sewed applique tapestries called arpilleras that depicted the loss of loved ones due to the political violence that killed tens of thousands under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet. These arpilleras were smuggled out of the country and sold to generate international awareness and raise money as part of these women’s ‘‘strategies to challenge fear, feed their children, engage in a new form of political activism and of struggle against authoritarianism’’ (Agosin 1994: 12). This women-led movement relied on a women’s folkloric tradition to give voice to protest when men’s political protest was silenced by murder. Ironically, the lack of significance attributed to women and their sewing traditions allowed their activism to develop without political reprisals. Women also use folklore to work through their experiences of violence. Lawless argues that women’s self-representation through a process of articulating and examining their personal history in community is critical for the legitimization of women’s experience and their subjectivity within dominant discourses. In 1990, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the Clothesline Project was created by artist Rachel Carey-Harper as a means for women to make visible their witness to gender-based violence. For this project and its spinoffs throughout the United States, women decorate T-shirts, for example, expressing feelings about their own abuse or memorializing a friend who died as a result of battering. T-shirts are displayed singly or collectively on a

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clothesline as a visual testimony to a relatively unacknowledged social problem. Knowledge grounded within women’s expressive traditions is potentially a means whereby the personal becomes political. See also: Coding; Crime-Victim Stories; Folktale; Gender; Politics; Quiltmaking; Rape; Sewing; Sexism; Sexuality; Storytelling; Witchcraft, Historical.

References: Agosin, Marjorie. Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love: The Arpillera Movement in Chile, 1974–1994, Trans. Celeste-Kostopulos-Cooperman. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996; Bottigheimer, Ruth. Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987; Bourke, Angela. ‘‘More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry.’’ In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner, 160– 182. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992; Lawless, Elaine. Women Escaping Violence: Empowerment through Narrative. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001; ———. ‘‘Woman as Abject: Resisting Culture and Religious Myths that Condone Violence against Women.’’ Western Folklore, vol. 62, no. 4 (2003): 237–269; Reiti, Barbara. ‘‘Riddling the Witch: Violence against Women in Newfoundland Witch Tradition.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, 77–86. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

Jessica Senehi Virgin, Cult of the The cult of the Virgin Mary is a centuries-old devotional tradition that reflects broad issues of the times in which it has been enacted. Pagan elements, theological scholarship, papal decrees, and popular devotion combine to create its content. Devotees adapt the Marian symbol to accommodate new meanings. The cult is strongest within the Catholic and Orthodox churches, wherein Mary is understood as a perpetual virgin and the mother of God who intercedes between humanity and God. Protestant Christianity rejects Mary’s role as mediator and discourages her veneration, although some twentiethcentury feminist Protestants have worked to reclaim Mary. Neo-Pagans understand Mary as a continuation of the triple goddess—maiden, mother, and crone—incorporated in one figure. In the first Christian centuries, the Church sought to define itself in contrast to the other religions of imperial Rome. Its focus was on Jesus, and Mary was relevant in regard only to Jesus-centered questions. The scriptures provide relatively little information about her; the gospels feature her at the birth of Jesus, supplemented by a few subsequent mentions. The gospels of Matthew and Luke, written around 80 CE, reference Mary most frequently, focusing on the miraculous circumstances surrounding Jesus’ conception and birth, stressing mostly Mary’s virginity, which is invoked as evidence of Jesus’ extraordinary nature. Matthew links Mary’s virginity with a prophecy by Isaiah. Luke describes the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel greets Mary with the words that form the first half of the ‘‘Hail Mary’’: ‘‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.’’ Luke also relates stories from Jesus’ infancy that involve Mary. In one (Luke 2:22–39), Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple for his presentation ritual. While there, Simeon recognizes the infant

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as the messiah and prophesies that Mary will experience sorrow like a sword piercing her heart. Until various apocryphal gospels, many of which reflected popular beliefs, were excluded from the canon, these texts filled in some of the missing information on Mary. The second-century Greek Book of James (Protoevangelium) is notable for its role in establishing Mary’s virginity before, during, and after the birth of Jesus. Naming her parents, the Protoevangelium tells how they conceived miraculously in old age and reared Mary in the temple from the age of three. When she was twelve, the priests promised Mary to Joseph following a miraculous sign. Joseph protests that he is too old, a widower with children; this is the source for explaining Jesus’ brethren as stepsiblings, protecting Mary’s lifelong virginity. When Mary becomes pregnant, she and Joseph protest their innocence. The priests subject them to a trial by poison which they both survive. The Protoevangelium is the source for Jesus’ birth in a cave, and one of the sources for Mary’s virginity in partu (during delivery). After Mary gives birth, a disbelieving midwife tests Mary’s hymen. Finding it intact, she begs and receives forgiveness from God for her doubt. Currently, the Catholic Church gives more theological than biological emphasis to Mary’s virginity. The virginity of Mary is considered one of several Christian dogmas, as is her status as the mother of God. A fifth-century debate over the simultaneously divine and human natures of Jesus resulted in an ecumenical council which named Mary Theotokos, Mother of God. The pronouncement occurred in Ephesus, home to the cult of Diana of Ephesus (a Roman goddess already conflated with the Magna Mater, the Phrygian Great Mother figure of Asia Minor), leading to the fusion of Mary and Diana in popular belief. Such convergence occurred throughout the centuries in locales where Christianity replaced earlier or Indigenous religions. Other dimensions of Mary emerge from a blending of popular devotion and theological argument. Theological focus on Mary as the Sorrowful Mother, Mater Dolorosa, began in the fourth century. Popular devotion to Mary as Sorrowful Mother paralleled Egyptian and Sumerian cults of the time that centered on a goddess mourning her deceased son or spouse. Sorrowful Mother devotion reached its peak during the European medieval period. Today, claims of weeping statues and tearful icons of Mary draw from this traditional characterization of Mary. The basis for Mary’s role as Mediatrix of All Graces—the name given to her special role as mediator and intercessor between God and humanity— comes from many sources, beginning with Mary’s request to Jesus to help the wedding hosts in Cana (John 2:1–12). In the Greek apocryphal gospel Transitus Mariae, Jesus proclaims that any soul who calls upon Mary will find mercy and comfort. The earliest recorded prayer to Mary, the Sub tuum, dates from the third century and implores Mary to deliver her supplicants from danger. The Greek seventh-century hymn, Akathistos, honors Mary for saving Constantinople from invaders. The eighth-century legend of Theophilus describes a man who bargains his soul to the Devil and then obtains Mary’s assistance in reclaiming it. This influential legend inspired

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sermons, theological tracts, poetry, songs, plays, illuminated manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, carvings, and stained glass. By the thirteenth century, miraculous legends featuring Mary as mediatrix were plentiful and popular. Preachers used collections of these exempla as the basis for sermons; authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer elaborated them for texts or miracle plays; men and women told them as favorite tales. Some plots include Mary calming a storm for the safety of sailors, intervening in a battle, helping a woman with childcare, and using her mantle to shield a devotee from fire or water. Others reflect feudal chivalry, as when Mary demands a suitor continue his attentions after pledging his devotion to her. These exempla frequently place Marian love over divine justice; Mary intervenes for sinners who, the devils complain, rightly deserve damnation. In one tale, Mary replaces a philandering nun until the repentant woman returns to her convent. In another, Mary saves a murderous thief at the time of death because he fasted on Saturdays. Other forms of medieval Marian devotion include the establishment of feasts, lay associations, new religious orders, prayers, cathedrals, and pilgrimages in her honor. She also received the additional titles of Queen of Heaven and Bride of Christ, based on the metaphor of heaven as a kingdom and reflecting her role as the symbol of the church. By the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers saw the Marian cult as embodying the worst aspects of Catholicism. Reformers rejected most of Mary’s cult, except for her purity and role as the mother of God. In response to the Reformation, the Catholic Church addressed its worst excesses, but did not back away from Marian devotion. For instance, October and first Saturdays joined May as officially dedicated to Mary, and the popular practice of wearing scapulars (two small pieces of cloth, each with a devotional image, attached by strings that hang over the chest and back) flourished. Wearing a scapular at the time of death is believed to secure Mary’s help in avoiding the punishments of hell. While the Counter-Reformation focused on Europe, exploration in the Americas and Asia inspired missionary outreach that conflated Christianity, colonial politics, and Indigenous beliefs. In 1531, an apparition of Mary to the convert Juan Diego occurred near Tepeyac, Mexico, a site associated with the goddess Tonantzin. When a disbelieving bishop challenged Juan Diego’s apparition claims, Mary intervened with two miracles: roses bloomed in December and her life-sized image was miraculously imprinted on Juan Diego’s cloak. That image, showing her as an Indigenous woman, has become a national symbol for Mexico. Pilgrimages to the site of his vision and its shrine continue today, making Mexico City the third most popular Catholic pilgrimage destination, trailing only Rome and Jerusalem. Juan Diego’s vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe was the first to be officially recognized by the Catholic Church. Numerous apparitions of the image in the United States (in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Watsonville, California, for example) attest to her powerful cultural hold on believers. Ana Castillo’s book Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgen of Guadalupe (2000) discusses devotion to her. The cult of Mary experienced a decline during the Enlightenment and did not rebound until the nineteenth century, when other apparition claims became more frequent. In 1830, Catherine Laboure, a Parisian nun, claimed

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an apparition of Mary and, following Mary’s instructions, had a medal created of the vision with the words, ‘‘O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.’’ Wearers proclaimed the medal miraculous, following Mary’s promise that anyone who wore it would experience many graces. The apparition and medal helped spur declaration of a third Catholic Marian dogma, the Immaculate Conception, which states that Mary never experienced original sin, sharing that distinction only with Jesus. Originating in popular belief and described in the Protoevangelium, the Immaculate Conception was controversial among medieval theologians and objected to by nineteenth-century Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and liberal Catholics. In 1846, U.S. bishops named the Immaculate Conception the patroness of the United States. Pope Pius IX declared the dogma in 1854, and, four years later, Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France, identifying herself with the phrase, ‘‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’’ That event accelerated acceptance of the Catholic dogma that Mary was born without sin, transforming Lourdes into a major modern pilgrimage site. Other influential Marian apparitions occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, establishing a general pattern that Catholics turn to for judging subsequent apparition claims: La Salette, France (1846, to two children); Fatima, Portugal (1917, to three children); Beauraing, Belgium (1932, to five children); Banneux, Belgium (1933, to one girl); and Knock, Ireland (1879, to multiple villagers). The apparitions in Fatima established an anti-Communist tone within the cult that continued throughout the twentieth century and reinforced the rosary’s status as a pre-eminent spiritual weapon. The Fatima visionaries reported Mary’s promise that people could obtain world peace and an end to World War I by praying the rosary daily, and that newly Communist Russia would convert back to Christianity if it was consecrated to Mary’s Immaculate Heart and the faithful received the Eucharist on first Saturdays. These promises encouraged renewed Marian devotion in Cold War countries during the 1940s and 1950s. New lay apostolic organizations were formed, such as the Legion of Mary and the Blue Army. The Family Rosary Crusade utilized top entertainers to lead the rosary at rallies. The National Radio Rosary Devotion recruited listeners to pray along as the rosary was recited over the radio. The Block Rosary Program encouraged neighbors to meet in each other’s homes to pray the rosary for world peace, the abolishment of atheism and communism, the conversion of Russia, a renewal of faith among Catholics, and the reunification of Christian denominations. By the end of the century, many Marian followers believed their prayers had been successful, attributing the dissolution of the Soviet Union to the fulfillment of the Fatima promises. The first half of the twentieth century hosted debate over definition of a fourth Catholic Marian dogma, the Assumption. Growing out of a fifthcentury feast that honored the day Mary entered heaven, the Assumption is the belief that Mary’s body as well as her soul were taken into heaven. In 1950, culminating a tradition that had existed in Christianity since the fourth century, Pope Pius XII named the Assumption a dogma, making Mary

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unique among mortals in yet another way, and again exacerbating the divisions between Christian sects. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) reaffirmed Mary’s status as virgin mother of God, mother of the Church, bearer and spouse of God, and unique Mediatrix. Public devotionalism by Catholics saw a revival in the 1980s and 1990s due to a spate of Marian apparition claims. During this period in the United States, two of the most influential occurred in Conyers, Georgia, and Scottsdale, Arizona, and another in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia (BosniaHercegovina). The Medjugorje visions continue in the twenty-first century. Recent developments in the cult of the virgin speak to the continued creative vitality of Marian devotion. Some devotees link Mary’s twentieth-century apparitions with apocalyptic prophecies, drawing on theological interpretations of Mary as the woman in Revelation 12, and building on her tradition of providing aid at death. Catholic anti-abortion advocates adopted Our Lady of Guadalupe as their symbol because her miraculous image suggests a pregnant Mary since she is wearing a cinta (‘‘ribbon’’) as the Indigenous tradition dictates. It is said of a pregnant woman that she is encinta. See also: Archetype; Chastity; Maiden, Mother, and Crone; Virgin of Guadalupe; Virginity; Wicca and Neo-Paganism. References: Castillo, Ana. Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York: Riverhead Books (Penguin USA), 2000; Graef, Hilda. Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion. Two volumes. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963; Harris, Ruth. Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. New York: Penguin, 1999; Orsi, Robert Anthony. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; Tweed, Thomas. Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; Varghese, Roy Abraham. God-Sent: A History of the Accredited Apparitions of Mary. New York: Crossroad, 2000; Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Knopf, 1976; Zimdars-Swartz, Sandra L. Encountering Mary: Visions of Mary from La Salette to Medjugorje. New York: Avon, 1991.

Anne Pryor Virgin of Guadalupe The apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1531 at Tepeyac, a hill northwest of what is now Mexico City, had a significant impact on the colonization of Mexico and the Americas, for she emerged as a symbol of Mestizaje (‘‘Mexican-ness’’) and as an advocate for the Mexican people. The Nican mopohua (‘‘Here it is recounted’’), the detailed narrative published in the Nahuatl language by Luis Laso de la Vega in 1649, describes the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to a Nahua convert, Juan Diego. The core of the narrative rests on how Juan Diego convinces the skeptical Bishop Zumarraga of his story’s veracity. When asked for a sign, the Virgin asks Juan Diego to gather rare roses in his tilma, a rough cloak. When Juan Diego presents the roses to the bishop, the Virgin’s image miraculously appears on the tilma. Subsequently, a shrine was built on the hill of Tepeyac, the site of the apparition. The image remains an object of veneration at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

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In 1810, the image, a powerful national symbol for Mexico and Mexicans, became the rallying icon for revolution against Spain. In the 1960s, Chicanas/os marched behind her image as they sought social justice. Because she appears as an Indigenous woman to an Indigenous man, Guadalupe has become a symbol of the Indigenous and dispossessed. As such, she was declared patroness of all of the Americas by the Catholic Church in 1999. Annual celebrations often include a reenactment of the apparitions, an all-night vigil on December 11, preceded by nine days of dancing and prayer by devotees including Matachines and Concheros who often dance in processions honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe, testimony to her place in the folk traditions of Mexico and of Greater Mexico. Women play a significant role in these traditional celebrations. The Guadalupanas, women who have pledged a vow to Guadalupe, form a sodality whose members are the Virgin’s tradition-bearers both in Mexico and in the United States. Recently, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been taken up by Chicana artists and writers whose rearticulation of her as a symbol for Mexican women has resulted in controversy; they reclaim her as a symbol of liberation, even as that symbol retains other deeply rooted religious meanings within the Roman Catholic Church. See also: Politics; Region: Mexico; Region: South America; Saints; Tradition-Bearer; Virgin, Cult of the. References: Brading, David A. Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Castillo, Ana, ed. Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996; Laso de la Vega, Luis, Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart. The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei Tlamahuicoltica of 1645. UCLA Latin American Studies, vol. 84. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998; Poole, Stafford, C. M. Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995; Rodriguez, Jeannette. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican American Women. Austin: University of Texas, 1994.

Norma E. Cantu

Virginity The concept of virginity generally refers to sexual inexperience. The term originates in Latin from virgo (‘‘unmarried woman/girl’’); it is cognate with  (‘‘strength’’) or urga-jami  the Sanskrit urg (‘‘nourish’’). When used in reference to males, it connotes naivete, but is more often applicable to the physical sexuality of girls and women: a product of patriarchy’s need to control female sexuality in order to insure that women give birth only to their husbands’ children. North American girls, as they grow into adolescence, inherit a complicated set of assumptions about their sexuality, but underneath it all is a clear message that the female body is a commodity. Commercialized vestiges of folkloric maidens represent sexual awakening as a loss: the Little Mermaid gives up her tail; Rapunzel cuts her hair; Cinderella loses her shoe, and the implication of the prince sliding it on her foot is that he claims her fertility. The ancient Greek poet Sappho describes a bride’s virginity as the highest apple on the highest branch. The mythic virgin Atalanta can outrun all

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her suitors except the one who drops a golden apple in her path. Although she picks it up and is overtaken by her future husband, Atalanta is more of an agent than is Snow White, who eats the apple and falls into a coma. Puberty for these maidens is represented as an extreme form of passivity; by being locked in a tower or put to sleep, they are kept pure. By such social conditioning, girls are programmed to expect a highly ritualized wedding with implicit and obvious symbols of their ‘‘lost’’ virginity: they toss their bouquets to signify the end of sexual innocence; and elaborate white cakes which represent the bride’s virginity are sliced open with the groom’s hand guiding the bride’s. The fact that few North American brides in this century are sexually inexperienced at the time of marriage only serves to strengthen the contention that virginity is a social construction rather than a physiological state. Movements such as the ‘‘born-again virgins,’’ mature women who have decided to live without men and sex, likewise suggest that virginity is not necessarily about having an intact hymen. In fact, the ancient myths from which we derive our ideas about virginity arose in a culture that had not yet discovered or invented the hymen. Consequently, the Greek goddess of marriage, Hera, could take an annual bath to refresh her virginity. Madhavi, a heroine of the Indic epic the Mahabharata, marries three kings in succession, bearing a son to each, then recovering her virginity and her potency as a bride. The Scandinavian goddess Gefjon bears several sons for her giant husband, but remains a virgin. The perpetual virginity of Mary, mother of Christ, was established as official Christian dogma in 451 CE. Implicit in Mary’s celibacy is the notion that a nubile woman possesses a latent fertility that imbues her with a special power to protect and to heal, if she chooses to keep this power to herself. Followers of Mary’s cult—unquestionably influenced by the historical reverberations of such ancient fertility goddesses as Egypt’s Isis—appeal to her for healing, intercession, and other favors. The strength of Mariolatry (devotion to Mary) in contemporary North America attests to the continued psychic need for an all-powerful Mother Goddess who can offer comfort and succor in an age of pandemics, terrorism, and economic uncertainty. Marian apparitions were at an all-time high in the late twentieth century, and often attracted thousands of pilgrims. The paradigm of Mary influenced a tradition of Christian saints and martyrs whose virginity was foregrounded as evidence of their ability to transcend corporeal pleasures. Kateri Tekakwitha, often called ‘‘Lily of the Mohawks,’’ was a seventeenth-century Native North American celibate and ascetic who modeled herself after Mary and European Christian martyrs. Her biography, recorded and perhaps manipulated by Jesuit missionaries, recounts how she vigorously refused her family’s efforts to get her married, and how she practiced a regime of celibacy, self-abnegation, flagellation, and bodily mortification until her death. In the tradition of other female virgin saints (while not yet a saint, she was beatified in 1980), Kateri became a tremendous spiritual force among Jesuits and First Nation converts to Christianity. She exemplifies the ancient idea that the virginal body is possessed of a numinous fertile energy that is transferable. Like the Virgin Mary, she performs miracles of healing and intercession.

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The concept of the virgin’s power is manifested differently in contemporary popular culture, a phenomenon which illustrates how the female body functions as an index of cultural values. Hollywood has exploited the concept of the virgin’s power by emphasizing her latent sexual energy. In the 1950s, the star system produced Doris Day and Sandra Dee, who both combined virginity with a teasing sexuality. Films like Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon 1959) represented Day as a chaste professional woman who resisted the advances of sexual adventurer Rock Hudson. Dee’s image as a virgin was perpetuated by films in which she played a sweet innocent who was unaware of her sexual power. One might expect the combination of second-wave feminism and effective birth control to result in a diminution of the value of virginity, but capitalist patriarchy continues to set a price on it. In Pretty Baby (Louis Malle 1978), Violet (played by twelve-year-old Brooke Shields) is auctioned off as the ‘‘choicest morsel New Orleans has to offer.’’ Likewise, an anonymous businessman bid $7.5 million to sleep with pop singer Britney Spears, an offer which she very publicly denounced. Another pop princess, Jessica Simpson, received a ‘‘chastity ring’’ for her thirteenth birthday from her father, who was also her business manager. While a girl who pledges her virginity to her father may sound like something out of a fairy tale, the construction of virginity contains within it a possibility for women to reclaim control of their own bodies. Popular figures such as Wonder Woman (a contemporary version of an Amazon) and Xena: Warrior Princess are informed by an alternative construction of the female celibate who enjoys agency and autonomy. See also: Chastity; Film; Folktale; Goddess Worship; Maiden, Mother, and Crone; Popular Culture; Ritual; Saints; Sexuality; Virgin, Cult of the; Wedding. References: Dexter, Miriam Robbins. ‘‘Indo-European Reflection of Virginity and Autonomy.’’ Mankind Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1/2 (1985): 57–74; Fletcher, Judith, and Bonnie MacLachlan, eds. Virginity Revisited: Configurations of Female Sexual Renunciation Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005; Koppedrayer, Kay. ‘‘The Making of the First Iroquois Virgin: Early Jesuit Biographies of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha.’’ Ethnohistory, vol. 40, no. 2 (1993): 277–306; Sissa, Giulia. Greek Virginity. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990; Stone, Kay. ‘‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 88, no. 347 (1975): 42–50.

Judith Fletcher

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W Wage Work In 1955, for the first time, the United States began tracking the earnings ratio between women and men. The Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963, and is still administered and enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The main point of the act is the prohibition of sex-based discrimination between men and women in the same establishment who are employed in a comparable job. Between 1950 and 1960, women with fulltime jobs earned, on average, between fifty-nine and sixty-four cents for every dollar a man earned. In 2004, it was closer to seventy-five cents. Another important point in examining the issue of wages disparities is that women earn less than men in all ethnic groups. Women’s earnings have been consistently lower than men’s regardless of how earnings are expressed (for example, annual versus weekly pay, mean earnings versus median earnings). From 1955 to 1981, the gender wage ratio showed a slight decline. The median annual earnings of women who worked year-round and full-time was 59.1 percent that of comparable to men in 1955, and 59.2 percent in 1981. After 1981, the wage ratio moved up and down from 69.9 percent in 1991, peaking at 74.2 percent in 1997, and falling to 73 percent in 2000. The main reason for this evolution is due more to the decrease in men’s real wages than to an increase in women’s real wages. In general, the earning ratio is highest among young workers and declines with age and experience. In 1997, women under the age of twenty-five working full time earned 92.1 percent of men’s salaries compared to older women (ages twenty-five to fifty-four), who earned 74.4 percent of what men made. The earnings gap in the United States is larger than it is in some other countries, including Sweden (where women make 90 percent of male earnings on average), Denmark (85 percent), Norway (83 percent), and Australia (83 percent). The gender-based wage gap or the wage differential is one of the most important statistical indicators for assessing women’s economic status. Women lose a large proportion of their lifetime’s income by taking time out of the workplace to have children. Moreover, childless women also lose out on earnings compared with their male counterparts.

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According to neoclassical economists, the explanation of differential wages can, in general, be found in the gendered occupational segregation of the labor market. But even in branches where men and women have the same education, their careers differ from the very start. Feminist economists, dissatisfied with the limits of neoclassical analysis in the explanation of wage gap, are convinced that labor-market segmentation, other institutional variables, and non-market factors have a significant influence on the wage differential. The very persistent wage gap between women and men is caused by a complex interplay among a variety of factors, such as the undervaluing of women’s work, gender segregation in the labor market, differing work patterns due to the unequal impact of family responsibilities, and pay discrimination. Enormous progress has been made by women in the workforce since the Equal Pay Act of 1963. However, four decades later, the basic goal of the act still has not yet been realized. See also: Childbirth and Childrearing; Gender; Occupational Folklore; Women’s Work. References: Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence Kahn. ‘‘The gender earnings gap: learning from international comparisons.’’ American Economic Review, vol. 82, no. 2 (1992): 533–538; ———. ‘‘Rising inequality and the U.S. gender gap.’’ American Economic Review, vol. 84, no. 2: (1994): 23–33; Kramarae, Cheris, and Dale Spender, eds. Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women’s Issues and Knowledge. Four volumes. New York: Routledge, 2000; Peterson, Alice, and Margaret Lewis, eds. The Elgar Companion to Feminist Economists. Northampton: Edward Elgar, 1999; Powell, Gary N., ed. Handbook of Gender and Work. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 2000; Sales, Rosemary and Ariane Hegewish, eds. Women, Work and Inequality: The Challenge of Equal Pay in a Deregulated Labour Market. London: Macmillan, 1999; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 2001. ‘‘Highlights of women’s earnings in 2000.’’ Report 952, August 2001. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2000.pdf (accessed January 19, 2004); U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, ‘‘The Equal Pay Act of 1963.’’ n.d. http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/epa.html (accessed January 19, 2004); Worell, Judith, ed. Encyclopedia of Women and Gender, Sex Similarities and Differences and the Impact of Society on Gender. Two volumes. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2001.

Nathalie Cavasin Walled-Up Wife The ‘‘Walled-Up Wife’’ in its most common form is a legend in which a mason tricks a female relative into being interred in a construction project; her death is meant to appease supernatural forces suspected of undoing each day’s work at the site. The legend is best known in the Balkans and in Greece in the form of ballad variants. No versions are known in Western Europe, although related legends from India suggest diffusion westward through Roma (Gypsy) culture. The core elements of the legend involve a crew of male masons commissioned to build a castle, monastery, or bridge who find that the previous day’s work has been ruined overnight. The chief mason learns through supernatural means (for example, a talking bird or a dream) that the work will remain solid only after he walls up the first woman to arrive at the site— invariably his wife or sister.

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Some variants include warnings or natural impediments that delay her arrival, but eventually she is tricked into entering the stonework (for example, the chief mason drops his wedding ring inside and asks her to retrieve it for him), or she is led to believe the process of walling her slowly into the stonework is a joke until, too late, she begins pleading for her life. When the woman is a mother, she requests that a hole be made so she can nurse a child left behind in the outside world. She sometimes curses the construction project before she dies. Many variants feature the formation of a well (occasionally filled with milk) beside her ‘‘grave’’ which has special properties sought by the local women thereafter; it may form spontaneously or as a result of acts such as the suicide of the chief mason. The Indic parallels figure the construction of a well or waterway, which is dry until a female relative of one of the builders is persuaded (rather than tricked) to sacrifice herself by being walled up inside, after which the waters rise, drowning the woman and insuring a properly functioning construction. The myth-ritual theoretical approach suggests the legend retains a memory of actual foundation-sacrifice rituals in the past; however, evidence for such rituals is scarce and difficult to interpret despite the widespread occurrence of foundation-sacrifice legends. Feminist analyses emphasize that the legend depicts a male oriented toward his trade, his all-male work group, and the political authority that has commissioned the project; in contrast, the woman is oriented to her family (for example, a nursing mother or a woman performing an errand for her male relative), and in some variants is tricked into the foundation with a ruse involving the husband’s wedding ring dropped into the construction for the wife’s retrieval (the husband is willing to sacrifice his marriage/marriage partner in deference to his occupation). The patriarchal message of the legend is clear: marriage (when the victim is a wife) or status as a domestic female (if the victim is a sister) is depicted as a sacrifice made by women for the benefit of their husband or family, a logic that echoes the traditional gender ideologies in the regions that support the legend. See also: Ballad; Breastfeeding, Childbirth and Childrearing; Cursing; Feminisms; Folk Belief; Folklore About Women; Gender; Legend, Supernatural; Marriage; Occupational Folklore; Ritual; Sexuality; Superstition; Violence. References: Brewster, Paul G. ‘‘The Foundation Sacrifice Motif in Legend, Folksong, Game, and Dance.’’ In The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes, 35–62. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996; Dundes, Alan. ‘‘The Building of Skadar: The Measure of Meaning of a Ballad of the Balkans.’’ Folklore Matters, ed. Alan Dundes, 151– 168. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989; ———. ‘‘How Indic Parallels to the Ballad of the ‘Walled-Up Wife’ Reveal the Pitfalls of Parochial Nationalistic Folkloristics.’’ Journal of American Folklore 108/427 (1995): 38–53; Mandel, Ruth. ‘‘‘Sacrifice at the Bridge of Arta’: Sex Roles and the Manipulation of Power.’’ In The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes, 157–168. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996; Talo+, Ion. ‘‘Foundation Rites.’’ In The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 5, ed. Mircea Eliade, 395–401. New York: Macmillan, 1987; Vargyas, Lajos. Hungarian Ballads and the European Ballad Tradition, vol. II. Budapest: Akademiai Kiad o, 1983.

Wade Tarzia

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Weaving Weaving is the making of fabric, especially on a loom, by interlacing threads or yarn at right angles to each other to form a continuous web. The term ‘‘weaving’’ comes from the Middle English weven. Weaving is one of the oldest crafts in the history of humankind, dating back more than 12,000 years. From that time until about 1800, all weaving was done on hand looms of varying types. Before the development of towns, families supplied all their own textile needs. Weaving was almost invariably considered women’s work. As the manufacture of cloth moved from the home into workshops in Europe, it became more and more the province of men, who formed guilds that excluded women. These workshops provided textiles for trade, the nobility, and the church. Nevertheless, throughout the seventeenth century, weaving was still a common household chore in the countryside. Settlers in the American colonies brought their looms and patterns with them, each family or settlement supplying their own needs for clothing and household goods. Later, itinerant weavers or journeymen traveled from settlement to settlement bringing news and skill in weaving, especially of coverlets. Weaver Rose was one of these whose name we still have. The Industrial Revolution reached America shortly after it had taken hold in England, and home production of fabric virtually ceased. Textile mills were one place in which women were able to find paid work. Although there are many types of looms, the basic types are the simple frame loom, the vertical loom (usually used to make tapestries and rugs), the horizontal (floor) treadle loom, and specialty looms for making braids and tapes. The first weaving was probably done with the fingers by wrapping fibers around other stiffer fibers to make baskets and mats. The first loom was likely a vertical weighted-warp loom. From drawings on ancient pottery, we can assume this would have been the type of loom used so famously by Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, while he was away from Ithaca for many years and presumed lost. Penelope refused her many suitors, saying she had to finish weaving her father-in-law’s burial shroud. Weaving during the day, she unraveled the web at night, thus never finishing the cloth. Her suitors pressed her to finish her endless work, but Odysseus returned, routed the suitors, and reclaimed his wife. The horizontal (floor) loom is the one with which most people are familiar. There are three main types of floor looms. The jack loom is preferred by many weavers because the harnesses—frames that hold the loom’s heddles, usually made of metal or string—can be raised individually. In the counterbalance loom, the harnesses work in tandem (as one harness is raised, its opposite is pulled down). The countermarch loom is similar to the counterbalance loom (differing in how its harnesses are raised), but the structure and principles of setting up and weaving on it are the same. The number of harnesses on a loom ranges from a minimum of two to more than sixty. The greater the number of harnesses on a loom, the more complex the weave that can be produced on it. Jacquard and dobby looms are the most complex types, most often used in industrial weaving.

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In pre-Columbian Mexico and the Southwestern United States, Native American women traditionally used backstrap looms, while upright looms were usually associated with men. This was not the case with Euro Americans, for whom weaving on any loom, outside of industrial textile manufacture, was generally associated with women. In the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century textile industries, men were generally factory owners, designers, and machinists, while women took charge of threading the looms. The warp is the set of threads fastened to the loom, positioned parallel to one another and to the selvedge (the edge of the fabric) constituting the basis of the longer dimension of a woven fabric. The weft (or woof) is the yarn or other material that acts as the crosswise element in a woven fabric, usually wound around a shuttle which is pushed through the shed (the space between the separated warp) by the weaver. The weft can be of any material—thread, yarn, grasses, or reeds—depending on the intended use of the finished piece. For example, the coarse fabric linsey-woolsey is made with a linen warp and wool weft. Once the pattern or draft (the graphic representation of the appearance of a particular weave) is selected and the width and length of the fabric decided upon, the warp is measured on a warping board or reel. After threading through the reed which keeps the warp spread evenly across the loom and the heddles according to the draft, the warp is carried over the back beam and tied to the back apron on the warp beam. The warp is wound on the back beam and the front ends are tied over the front beam to the front apron. The treadles are fastened to the harness frames in the treadling pattern required by the draft. The weaver manipulates the treadles in the sequence indicated by the draft to produce the pattern. Contemporary weavers are free to develop their own patterns, but many have been handed down from mother to daughter and from master to apprentice. Books of pattern drafts were available even in the colonial period. Marguerite Davison’s A Handweaver’s Pattern Book is a classic among handweavers; known for its clear, basic diagrams, its drafts range from simple twills to complex crackle weaves, including many traditional overshot patterns recognizable from colonial coverlets. Tapestry weaving is done on simple upright looms using the fingers as primary tools to manipulate the weft through the warp. A cartoon (drawing of the tapestry design) is often placed behind the loom to assist the weaver in the tapestry-making process. Navajo rugs are woven using a tapestry-style loom, but the weaver generally works with traditional patterns committed to memory. According to Navajo (Dine) tradition, Spider Woman gave the gift of weaving after her husband, Spider Man, made her a loom with crosspoles made from sky and Earth cords, warp sticks made of the sun’s rays, a sun halo forming the batten, and a comb of white shell. According to her directives, weaving is to be taught only in October when the spiders came out of their dens and cover the Earth with webs before returning to the world below. See also: Aesthetics; First Nations of North America; Folk Art; Women’s Work. References: Birrell, V. The Textile Arts. New York: Schocken Books, 1974; Black, Mary. The Key to Weaving. New York: Macmillan, 1980; Davison, Marguerite.

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A Handweaver’s Pattern Book. Chester, PA: John Spencer, Inc., 1974; Ligon, Linda, Marilyn Murphy, and Madelyn van der Hoogt, eds. Weaver’s Companion. Loveland, CO: Interweave Press, 2001; Messenger, Betty. Picking Up the Linen Threads: A Study in Industrial Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980; Pendleton, Mary. Navajo and Hopi Weaving Techniques. New York: Macmillan, 1974; Regensteiner, Else. Art of Weaving. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1986 [1970]. Ross, Patricia Fent. Made in Mexico. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952; Wroth, William, ed. Hispanic Crafts of the Southwest. Colorado Springs, CO: The Taylor Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1977.

Nancy Piatkowski Wedding The wedding—the union of two people economically, socially, and spiritually for the purposes of companionship and/or procreation—is one of life’s rites of passage. Nearly all of the ethnic and cultural wedding customs observed today have their origins in times past. Whatever a bride decides to include in her wedding ceremonies has social and cultural significance, from her choice of companions, to what she eats and wears. In the planning stages of this event, the bride is often influenced by superstitions, among which are those about the suitability of having her wedding during a certain month of the year or on a particular day of the week. This rhyme contains advice on which day to marry: Monday for wealth Tuesday for health Wednesday the best day of all Thursday for losses Friday for crosses And Saturday for no luck at all (Laverack 1979).

Another advises on the month: Marry when the year is new, Always loving, kind, and true. When February birds do mate, You may wed, nor dread your fate. If you wed when March winds blow, Joy and sorrow both you’ll know. Marry in April when you can, Joy for maiden and for man. Marry in the month of May, You’ll surely rue the day. Marry when June roses blow, Over land and sea you’ll go. They who in July do wed, Must labor always for their bread. Whoever wed in August be, Many a change are sure to see. Marry in September’s shine, Your living will be fair and fine. If in October you do marry,

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Love will come, but riches tarry. If you wed in bleak November, Only joy will come, remember. When December’s snows fall fast, Marry, and true love will last (Laverack 1979).

June is considered lucky because it is eponymous of Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage. Summer is considered auspicious due to the agricultural association of the sun with fertility and good luck. Preceding the wedding ceremony, a bridal shower may be given by a close friend of the bride, often an unmarried woman chosen to be the maid of honor in the wedding procession. Its primary purpose is to help the newlyweds furnish and equip their home. Some contemporary bridal showers bear genre names—‘‘happy memories,’’ ‘‘kitchen/recipe,’’ ‘‘relaxation,’’ or ‘‘lingerie’’—to guide the guests’ expectations and choice of gifts. The first bridal shower is said to have been given to a bride in Holland, denied her dowry because her bridegroom was a poor miller. To help him keep his bride, his friends showered her with goods for her to use in her new life. The wedding ring is meant to provide lasting physical evidence of the fact that a marriage has taken place. The ring is traditionally worn on the fourth finger of the bride’s (and husband’s) left hand in the belief that its vein runs directly to the heart. The circular shape of the ring symbolizes unity and unending love. Today’s popular wedding rings are still—engraved or unadorned— bands made of gold: the ‘‘noble metal’’ is variously attributed as symbolic of durability, richness, purity, beauty, and a host of other desirable qualities. The tradition of the bride wearing ‘‘something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’’ at the wedding ceremony originated in Victorian England and has become a widespread popular tradition in Anglo European weddings. The ‘‘old’’ item is usually a personal gift from mother to daughter, a symbol of wisdom in married life. The ‘‘new’’ symbolizes the new life the bride is embracing, usually the wedding dress or a new accessory. ‘‘Borrowed’’ involves an item donated by a happily married woman, who thereby lends the bride a portion of her own joy and satisfaction. Finally, the bride is advised to wear something blue, a ribbon sewn into her dress or garter, or, more recently, blue-painted fingernails and/or toenails, to denote purity, love, and fidelity. Bridesmaids probably had their origin in military guards or attendants assigned to the bride in societies that practiced marriage-by-capture wherein a bride might be stolen by another suitor. Bridesmaids are said to dress alike to confuse evil spirits, thereby protecting the bride from harm. Anglo European brides in North America wear a white or off-white wedding dress, regardless of the status of their virginity; it has come to symbolize purity of heart, happiness, and joy. This traditional rhyme offers advice on choosing the dress’s color: Married Married Married Married

in in in in

white, you have chosen all right, green, ashamed to be seen. blue, love ever true, grey, you will go far away.

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Married Married Married Married

in in in in

red, you will wish yourself dead, pink, of you he’ll aye think. yellow, ashamed of your fellow, black, you will wish yourself back (Laverack 1979).

A green dress is thought to be unlucky, unless the bride is Irish. The folk expression ‘‘the woman has a green gown’’ was meant to imply promiscuity, her green-stained dress proof that she’d been rolling in the grass. It is thought unlucky for the bride to make her own wedding dress. It is also unlucky for the groom to see the bride in her wedding dress before she arrives at the ceremony; even so, she traditionally wears a veil until the marriage vows have been exchanged. Veiling may also have served as a disguise against evil spirits. Some brides leave undone the final stitch on the wedding dress until it is time to prepare for the ceremony in order to avoid misfortune. The bridal bouquet is said to have originated in the ancient Mediterranean world and remains multiply interpretable. It represents her nubile sexuality, as was frequently the case in poetry; or she carries sweet herbs beneath her veil to symbolize fidelity; or she carries a stinking garland of herbs and spices to frighten off demons. Many women today choose flowers (and their meanings) as very personal statements about their hopes for the future. Orange blossoms are symbols of fruitfulness and happiness because the orange tree flowers and bears fruit at the same time; roses symbolize love; snowdrops represent hope; lilies symbolize majesty to some, but are thought unlucky by others because of their association with death; peonies are avoided by some as they represent shame. Interestingly, a combination of red and white flowers at the ceremony is avoided by some modern brides because of the belief that they signify ‘‘bandages and blood.’’ As a woman readies herself for the wedding ceremony, a last look in the mirror will bring her good luck; however, returning to the mirror once she has set out is unlucky. If she sees a chimney sweep, lamb, toad, spider, black cat, or rainbows on her way to the ceremony, the marriage will be lucky. Seeing an open grave, a pig, a lizard, or hearing a cockerel crow are thought disastrous. Seeing monks and nuns is also a bad omen, signaling future dependence on charity. Snow announces fertility and wealth, but cloudy skies and wind are believed to bode a stormy marriage. A bride may meet her groom with a silver sixpence (or other coin) in her right shoe to ensure sexual vitality, wealth, and good fortune in the marriage. The bride, historically considered in many cultures the property of her father (or her father’s lineage) until her wedding day—sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively—is traditionally ‘‘given away’’ to the bridegroom by her father. Today, the practice is considered symbolic of her parents’ blessings and support of their daughter in her new role. Almost invariably, the bride and bridegroom exchange wedding vows to publicly proclaim their love and commitment to each other, usually for the rest of their lives. The tradition of the bridegroom kissing the bride may have started in ancient Rome. A suspicious bridegroom kissed his bride to learn if she had been drinking wine (which would have reflected badly on her). Today, the kiss is widely understood as a symbolic gesture sealing the matrimonial vows just exchanged.

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In a custom reported with increasing frequency, the bride and groom light two candles to acknowledge their wish to respect one another’s separate lives; they then light a single ‘‘unity candle’’ simultaneously from their own to symbolize the coming together of their lives and those of their families. After the ceremony proper, confetti or rice is thrown at the departing newlyweds—directed mainly at the bride—symbolic of fertility, prosperity, and good luck. Confetti has recently began to replace rice in the United States in recent decades because of reports that uncooked rice is injurious to birds. It is common to hold a wedding reception or banquet, for which the bride’s father is customarily expected to pay, celebrating the formal incorporation of the newlyweds into married society after the wedding. Receptions typically combine elements of many traditional practices, including those involving food, music, drinking, dancing, storytelling, joking, flirting, and a host of other entertainments. At or after the wedding reception, the bride throws the wedding bouquet over her shoulder into a group of unmarried women gathered together in hope of catching it. The woman who catches it is said to be the next to marry. Shoes are commonly associated with fertility in Anglo European folklore. In North America, they are sometimes tied to the back of the newlyweds’ departing car. The bride’s father may give the bridegroom one of her shoes, said to symbolize his passing of responsibility for her to her husband. In this case, she may be made aware of the transfer of her keeping with the groom’s gentle tap on her head with her own shoe. The breaking of dishes, drinking glasses, eggs, and other objects, common in wedding ceremonies, is both said to represent the loss of the bride’s virginity and to drive away evil spirits. Wedding cakes originated in an ancient Roman custom in which a loaf of wheat bread was broken over the bride’s head to symbolize the wedding party’s hopes for her satisfaction and fulfillment as a married woman and mother. The guests ate the crumbs for good luck. In English tradition, the unmarried consumer of wedding-cake crumbs could expect to see a vision of her or his future marriage partner. The cake may be adorned in various media with traditional motifs, for example, shamrocks for Irish wedding cakes or thistles for Scottish ones. There is a popular belief among the Irish that if the bride’s mother-in-law breaks a piece of the wedding cake over the bride’s head as she enters the house after the ceremony, they will be friends for life. The new bride in North America knows that she may be physically carried by her husband over the threshold of the front door of her first home as a married woman. What she may not know is that this action on her husband’s part was once considered necessary due to her appropriate and expected feminine hesitancy to approach the marital bed. Alternatively, the custom may be an artifact of marriage-by-capture traditions. Today, the new husband may lift his wife to protect her from evil spirits that might be lingering in the doorway. ‘‘Jumping the broom’’—a practice in which the

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groom lifts his bride, and together they jump over a long-handled broom— served similar functions in the wedding traditions of African Americans. The honeymoon, a period of seclusion of the couple following the wedding, is probably another survival of marriage-by-capture traditions in which the bride remains in hiding with her new husband in a place where her relatives—prying or concerned—would not find them. In the ancient Mediterranean region, while the moon went its full round (about thirty days), the couple ate cakes and drank honey for lasting sweetness and good luck. Today, depending on the couple’s class, they are expected to go away together (for at least a single day and up to a month) to a locale where they can relax and enjoy each other’s company before returning to the stress of everyday life Perhaps the most influential modern wedding tradition is related to the use of still images and video cameras to document weddings, often by paid professional photographers. Middle-class couples increasingly want to view and reexperience their wedding day—from the bride’s arrival at the wedding to the departure of the last guest—and to eventually share it with their children. Although the right to marry is recognized by the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the notion that weddings should be restricted to heterosexual couples is all too common. However, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people are increasingly asserting this right in North America and Europe. Where all but heterosexual weddings are illegal, commitment ceremonies allow lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people to affirm their relationship and their resolve to bear and raise children in loving and supportive families and communities. See also: Engagement; Family Folklore; Folk Custom; Lesbian Folklore; Marriage; Rites of Passage; Sexuality; Superstition; Tradition. References: Bennett, Margaret. Scottish Customs: From the Cradle to the Grave. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992; Bud, Eric Merrill. Scottish Tartan Weddings: A Practical Guidebook. New York: Hippocrene Books, Inc., 1999; Charsley, Simon R. Rites of Marrying. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991; Cole, Harriette. Jumping The Broom: The African-American Wedding Planner. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993; Fielding, William J. Strange Customs of Courtship and Marriage. New York: Hart Publishing Company Inc., 1942; Gourse, Leslie. Native American Courtship and Marriage Traditions. New York: Hippocrene Books, Inc., 1999; Haggerty, Bridget. The Traditional Irish Wedding. Minneapolis, MN: Irish Books and Media, 2000; Heckman, Marsha, and Richard Jung. Bouquets: A Year of Flowers for the Bride. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2000; Laverack, Elizabeth. With This Ring: 1,000 Years of Marriage. London: Elm Tree Books, 1979; Lewin, Ellen. ‘‘‘Why in the world would you want to do that?’: Claiming Community in Lesbian Commitment Ceremonies.’’ In Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America, ed. Ellen Lewin, 105–130. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996; McBride-Mellinger, Maria. The Perfect Wedding. New York: HarperCollins, 1997; McMahon-Lichte, Shannon, and Patricia Brentano. Irish Wedding Traditions: Using Your Irish Heritage to Create the Perfect Wedding. New York: Hyperion, 2001; Mordecai, Carolyn. Weddings: Dating & Love Customs of Cultures Worldwide including Royalty. Phoenix: Nittany, 1999; Murphy, Brain. The World of Weddings. New York and London: Paddington Press, 1978; Urlin, Ethel L. A Short History of Marriage. Detroit: Singing Press, 1969; Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Zainab Jerret

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Wedding, Mock A mock wedding is a satirical folk drama usually incorporated into another ritual event, in which traditional wedding ceremonies are parodied and/or travestied. Dramatic presentations to sell wedding-planning services, touristic demonstrations of ethnosocial marriage traditions, and realistic representations in family life, psychology, or sociology courses are often termed ‘‘mock weddings.’’ However, without the folk mock wedding’s satirical tone, their intent is to exemplify weddings seriously and authentically. The practice’s origins are obscure, but mock weddings have been used as community or family fundraisers in Britain and North America from the late nineteenth century to the present day. There are Tom Thumb weddings (between children) to promote donations to a parish; all-female mock weddings as part of bridal showers for factory workers; and ‘‘womanless weddings’’ to support a local fire brigade. In each of these examples, as in real marriages, audience members do not actually pay directly for the performance, although sometimes money or gifts are offered in exchange for the privilege of viewing or participating. In some mock weddings, aspects of marriage itself are satirized, as when public protests against the banning of same-sex marriages include a dramatic exchange of mock (or serious) vows before a real (or feigned) religious functionary. But mock weddings are not always about marriage; they can be incorporated as dramatic and humorous elements into anti-poverty and union rallies, or as entertainment in non-familial residential facilities ranging from sorority houses to senior citizens’ homes. Like marriages, these mock weddings foreground spectacle and presentation by community insiders for an audience of both insiders and outsiders. Perhaps the most common mock weddings appear at milestone anniversary parties and wedding showers in Canada and the United States, complete with outlandish attire, cross-dressing, humorous vows, and bawdy references. Women generally organize and orchestrate these events. They keep copies of a family or community text (usually personalized to the honored couple), assign roles and direct rehearsals, choose costumes, and dress actors. As is characteristic of most folk drama, participants’ roles are doubled in multiple domains. One actor is simultaneously the mock wedding bride and the honored couple’s son; another is both the minister and the town’s mayor, and so on. Male/female doubling pervades the drama: men play brides, flower girls, mothers, sisters, and female friends, and women play grooms, ring bearers, fathers, brothers, and male friends. The ceremony may simultaneously make oblique or direct references to the honored couple’s actual experience, and to the traditional wedding vows. It may also introduce (im)possibilities: pregnant brides at shotgun weddings; objections to the match from the groom’s pregnant ex-girlfriend; the groom’s vows to ‘‘leave the toilet seat up at all times to annoy you’’ and ‘‘live with you as long as you do the housework,’’ and the bride’s vows to ‘‘cook for you when it suits me’’ and ‘‘go out when I like.’’ While participants and audiences will generally describe a mock wedding as entertainment, its symbolic aspects—especially gender role-play—require

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interpretation. Some argue that mock weddings coercively reinscribe JudeoChristian heterosexuality and conventional gender roles by staging travesties of the alternatives. However, like other forms of symbolic opposition, mock weddings also present meaningful alternatives for acknowledging a continuum of unions from transgendered spouses, to the sexual and social independence of women, to non-monogamous heterosexual relationships. See also: Cross-Dressing; Folk Custom; Folk Drama; Lesbian Folklore; Marriage; Ritual; Transgender Folklore; Wedding. References: Greenhill, Pauline. ‘‘Folk Drama in Anglo Canada and the Mock Wedding: Transaction, Performance, and Meaning.’’ Canadian Drama, vol. 14, no. 2 (1988): 169– 205; Taft, Michael. ‘‘Men in Women’s Clothes: Theatrical Transvestites on the Canadian Prairie.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, 131–38. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

Pauline Greenhill Wicca and Neo-Paganism Wicca may be thought of as a large subset of a broad range of loosely related religious practices called ‘‘Neo-Paganism’’ (‘‘New Paganism’’). Pagan religions are typically polytheistic (involving multiple deities), or at least duotheistic (involving two deities), with both female and male images of the divine. Both Wicca and modern Paganism revere Goddesses and Gods, or other dual-gendered images of the divine, and offer important leadership roles for women, making them attractive alternatives to those disillusioned with Western male monotheisms. The word ‘‘pagan’’ comes from the Latin paganus, which originally meant ‘‘country-dweller’’ or ‘‘rustic.’’ The term gradually took on a mildly derogatory meaning akin to ‘‘hillbilly’’ (generally used in reference to people of the Appalachian region in the United States). Roman soldiers used it to refer to ‘‘civilians.’’ Finally, it took on the connotations of ‘‘unbeliever’’ or ‘‘infidel’’ after the growth of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions of Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam. In those contexts, ‘‘pagan’’ and its companion ‘‘heathen’’ are used as insulting terms to mean ‘‘a person who has no religion.’’ Therefore, anyone who did not believe in an Abrahamic religion was classified as a pagan—including Hindus, Buddhists, Shinto practitioners, and so forth— making Paganism a very broad category indeed. After the publication of Isaac Bonewits’ Real Magic in 1972, the term ‘‘Neo-Paganism’’ took on a renewed meaning in both popular and academic discourse. Bonewits distinguished between several fluid and overlapping historical categories of Paganism: 1) Paleopaganism—the Indigenous polytheistic, nature-based religions of the world. Some of these—for example, Hinduism and Taoism—have survived into the present, although their practitioners would likely be uncomfortable if labeled pagan; 2) Mesopaganism—Indigenous religions, influenced by Abrahamic religions—for example, Lucumi or Santerı´a, Voudon, and other religions of the African diaspora; 3) Neo-Paganism—from about the 1960s onward, consciously created or reconstructed religions blending paleopagan traditions with modern ‘‘Aquarian Age’’ ideals. ‘‘Neo-Pagan’’ became increasingly used as an umbrella

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term to refer to religions such as the Church of All Worlds, the Druidry  r nDraı´ocht Fein and some forms of Wicca. practiced by A Of the terms used to designate Pagan religions in the modern era, ‘‘Contemporary Paganism’’ has recently become the preferred designate; many practitioners find the ‘‘neo’’ in Neo-Paganism pejorative, or at least somewhat suspect. Widespread acceptance of the term Contemporary Paganism is reflected in its position as a recognized group of study within the American Academy of Religion, the largest international professional organization of scholars of religions in North America. Scholars now follow conventional notations used with other religions—in texts, for example, by capitalizing Pagan, as one would Hindu or Christian, and capitalizing God and Goddess within a Pagan context, as one would capitalize God in a Christian one. Contemporary Paganism includes a vast and complex array of beliefs, practices, and perspectives, each colored by its particular place of origin. As one would expect of Earth-centered religions, Contemporary Pagans draw their religious holidays from the cycle of the seasons and those activities associated with agriculture and animal care. Not all Pagans celebrate the same holidays, or at the same times, or in quite the same ways, but seasonal celebrations involving planting, harvesting, and the marking of the winter and summer solstices are quite common across Pagan religions around the world. Pagans typically characterize their spiritual practices as modern-day revivals or recreations of practices rooted in the shamanic techniques and Indigenous religions of pre-Christian Europe. Some Pagans use shamanic techniques such as drumming or dancing to achieve ecstatic trances or to experience an alternate reality. These techniques are not unique to European forms of Contemporary Paganism, but are used in many parts of the world. One of the most informative and extensively researched books on Contemporary Paganism, Michael Strmiska’s Modern Paganism in World Cultures offers an insightful look into several underreported forms of European and North American Paganism. Strmiska includes in Modern Paganism Italian American Stregheria, Druidry in contemporary Ireland, Asatru in Iceland and the United States, British Heathenry, Ukrainian Native Faith, and Lithuanian Paganism. Each chapter explores a particular strain of Paganism, considering the complex roles of ethnicity, language, and race in the construction of Pagan identity, the nature and place of tradition, folklore, and history in Pagan practice, and the relationship between Paganism and Christianity. Collectively, these chapters reveal the rich and dynamic range of Pagan religious practice. Pagans share similarities, but clearly Paganism is not just one kind of belief. While one might expect an Irish Druid to differ from an Italian Witch, Modern Paganism reveals surprising differences between Europeans and North Americans who practice the same religion. Europeans have a tendency to understand religion as received tradition within a particular ethnic and linguistic context and are likely to perceive Paganism as reconstructed rather than invented—in contrast to their more eclectic North American cousins, for whom race and ethnicity are often more fluid affairs. Can one

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be a Lithuanian Pagan who doesn’t speak Lithuanian? Or a Druid who isn’t Irish? In North America, the answer may well be a resounding ‘‘Why not?’’ These differences frequently raise important questions about appropriation and who owns a religious tradition. Within Pagan communities, they also raise the issue of whether the Gods have agency and may therefore choose their own worshippers. Barb Davy’s Introduction to Pagan Studies examines the historical influences on the development of Pagan thought and practice, including folklorists such as Sir James G. Frazer and Charles Godfrey Leland; Romantic writers such as Shelley and Yeats; the infamous magician and founder of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley; and Gerald Gardner—the almost equally infamous founder of modern Wicca. She also discusses some of Paganism’s contemporary figures, such as Raymond Buckland, Starhawk, and Isaac Bonewits. Davy explores Paganism’s extensive use of literature, from the historically and ethnically important Icelandic Eddas and Sagas, to modern fiction such as Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Today, there is a large and growing body of scholarship that concentrates on one of the largest groups within Contemporary Paganism—Wicca. Controversy over just what to call these religions did not end with Paganism. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wicca was variously and interchangeably called ‘‘the Old Religion,’’ ‘‘Witchcraft,’’ and ‘‘the Craft,’’ with little or no distinction made between ‘‘Wiccan’’ and ‘‘Witch.’’ Today, there is some discussion about whether Wicca and Witchcraft even refer to the same kinds of religious activities. Some practitioners identify themselves as Witches, but not Wiccans, and vice versa. The distinction seems to be variously understood as referring to differences in terms of origin, organization, formal training, and use of ceremonial magic. To further complicate matters, practitioners today may reject both terms, preferring ‘‘Earth Spirituality Practitioner’’ or ‘‘Wise Woman/Cunning Man’’ instead. Whatever it was called, its early practitioners emphasized that Wicca/ Witchcraft was the practice of a pre-Christian religion that had nothing to do with the worship of Satan, a figure in Christian cosmology. It also had nothing to do with the unfortunate and widespread English translation by anthropologists of words intended to indicate negative magic or sorcery as witchcraft. Early practitioners who maintained their religious practices were rooted in ancient traditions predating Christianity and stretching back possibly to the dawn of time. Belief in Wicca’s great antiquity results from the combined influences of anthropologist Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant and writer of occult fiction. Murray’s Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) sketched a romanticized vision of an organized Pagan underground that kept the old ways alive under a veneer of Christianity. Although other anthropologists have reported with impunity on similar phenomena among peoples compelled to convert to foreign religions, Murray was ridiculed and soundly criticized for her overactive imagination and faulty scholarship. To be sure, her work is flawed by many of the same problems that plagued Frazer: questionable methodology in collecting information, reductionism,

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selective use of data, and exaggerated claims based on limited evidence. Despite her faults, Murray’s work serves as a reminder for today’s scholars of the possible continuities of traditional Indigenous ritual practice in modern customs, traditions, and folklore. Margaret Murray undoubtedly influenced Gerald Gardner, who was directly responsible for the modern resurgence—or perhaps creation—of Wicca. Gardner’s 1954 publication of Witchcraft Today openly proclaimed the existence of the Old Religion as an ancient pre-Christian religion that had been forced underground for several hundred years to avoid persecution. Thanks largely to Ronald Hutton’s 1999 work, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, most Witches today see their faith as a modern and complex recreation or reconstruction of folk practices, Western esoteric philosophy, and literature. In the early stages of modern revival, Witches placed great emphasis on tradition, on ancient practices traced in unbroken lines, in order to legitimize the authority of their religious experience. But two publications provide other means to understand authority and to ground religious experience: Susan Greenwood’s The Nature of Magic and Nikki Bado-Fralick’s Coming to the Edge of the Circle. Greenwood’s ‘‘magical consciousness’’ and Bado-Fralick’s ‘‘body-in-practice’’ techniques are intended to help Pagans to develop expanded and participatory modes of awareness that include the interrelatedness of human and other-than-human persons and to describe and understand experiences between humans and the natural world, including spirits and deities that are considered immanent within nature. Like Paganism, Wicca is usually considered a ‘‘nature religion,’’ although precisely how this is understood is contested both by scholars and Witches themselves. Witches draw insights from the seasonal cycles of nature, celebrated in a calendar of eight sabbats (Sabbath) called the Wheel of the Year. They also follow the monthly cycles of the moon, keying ritual activities to its waxing and waning. Generally speaking, Wiccans are polytheistic or duotheistic and worship both Gods and Goddesses. Many covens (communities of practioners) choose to worship Gods and Goddesses within a particular group or pantheon of related deities, but also feel free to invoke deities outside those pantheons as required by the circumstances of a particular ritual or need. Goddesses and Gods are generally worshipped within the context of the seasons and invoked as catalysts for change and growth. The simple observation that witches worship Gods and Goddesses is complicated by the emergence of Feminist or Dianic Wicca in the 1970s and 1980s, usually credited to the influence of Starhawk and Z Budapest. Starhawk (Miriam Simos) was one of the founders of the Reclaiming Community in San Francisco, and her 1979 publication of Spiral Dance led a number of women dissatisfied with male monotheisms to awareness of Witchcraft and the worship of the Goddess. Z Budapest (Zsuzsanna Emese Budapest) founded the first feminist or Dianic coven in the mid-1970s—the Susan B. Anthony Coven Number 1. Dianic groups tend to worship the Goddess exclusively and may also exclude men from their covens. Feminist

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Wicca reinvigorated the Craft, providing new levels of maturity to the understanding of Goddesses, new modes of religious discourse and models of ritual expression, challenges to rigid hierarchical structures, and an increased sense of social and political activism among Witches. It is prudent not to conflate Feminist Wicca with Witchcraft in its entirety, or to assume that Witchcraft is a religion only of women and Goddesses. Generally speaking, women have roles that are both powerful and highly valued within all forms of the Craft. But the Craft is not feminist heaven because it includes Goddesses and women leaders. As seen with other world religions that have female images of the divine, Goddesses may be used to reinforce patriarchal models as easily as challenge them. The distinction between Dianic Wicca and other Craft traditions reminds us that Wiccan practice and theology are not monolithic. Like most religious practitioners, Witches participate in competing and sometimes conflicting discourses and practices, making extensive examination of the particularity of the group one is studying quite important. The Craft is practiced by individuals called solitaries or by groups called covens. Covens have a great deal of autonomy and vary widely in composition, size, and structure. Some covens practice ritual initiation as a form of entry into the group. Not all covens practice initiation, and some that do may not require a course of study. Bado-Fralick’s Coming to the Edge of the Circle provides an extensive examination of one form of Wiccan initiation practiced by a midwestern coven and uses Wiccan ritual initiation to challenge widely accepted paradigms of rites of passage. Coven structures range from minimalist to highly elaborate patterns of training and advancement. Some have an extensive training program and a structure based on expertise and experience. A few groups have a rigid, even authoritarian hierarchical structure that may or may not be connected to training. Still other covens have no discernable training, disciplined praxis, or structure, preferring a spontaneous and creative approach to worship. One such group, Reclaiming, extensively studied by Jone Salomonsen in Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco, has a self-described anarchic structure that purports to be free of hierarchy. Witches emphasize personal experiences of the sacred and ritual creativity, both of which reinforce an emphasis on local ritual praxis (a linking of theory and practice) over universal dogma in most groups. Wiccan ritual takes on a dizzying variety of forms, from the elementary to the most sophisticated and from the simplest to the most elaborate, artistic, and ceremonial patterns of ritual behavior and expression. A single coven may practice a wide variety of ritual styles, adapting each creatively to fit both the occasion and the place where the ritual must be performed. The growth and popularity of international Pagan festivals that include a wide variety of Pagans, Witches, and often the interested but unaffiliated public, make possible the study of a wide range of ritual forms. Since the early 2000s, several worthy books describing Wiccan ritual have been published, including Sabina Magliocco’s Witching Culture: Folklore and NeoPaganism in America and Sarah Pike’s Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community.

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By embracing the deliberately constructed nature of their religious practice, Wiccans and Pagans provide ample material to ‘‘think with’’ and present an opportunity to examine and understand other religions as examples of creative activities and lived processes. See also: Activism; Ethnicity; Festival; Folklore About Women; Goddess Worship; Initiation; Magic; Maiden, Mother, Crone; Mother Earth; Race; Ritual; Witchcraft, Historical; Women’s Folklore. References: Bado-Fralick, Nikki. Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual. American Academy of Religion, Academy Series. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; Bonewits, Isaac. Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise on the Basic Principles of Yellow Magic. Newburyport, MA: Weiser Books, 1972, 1989; Budapest, Z. The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Newburyport, MA: Weiser Books, 2007. Originally published in 1975 as The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows; Davy, Barbara Jane. Introduction to Pagan Studies. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006; Gardner, Gerald. Witchcraft Today. New York: Citadel Press, 1971 [1954]; Greenwood, Susan. The Nature of Magic: An Anthropology of Consciousness. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2005 Heselton, Philip. Wiccan Roots: Gerald Gardner and the Modern Witchcraft Revival. Chieveley, UK: Capall Bann Publishing, 2000; Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Magliocco, Sabina. ‘‘Special issue: Wicca.’’ Ethnologies, vol. 20, no. 1 (1998); ———, ed. Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004; Pike, Sarah. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; Salomonsen, Jone. Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. London: Routledge, 2002; Starhawk (Miriam Simos). The Spiral Dance. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989 [1979]; Strmiska, Michael, ed. Modern Paganism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2005.

Nikki Bado-Fralick Wife Sales Most reports of wife sales, a popular divorce ritual of the English working classes, date from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, with some isolated accounts from the sixteenth century. Wife sales took a highly ritualized form. First, the sale was advertised and publicly announced. On the appointed day, the husband led his wife to the public marketplace by means of a new halter around her neck or waist. The sale took the form of an auction, after which money was exchanged between the husband and the successful bidder. The husband then formally transferred ownership of his wife by passing the end of the halter to the new husband. More rarely, private wife sales took place before witnesses in public bars. A wife sale constitutes the opening chapter of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, and comic broadside ballads about them circulated in England in the nineteenth century. The custom was transported to Australia with British convicts during the same time period. Wife sales declined and then died out after legal divorce became available in England in the mid-nineteenth century. English folk belief held that a wife sale properly performed according to the formula given above constituted a legal divorce. The custom appealed

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to a supposed ancient law, but there is little evidence of it—especially in this ritualized form—before the late eighteenth century, and the authorities always disallowed divorce by wife sale if a case came to their attention. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the only way to obtain a legal divorce in England was by an act of Parliament, a recourse effectively open only to the very rich. The wife sale appears to be an invented tradition resorted to by the working classes as an alternative to simple desertion or bigamy. Wife sales have been seen as prima facie evidence of the barbarous mistreatment of women among the English working class. The inevitable use of the halter—an instrument used to control and to signify ownership of domestic animals—suggests that a wife was seen as a mere chattel to be exploited by the husband for her monetary value. However, several details suggest another interpretation. First, the sales were apparently almost always prearranged, the buyer usually being the wife’s lover or someone else known to her, such as a member of her family. The prices paid were very low, suggesting that they were purely symbolic. Most importantly, the women at the center of the ritual usually participated willingly; and in many cases, their emotional or economic lot was apparently improved by this change of spouse. See also: Ballad; Class; Divorce; Folk Belief; Folk Custom; Marriage; Ritual; Sexism. References: Ihde, Erin. ‘‘So Gross a Violation of Decency: A Note on Wife Sales in Colonial Australia.’’ Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 84, no. 1 (1998): 26–37; Menefee, Samuel Pyeatt. Wives for Sale: An Ethnographic Study of British Popular Divorce. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981; Taft, Michael. ‘‘Hardy’s Manipulation of Folklore and Literary Imagination: The Case of the Wife Sale in The Mayor of Casterbridge.’’ Studies in the Novel, vol. 13, no. 4 (1981): 399–407; Thompson, E. P. Customs in Common. New York: New Press, 1991.

Moira Smith Witchcraft, Historical A witch is a person who carries out harm by supernatural or magical means. This definition still has power in most of Africa, Oceania, Asia, South America, and First Nations of North America today. However, in early fifteenth-century Europe, a witch became defined as a person who swore allegiance to the Devil and carried out harm with his supernatural aid. The second definition led to a period of extensive witch trials between the late fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries. Belief in witches was widespread in the past, but the shape of that belief varied among different social classes and changed over time. More importantly, ideas about how to deal with witches also varied. While the first definition of witchcraft was widespread at the popular level—that is, in villages and among the lower classes—the second had its origins in the thinking of elites, among clerics, secular rulers, and jurists. The history of historical witchcraft in Anglo European cultures is the history of how these two definitions of the witch—the popular and the demonological—were acted upon and combined in different ways over those two centuries. Today, the witch figure of folklore and popular culture combines elements of both.

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Throughout Europe, every village contained people who were suspected by their neighbors of being witches. They were blamed for using occult means to do harm to their neighbors, cause illness and injury to people or livestock, damage crops, or spoil household tasks such as the churning of butter. Not all misfortunes were blamed on a witch; typically, this only happened when the trouble followed soon after an argument with an alleged witch. Most, but not all village witches were women (see Apps and Gow 2003), often old and poor women who were socially alienated from their communities. Not all were vulnerable to suspicions of witchcraft; usually, suspected witches were quarrelsome or spiteful—in brief, bad neighbors. A few may have actually practiced malicious magic, but such activity was by no means necessary for one to gain a reputation for witchcraft. On the contrary, magical practitioners, or ‘‘cunning folk,’’ were only occasionally confused with witches. Mostly male, they practiced divination, medicine, herbalism, and fortune-telling. People would pay for their services to help them discover the witch whom they thought had done them harm. A suspected witch’s reputation grew over many years. Villagers preferred to deal themselves with the witches in their midst—but only as a last resort would they take a suspected witch to court. Instead, they either tried to appease the witch—making her promises in order to get her to remove the spell—or they resorted to countermagic, sometimes calling in the help of supposedly cunning folk. Countermagic consisted of rituals for discovering the identity of a witch (often confirming the suspicions that the accuser/victim had already formed), and rituals for rendering her magical powers ineffective. In England, for example, folk belief held that a witch could be made powerless if you drew some of her blood by scratching her. A witch’s neighbors were worried about the actual harm she caused, rather than about the source of her power; in fact, they were happy to employ magic themselves to counteract her witchcraft. This picture of village witchcraft beliefs and practices held across Europe at the time of the witch hunts, and bears many similarities to witchcraft beliefs and practices in cultures around the world. Indeed, these beliefs continued unofficially in Europe until the nineteenth century. While the popular definitions of witchcraft prevailed, mass persecutions of witches were unknown, and even trials of individual witches were relatively rare. In part, villagers were reluctant to take a witch to court because judges and lawyers were either skeptical of witchcraft claims or considered such charges trivial, so legal proceedings often failed. The legal situation changed when the demonological definition of witchcraft arose among the European elite in the fifteenth century, as jurists and theologians came to view witchcraft as a form of heresy. Specifically, they thought witches were devil-worshippers who denied God and the church and formed a pact with Satan. In return for worshipping Satan, they received magical powers with which to harm others. As part of this pact, they flew to nighttime meetings (sabbats) of fellow witches, described as mass orgies. These allegations—reverse images of Christian belief and ritual—had been made against heretics since the eleventh century; the stereotype often was transferred to the witch figure.

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Demonological definitions were developed in a series of learned treatises, finding fullest expression in the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1486, as well as other works by expert witch hunters and scholarly demonologists. To theologians, the actual harm supposedly caused by a witch was less important than the fact that the source of her magic was her pact with the Devil. These learned definitions of the witch as a follower of Satan encouraged many rulers, clergy, and jurists to treat witchcraft as a serious social problem that required their intervention. Under the new definition, they were no longer dealing with relatively minor claims of illness and bad luck, but with heresy, murder, infanticide, and conspiracy. The Office of the Inquisition, the Catholic Church’s campaigner against heresy, was empowered to seek out witches as they did other heretics. Between 1450 and 1750, there were approximately 100,000 witchcraft trials across Europe (Briggs 1996). The worst period was between 1590 and 1670—not in the Middle Ages, as popular opinion would have it, but in the early modern period. In the final analysis, between 40,000 and 50,000 men and women were executed as witches (ibid.). Even at their height, the number of witch trials varied widely at different times and in many places. The areas of most intensive witch hunts are all found in Western Europe, especially Germany, France, Switzerland, Scotland, and England. There were outbreaks of witch panics at certain times— the first in the late 1400s to the early 1500s; another around 1560; a third at the end of the 1500s, and a final from 1620 to 1675. By the eighteenth century, witch trials had essentially ended in Europe. The Salem, Massachussetts, witch trials of 1692 were one of the last witch panics; probably no more than thirty people were executed for witchcraft in the whole of New England. Judges wanted proof before they would condemn anyone as a witch. Since witchcraft, being magical, leaves no physical evidence, a witch could be convicted only by her own confession, which almost always required torture. Another accepted form of proof was the presence of the ‘‘Devil’s mark’’ on her body. This mark was an insensitive spot that was a sign of her pact with Satan. (In English trials, it was believed to be an extra nipple hidden on her body from which she suckled her ‘‘familiar spirit,’’ usually an animal such as a cat. Panels of women jurors, or professional witch finders, were called upon to search the bodies of the accused for these marks, or teats.) Torture played a large role in spreading witch panics. One trial would spawn others in a chain reaction as the accused were forced to name the fellow members of their witch sects. In countries where torture was illegal, for example England, there were fewer witch trials. The centrality of torture has encouraged the belief that witch hunters were sadistic and all-powerful, and that to be accused of witchcraft was a virtual death warrant. However, across Europe throughout the period of such trials, only half of those accused were executed, and conviction rates varied between 15 and 90 percent. Formerly, historians spoke of ‘‘the European witch craze,’’ a phrase that suggested both widespread hysteria and a single massive movement that engulfed the continent. More recent research shows that these witch hunts were not a coordinated, top-down imposition of elite beliefs. When

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demonological opinion and local elites’ opinions coincided with popular witchcraft suspicions, a witch panic could ensue, leading to a spate of witch trials that implicated suspects from all levels of the community. But such panics were relatively localized and generally short-lived. There was no such thing as a typical witch trial. Crimes and practices attributed to witches varied from one country to another. For example, claims that witches attended sabbats are common on the Continent, but rare in English trials, where prosecutors stressed the role of the witches’ familiar, and the existence of a corresponding witches’ teat somewhere on the body that was used to suckle it. One reason that the European witch hunts are thought of as a single mass phenomenon is because people relied on the descriptions of the demonologists, preserved in documents such as the Malleus Maleficarum. However, these works are not representative of all European ideas on the subject, nor even of European elite thought. Demonologists’ views were never universally accepted (a fact that they themselves often complained about). The Office of the Inquisition was not all-powerful; its agents required the cooperation of secular courts to actually sentence witches, and cooperation was not always forthcoming. Some lawyers and secular rulers were reluctant to embrace witch-hunting, in part because fear of witches was associated with the lower classes, from which the educated sought to distinguish themselves. (Until the thirteenth century, even the Catholic Church denounced as mere superstition the popular belief in witches who flew at night.) But if they did believe in witches, unless they embraced the demonological ideas about a conspiracy of witches, they were unlikely to see the solitary village witches as a threat or a problem. The stereotypical witch is always a woman—usually, an old woman. Witch-hunters’ manuals asserted that women were naturally more prone to witchcraft than men, and popular belief supported that view. Across Europe, 75 percent of those executed as witches were women (Briggs 1996). Some have interpreted these facts to mean that the witch hunts were a thinly disguised excuse for a concerted patriarchal campaign to control women’s political power and to eliminate professional competition from midwives, and from female folk healers and magical specialists. In its most extreme form, this theory has become a vision of a misogynistic campaign of ‘‘gendercide’’—often with wildly inflated numbers of victims. This picture is rhetorically powerful but historically inaccurate. The reality is both more interesting and more complex. Neither popular nor demonological definitions of the witch stated that she must be a woman. Men as well as women were tried and executed (and, in some places, in greater numbers). Although misogynistic attitudes were common in all social classes and no doubt contributed to the stereotype of the female witch, the preponderance of women identified as witches also had demographic and sociological causes. In part, the social system was hardest on the female poor, and so widows and older women were most likely to be alienated from their communities and vulnerable to suspicions of witchcraft from their neighbors.

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At the village level, women usually initiated accusations against other women. Early modern European life was strongly gendered—adult women spent most of their waking hours in the company of other women. The disputes and tensions that gave rise to witchcraft suspicions and accusations took place in the female domains close to home, in kitchens and yards, rather than in the male domains of fields, mills, and workplaces. Most witchcraft beliefs were concerned with household and farmyard affairs— family health, daily chores, and food. Women competed with each other for scarce resources in this sphere, and reputations for witchcraft were formulated by women against other women with whom they disputed. Men had other avenues for competing directly and for resolving disputes. Other explanations for the rise of the witch trials tie them to the early modern development of centralized state power, part of a widespread move to legislate the private lives of all citizens. The demonologists’ campaigns were part of an early modern trend toward legislation of private life, especially sexuality, so it is not surprising that women bore the brunt of this development. Some historians suggest that the demonologists’ view of witchcraft was based on partial knowledge of an actual Pagan cult or religion, which they persecuted as a competitor to the Christian religion. However, historical research has discredited Margaret Murray’s theory that witchcraft was a woman-centered Pagan religion. While there is some evidence of folk beliefs from some regions, notably northern Italy, that could have influenced the theologians’ constructs, it remains uncertain whether these folk beliefs signal the existence of a Pagan cult either at the time of the witch hunts or before. Although witch trials ended in much of Europe by the eighteenth century, popular belief in witches continued. Laws against witchcraft were repealed, not because the elite classes had stopped believing in witches, but because witches were no longer seen as a threat. At the popular level, extralegal measures and countermagic continued to be used against suspected witches. By the nineteenth century, the widespread folk belief in witchcraft was gradually reduced to a more generalized locus for the expression of beliefs about good and bad luck. Today, it is easy to dismiss belief in witchcraft as an irrational superstition that has been outgrown, but it is likely that the present generation is no more or less irrational than those of the past. See also: Cursing; Divination Practices; Folk Belief; Folk Medicine; Fortune-Teller; Herbs; Magic; Midwifery; Wicca and Neo-Paganism. References: Apps, Laura, and Andrew Gow. Male Witches in Early Modern Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003; Briggs, Robin. Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. New York: Penguin, 1996; Cohn, Norman. Europe’s Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-hunt. New York: Basic Books, 1975; Davies, Owen. Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736– 1951. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999; Klaits, Joseph. Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts. Reprint edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987; Larner, Christina. Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984; Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Vintage Books, 2003; Oldridge, Darren. The Witchcraft Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002; Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern

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and Twentieth-Century Representations. New York: Routledge, 1996; Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Scarre, Geoffrey. Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury Europe. London: Macmillan, 1987; Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971.

Moira Smith Women Religious Women religious, most commonly called nuns or religious sisters, choose to live a formal monastic life. They are usually associated with Catholic Christianity and Theravada Buddhism, although nuns exist in all Buddhist traditions. There are also women religious in Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Jain, and Taoist denominations. Women religious devote their lives to pious and spiritual pursuits. Within monastic traditions, they lead a celibate existence of service, meditation, and prayer. They generally live simply, with few possessions (some religious orders and traditions forbid any personal ownership). Some choose to live communally with other women religious in a convent, while some dwell apart. In Catholic Christianity, independent living has become more common as the numbers of women religious have steadily dropped, and communal convent life becomes more difficult to maintain. An early proponent of women religious in Catholic Christianity was Saint Scholastica. Sister to Benedict of Nursia, founder of the Benedictines, Scholastica ran a monastery near Monte Cassino in sixth-century Italy. Numerous orders of women religious have been founded since then, including the Carmelites, the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Franciscan Poor Clares, various missionary orders, Dominicans, and Ursulines. The many orders of nuns have different goals and missions—teaching, nursing, social work, missionary activity, alleviation of poverty, or cloistered contemplation—but share commitments to faith, simplicity, and chastity. In most orders, a woman religious is known as a ‘‘bride of Christ’’ and may wear a symbolic wedding band as an outward sign of this allegorical marriage. Perhaps the best-known religious woman in contemporary times was Mother Teresa, an Albanian woman who founded the Missionaries of Charity and was famous for her work with the very poor in Calcutta, India. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. While she has been criticized for her ‘‘tolerant’’ beliefs and ‘‘arrogant’’ style, she remains a model of selfless devotion to God and the Church for many Catholics. After her death in 1997, Pope John Paul II beatified her, thereby putting her on the official path to sainthood. The ordination of Buddhist nuns began during the time of the historical Buddha in the fourth century BCE. An unprecedented event at that time, formal recognition of women’s religiosity has continued throughout Buddhist history. In some traditions, such as Tibetan Vajrayana (‘‘Indestructible Vehicle’’) Buddhism, and Thai Theravada Buddhism, women may not take the full vows permitted monks. The situation is similar in Catholic Christianity, where women may not take vows of priesthood. In Thailand, women

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religious are recognized and respected by the populace, but are not recognized as ordained nuns by the government. Buddhist women religious usually take on the outward appearance of monks, with shaved heads and distinctive robes. They usually live communally, but may also pursue spiritual enlightenment as hermits. Women religious have been the subject of numerous films, television shows, and books. For example, the films Agnes of God (1985) and Therese (1986) both explore the themes of religious devotion in nuns, especially the question of whether someone is truly touched by God or is better understood as mentally ill. Many women religious can be celebrated or vilified in traditional narratives, but some themselves use folklore to influence their own situations. For example, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a seventeenthcentury Mexican nun and writer, used the villancico, a Spanish-lyric folksong form, for the coded performance of her sometimes-subversive woman-centered perspective. Further, as a result of their once-common participation in Catholic education, much Catholic folklore about nuns persists, especially from the period when North American nuns wore the full habit (religious costume) of their order. Children’s jokes about women religious include riddles like ‘‘What is black and white and black and white and black and white?’’ with the response, ‘‘A nun rolling down a hill.’’ See also: Activism; Chastity; Folk Music and Folksong; Joke; Riddle; Saints; Sister; Wedding. References: Kolmer, Elizabeth. ‘‘Catholic Women Religious and Women’s History: A Survey of the Literature.’’ American Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 5, Special Issue: Women and Religion (Winter, 1979): 639–651; Peach, Lucinda Joy. Women and World Religions. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002; Pearlman, Bari, dir. Daughters of Wisdom. BTG Productions, 2007. Avaible on DVD at http://www.daughtersofwisdom.com/ buydvd.html (accessed August 11, 2008); Underberg, Natalie. ‘‘Sor Juana’s Villancicos: Context, Gender, and Genre.’’ Western Folklore 60:4 (2001): 297–316.

Theresa A. Vaughan Women Warriors Women warriors are mythological, legendary, fictional, or historical female who have taken up arms, and can be found in most cultures and time periods. They are particularly notable because men are, in most cultures, considered to be under obligations to become warriors in order to protect women and children. Stories of women warriors depict women who have chosen to become warriors due to personal inclination or predilection, or who become warriors of necessity—when men are unable to defend home and hearth. Mythological representations of women warriors run the gamut from the Sumerian, Greek, and Roman pantheons to those of the Celts and Aztecs. In North America, the Greek/Trojan god Athene is possibly the best-known immortal warrior woman, but the most numerous are those in the Celtic pantheon, including the Morrigan, the Triple Goddess of War. As a rule, warrior goddesses did not fight. Rather, they bore arms, wore armor, presided over battlefields, chose the winning side, or, as in the case of the

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Valkyries of Norse mythology, rode onto the field of battle to choose among the slain those who would fight in the great battle at the end of the world. This hymn to a Mexican war goddess, Cihuacoatl, emphasizes her protective roles in times of war rather than her ferocity. Serpent Woman, plumed with eagle feathers, with the crest of eagles, comes, beating her drum, from the Place of the Old. She alone, who is our flesh, goddess of the fields and shrubs, is strong to support us. Our mother is as twelve eagles, goddess of drums calling the gods, filling the fields. She is our mother—a goddess of war, our mother, a companion from the Home of Ancestors. She comes forth, she appears when war is waged, she protects us in war that we be not destroyed—an example and companion from the Home of the Ancestors. She comes adorned in the ancient manner with the eagle’s crest—in the ancient manner with the eagle’s crest! (Internet Sacred Text Archive)

One of the best-known legends of a race of warrior women comes from ancient Greek mythology, from whence they menaced, challenged, and finally underscored the primacy of the male in Athenian culture. The Amazons are usually described as the daughters of Ares, god of war. They make frequent appearances in Greek mythology, in which they are always antagonistic to men; while they acquit themselves well, they always lose. Theseus’s route of the Amazons in the center of Athens was a favorite subject for vase painters. As William Blake Tyrrell notes, ‘‘The Amazons are said to have invaded Attica and to have been slaughtered because in classical Athens they existed expressly to die each time they were seen in paintings or their name was spoken’’ (Tyrell: 113). In some depictions, the Amazons amputated their left breasts in order to improve their skills as archers, which made them doubly monstrous: not only does this image in the popular imagination suggest that a warrior’s body must be masculinized to be effective in battle, it disturbs the possibility that an Amazon might nurture an infant, an emblematic task of motherhood. One theory about the origin of the name ‘‘Amazon’’ is that it is derived from term a mazos—‘‘without breast.’’ Mythical Amazon society represented an ever-present threat to the real institution of Greek marriage. The myth expresses the belief that if the women could leave, they would; whereupon they would strive mightily to destroy their oppressors. The location of the Amazon homeland varies from tale to tale and their dress and appearance in Greek art changes to align with that that of the primary military threat to the Hellenes at any given time. Lawrence Osborn notes that, ‘‘So persistent is [the Amazons’] hold on the Western psyche that when the Spanish navigated a huge river in South America in 1542, they sent back reports of Amazon sightings and the river eventually acquired their name’’ (Osborne: 50). According to Herodotus and other early Greek historians-mythographers, the Amazons were not only great fighters, but were the first to use iron and mount horses. Between 1992 and 1995, archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball excavated gravesites

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on the Russia-Kazakhstan border; these sites contained the skeletons of relatively tall, bowlegged women (ostensibly from riding horses) buried with daggers, bronze-tipped arrows, and swords. Other recent archeological discoveries have revealed the remains of Viking women laid to rest with weapons, and others who confirm the historical existence of female Roman gladiators. However, none of these finds offer any bases for the Amazons of lore. Celtic lore boasts a wide array of women warriors. The most notable is the historical Queen Boudicca, around whom many legends arose. During the Roman occupation of Britain in the first century, Boudicca dedicated herself to the warrior goddess Andraste and successfully led the northern tribes in revolt, nearly costing the Romans the province. The English and Canadian ballad traditions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries frequently made use of the image of the cross-dressed warrior woman. Beginning with Mary Ambree, these characters generally went to war as sailors, fought with arms, were wounded, and finally returned to civilian life to marry their lovers. In Chinese legend, Hua Mulan disguised herself as a man and took up arms in place of her father. Mulan first appeared in a sixth-century ballad. Although there are few warrior women in Chinese folklore, the proliferation of popular embellishments of Mulan’s story over time indicates the importance to the Chinese of at least one strong and clever female warrior. In Mexico, where women were banned from military barracks in 1925, they have nonetheless played central roles during the country’s periods of unrest and revolution. The image of the soldadera, the strong woman soldier, is today an emblem of Chicana identity, and is frequently depicted in paintings and corridos. European folktales describe many women characters who meet conflict, threats, and adversity with sharp wits and clever tongues, yet there are relatively few who actually function as warriors. Aside from the miraculous military prowess of Brunhild of the Norse Edda poems and Volsunga Saga, whose powers disappeared when she was raped on her wedding night, very few take up arms or actively fight. Gretel’s action in shoving a childeating witch into her own oven is one of the rare examples of an active rather than passive heroine of a folktale. North American folktales, however, detail the exploits of many women who fit the definition of a warrior: they are physically active, frequently destroy threatening males, and often refuse rescue for themselves. This is particularly true of First Nations tales, which often have women who— when their tribes are threatened—ride out to battle, undisguised or in masculine warrior-garb, sometimes to shame men into fighting. They menace, count coup, and sometimes sacrifice their own lives. For example, in the Oneida tale, ‘‘The Warrior Maiden,’’ a tribe is threatened by encroaching enemies. A young girl receives a vision that tells her how to save her people by luring the enemy into a trap. She sneaks into the enemy’s camp, allows herself to be captured and tortured, and finally, lead her oppressors to a site where the Oneida hurl boulders down, killing everyone, including the warrior maiden. Warrior women in First Nation people’s narratives are prone to frighten enemy males by lifting their skirts and exposing their genitalia.

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The nineteenth-century west African ‘‘Amazons of Dahomey’’ present the only confirmed historical case in which a society’s fiercest and most respected fighting force were women. King Gezo made them his elite troops in 1818; as many as 8,000 women served in Dahomey’s army until they were wiped out by better-armed European colonizers. Historian Roger Edgerton recounts this remark from a French Foreign Legion soldier in a letter home: ‘‘These young women were far and away the best men in the Dahomeyan army, and woman to man were quite a match for any of us’’ (‘‘Girls with Guns’’). Aisha, the youngest wife of Muhammad, Cleopatra, who commanded a fleet during her rebellion with Marc Antony, a few Chinese empresses, and several Mongol queens may be justifiably called warrior women. And there are many historical/quasihistorical women who have made their way into legend. Many had verifiable lives as warriors; others did not, but all have stories attached to their names. In European lore, the best known is certainly Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, who led the French Dauphin to victory over the English and was burned at the stake for her pains—specifically for the crime of wearing men’s clothing. But Joan was not the only medieval European woman to take up arms. Castle chatelaines and wives who followed their husbands on crusades were often required to take up arms to defend their homes and persons against attack. Despite the horror of Joan of Arc’s fate, in the later Middle Ages, popular literature frequently depicted crossdressed female knights. Other legendary European women warriors include Moll Cutpurse, the ‘‘First Highwaywoman’’ and Black Agnes, the ‘‘Scottish Amazon.’’ It should be noted that, as a rule, women who go to war in fiction, fare much better than they do in folklore, legend, and reality. Warrior women are increasingly appearing in North American popular culture, with their characters and plotlines drawn mainly from folklore and myth rather than from reality. The first female superhero, Wonder Woman, an Amazon princess from Paradise Island who fights for love, truth, and the United States of America, appeared in her own comic book in 1941. After several hiatuses and incarnations, DC Comics brought her back in a new series in 2006, this time accompanied by a spin-off comic, Amazons Attack! No other female comic book character had the success of Wonder Woman until the campy Xena: Warrior Princess appeared on television in 1995. Squarely centered on Xena’s friendship with her compassionate sidekick, Gabrielle, the program’s lesbian subtext became increasingly overt as its fan base grew over six years to reach a worldwide audience. Since 1995, women warrior characters have made regular appearances in science fiction television programs including Hel, Sarge, and Cleo in Cleopatra 2525, Samantha Carter in Stargate: SG1, Delenn and Commander Susan Ivonova in Babylon 5, Buffy Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Zoe Alleyne in Firefly. Women warriors are also increasingly popular in science fiction/fantasy films; examples include Terminator, Alien, Tank Girl; Electra, The Return of the King, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and X-Men: The Last Stand. In one example of literary science fiction, females of various species who disguise themselves as men to go to war are treated with feminist glee in Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment.

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However, North American popular culture has given its real women warriors short shrift by comparison. Despite the fact that 160,000 American women had been deployed to Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq (Johnson: 18), and one in seven soldiers fighting in the U.S.-Iraq War in 2006 were women, the film GI Jane (1998) stands virtually alone to represent U.S. military women in the popular imagination. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen growing numbers of real women warriors on actual battlefields. Women have become soldiers in dozens of nations, including the United States and Canada. While military policy in the United States officially proscribes the roles of women to noncombat, supportive positions, in the heat of battle, women are increasingly involved in active combat situations. Despite their significant contributions, they face discrimination and sexual harassment in the modern military. As some elements of popular culture slowly make their way into folklore, we can expect to see the continuation and strengthening of the women warrior tradition. See also: Ballad; Cross-Dressing; Folktale; Matriarchy; Military Women’s Folklore; Myth Studies; Politics; Violence. References: Corbett, Sara. ‘‘The Women’s War.’’ New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2007; Davis-Kimball, Jeannie. Warrior Women: An Archeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines. New York: Warner Books, 2002; Dugaw, Diane. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Edgerton, Robert B. Warrior Women: The Amazons of Dahomey. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000; Girls with Guns.org: Home of the action heroine. n.d. http://www.girlswithguns. org/short/short0077.htm (accessed July 4, 2007); Internet Sacred Text Archive. ‘‘Hymn to Cihu-coatl.’’ n.d. http://www.sacred-texts.com/index.htm (accessed July 6, 2007); Johnson, Lucas, II. ‘‘Duty Bound: Women in Iraq Risk Their Lives to Serve Their Country.’’ In The Crisis (NAACP), March/April 2007. Baltimore: The Crisis Publishing Co., Inc., 16–19; Jones, David E. Women Warriors: A History. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1997; Mann, Susan. ‘‘Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womenhood.’’ The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no. 4 (November 2000): 835–862; Osborne, Lawrence. ‘‘Women Warriors.’’ Lingua Franca (November 1998): 50–57; Salas, Elizabeth. Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990; Tyrrell, William Blake. Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984; Zoll, Amy. Gladiatrix: The True Story of History’s Unknown Woman Warrior. New York: Berkeley Boulevard Books, 2002.

Julia Kelso and Liz Locke Women’s Clubs Women’s clubs are voluntary organizations with exclusively female membership that provide regular opportunities for members to meet, create, and share lore. They are social spaces that serve and enhance some aspect of their members’ shared experience. That shared experience may be a career, a cause, a history, or a hobby—women’s clubs are as myriad as the lives of those who belong to them. Histories of the women’s club movement or institutional histories of particular clubs rarely explore the folkloric dimension of these organizations, but much narrative, material, and customary folklore can be found in women’s club meetings. While women’s voluntary organizations have changed with the shifting demands on women’s time, the need for connection with other women to accomplish shared

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goals, provide social support, and develop common interests will continue to be met by membership in them, and folklore will continue to be performed as an integral part of the life of these organizations. Alan Dundes has identified the folk as ‘‘any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor’’ (1965), and all women’s clubs fit within this broad definition. However, a number of variables determine the quality and quantity of folklore in these organizations. The club must provide regular interaction among its members in order to develop a shared identity and the folklore to sustain it. Interaction may be face-to-face, or it may take place on the Internet, a virtual social space for women too busy or too physically distant from one another to meet in person. Folklore requires emotional involvement in the group—engaged performers and an engaged audience: the greater the members’ involvement in the work and aims of the club, the richer the folklore that will be found there. The centrality of a club’s ideology and activities to the members’ identity also shapes its folklore—not all club memberships are equally engrossing, and not all members are equally involved in a club’s life. There are women’s clubs that address every aspect of women’s lives, allowing their members to create and explore shared roles, talents, interests, and social relationships. Professional organizations serve women in many careers, such as police officers, physicians, and ministers, enabling them to address the challenges unique to their work lives. Clubs also form around a political cause or social movement, a national identity, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. Social clubs provide space for women to pursue a favorite leisure activity, such as bridge, quilting, horticulture, motorcycling, camping, or sports. Women’s clubs can support and promote a shared trait or an experience held in common, such as a breast cancer survivors’ support group. Women’s clubs can also be auxiliaries of or counterpart organizations to men’s clubs, providing a separate space for women’s participation in a pursuit shared in common with men, such as the American Legion Auxiliary or the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Scholars trace the beginning of the women’s club movement in the United States to the literary clubs and art-appreciation clubs founded in the Midwest and New England in the mid-nineteenth century. Regular gatherings of women were part of traditional life for centuries as settings for the social performance of work or as a part of women’s spiritual lives; however, women’s clubs are distinguished from these informal groups by women’s self-conscious creation of a time and space distinct from work or worship and as venues for the pursuit of self-improvement, sociability, and activism. Early women’s clubs offered their members an identity distinct from their roles of wife and mother, but one that members could argue was an extension into the public sphere of women’s traditional roles. Women’s clubs beautified the public spaces in their communities, improved public health and working conditions, assisted immigrants, and campaigned for causes such as suffrage or temperance. Women’s clubs provide sites for folklore performance at regular meetings or special gatherings: retreats, initiations, workshops, trips, conferences, exhibits, protests, parades, or commemorations. The folklore performed can

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be specific to the club, providing members with a way to train newcomers in the group’s traditions, to entertain, to share values, or to demonstrate allegiance to the club. Elaine Lawless’ study of women ministers (1993) is an example of club-specific folklore, as is Joyce Ice’s research into the shared aesthetics of a women’s quilting group (1993) and Barbara Truesdell’s study of the rituals of the Daughters of the American Revolution (1996). Folklore may also be part of the repertoire available to women as members of their culture, providing social contact, self-expression, and the opportunity to consider shared experiences and meanings. Eleanor Wachs’ work (1988) with the crime-victim narratives of a women’s literary club is a good example of performance analysis of folklore transmitted in a club setting to explore issues outside of the club’s purpose, but essential to women’s competence in an urban setting. Whatever a club’s role, the folklore performed there creates and explores the shared identity of the women as members and as women in their culture. See also: Camplore; Crime-Victim Stories; Folk Group; Quiltmaking; Sorority Folklore; Storytelling; Suffrage Movement; Women Religious; Women’s Friendship Groups. References: Dundes, Alan. ‘‘What is Folklore?’’ In The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes, 1–3. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965; Gere, Anne Ruggles. Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997; Ice, Joyce. ‘‘Women’s Aesthetics and the Quilting Process.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 166–77. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Joslin, Katherine. ‘‘Introduction: The Gathering of Women.’’ In American Feminism: Key Source Documents, 1848–1920. Volume IV: Women’s Clubs and Settlements, eds. Janet Beer, AnneMarie Ford, and Katherine Joslin, 1–12. London and New York: Routledge, 2002; Lawless, Elaine J. Holy Women, Wholly Women: Sharing Ministries of Wholeness Through Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993; Marti, Donald B. Women of the Grange: Mutuality and Sisterhood in Rural America, 1866–1920. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991; Martin, Theodora Penny. The Sound of Our Own Voices: Women’s Study Clubs, 1860–1910. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987; Scott, Anne Firor. Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991; Truesdell, Barbara. ‘‘Exalting ‘U.S.ness’: Patriotic Rituals of the Daughters of the American Revolution.’’ In Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism, ed. John Bodnar, 273–89. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996; Wachs, Eleanor. Crime-Victim Stories: New York City’s Urban Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Barbara Truesdell Women’s Friendship Groups Informal, often spontaneously formed, groups of women who gather regularly over an extended period of time for close friendship, support, play, and, sometimes, work, women’s friendship groups provide venues for telling stories, creating traditional art, and celebrating festive occasions. For centuries, women have gathered to share both household and spiritually related tasks. Whether quilting, sewing, knitting, spinning, making baskets or pottery, or teaching, preaching, reading, or writing, women of many races and ethnicities have formed groups such as quilting bees, prayer circles, and book clubs to lighten their burdens and hearts and stimulate

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their minds. Quilts and quilting bees began in the American colonies; during the Civil War, women’s groups raised funds for churches, the war, abolition, and other causes with the sale of their quilts. British American women in mid-1800s New England towns often carried their finer ‘‘go-abroad’’ knitting with them when they made regular visits to friends and neighbors. And as early as 1895, female faculty of Wellesley College met for support and sharing. Aware of women’s gatherings, commercial enterprises such as Tupperware and Avon offered mid-twentieth-century women the chance to sell plastic household goods and cosmetics to friends at in-home parties. This strategy has since been taken up with enthusiasm by the Mary Kay cosmetics company, as well as other women-run businesses that market sex toys and other sex-enhancing products at women-only, home-hosted ‘‘pleasure parties’’ for friends. Women dedicated to social justice, political action, and feminist spirituality have also come together over the years. In 1966, the Freedom Quilting Bee of Alberta, Alabama, began as an outgrowth of the civil right’s movement when local people were losing their income and their homes after registering to vote. In 1968, the Bee purchased twenty-three acres of land to build a workplace; eight lots also were sold to families who had been evicted from their homes. During second-wave feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s, women joined consciousness-raising or rap groups to explore their personal histories, the implications of patriarchal structures, and the strategies necessary for revisioning both their own lives and society. As Susan Kalcik has shown, these women came to know each other so well that their storytelling took on a particularly intimate form where they could utter just a phrase, a ‘‘kernel,’’ and other group members would immediately know the full story to which the kernel referred. In her 1993 study, Elaine Lawless recorded the life stories of a group of women ministers in mainstream Christian churches who were meeting regularly to talk about being female in the pulpit. Recent wars, such as the U.S,-Iraq War, have also propelled the formation of women’s groups. With an army that, as of 2006 is 86 percent male and excludes women from infantry, armor, and artillery units, such groups remain predominantly the province of women. At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for example, the Army sponsors 222 Family Readiness Groups, each registered to a particular company, brigade, or battalion. At Fort Meade, Maryland, women attend military family support groups to meet others who understand what it’s like to have a loved one in battle. Web sites and e-mail Listservs also provide virtual support. Tracy Della Vecchia of Columbia, Missouri, for example, created http://www.marineparents.com; and Fawn Quick of Severn, Maryland, formed an e-mail group for spouses of soldiers in her husband’s unit; they trade messages of support and any news they hear; if one gets a letter or phone call from her husband, she tells the others. ‘‘If I know one of them is safe and can call out.’’ Quick explains, ‘‘then I know the unit’s safe.’’ In Brooklyn, New York, a group of Black lesbians started the GRIOT Circle, ‘‘an organization of seniors doing for ourselves,’’ in 1995. Although

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not exclusive to women, most of its male membership has died of AIDS, leaving the group predominantly female. Because of the necessary secrecy attendant upon being gay throughout most of the twentieth century, in addition to a desire to depend only on oneself, lesbians who never imagined needing help have been able to reach out via the group’s Buddy-2-Buddy Unisex Program to find lasting friendships in their senior years (Shavers). While some friendship groups serve important, short-term needs, others last a lifetime. In Clarksville, Maryland, for example, the Wednesday Night Bridge Club, created by eight women who were inspired by an older group of women bridge players, has been together since September 1946. ‘‘We enjoy the game,’’ Betty Roby explained, ‘‘but if that’s all there was to it, we wouldn’t still be playing. We all care about each other.’’ This same caring unites another, even longer-term group of women in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Begun in the winter of 1942–1943 while their boyfriends were off fighting in World War II, this club of eight high-school-aged women met weekly in their parents’ homes to keep each other company. In the early years, they stitched, knitted, and crocheted personal objects as well as household items for their hope chests. They gathered in homes whose windows were covered with blackout curtains and shared what little they heard from their young men flying missions over Germany, fighting in General George S. Patton’s Army, and tending the wounded in stateside hospitals. When the war ended, they sewed clothing and diapers for their babies, held birthday parties for children, and enjoyed outings with their husbands. Their focus, though, was always on women-only gatherings, which shifted to every other week to members’ apartments and homes. Now that all are retired, they meet once a month in restaurants. ‘‘We don’t cook anymore,’’ Lucille Garner laughed. ‘‘Those days are over!’’ Through their sixty-one years together, they’ve seen each other through the losses of children, other club members, husbands, and many more crises. When asked why their club has lasted so long, Betty Yocom replied, ‘‘We’re just a group that cares.’’ In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, interest in women’s friendship groups has increased. The Red Hat Society, for example, began when Sue Ellen Granger, a freelance illustrator from Fullerton, California, bought red hats for several friends’ fiftieth birthdays. Inspired by the opening lines of ‘‘Warning,’’ a poem by Jenny Joseph—‘‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me’’— Granger gathered a number of women for tea. After the publication of an article on Granger’s group in Romantic Homes magazine in July 2000, many women over fifty formed groups of their own with such names as Les Chapeaux Rouge of Portland (Maine), the Red Hatters, the Red Hat Tomatoes, and the Vermilion Vixens. As of 2004, more than one million women in 41,000 chapters in thirty countries had turned to the Red Hat Society, whose Web site announces: ‘‘Underneath the frivolity, we share a bond of affection, forged by common life experiences and a genuine enthusiasm for wherever life takes us next.’’ A wealth of recent novels, plays, films, non-fiction writings, and academic monographs explores and celebrates the world of women’s friendship

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groups: Circle of Friends, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, The Joy Luck Club, Waiting To Exhale, Steel Magnolias, Top Girls, The Fierce Beauty Club, and Girls’ Night Out are just a few. See also: Activism; Aging; Basketmaking; Birthdays; Consciousness Raising; Croning; Film; Knitting; Lesbian Folklore; Military Women’s Folklore; Politics; Pottery; Quilting; Sewing; Spinning; Storytelling; Women Religious. References: Atkins, Hazel Hartenstine, Nancy Keller Bicksler, LaRue Frech Casper, Helen Swavely Dunlap, Lucille Jackson Garner, Gloria Haas Gill, Barbara Moore Kurtz, and Betty Keck Yocom. Tape-recorded interview with Margaret Yocom. Pottstown, PA, June 10, 2003. Tapes Club-03-6-10-1, Club-03-6-10-2; Binchy, Maeve. Circle of Friends. New York: Delacorte, 1991; Churchill, Caryl. Top Girls. London: Methuen Drama, 1990; Clarke, Alison J. Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001; Davenport, Christian. ‘‘Comrades in One Big Worried Family; Mutual Aid Sustains Military Wives, Mothers, Others Who Wait at Home.’’ Washington Post, April 29, 2003; Freedom Quilting Bee. ‘‘History, Activities, Plans.’’ n.d. http://www.ruraldevelopment.org/FQBhistory.html (accessed July 1, 2003); Harling, Robert. Steel Magnolias. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1988; Herron, Elizabeth. The Fierce Beauty Club: Girlfriends Discovering Power and Celebrating Body and Soul. Boston: Element Press, 2000; Hull, Anne. ‘‘Keeping It Together on the Home Front; At Fort Campbell, Families Work Through Day-to-Day Demands and Deeper Worries.’’ Washington Post, March 23, 2003; Kalcik, Susan. ‘‘‘. . . like Ann’s gynecologist or the time I was almost raped’: Personal Narratives in Women’s Rap Groups.’’ Journal of American Folklore, vol. 88, no. 347 (1975): 3–11; Lawless, Elaine. Holy Women, Wholly Women: Sharing Ministries of Wholeness through Life Stories and Reciprocal Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993; McMillan, Terry. Waiting To Exhale. New York: Washington Square Press, 1994; Nylander, Jane C. Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760–1860. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993; O’Connor, Pat. Friendships Between Women: A Critical Review. New York: Guilford Press, 1992; Passion Parties. ‘‘Host a Party.’’ n.d. http://www.passionparties.com (accessed June 24, 2003); Radner, Joan Newlon. ‘‘Performing the Paper: Handwritten Newspapers and Village Life in Postbellum Maine.’’ Northeast Folklore. Special Issue: Essays in Honor of Edward D. ‘‘Sandy’’ Ives, eds. Pauleena MacDougall and David Taylor, vol. 35 (2000): 363–82; Red Hat Society. ‘‘About the Red Hat Society.’’ n.d. http:// www.redhatsociety.com (accessed June 24, 2003); Sack, Kathryn W. Primary Lifelines: Informal Friendship Groups of Women in Higher Education. PhD diss., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2001. http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd02242001-202119/ (accessed August 11, 2008); Shavers, Regina, as told to Daisy Hernandez. ‘‘Gay, Gray and Black.’’ Colorlines (Fall 2005): 23–24; Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam, 1989; Toys in Babeland. ‘‘Welcome!’’ n.d. http://www. babeland.com (accessed February 24, 2004); Wells, Rebecca. The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996; Women in the U.S. Army. ‘‘Today’s Soldier.’’ Posted September 2006. http://www.army.mil/women/today.html (accessed August 11, 2008).

Margaret R. Yocom Women’s Movement Rather than calling it ‘‘the women’s movement,’’ which constructs the movement as stable and immobile, many feminists insist that this movement be termed ‘‘women’s movement,’’ in order to emphasize its inherent activism and drive. Usually seen as synonymous with the feminist movement and women’s liberation movement, women’s movement is a worldwide

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effort to eliminate sexism as well as all other forms of bias and discrimination that maintain relations of power and hegemony oppressing individuals and groups. Along with other popular movements, women’s movement incorporates formal, institutional actions such as legal cases and government lobbying with more traditional, informal, folkloric ones such as letterwriting campaigns and demonstrations. Women’s movement is cultural as much as it is political and ‘‘has always encouraged a wide range of attitudes, concerns and strategies’’ (Hannam 2007: 3). Simply being female isn’t sufficient to be part of women’s movement; neither is it a requirement for belonging. Male and transgendered supporters have launched such drives as the White Ribbon Campaign to bring attention to violence against women; they are significant allies in women’s movement. In contrast, few would include reactionary groups as part of women’s movement, though their membership is primarily female. These groups include associations like REAL (Realistic, Equal, Active for Life) Women of Canada, which condemns same-sex marriage, government-regulated childcare, and reproductive choice, or the Eagle Forum in the United States, which opposes an Equal Rights Amendment to the American constitution guaranteeing equality between women and men, and sex education in schools. In Canada, such groups sometimes appropriate the language of feminism—empowerment, diversity, and equality. In in the United States, however, their anti-feminist positions are made clear in denunciations of progressive legislation like amnesty for guest workers and of international agreements like the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. ‘‘Lifestyle feminism,’’ which claims that anyone can be a feminist, regardless of her or his personal and political views, is inconsistent with women’s movement. For example, as Angela Davis points out, ‘‘Birth control—individual choice, safe contraceptive methods, as well as abortions when necessary—is a fundamental prerequisite for the emancipation of women’’ (Davis: 202). Particular areas of concern are perennially included in women’s movement. The ongoing international fight for women’s rights continues to address unpaid domestic labor and the systemic underpayment of women compared to men, reproductive rights and maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, poverty, development and globalization, trafficking in women, consumerism, the environment, health, politics and law, education and literacy, violence against women, sexuality, relationships, aging, and women’s organizing. Those who supported giving women the right to vote appropriated the pejorative and diminutive term ‘‘suffragette,’’ originally used as a slur against them, as a self-description. Traditional protest has long been part of women’s movement; early suffragists in North America and Britain were known for their militancy. Heckling politicians at public events, chaining themselves to public edifices, smashing windows, burning empty buildings, destroying mail, and public demonstrations, pageants, marches, pickets, and processions often led to prison, where the women went on hunger strikes. Some boycotted the 1911 census and/or refused to pay taxes. Suffragists also worked to counter stereotypes that involvement in civil society made

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women ‘‘manly’’ by drawing examples from the professions in which women already dominated—teaching, nursing, and midwifery—and by enlisting civically conscious historical figures like Joan of Arc. Some would argue that a new era for women’s movement began with protests in the late 1960s against beauty contests. Women were encouraged ‘‘to throw their bras and girdles, symbols of the pressures on women to conform to unrealistic standards of beauty, into a ‘freedom trash bucket’’’ (Hannam 2007: 133). Protesters at the 1970 Miss World beauty competition in London, England, ran on to the stage ‘‘mooing like cows and wearing placards bearing titles such as Miss-conception, Miss-treated, Miss-placed and Miss-judged’’ (Osborne 2001: 28). Involvement in civil rights protests (in the United States) and anti-capitalist strikes (in France) reacquainted women with the practices of civil disobedience that their foremothers had used to gain the vote. Demonstrations and sit-ins raised public awareness of the need for childcare, reproductive freedom, equal pay, and other crucial demands. The slogan ‘‘sisterhood is powerful’’ expressed a utopian ideal of women uniting across difference and simultaneously drew attention to the reality that much of women’s movement at the time was White, middleclass, and privileged. Another slogan, ‘‘the personal is political,’’ developed in the crucible of women’s movement consciousness-raising (CR) groups; it drew attention to the fact that the products and ideas that patriarchy has sold women, both literally and figuratively, are not to their benefit. CR groups discussed how the purveying of products not only encourages rampant consumerism but also aims at ensuring that women never feel thin enough, pretty enough, well-dressed enough, and so on. CR groups also helped women learn that their personal experiences of sexism, rape, violence, and other practices of patriarchy are, in fact, shared—and that collective action can provide remedies. Thus, ‘‘Take Back the Night’’ marches, in which women walked collectively in safety to underline that they could not do so alone, were simultaneously educative and empowering. Continuing women’s movement actions include peace camps such as those at Greenham Common in England, which protest the NATO Cruise missile base there, and Cindy Sheehan’s Camp Casey—named after her son killed in the U.S.-Iraq War—outside President George W. Bush’s Crawford, Texas, ranch. Other peace actions by women, like the ribbon around the Pentagon, often involve encircling (women holding hands around the perimeter) and decorating (with colorful banners and handmade crafts) as well as discussion. Women’s movement is international. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the Latin America feminist movement was distinguished from women’s movement; the latter referred to community groups or those seeking to uphold the status quo. Mexican women’s movement over the last twenty-five years, was originally concerned with ‘‘women’s rights, . . . the patriarchal double moral in relation to sexuality, asking for access to abortion rights, and debunking feminine stereotypes by which a woman’s identity was made exclusively dependent on having a husband and becoming a mother’’ (Marcos 1999: 431); it has now moved to coalition work on

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voluntary maternity, against sexual violence, for lesbian and gay rights, and ‘‘how to coordinate the rights of the dispossessed with specific women’s rights’’ (ibid.: 432). Historically, women’s movement has been linked with anti-colonial and nationalist struggles in many locations including Iceland, Norway, and Czechoslovakia. Elsewhere, though, women fought for political independence alongside men, only to find themselves denied the vote once it was won. Egypt, for example, got independence in 1922 but women were enfranchised only in 1956, and then only if they made a special request to be registered (Hannam 2007: 90). In contemporary Islamic states, two different streams of women’s movement have emerged. ‘‘One took a secularist approach to politics and looked to the West as representing progress. . . . The other . . . sought to affirm women’s sense of self within Islam and to see it as part of a renovation of the whole society’’ (ibid.: 94). Some early women’s movement participants in Britain and North America linked feminism with Eurocentric, racist, and colonialist ideals—women’s mission in becoming more involved in the public sphere and civil society was to guarantee the civilizing mission of White people. Some supported giving the vote only to propertied women and men. Many of their contemporaries, as well as feminists today, have repudiated these notions, but women’s movement is still criticized as a distraction from more central issues of political autonomy, class solidarity, or anti-racist practice. And yet, international women’s movement has been both established and maintained by (mostly privileged) women attending international meetings, and then keeping in touch with one another through letter-writing. Women’s movement continues to flourish despite media claims that we now live in a ‘‘postfeminist era.’’ Most participating in women’s movement are activists and theorists simultaneously. They encourage the popularization of certain forms of third-wave feminisms—‘‘Let’s have T-shirts and bumper stickers and postcards and hip-hop music’’ (hooks 2000: 6)—as well as its critical insertion into academe. The Internet has proved an especially productive location for women’s movement. Although the information superhighway is by no means universally accessible, and is thus limited in its effects, it has helped to foster women’s empowerment, participation in political and social action, and community globally, nationally, and locally. Young women with access to the Internet have enlivened feminist discourse with Web sites, blogs, and ‘‘girl-power’’ chat rooms. Women’s zines (private publications) and e-zines (Internet publications) address issues of concern to women and girls. Contrary to the assertion that feminist discourse is all complaint and no solution, menstrual product activists, for example, not only critique the medically and environmentally dangerous pad and tampon industry, but provide safe and ecologically sound alternatives. Recent women’s movement action addresses sex, sexuality, gender identity, fashion, weight, and body image as well as racism, homophobia, classism, and ageism among other topics and issues. Popular groups such as the Raging Grannies and the Radical Cheerleaders provide examples of the popular appeal of women’s movement. Both groups have chapters across North America, and their members make

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frequent appearances at progressive demonstrations. The Raging Grannies, whose Web site invites visitors to ‘‘please, pour yourself a cup of tea and join us inside,’’ describe themselves thus: Grannies are best equipped to make public, corrupt things that have been hidden (often for profit). Local toxic waste sites that no one seems prepared to tackle, asbestos sites employing young people desperate for work, nuclear waste products being dumped outside an uninformed small town, laws that affect an entire community, passed quickly with no opportunity for study. The delights of grannying include: dressing like innocent little old ladies so we can get close to our ‘‘target’’, writing songs from old favorites that skewer modern wrongs, satirizing evil-doing in public and getting everyone singing about it, watching a wrong back down and turn tail and run, sharing a history with other women who know who they are and what they’re about. Grannying is the least understood yet most powerful weapon we have. Sometimes, looking back, we can see grannying was the only thing that could have met the need (International Raging Grannies).

A satirical example from their repertoire, ‘‘We Grannies Work for Peace,’’ by the Ottawagrans of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, is sung to the tune of ‘‘The Farmer in the Dell’’ and begins: We Grannies work for peace We work that wars might cease We sing our songs condemning wrongs And hope to tame this beast. We Grannies know for sure The price that’s paid for war We’ve sadly lived through many, and We don’t want any more. We say it’s an offense To slaughter innocents Destroying health and lives defies Morality and sense (International Raging Grannies).

The Radical Cheerleaders aim for another demographic—young women. Their self-description takes a different tone: Radical Cheerleading is ProtestþPerformance. It’s activism with pom poms and middle fingers extended. It’s screaming FUCK CAPITALISM while doing a split. The Radical Cheerleaders started when once upon a time, two magical sisters from the land of Florida named Cara and Aimee decided that regular old protests on street corners holding signs and waving at oncoming traffic was just not RADICAL enough. They made pom-poms out of plastic bags and passed their cheers out in zine form. Soon enough, Radical Cheerleading spread like blue bonnet margarine on vegan biscuits. Squads are popping up at an alarmingly bad ass rate, from us here in Memphis, to Austin, New York, Atlanta, New Orleans.

An example of their cheers is ‘‘Riot Don’t Diet’’ by Mary Xmas: RIOT DON’T DIET GET UP GET OUT AND TRY IT RIOT DON’T DIET GET UP GET OUT AND TRY IT

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hey girl (clap clap clap) get yer face out of that magazine you are more than a beauty machine you’ve got anger soul and more take to the street and let it roar RIOT DON’T DIET GET UP GET OUT AND TRY IT RIOT DON’T DIET GET UP GET OUT AND TRY IT Uh-HUH (clap clap clap) If cosmo makes you sick and pale you know what you need to do MOLOTOV COCKTAIL! liberate the beauty queen burn the bibles of the fashion scene LET’S (CLAP) GET (CLAP) MEAN!!!!!! (Radical Cheerleaders)

See also: Activism; Beauty Contest; Cyberculture; Consciousness Raising; Diet Culture; Feminisms; Muslim Women’s Folklore; Politics. References: Bobel, Chris. ‘‘‘Our Revolution Has Style’: Contemporary Menstrual Product Activists ‘Doing Feminism’ in the Third Wave.’’ Sex Roles 54 (2006): 331–342; Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1981; Hannam, June. Feminism. New York: Longman Publishers, 2007; hooks, bell. Feminism Is For Everybody. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000; International Raging Grannies. n.d. http:// www.geocities.com/raginggrannies; Marcos, Sylvia. ‘‘Twenty-Five Years of Mexican Feminisms.’’ Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 22, no. 4 (1999): 431–433; Mitchell, Allyson. Turbo Chicks: Talking Young Feminisms. Toronto: Sumach Press, 2001; Osborne, Susan. Feminism. Manchester, UK: Pocket Essentials, 2001; Pershing, Linda. ‘‘Peace Work out of Piecework: Feminist Needlework Metaphors and The Ribbon around the Pentagon.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 327–357. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Radical Cheerleaders. n.d. http://radcheers.tripod.com/RC/id1.html; van der Gaag, Nikki The No-Nonsense Guide to Women’s Rights. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2004.

Pauline Greenhill Women’s Music Festivals Born from two cultural and social movements in the United States—the 1950s folk music revival and the 1960s women’s liberation movement— women’s music festivals feature artistic performances and technical production by women for women-only audiences. The innovation of women-only music festivals coincided with the peak popularity in North America of large outdoor folk, rock, and jazz festivals, like those held in Newport, Rhode Island; Monterrey, California; Woodstock, New York; and Kerrville, Texas. However, within the women’s culture movement of the 1970s that gave rise to Olivia Records (1973) and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–1979), women’s festivals are unique, cooperative communities created in the spirit of the radical separatist vein of feminist philosophy and politics, designed to showcase the range of women’s creativity and capacities for work. Stage performances, primarily musical, are central, with additional spaces provided for craft bazaars, film screenings, and politically or socially themed

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workshops. Although these (usually annual) festival spaces are temporary, a rich folk culture has emerged from them, and evolved through the years to include traditions revolving around dress, ritual, parody, ballads, personalexperience narratives, and other oral-narrative genres, humor, place names, and folk speech. In the early years, lesbian separatists and other radical feminists sought to create gatherings of women to showcase their own abilities and unique cultures. Their philosophy was developed in direct opposition to mainstream, White, liberal feminist politics, the conventional content and production of folk festivals, and the patriarchal nature of the dominant American culture. The oldest surviving women’s music festival is the National Women’s Music Festival (NWMF), founded in 1974 by Women in the Arts (WIA). NWMF, celebrated until 1990 on the campus of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, was held at Ohio State University in 2004; WIAs board of directors cancelled the 2005 festival in order to allow its organizers time to ‘‘solidify the foundation and ensure the future of this festival’’ (http://wiaonline.org/ home.htm). However, smaller, grassroots, women-only gatherings have taken place across the United States in coffeehouses, community centers, cooperatives, and other public and private settings. For example, a collective of women, governed by consensus, produced the Midwest Womyn’s Festival on rented space in Missouri’s state parks in 1973. Presently, there are more than twenty annual or biannual women’s music festivals produced in the United States, Australia, Canada, England, and Germany. Venues for the sites range from public spaces like university campuses to private property owned or rented by festival producers. The largest and most renowned women’s music festival is the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2005. That festival’s attendance ranges from 4,000 to 10,000 women, girls, and boys age ten and under; they travel from around the United States and internationally to participate in a week-long event held on more than 650 acres of private land. The annual event, known simply as ‘‘Michigan,’’ produces performances on three stages; supports a craft bazaar with more than 200 artisans and vendors; hosts dozens of workshops in its meadow; and provides a broad range of services, including vegetarian meals and accessible camping for women with disabilities, with a volunteer staff of more than 500 women. Radical Harmonies, a documentary film about the women’s music cultural movement of the 1970s and 1980s, directed by Dee Mosbacher, won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2002 San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. See also: Ballad; Feminisms; Festival; Film; Folk Costume; Folk Group; Folk Music and Folksong; Humor; Lesbian Folklore; Lilith Fair; Personal-Experience Narrative; Ritual; Women’s Movement. References: Morris, Bonnie J. Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals. Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 1999; Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. http:// www.michfest.com (accessed February 16, 2005); National Women’s Music Festival. http://wiaonline.org/home.htm (accessed February 16, 2005); Penelope, Julia and, Susan J. Wolfe. Lesbian Culture: An Anthology: The Lives, Work, Ideas, Arts and Visions of

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Lesbians Past and Present. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1993; Woman Vision Films: Radical Harmonies (2002). http://www.womanvision.org/radicalharmonies/index.htm (accessed February 16, 2005).

Lisa L. Higgins Women’s Work Women’s oppression cross-culturally is based on the sexual division of labor, which arbitrarily distinguishes women’s work from men’s. Though the specific content of women’s work varies from culture to culture, certain tendencies recur. Women’s work is consistently un(der)paid, domestic, not formally recognized in economic systems, repetitive (‘‘never done’’), segregated in the caring and service fields, and subject to a ‘‘glass ceiling’’ above which, despite their abilities and accomplishments, women cannot rise. But paid or un(der)paid, in formal or informal economies, productive or reproductive, domestic or public, in traditional or non-traditional fields, part-time or full-time, waged or volunteer, above or below the glass ceiling, women’s work is the subject of, and subject to, a variety of traditional and popular discourses. Anthropologist Gayle Rubin argues that distinctions in gendered experience derive from the strong taboos that some cultures maintain against each sex performing the other’s work. Even in feminist households, women do most of the housework. Despite some forty years of radical social change and movement toward women’s equality with men, recent Canadian statistics show that, in dual wage-earning heterosexual families, women still perform three quarters of the housekeeping—and even more if childcare is included. Yet this work, often performed out of the view of family members, remains too often invisible, and is one of the most persistent misconceptions perpetrated about women in Euro North American society that ‘‘they do not work.’’ An unfounded belief in some magic-cleaning fairy, who waves her wand and suddenly the entire house is miraculously free of dust and dirt, is implicitly pervasive even among adults. There are at least two assumptions contributing to this idea. First, if women do paid work outside the home, that labor is characterized as a choice rather than a necessity. Second, women’s domestic work is considered as a ‘‘labor of love,’’ conducted for pleasure and lacking a substantial contribution to the economic benefit of the woman, her family, her community, and her society. These stereotypes are profoundly classist as well as sexist. Though historically, most middle-class and upper-class Euro North American women never worked for wages—or did not do so after they married—working-class women’s labor was responsible for childcare, cooking, and cleaning in wealthier households as well as in their own, and for agricultural and industrial labor; they often performed tasks considered too demeaning, tedious, or awkward for men. For example, in the Irish textile industry of the nineteenth century, women were the ‘‘doffers’’ preparing the looms (using ‘‘pickers’’ to dig out portions of thread at breaks, protected by a ‘‘rubber’’ waist apron), spinners, and weavers:

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You will easy know a doffer, When she comes into town, With her long yeller hair, And her ringlets hangin’ down, And her rubber tied before her, And her picker in her hand, You will easy know a doffer, For she’ll always get her man (Messenger 1975: 35).

Indeed, women’s textile work, including spinning, weaving, and sewing, dates to at least the Upper Paleolithic times and extends throughout history and across cultures to twenty-first-century sweatshops, and to handwork and piecework completed at home. As described by Marie-Annick Desplanques (in Greenhill and Tye 1997), women conduct these domestic tasks communally, often by necessity, but frequently by choice, finding that ‘‘many hands make light work,’’ whether quilting, sewing, or mending. When women work outside the home, resistance to their unionizing frequently comes not only from management, but also from their male counterparts, who are concerned about the devaluation of ‘‘their’’ work and new competitors for scarce positions. Traditionally, too many unions saw women’s place as an auxiliary one; they were expected to serve refreshments at meetings, rather than to conduct policy and political work. In the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the forerunner of Canada’s New Democratic Party (based in organized labor), women began to break into new roles in the 1940s: (sung to the tune of the song ‘‘Clementine’’) In the kitchen or the factory Women do not know their power, We are here to gloat upon it; This is woman’s little hour.

Chorus: CCF’ers, CCF’ers, when we women all combine We’re the ladies to raise hades, with the Grit and Tory line (Melnyk 1989: 75).

The Grit (Liberal) and Tory (Conservative) parties, rather than support of male politics, were the object of the CCF Status of Women Committee’s attention, even though its purpose was rhetorically devalued as ‘‘little.’’ The notion also persists that women’s domestic labor—food preparation, maintaining the household, taking care of children and elders, preserving relationships with kin and community, and sexual service—is fun, not work. This idea may derive from the fact that parts of such tasks allotted to Euro North American men are performed at and for their pleasure, rather than as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly routine. Someone—usually female—must make sure breakfasts, lunches, and dinners appear on the table daily; however, when they wish to do so, men can choose to barbecue. Someone—usually female—has to ensure that bathrooms and kitchens are cleaned; but men can take a Sunday afternoon to wash and wax a prized automobile. Many women (and men) enjoy their daily work, but it remains, as sociologist Meg Luxton (1980) points out, more than a labor of love. Increasingly,

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women’s unpaid and volunteer work is being recognized for its social and economic contributions. Recognition for housework (Levin 1993) and sex work has been much more difficult to obtain. Feminist activist and theorist Marilyn Waring’s thought-provoking critique of the economic system perpetrated by international capital points out its absurdity. An American man sitting in a missile silo with his finger on a button to launch a weapon of mass destruction is considered economically productive, while a Native woman who does housekeeping, fetches wood and water, tends to a home garden and domestic animals, preserves food, and cares for children, is defined as economically inactive. Waring advocates a more gender-sensitive and ecology-friendly system for evaluating work based in time/use surveys (Waring 1996: 44–101). In effect, she asks for the inclusion of women’s unpaid domestic and volunteer work in existing economic structures. Like housework, sex work is often invisible, but it is also problematically tabooed. Traffic in women’s sexual services has a long history. Although sex frequently exploits women’s relative lack of power, some feminist theorists rehabilitate the reputation of this form of labor. They point out that women exchange sexual services in many heterosexual partnerships, not directly for money, but instead for housing, domestic work, and provisions. The monetary sex trade can be understood as a capitalized form of an identical exchange. Similarly, reproductive choices for women and new reproductive technologies partially disengage the emotional from the economic aspects of reproduction. A woman with safe contraception and the option of abortion when she needs it is less economically dependant on men. She does not have to face the possibility of having primary responsibility for someone other than herself. Capitalist heteropatriarchy has predictably responded to these new freedoms for women with political, legal, and religious repression. See also: Abortion; Class; Elder Care; Gender; Glass Ceiling; Housekeeping; Laundry; Piecework; Prostitution/Sex Work; Quiltmaking; Sewing; Spinning; Wage Work; Weaving. References: Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995; Desplanques, Marie-Annick. ‘‘Making Time for Talk: Women’s Informal Gatherings in Cape St. George, Newfoundland.’’ In Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds. Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, 234– 241. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997; Levin, Judith. ‘‘Why Folklorists Should Study Housework.’’ In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, 285–296. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993; Luxton, Meg. More Than a Labor of Love: Three Generations of Women’s Work in the Home. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1980; Melnyk, Olenka. No Bankers in Heaven: Remembering the CCF. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1989; Messenger, Betty. Picking Up the Linen Threads: A Study in Industrial Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975; Waring, Marilyn. Three Masquerades: Essays on Equality, Work, and Human Rights. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1996.

Pauline Greenhill

Y Yellow Woman/ Irriaku Stories From Laguna Pueblo and Acoma Pueblo (New Mexico) narrative tradition, Yellow Women, or Irriaku, are the personified sacred ears of yellow corn given to the Laguna people by their mother goddess, Iyatiku. Irriaku narratives serve as puberty stories for young women about how to perform a traditional woman’s role in Laguna society. The most well-known narrative modern representations of Yellow Woman were created by the Laguna writers Leslie Marmon Silko and Paula Gunn Allen (1938–2008). In The Sacred Hoop (1986), Allen writes that there are two basic forms of Native literature: ceremony and myth. Ceremony is a ritual reenactment of a specialized perception of a cosmic relationship, while myth is a prose record of that relationship (xi). According to Allen, the literary tradition within Native American cultures forms an unbroken line in the oral tradition from ‘‘time immemorial to the vital now’’ (96). Stories, in both their oral and written forms, are instruments of resistance against Euro American occupation, a means of survival, and a recognition of self and community in the face of the ‘‘vanishing/red race’’ stereotype. In Yellow Woman stories, the Irriaku are a gift to the people; but when the Irriaku are stolen by Evil Katsina, the people lose their connection to Iyetiku (the Divine). The people and the land are no longer one because when the corn is gone, there can be no sacred connection between the people, the land, and the goddess. In her story ‘‘Yellow Woman’’ (1980), Silko enacts a performance of author-as-trickster/coyote in her application of the modern Yellow Woman tale to traditional tribal concepts and values; the narrator’s identity as Yellow Woman demonstrates how contemporary Native American literatures are grounded in spiritual traditions. In looking at traditional Yellow Woman stories (see especially Allen’s adaptation of ‘‘Whirlwind Man Steals Yellow Woman’’ [1989: 187]), we can see how Silko ties a modern love story to traditional Laguna consciousness. Whenever a woman in the community disappears, Silko suggests that she was taken away by the mountain spirit known

730 YELLOW WOMAN/IRRIAKU STORIES

as Kochinennako, a male character who often serves as the antagonist in Yellow Woman stories. It is Yellow Woman’s connection with a tribal consciousness that motivates her in contemporary versions of the story. The part of her that lives in the modern world, the part that went to school and travels the highways in pickup trucks, refuses to believe that the story is also hers. But Yellow Woman knows about the connection between Irriaku and the spirit of the mountains. She has heard the tales all her life, and so wonders if she is the story. The Yellow Woman of Silko’s story has no choice but to return to her family, just as the Yellow Woman of the traditional stories must go back to hers. She is the gift that brings sacred knowledge from the wilderness back to the people to strengthen their ties with Iyetiku. Silko also has no choice but to return to her own tribal traditions because she is a storyteller, a woman inexorably tied to the storytelling traditions of her people: distinctly female, self-definitive, assertive, decisive, and continuous. See also: First Nations of North America; Folktale; Initiation; Mother Earth; Myth Studies; Ritual; Storytelling; Tradition. References: Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986; ———. Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989; Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Viking Press, 1980.

Carolyn Dunn

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY/WEB SITES American Folklife Center, the, http://www.loc.gov/folklife. American Folklife Center, The. Ethnographic Resources related to Folklore, Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and the Humanities. http://www.loc.gov/folklife/other.html. American Folklore Society. http://afsnet.org. Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Bado-Fralick, Nikki. Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual. American Academy of Religion, Academy Series. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Borland, Katherine. Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006. Bourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999. Burke, Carol. Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture. Boston: Beacon, 2004. Cantu ´ , Norma E., and Olga Na´jera-Ramı´rez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Culture & Tradition. http://www.ucs.mun.ca/culture/index.html. Ethnologies. http://www.erudit.org/en/revue/ethno. Farrer, Claire R., ed. Women and Folklore: Images and Genres. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1975. Folklore Society, The (London). http://www.folklore-society.com. Folklore Society, The (London). Our Journal Folklore. http://www.folklore-society.com/our_ journal.htm. Folklore Studies Association of Canada. http://www.celat.ulaval.ca/acef. Gaunt, Kyra D. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to HipHop. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion (Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. Greenhill, Pauline, and Diane Tye, eds. Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Hollis, Susan Tower, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young, eds. Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Horton, Laurel. Mary Black’s Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Jordan, Rosan A., and F. A. de Caro. ‘‘Women and the Study of Folklore.’’ Signs 11 (1986): 500–518.

732 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY/WEB SITES

Jordan, Rosan A., and Susan J. Kalcˇik, eds. Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Journal of American Folklore, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jaf. Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 390–588. ‘‘Special Issue: Folklore and Feminism.’’ Lawless, Elaine. Women Escaping Violence: Empowerment Through Narrative. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Magliocco, Sabina. Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Martin, Patricia Preciado. Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of MexicanAmerican Women. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. Mathieu, Jocelyne, ed. ‘‘Special Issue: Femmes et Traditions/Women & Traditions.’’ Canadian Folklore canadien, vol. 15, no. 2 (1993): 5–166. Mills, Margaret. ‘‘Theory and the Study of Folklore: A Twenty-Year Trajectory.’’ Western Folklore 52 (1993): 173–192. Online Archive of American Folk Medicine. http://www.folkmed.ucla.edu. Pershing, Linda. The Ribbon around the Pentagon: Peace by Piecemakers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. Preston, Cathy Lynn, ed. Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory: Collected Essays. New York: Garland, 1995. Radner, Joan Newlon, ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Sawin, Patricia. Listening For a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth Through Her Songs and Stories. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004. Shukla, Pravina. The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Stoeltje, Beverly J., ed. ‘‘Special Issue: Feminist Revisions in Folklore Studies.’’ Journal of Folklore Research 25 (1988): 141–242. SurLaLune Fairy Tales.com. http://www.surlalunefairytales.com. Thomas, Jeannie Banks. Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Turner, Kay. Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Ware, Carolyn E. Cajun Women and Mardi Gras: Reading the Rules Backward. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Weigle, Marta. Spiders and Spinsters: Women and Mythology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Whatley, Mariamne H., and Elissa R. Henken. Did You Hear about the Girl Who . . . ?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, and Human Sexuality. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

INDEX Bold face page numbers indicates a main entry. Aarne, Antti, 247 Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index, 646 Abarca, Meredith, 257 Abomsawin, Alanis, 527 Abortion, 1–3, 300, 482, 521 Abortionists, 1–2, 76 Abrahams, Roger, 30, 340, 585 Abu-Jaber, Diana, 560, 562 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 236 Abuse, 160, 306, 487, 649–50 Accouchement sans douleur. See also Lamaze method Ackerley, Janice, 595 Activism, 3–4; anti-war, 464, 465; beauty contests as, 44; consciousness-raising groups and, 97–98; Deaf community and, 124; feminism and, 170–75; folk costumes as, 209; folk music and, 3, 226, 228–29, 466; gay and lesbian, 360–61; graffiti as, 287; Internet and, 393; mock weddings as, 697; processional performance as, 482–83; prostitution and, 486–87; quilting as, 244; against violence, 677; Wicca and, 701–2; women’s friendship groups and, 717; working women and, 90. See also politics; suffrage movement; women’s movement Activism, regional: Canada, 521; Central America, 531, 534;

Mexico, 321; Sub-Sahara Africa, 576, 579; Western Europe, 593 Adams, Elizabeth, 367 Adegbolola, Gaye, 410 Adler, Larissa Lomnitz, 556 Adler, Margot, 608 Adler, Thomas, 159 Adoption, 4–6, 160, 570 Adultery, 387–88, 673 Aesthetics, 6–9; basketmaking and, 36–37; body modification and, 54; embroidery and, 144, 198; folk art and, 200; folk belief and, 205–6; folklife and, 242; of the food table, 257; gardens and, 265; housekeeping and, 308; and lesbian folklore, 364; personal, 364; popular culture and, 470; women’s beauty and, 41, 99 African American folklore: dolls and, 136; family, 158; folk music of, 237, 492; girls’ games in, 276; hip-hop culture/rap and, 301–3; mythology and, 435; processional performance in, 482; quilting and, 8, 201, 396; ‘‘ring shout,’’ 644–45; ‘‘stepping,’’ 213–14; vaginal serpent tales in, 671 African American women: body image of, 129; class and, 86; earnings and, 84, 90; on ethnicity, 148–49; feminism and, 174–75; in film/television, 473; folklore fieldwork and, 184;

gender traditions and, 662–63; granny midwives and, 420; marriage and, 388; menopause and, 410, 411–12; menstruation and, 417; naming practices of, 442; Nation of Islam and, 434; racism and, 506, 508; rumors and, 614; sexism and, 630; ‘‘signifyin,’’ 583 African region. See also Sub-Sahara African region Agee, Eve, 410, 411–12 Ageism, 9 Aging, 9–12; aphrodisiacs and, 18; grandmothers, 287–88; jokes about, 636; magazines and, 377–78; menopause and, 410; as a rite of passage, 601–2. See also elder care; Red Hat Society Agnes of God, 710 Aguilar, Josefina, 557 Agus, Arlene, 334 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 577 AIDS, 168, 486–87, 614 AIDS quilts, 244, 583 Akkyzdyn, Akhmetkyzy, 540 Alcoff, Linda Martin, 149 Alegrı´a, Claribel, 535 Alford, Violet, 211, 217 Alger, Horatio, 80 Allen, Paula Gunn, 436, 509, 729 Almanac Singers, The, 227 Altar, home, 12–14, 557, 611–12, 616

734 INDEX

Alternative birth movement (natural birthing), 50, 77, 137–38, 305 Alvarez, Julia, 322, 529 Alvarez, Louis, 85 Amadiume, Ifi, 404 Amanova, Zhadyra, 540–41 Amazons, 506, 711 Amazons Attack! (DC Comics), 713 ‘‘Amazons of Dahomey,’’ 713 Ambree, Mary, 712 American Academy of Religion, 699 American Camp Association, 65 American College of NurseMidwives (ACNM), 305, 421–22 American Folklore Society (AFS), 183 American Folklore Society— Women’s Section, 15–16, 108, 245, 413, 602 American Indians. See also First Nations of North American American Medical Association (AMA), 2 American Sign Language (ASL), 123 American Tongues (Alvarez and Kolker 1987), 85 Amina, Queen of Zaria, 577 Amish, 200, 207, 396 Analytical Engine (Babbage 1840), 115 Anaya, Rudolfo, 11 Ancient Society (Morgan 1877), 401 Anderson, Marian, 645 Andre´e, Carlota, 567 Androgyny, 16–17, 266, 615. See also cross-dressing; transgender folklore Angelou, Maya, 577 Angel that Stands By Me: Minnie Evans’ Paintings, The (Light 1983), 187 Anorexia, 130, 260 Anspaugh, Jean Renfro, 129 Anthony, Susan B., 49, 651, 662 Anzaldu ´ a, Gloria, 509, 554 Aphrodisiacs, 17–19, 259, 634 Apollonius of Rhodes, 103 Appalachia studies, 88, 250, 410, 412 Appel-Slingbaum, Carel, 408 Appiah, Kwame, 504 Archuleta, Eppie, 199 Aretz, Isabel, 567 Arewa, E. Ojo, 490 Argonautica, The (Rhodes ca. 260 BC), 103

Aristotle, 505 Arizmendi, Yareli, 322 Arizpe, Lourdes, 556 Arleo, Andy, 595 Armatrading, Joan, 229 Arora, Shirley L., 490 Arpilleras, 465, 662, 677 Artez, Isabel, 567 Assault, supernatural, 19–20, 369, 671. See also legend, supernatural; memorate Attar, Farid al-Din, 617 At the Bottom of the Garden (Purkiss 2001), 355 Atwood, Margaret, 253, 520 Austen, Hallie Iglehart, 283 Australia and New Zealand region, 41, 61, 517–20, 687 Autograph book, 21–22. See also scrapbooks Avon Cosmetics, 99 Aztecs, 551–53 Ba, Mariama, 577 Babb, Florence E., 534 Babbage, Charles, 115–16 Babcock, Barbara, 201, 584–85, 662 Babysitting, 23–24, 358 Baccilega, Cristina, 254, 444 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 279, 401, 589 Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Faludi 1991), 473 Backstrom, Maryel, 418 Baden-Powell, Robert, 271 Bado-Fralick, Nikki, 329–30, 701, 702 Badran, Margot, 560 Badu, Erykah, 638 Baez, Joan, 3, 228–29, 638 Baker, Josephine, 315 Balch, Emily Green, 464 Baldwin, Karen, 158, 159, 492, 515, 649 Balglanova, Roza, 540 Ball, Lucille, 315 Ballad collections: Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England (Flanders 1960–1965), 29; Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan (Gardner and Chickering), 29; Ballad Tree, The (Bates 1950), 28; With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Paredes 1958), 28

Ballads, 24–30; composition of, 223; cross-dressing in, 110, 121; daughters and, 121; death and, 128; on prostitution, 483; sisters in, 637–38; on U.S./ Mexican borderland conflicts, 553–54; vaginal serpent tales and, 671; violence and, 582–83; from the Western European region, 592; woman warriors, 712 Bambaataa, Africa (Kevin Donovan), 301 Banks, Amanda Carson, 50 Banks, Mary Macleod, 211 Banner, Lois W., 11 Banshee, 31–32, 126 Barbeau, Marius, 524, 526 Barbie dolls, 32–34, 42, 136, 325 Bard, Marjorie, 306 ˜ artu, Camila, 567 Bari de Zan Barker, Ma, 34–35 Barnacle, Mary Elizabeth, 29 Barren. See also infertility Barret, Elizabeth, 187, 189 Barry, Phillips, 29 Barta, Eli, 567 Basile, Giambattista, 78, 79 Basketmaking, 35–37, 291 Bass, Ruth, 136 Bates, Katharine Lee, 28 Bateson, Gregory, 186 Bat mitzvah, 37–39 Baum, Frank, 253 Bauman, Richard, 85–86, 184 Baumberger, Joan, 401 Bausinger, Hermann, 588 Bayseitova, Kulash, 540 Beadwork, 39–41. See also piecework Beaulieu, Olga, 525 Beaupre´, Lucie, 525 Beauty, 41–43; Cinderella story and, 80; cosmetics and, 99–100; diet culture and, 129–30; effect on brideprice, 62; emphasis on, 10, 376; the Indian Maiden and, 325; processional performances and, 481; spa culture and, 642; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 579; through body modification, 54–57; veiling, 675 ‘‘Beauty and the Beast,’’ 122 Beauty contests, 43–44, 180–81, 607, 721

INDEX 735

Beauty queens, 44–46, 180–81, 534 Beauty salons, 100. See also hair; makeup artists Beauvoir, Simone de, 9 Beck, Jane, 159, 493 Beck, Lois, 559 Beckwith, Martha Warren, 395, 435, 581 Beecher, Catharine, 350 Be´gin, Carmelle, 526 Behar, Ruth, 556 Belkin, Lisa, 278 Bell, Michael J., 89 Bell hooks. See also hooks, bell Belly dance, 46–48 Bellydancers of Color Association (BOCA), 47 Belo, Jane, 186 Bem, Sandra, 17 Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), 17 Ben-Amos, Dan, 660 Bendix, Regina, 588 Benedict, Ruth, 435, 436 Benjamin, Medea, 535 Bennet, Margaret, 211 Bennett, Gillian, 204–5, 355, 406, 591, 654 Beoku-Betts, Josephine, 291 Bergen, Fanny, 71 Bergman, Ingrid, 593 Berlo, Janet, 533 Bernal, Dolores Delgado, 455 Bernheimer, Kate, 255 Bernier, He´le`ne, 525 Bernstein, Stan, 628 Best, Anita, 526 Best, Carrie M., 577 Best friend, 48–49, 274 Bettelheim, Bruno, 104, 640, 646 Bezirgan, Basima, 561 Biberman, Herbert, 90 Bibler-Cohen, Susan, 535 Bingham, Richard D., 307 Birth as an American Rite of Passage (Davis-Floyd 2003), 601 Birth chair, 49–50, 75 Birthdays, 50–52 Bitch, 119, 393 Black Agnes, 713 Blank, Les, 188 Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya 1999), 11 Blind, Berit Anne, 592 Blind folklore, 52–53 Blizzard, Georgia, 201 Block, Francesca Lia, 253 Bloody Mary, 53–54, 355

Blue collar workers, 83 Blues ballads, 27 Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless (Desjarlais 1997), 306 Boas, Franz, 435, 436, 557 Boatright, Mody, 157, 159 Bodmer, Karl, 336 Bodnar, John, 84–85 Body modification and adornment, 54–58; to belong to a clique, 92; to deal with rape, 512; folk costumes and, 208; henna art and, 298–99; lesbian, 365; as rite of passage, 329; women’s traditional role in, 243. See also henna art Bolivar, Natalia, 530 Bolton, Laura, 492 Bombeck, Erma, 315 Bonds, Margaret, 645 Bonewits, Isaac, 698, 700 Book of Lamentations, The (Castellanos 1998), 87 Borda, Jennifer, 482 Borden, Lizzie, 58–59, 351, 390 Bordo, Susan, 130 Borland, Katherine, 455, 534, 535 Born in Flames (Borden 1983), 390–91 Bosom Serpent, The (Hawthorne 1846), 671 Bottigheimer, Ruth B., 81, 251, 677 Boudicca, Queen, 712 Bourboulis, Photeine, 79 Bourke, Angela, 204, 591, 656 Bowman, Marion, 591 Bowman, Paddy, 492 Bradstreet, Anne, 314 Brady, Margaret K., 205, 353, 585 Braid, Donald, 459 Brandes, Stanley, 158 Breastfeeding, 59–61, 259, 571, 579 Breckenridge, Mary, 421 Breit, Jill, 344 Brideprice, 61–62, 578–79. See also dowry Bridgman, Laura, 52 Briggs, Charles, 605 Briggs, Katherine, 355 Broadside ballads, 25–27 Bronner, Simon J., 21, 295, 340 Bronson, Bertrand Harris, 25 Brooks, Angela, 313 Brouma, Olga, 80

Brown, Frank C., 477 Brown, Lorin, 585 Brown, Rita Mae, 364 Brown, Robert, 401 Brown, Rosemary, 149 Broyles-Gonzalez, Yolanda, 29 Brunhild, 712 Brunvand, Jan Harold, 219–20, 238–39, 359 Buckland, Raymond, 700 Buckland, Theresa, 212 Buckley, Thomas, 415–16 Budapest, Z. (Zsuzanna), 283, 701 Buddhism, 543–44, 570, 617, 709–10 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 128, 473, 474, 674 Bulimia, 130, 260 Bullock, Caroline Canfield, 653–54 Bunzel, Ruth, 476 Burdine, Lucille, 159 Burk, Tamara, 184 Burke, Carol, 406 Burke, Peter, 469 Burkhart, Louise, 552 Burlin, Natalie Curtis, 225 Burn, Harry, 464 Burnham, Dorothy, 247 Burson, Anne C., 218 Bust, 393 Butler, Edith, 247 Butler, Judith, 152, 270 Butler-Bowdon, Tom, 623 Byerly, Victoria, 89–90 Bynoe, Yvonne, 301–2 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 328

Cabeen, Lou, 446 Cabrera, Lydia, 530 Cadaval, Olivia, 535 Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Cannary), 63–64 Callahan, Janet, 205 Campa, Arthur, 28 Campbell, John C., 27 Campbell, Joseph, 436–37 Campbell, Marie, 216, 477 Campbell, Olive Dame, 27, 189, 225 Camplore, 64–66. See also Girl Scouts/girl guides Campos, Rube´n, 554, 558 Canadian region, 520–28. See also individual main subjects

736 INDEX

Canadian region studies: Ethnologies, 527; Journal of Canadian Studies, 527; Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada (Greenhill and Tye 1997), 527 Cantow, Roberta, 187, 308 Cantu ´ , Norma, 509, 555, 581 Cape, Peter, 518 Caputi, Jane, 438, 485 Carby, Hazel, 303 Cardigos, Isabel, 252 Cardozo-Freeman, Inez, 15 Carey-Harper, Rachel, 677 Caribbean region, 150–51, 301–2, 528–31 Caribbean region studies: Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti (Deren 1953), 186, 530; Dreaming in Cuban (Garcia), 529; El Monte Igbo Finda Ewe Orisha. Vititi Nfinde (Cabrera 1968), 530; My Music Is My Flag (Glasser 1995), 530 Carlin, Phyllis Scott, 160 Carpenter, Carole, 246, 276, 493, 527 Carpenter, Edmund, 186 Carroll, Diahann, 473 Carter, Angela: Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, The, 253; on folktales, 254; on Lizzie Borden, 59; Virago Book of Fairy Tales, The, 251 Carter, Isabel Gordon, 28 Carter, Mother Maybelle, 30 Cass-Beggs, Barbara, 526 Castellanos, Isabel, 530 Castellanos, Rosario, 87 Castellanoz, Eva, 494 Castillo, Ana, 680 Catherine, of Siena, Saint, 616 Catholic Church. See also Roman Catholic Church Cayuga, 191 Celebrities, 47, 100, 294, 363 Central American region, 323, 442, 465, 531–36 Central American region studies: Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart: The Story of Elvia Alvarado (Benjamin 1989), 535; El Norte (Navas), 535; After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Culture Politics in

Neoliberal Nicaragua (Babb 2001), 534; Sandino’s Daughters (Randall 1981), 534; Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (Randall 1994), 534; ‘‘That We Should All Turn Queer?’’ (Lancaster 1995), 534; They Won’t Take Me Alive (Alegrı´a 1987), 535 Central Asia region, 41, 536–42 Certified professional midwife (CPM), 421 Cervantes, Yreina, 552 Chamberlain, Lindy, 517–18 Chambers, Edmund K., 218 Change of life. See also menopause Channing, Walter, 73 Chapman, Tracy, 229, 230 Charivari/shivaree, 66–67, 388, 593 Charles, Prince of Wales, 621 ‘‘Chasing Shadows: the Misplaced Search for Matriarchy’’ (Nzegwu 1998), 404 Chastity, 45, 67–68, 572. See also virginity Cheerleading, 69–70 Cherokee, 190, 192 Chica Luna Productions, 188 Chicana Traditions (Cantu ´ and Na´jera-Ramı´rez 2002), 555 Chicana women: activism and, 321, 455, 465; feminism and, 174; folklore fieldwork and, 184; humor and, 317–18; on La Llorona, 345–46; music traditions and, 663; in the United States region, 581; Virgin of Guadalupe and, 683; women’s movements of, 721–22 Chickering, Geraldine Jencks, 29 Child, Francis James, 25 Child ballad. See also classic ballad Childbirth, 70–78; belly dance and, 46; birth chair, 49–50; couvade and, 104; cursing during, 113; death and, 126, 345, 552; doulas and, 137–38; in the East Asia region, 544–45; feminist view of, 172; folk beliefs about, 204; gender preferences and, 539; herbs and, 300; at home, 304–6; phycsian control over, 420; as a rite of passage, 599–600, 601; sex determination, 262; in the Southeast Asian region, 570–71;

in the Sub-Sahara African region, 579; in the United States region, 584. See also pregnancy Childbirth and Childrearing, 70–78 Childrearing, 70–78; autograph books and, 21–22; breastfeeding and, 60; in the Central Asia region, 538; changing attitudes about, 75, 77, 432; ethnicity and, 151; families with Deaf members and, 123; folk belief about, 204; immigrant children, 322, 323; La Llorona and, 345–46; in the Middle East region, 562; quilts and, 498; singing lullabies, 372–73; in United States colonial era, 73; urban legends and, 358 Chisholm, Shirley, 465 Cho, Margaret, 546 Chrisler, Joan, 408 Christ, Carol P., 280 Christianity, 353, 432, 472, 644, 709 Christiansen, Evald Tang, 664 Christie, Lance, 282 Church of All Worlds (CAW), 282 Cincuentan˜era, 108, 413 Cinderella, 78–82; father/daughter relationship in, 122; in film, 189, 254; as literature and folktale, 248; sister relationship in, 638; the stepmother and, 646 Cinderella Cycle, 78 Circumcision, 168–70. See also female genital cutting (FGC) Cisneros, Sandra: House on Mango Street, The, 587; humor of, 317– 18; on immigrants, 322; on La Llorona, 346; Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, 587 Cixous, Helene, 319 Clark, Arizona Donnie. See also Barker, Ma Clark, La Rena, 30, 225, 247, 527 Class, 82–92; childrearing and, 76; Cinderella story and, 80; cliques and, 92; coming of age celebrations and, 500; division in housekeeping, 311; divorce and, 133; dowry and, 138–40; in the East Asia region, 544; emphasis on beauty and, 10, 99, 376; expected health and, 74; flowers use and, 194; folk music and, 227; gender roles and, 268;

INDEX 737

menopause and, 411; midwifery and, 421; politics and, 467; popular culture and, 469; in the Southeast Asian region, 571; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 578; in the United States region, 82–86; women’s work and, 726 Classic ballad, 24–26 Cleary, Bridget, 204, 591 Cleopatra, 713 Cliques, 69–70, 92–93, 640–41. See also folk groups Clitoral removal. See also female genital cutting (FGC) Clothesline Project, 677 Clotheslines (Cantow 1981), 187, 308, 310–11, 351 Coatlicue, 551 Cocchiara, Giuseppe, 588 Cocteau, Jean, 126 CODEPINK Women for Peace, 44, 209 Coding, 93–97; abortion and, 2; about violence, 677; in cliques, 92; cyberculture and, 118; in the Deaf community, 124; feminists, 480; in folktales, 252; foodways and, 260; girls and, 274; graffiti and, 286; in humor, 314, 339; language of flowers and, 193– 94; lesbian, 364–65, 663; in magazines, 378; riddles and, 597–98; spirituals and, 645; through Barbie dolls, 33; through branding, 56; through fans, 162–63; through folk art, 95, 201, 533; through handclapping games, 295–96; through housekeeping, 309; through quilting, 95–96, 498, 653; through storytelling, 662; through urban legends, 358; in United States region, 583; by women religious, 710 Coffin, Margaret, 211 Coffin, Tristram P., 29 Coggswell, Gladys, 650 Cohen, Anne, 29, 582–83 Cohen, John, 188 Colcord, Joanna C., 29 Cole, Joanna, 21–22 Collaborator. See also traditionbearer Collins, Judy, 3, 228 Collins, Patricia Hill, 85, 509 Collins, Randall, 308 Coltrane, Scott, 308

Colvin, Shawn, 229, 230 Combahee River Collective, The, 148–49 Combs-Schilling, M. Elaine, 330–31 Comfort, Alex, 267 Coming of Age, The (Beauvoir 1972), 9 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), 164–65 Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), 300 Conde´, Maryse, 529 Confucionism, 542–43 Conkey, Margaret W., 280 Conner, Randy, 284, 438 Conrad, JoAnn, 254 Consciousness raising, 97–99; cursing and, 114; on menstruation, 417; of the public, 171; rape and, 107, 512; on sexism, 629; through personal-experience narratives, 459–60; in women’s movements, 721 Contemporary Paganism. See also Wicca and Neo-Paganism Cookbooks. See also recipe books Cooke, Miriam, 560 Cool, Jenny, 188 Coover, Robert, 253 Cordell, Linda, 533 Cordero, Helen, 201, 584–85, 662 Cormier, Charlotte, 525 Cormier-Boudreau, Marielle, 525 Corridos ballads, 25 Cortez, Merenciana, 500 Cosmetics, 99–101; as an aphrodisiac, 18; beauty and, 42, 45; cheerleading and, 69–70; the evil eye and, 154; increasing use of, 10; magazines and, 375; Red Riding Hood and, 517 Cotten, Elizabeth ‘‘Libba,’’ 226 Coulbrooke, Star, 413 Courtship, 26, 101–3, 258, 597. See also dowry Couvade, 103–4 Cowboy poetry, 233–34 Cowell, Sidney Robertson, 29, 225, 492 Cowgirl, 63–64, 104–6, 584, 663 Cox, Marian Roalfe, 78, 79 Coyolxauhqui, 551 COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), 486–87 Crafting, 106–7, 621–22, 672. See also sampler

Crawford, Ruth, 30 Creighton, Helen, 29, 203, 225, 247, 525–26, 656 Crime-victim stories, 107–8, 459–60, 716. See also violence Crocheting, 347 Croft, Lara. See also Tomb Raider Crone, 381–84, 705 Croning, 16, 108–9, 413, 602 Cross-dressing, 109–11; in ballads, 110, 121; in beauty contest parodies, 180–81; Calamity Jane, 63–64; in different cultures, 268; in festivals, 177; in folk drama, 216, 518; in folk poetry, 236; Joan of Arc, 616, 713; mock weddings, 697; in the Western European region, 593; women warriors and, 100, 712. See also androgyny; transgender folklore Crowley, Aleister, 700 Cruz, Sor Juana Ine´s de la, 710 Csordas, Thomas, 330 Culpepper, Emily, 417 Cult of the Virgin, 13–14 Cultural consultant. See also tradition-bearer Cultural differences: breastfeeding and, 59–60; in death traditions, 127–28, 289, 348–49; in elder care, 141–42, 285; in embroidery styles, 143; in engagement practices, 61–62, 145; family folklore and, 160; feminism and, 173; in folklife, 243; in folktales, 251, 252; henna art and, 299; identity, 149–50; in interpreting infertility, 326; menopause and, 410–11; menstruation and, 416; in naming practices, 442; on view of Mother Earth, 426; in view of the mother-in-law, 428; in views of beauty, 43–44; in views of mass media, 391. See also ‘‘Westernized’’ views Cultural identity. See also identity Cunliffe, Barry, 589 Curanderas, 111–12; in the Caribbean region, 529; in the Central Asia region, 540; divination practices and, 132; in the Eastern European region, 549; gardening and, 266; gossip and, 285; immigrants and, 323; in the Mexican region, 556;

738 INDEX

Curanderas (continued ) midwives and, 419; of the South American region, 568; in the United States region, 584; virginity and, 684; witchcraft and, 705. See also divination practices; folk healers; folk medicine Cursing, 112–14. See also evil eye Custom of Couvade, The (Dawson 1929), 103 Cyberculture, 115–19; anti-date rape device (urban legend), 669–70; autograph books and, 21–22; dolls and, 33–34, 136; humor in, 337; mass media and, 391; supernatural assault beliefs and, 20; urban legends and, 356; vampires and, 674; videogames in, 392; women’s friendship groups and, 717; women’s movement and, 722–23. See also Internet Cybercultures Reader, The (Leary 2000), 115 Daigle, Jeanne-d’Arc, 525 Dale, Emily, 410 Daly, Mary, 438, 452 Danielson, Sofia, 593 Danticat, Edwidge, 529 Dargan, Amanda, 187 Dash, Julie, 292, 441–42 Das Mutterrecht (Bachofen, Johann Jakob 1861), 401 Date rape drugs, 18, 634, 669–70 Datlow, Ellen, 253 Daughters, 81, 121–22, 235, 336 Daughters of the Dust (Dash 1991), 441–42 Daveport, Tom, 188, 250 Davey, Gwenda Beed, 287 Davies, Lucy, 568 Davis, Angela Y., 509, 720 Davis, Dona, 411 Davis, Madeline, 364 Davis, Natalie Z., 469, 593 Davis, Susan, 89 Davis-Floyd, Robbie, 584, 601, 604 Davis-Kimball, Jeannine, 711–12 Davison, Marguerite, 691 Davy, Barb, 700 Dawson, Warren R., 103 Day, Doris, 685 Day Without a Mexican, A (Arizmendi 2004), 322

Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (Favret-Saada 1980), 205 Deaf folklore, 123–24 Deaf Women United (DWU), 124 Dean, Minnie, 517 Deane, Seamus, 270 Dean-Smith, Margaret, 217 Death, 124–29; in ballads, 26–27; banshees and, 31; in the Eastern European region, 546, 548; laments and, 348–49, 538; miscarriage, 425–26; poetry and, 126, 235–36; as a rite of passage, 289, 348–49, 602; roadside crosses and, 611; vampires and, 673–74. See also graves and gravemarkers ˜ era De´butante. See also Quincean Decapite, Daisy, 418 De Caro, Frank, 88, 581 Dee, Sandra, 685 DeGeneres, Ellen, 316 De´gh, Linda, 205, 353, 407, 649, 664 Dekker, Rudolf, 593 De Kroyft, Helen, 52 Delaney, Janice, 416 Del Negro, Giovanna, 590, 598 DeLys, Claudia, 656 Dempsey, Shawna, 318 Densmore, Frances, 225, 492 Deren, Maya, 186, 530 De Rochefort, Charles, 103 Desdouits, Anne-Marie, 524 DeShannon, Jackie, 228 Desjarlais, Robert, 306 Des Pe´riers, Bonaventure, 78 Desplanques, Marie-Annick, 727 Diana, Princess of Wales, 479, 621 Dianic Wicca, 282, 701 Dickens, Hazel, 226 Dickinson, Emily, 314 Dickinson, Hazel, 494 Diego, Juan, 680 Diet culture, 129–30; belly dance and, 47; emphasized in magazines, 376; to enhance beauty, 42; foodways and, 258; humor about, 318; rhymes and, 596; women’s movement against, 723–24 Differential identity, 85–86 Diller, Phyllis, 315 Dime novels, 63, 105 Disney. See also Walt Disney Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, 253, 322

Divination practices, 130–32, 273– 74, 276, 548, 654. See also curanderas; fortune-teller; sex determination Divorce, 132–34; in the Canadian region, 521; dowry and, 139–40; as a rite of passage, 601; in the Southeast Asian region, 571; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 578; wife sales and, 703 Dixie Chicks, 370, 392, 583 Dock, Lavina, 486 Documentary. See also films Dolby, Sandra, 459 Dolls, 32–34, 134–37, 501 Dominy, Craig, 355 ˜ a, 465, 552 Dona Marin Doniger (O’Flaherty), Wendy, 17, 438 Donoghue, Emma, 79, 253 Doress-Worters, Paula, 11 Dorson, Richard, 659 Doucette, Laurel, 527 Doulas, 77, 137–38. See also midwifery Dowd, Maureen, 505–6 Downing, Christine, 437 Dowry, 138–40, 538, 572, 583, 693. See also brideprice; courtship; engagement Doyon-Ferland, Madeleine, 524, 525 Dracula (Stoker), 20, 674 Drawing Down the Moon (Adler 1986), 608 Dubisch, Jill, 353–54 Du Bois, W. E. B., 509 Dugaw, Dianne M., 29, 236 Duggan, Anne, 249 Duke, Wynona, 260 Duke Nukem, 118, 392 Dundes, Alan: on family folklore, 160; on folk groups, 219; on jump rope rhymes, 340; on photocopy lore, 461; on proverbs, 490; on superstition, 654; on the term princess, 480; ‘‘Wet and Dry, the Evil Eye: An Essay in Indo-European and Semitic Worldview,’’ 154 Dusenbury, Emma, 30 Duvelleroy (fan maker), 162 Dylan, Bob, 227–28 Eagle Forum, 720 Earth Day, 426

INDEX 739

East Asia region, 542–46; adoption in, 4–6; beauty rituals in, 41; birthday rituals, 51; bride-show custom, 79; Cinderella Yehhsien, 78–79; cursing and, 113; death traditions, 125, 127; divorce in, 133; folk art in, 162, 200–201, 457–58, 476; menopause and, 411; politics in, 466; processional performance in, 482; prostitution in, 485; rape statistics, 510; reverence of the grandmother, 287; stereotypes in, 507; women warriors and, 712 Eastern Europe region, 546–51; banshee, 31; birthday rituals, 51; bride-show custom, 79; poetry and, 235–36; vampires and, 673 Echols, Alice, 98 Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy, 29, 182 Edda (Norse poem), 712 Eddy, Fanny Ann, 576 Eddy, Mary O., 29 Edgerton, Roger, 713 Education, folklore: in the Canadian region, 524–26; in the Mexican region, 554; in the South American region, 566–67; in the United States region, 581 Eff, Elaine, 187 Ehlers, Sonette, 669–70 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 90–91 Eisler, Riane, 280 Elder care, 9–10, 122, 141–43, 288, 602. See also aging; grandmother Eldreth, Bessie, 585 Eliade, Mircea, 437 Elijah al-Hakam, Rabbi Joseph Chaim ben, 38 Eller, Cynthia, 280–81, 283, 401 Ellis, Bill, 353 El Norte (Navas), 535 El-Shamy, Hassan, 561 Embroidery, 39–40, 143–44, 197–99, 548, 560. See also quilting; sampler Emecheta, Buchi, 577 Engagement, 144–46; brideprice and, 61; bride-show custom, 79; in the Central Asia region, 538; courtship before, 101–2; as a rite of passage, 600–601; rituals surrounding, 385; in the SubSahara African region, 578;

urban legend about, 357. See also dowry Ensler, Eve, 474 Environmental concerns, 100, 310, 418, 427, 722 Equal Pay Act, 687 Erdrich, Louise, 586 Erotic folklore, 146–48 Erskine, Frances (Marquesa Caldero´n de la Barca), 553 Esko, Tyyne, 196, 197 Espinoza, Aurelio, 28 Ethnicity, 148–52; beauty queens and, 45; in the Canadian region, 520, 524; of the Central Asia region, 536; effect on class status and, 82; feminism and, 323; folk dance and, 212–13; folk music and, 223–24; in folktales, 251; of the Gullah, 291–92; menopause and, 411; of the Pacific Island region, 565; race and, 503; of the United States region, 581; of the Western European region, 589. See also race Ethnic Notions (Riggs 1986), 507 Ethnoaesthetics, 7, 200 Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock), 402 Ethnographic studies, 81, 323, 410–11, 435 Ethnology (1962–1980), 402 Eurythmics, The, 638 Eve, 67, 125, 152–53, 296–97, 615 Everts-Boem, Dana, 534 Everyday Use (Walker), 586 Evil eye, 153–55. See also cursing E-zines, 119, 391, 393, 722

Fabian, Johannes, 330 Factor, June, 340, 596 Fadiman, Anne, 322–23 Fairy tales, 189, 247–53. See also Cinderella; folktales; Sleeping Beauty Faludi, Susan, 473 Family folklore, 157–62; banshees and, 31; coming of age, 499– 501, 519, 600; daughters and, 121–22; gardening and, 265–66; of the Gullah, 292; midwifery, 419; photography, 232; recitation and, 515; scrapbooks and, 622; stepmother, 646 Fans, language of, 162–63

˜ a, Mimi, 228, 638 Farin Farley, Melissa, 487 Farm women’s folklore, 154, 163–65, 234, 521 Farrer, Claire, 15, 581, 584 Fashion, 165–68; androgyny in, 17; Barbie dolls and, 32–34; beauty and, 42; causing problems with childbirth, 74; cliques and, 92–93; diet culture and, 130; fans, 162–63; hair and, 293, 294; henna art and, 298; lacemaking, 347; lesbian, 364–65; magazines, 375; sewing and, 624–25; in the South American region, 568; of the Sub-Sahara African region, 577–78; through body modification, 54–57. See also folk costume Fast Folk Cooperative, The, 229 Fat Like Us (Renfro 2001), 129 Fat Talk: What Girls and Their Parents Say About Dieting (Nichter 2000), 129 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 270 Favret-Saada, Jeanne, 205 Faye, Andra, 410 Felious, Odetta, 228 Female genital cutting (FGC), 67, 168–70, 562, 579, 600 Female genital mutilation (FGM), 168 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan 1963), 378, 628 Feminisms, 170–75; beauty contests and, 44, 45; consciousness-raising groups and, 98; ethnicity and, 323; festivals and, 178–79; fieldwork and, 182, 183; folklore films and, 187; folktales and, 253–55; Jewish, 333–34; magazines, 375; menopause and, 410; Mother Earth and, 427; naming practices and, 387, 442–43; religion and, 280–82; rituals and, 603; storytelling and, 454–55, 592, 650; through graffiti, 287; through hip-hop culture/rap, 302–3; through Sunbonnet Sue, 653, 662; women’s movements and, 722; women’s music festivals and, 725. See also matriarchy Feminists: anti, 720; Cinderella story and, 80–81; on class, 86; on courtship, 103; on cursing, 113;

740 INDEX

Feminists (continued ) on diet culture, 129–30; on ethnicity, 148–49; folk art and, 7–8; on folklore studies, 88; on folklore violence, 677; on gender, 90, 119; humor and, 314, 317; jokes and, 635; on popular culture, 470; proverbs and, 489; virginity and, 685; Wicca and, 701–2; on women and nature, 444 Femmage, 14 Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock, 559, 561, 562 Ferrero, Pat, 187 Ferris, Bill, 186 Festivals, 175–81; for belly dancing, 47; in the Central American region, 535; in the Central Asia region, 537; cowgirls at, 105; film, 179, 188; folk, 492; folk customs, 211; folk drama, 215; folk music, 228; lesbian, 365; Lilith Fair, 370–71; in the Mexican region, 556–57; Pagan, 702; popular culture and, 474; storytelling, 649; in the United States region, 584; Virgin of Guadalupe, 683. See also processional performance Field consultant. See also traditionbearer Fields, Connie, 90 Fieldwork, 181–85; in ballad collecting, 27–28; ethnicity and, 151; on family folklore, 158–59; for film, 188; folk photography and, 232; storytelling and, 649– 50; use of texts in, 659–60. See also folklorists 50 Self-Help Classics (ButlerBowdon 2003), 623 Films, 185–90; about blindness, 53; cliques in, 93; cowgirls and, 105; cross-dressing and, 110–11; cyberculture and, 117; divorce and, 134; dolls in, 136; elder care and, 142; fairy tales and, 80, 250, 254, 480; festivals for, 179; gender in, 267; on the Gullah, 292; on immigrants, 535; on the Lilith Fair, 370; mothering in, 432; popular culture and, 473; portrayal of best friends in, 49; proverbs in, 489; public folklore and, 493; race and, 507; Red Riding Hood,

516–17; vagina dentata motif in, 670; vampires and, 674; virginity and, 685; warrior women, 713–14; on women religious, 710; women’s humor in, 315. See also folklore films; mass media; television; Walt Disney Fine, Elizabeth, 213–14, 659 Fini, Mo, 568 Firefly (Whedon 2002), 485 First Nations of North American, 190–93; on berdaches, 110; camplore and, 64–65; in the Canadian region, 521–22; creation legends, 35–36, 153; dolls and, 135; folk art of, 40, 196–97; herbal use, 300; identity in, 149–50; jingle dresses and, 336; on menstruation, 416; quilting styles of, 200, 244; rites of passage and, 584, 600; women warriors and, 712. See also Indian Maiden; indigenous populations Fish, Lena Bourne, 28, 30 Fish, Lydia, 353 Fisher, Archie, 638 Fisher, Cilla, 638 Fisher, Ray, 638 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 645 ‘‘Fitcher’s Bird’’ (Grimm Brothers), 638 Flanders, Helen Hartness, 28, 29 Fletcher, Alice Cunningham, 225, 492 Fletcher, Susan, 253 Flowers, language of, 193–94, 694 Folk art, 194–202; aesthetics and, 6–8; in Australia and New Zealand, 518–19; basketmaking, 36–37; beadwork, 39–40; coding and, 95, 201, 533; crafting, 106– 7; dowry items, 139; embroidery, 143–44; fans, 162– 63; graffiti, 286–87; knitting, 343–44; in the Mexican region, 554–55, 557; in the Pacific Island region, 565; and popular culture, 470; pottery and, 475– 76; quilting, 497; rugmaking, 612–13; in the South American region, 568; in the Southeast Asian region, 571; in the SubSahara African region, 577; weaving, 690–91 Folk artists, 8, 198, 199, 201–2

Folk belief, 203–7; about aphrodisiacs, 18; about blindness, 52–53; assaults of the supernatural in, 20; banshees and, 31; Bloody Mary, 53–54; breastfeeding, 60; divination practices and, 130–32; dolls and, 134–37; erotic, 146–47; the evil eye and, 153–54; female genital cutting and, 169–70; feminism and, 173–74; in folk medicine, 221; La Llorona, 345–46; memorate and, 406; on menopause, 412; on menstruation, 415–16; on miscarriage, 425; on mothers-inlaw, 428; religious legends, 352– 54; in rituals, 607; rumors and, 613–14; sex determination and, 626; spa culture and, 642; urban legends, 356–59; vampires and, 673; in wedding rituals, 692–94; witchcraft, 704–8. See also superstition Folk belief, regional: East Asia, 544–45; Eastern Europe, 548; Pacific Islands, 565; United States, 584 Folk belief collections: Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse (Bennett 1999), 204, 355; Bluenose Magic: Popular Beliefs and Superstitions in Nova Scotia (Creighton 1968), 656; Current Superstitions: Collected from the Oral Traditions of English Speaking States (Bergen 1996), 71; Dictionary of Superstitions, A (Opie and Tatem 1989), 655; Encyclopedia of Superstitions (Radford, Radford and Hole 1961), 655; Folk-Lore of Maryland (Weston and Canfield), 653–54; ‘‘Hoodoo in America’’ (Hurston 1931), 656; Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Skinner 2003), 71; Popular Beliefs and Superstitions in Utah (Cannon, Hand and Talley 1984), 656; Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural (Bennett 1987), 204; Treasury of American Superstitions, A (DeLys 1997), 656

INDEX 741

Folk costume, 207–9; Barbie, 32–34; for belly dancing, 46; for cheerleading, 69–70; jingle dress, 336–37. See also fashion Folk customs, 209–12; in Australia and New Zealand, 518–19; Barbie, 32–34; camplore and, 64–65; charivari/shivaree, 66– 67; for cheerleading, 69–70; in childbirth and childrearing, 70– 78; diet culture and, 129–30; dowry, 139–40; engagements, 144–46; menarche, 408; wife sales, 703–4. See also naming practices Folk dance, 212–14; belly dance, 46–47; cheerleading, 69–70; with a jingle dress, 336; in the Mexican region, 555; Morris dancing, 151, 180, 213; as a ritual, 607–8 Folk drama, 215–19, 518, 697–98 Folk groups, 219–20; around foodways, 258; coding and, 95; the Deaf community, 123–24; drama and, 216; dress and, 207; elder care in, 141; ethnicity and, 148–52; the family, 158, 159–61; folk music and, 223; gender roles and, 268; photocopy lore and, 461; race and, 503; served by festivals, 176; through body modification and adornment, 54–57; through memorates, 406. See also cliques; women’s clubs; women’s friendship groups Folk healers. See also curanderas Folklife, 238–45. See also public folklore Folklore: female genital cutting and, 169; in the Middle East region, 561; military, 423–25; proverbs and, 489; race and, 504; sexuality and, 630–32, 636– 37; stepmothers and, 646–47; transmission of, 159; violence and, 676 Folklore about women: xxxv–xlvii; blindness and, 52; feminism and, 173–74; laundry, 350–51; proverbs, 489–91 Folklore collections: American Folklore (Brunvand 1998), 238– 39; Mules and Men (Hurston 1935), 251, 492, 586; public, 491–92; Tales of My Mother Goose (Perrault), 79

Folklore Feminists Communication (FFC), 15, 245–46, 581 Folklore films, 186–87; All Day and All Night: Memories from Beale Street Musicians (Peiser 1990), 186–87; Ashpet: An American Cinderella (Davenport 1990), 250; Divine Horseman: The Living Gods of Haiti (Deren 1985), 186; Fannie Bell Chapman, Gospel Singer (Peiser 1975), 186; Gap-Toothed Women (Simon and Kell 1987), 188; Georgia Sea Island Stingers, The (Hawes 1974/ 1963), 186; Home Economics: A Documentary of Suburbia (Cool 1994), 188; Joy Unspeakable (Lawless and Peterson 1981), 187; Kathleen Ware, Quiltmaker (Sherman 1979), 187; Kids Shoes (Sherman 2001), 188; Letter From Karelia (2004), 549; Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren 1943), 186; Music District, The (Levitas 1996), 187; Not a Love Story (Klein 1981), 188; Paris is Burning (Livingston 1990), 187; Passover: A Celebration (Sherman 1983), 186; PizzaPizza Daddy-O (Hawes 1969), 186; Sara and Maybelle (Cohen 1981), 188; Screen Painters, The (Eff 1988), 187; Spirits in the Wood (Sherman 1991), 188; Stone Carvers, The (Hunt and Wagner 1985), 187; Stranger with a Camera (Barret 2000), 189; Tales from the Hood (1995), 136; Tales of the Supernatural (Sherman 1970), 186; Trance and Dance in Bali (Mead 1952), 186; Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl 1935), 186; Union Maids (Reichart, Klein and Mogulescu 1976), 187; When My Work Is Over: The Life and Stories of Miss Louise Anderson, 1921–1994 (Daveport 2000), 188; Zulay, Facing the 21st Century (Preloran 1993), 188. See also films Folklore in American (Beckwith 1931), 395

Folklore Studies Association of Canada, 246–47 Folkloric Society of Mexico, 555 Folklorists: American Folklore Society and, 16; belief systems and, 205; folklife approach and, 239–40; Folklore Feminists Communication (FFC), 245–46; objectivity of, 158–59, 329–30; weaving personal stories into films, 188–89; women, lix-lxix. See also fieldwork Folklorist studies: on aging, 11; From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (Warner 1994), 252; Burning Brightly: New Light on Old Tales Told Today (Stone 1998), 252; ‘‘ÔCinderellaÕ as a Dirty Joke; Gender, Multivocality, and the Polysemic Text’’ (Preston 1994), 254; class focus of, 87–88; ‘‘Creolization as Agency in Women-Centered Folktales’’ (Haring 2004), 252; Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale (Preston 2004), 254; ‘‘Docile Bodies of (Im)Material Girls: The Fairy-Tale Construction of JonBenet Ramsey and Princess Diana’’ (Conrad 1999), 254; Fairies in Tradition and Literature, The (Briggs 1967), 355; Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (Haase 2004), 254; With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Paredes 1958), 28; ‘‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’’ (Ortner 1972), 268–69; Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (Bernheimer 1998), 255; on myths, 438; In and Out of Enchantment: Blood Symbolism in Portuguese Fairy Tales (Cardigos 1996), 252; on photocopy lore, 461; Poetic Origins and the Ballad (Pound 1921), 25; Postmodern Fairy Tales; Gender and Narrative Strategies (Baccilega 1997), 254; Pueblo Potter, The (Bunzel 1929), 476; reliance on text, 659; Rhetorics and Politics in

742 INDEX

Folklorist studies (continued ) Afghan Traditional Storytelling (Mills 1991), 252; ‘‘Spare Any Change? Power and Discourse in Toronto’s Urban Panhandling Subculture’’ (Warner 1996), 306; Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, The (Hufford 1982), 19; ‘‘Things Walt Disney Never Told Us’’ (Stone 1975), 250; Touch Magic (Yolen 1986), 253; The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context (Zipes 1983), 251; Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (Harries 2003), 254; on U.S./Mexican borderland conflicts, 553–54; ‘‘Wet and Dry, the Evil Eye: An Essay in Indo-European and Semitic Worldview’’ (Dundes 1980), 154; ‘‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’’ (McIntosh 1988), 508 Folk medicine, 220–22; aphrodisiacs and, 18; in childbirth, 72; for dieting, 129; doulas and, 137–38; herbs and, 266, 300; for infertility, 326; jingle dresses and, 336; in the Middle East region, 562; pregnancy and, 477; spa culture and, 642; through food, 257, 259. See also curanderas; midwifery; nursing; old wives tales Folk music and folksong, 222–31; about blindness, 52; about death, 126; activism and, 3, 226–29, 466; daughters in, 121; dolls and, 135; erotic expressions in, 147–48; in festivals, 180; fieldwork in gathering, 181–82; gender in, 269; hip-hop and rap, 301–3; lament, 349; lullaby, 372–73; the marimba, 532; military women and, 424; sisters in, 638; spirituals, 644–45; traditions and, 662–63; by women religious, 710; women’s movement and, 722–23; women’s music festivals, 724– 26; women’s traditional role in, 242–43; women warriors in,

711. See also ballads; folk poetry Folk music, regional: Australia and New Zealand, 518; Canada, 525– 26; Caribbean, 530; Central America, 535; Central Asia, 537– 38, 540, 541; Mexican, 558; Southeast Asia, 572; United States, 585 Folk music collections: American Folksongs for Children in Home, School and Nursery School, 226; American Folksongs for Children in Home, School and Nursery School (Seeger 1948), 226; Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England (Flanders 1960–1965), 29; Book of Songs (Chinese 1000-700 BCE), 627; Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors by Richard Allen, African Minister, A (1801), 645; Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music (Smithsonian), 228; Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes (Cotten 1989), 226; The Greeham Commons Women’s Peace Camp Songbook, 466; ‘‘The Mill Mother’s Lament’’ (Wiggins), 227; Minstrelsy of Maine: Folksongs and Ballads of the Woods and the Coast (Eckstorm and Smith 1927), 182; The Singing Family of the Cumberlands (Ritchie 1955), 225; Slave Songs of the United States (1867), 645; Traditional American Folksongs from the Anne and Frank Warner Collection (Warner 1984), 28; On the Trail of Negro Folksong (Scarborough 1925), 586 Folk photography, 231–32 Folk poetry, 233–38; about death, 126; African American, 583; in the Central Asia region, 540–41; cheerleading, 69–70; in Deaf communities, 123; handclapping games, 295; Red Hat Society, 718; textile worker, 727; on women, 505; women warriors, 712. See also folk music; recitation; ryhmes

Folk poetry collections: American Children’s Folklore (Bronner 1988), 21; Disenchantments; An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry (Mieder 1985), 253; The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (Beaumont and Carlson 2003), 253; Seven Hundred Album Verses (Ogilvie 1884), 21; Yours Till Banana Splits: 201 Autograph Rhymes (Cole 2004), 21–22 Folktales, 247–56; Barbie dolls and, 32–34; Cinderella, 78–82; cross-dressing and, 110; cursing and, 113–14; in Deaf communities, 123; death and, 128; dolls and, 135; elder care, 141; erotic expressions of, 147; father/daughter relationship in, 122; pregnancy and, 478; princesses in, 480; Sleeping Beauty, 639–40; from the SubSahara African region, 576; of the United States region, 586–87; women and politics in, 463–64; women warriors, 712; Yellow Woman/Irriaku stories, 729–30. See also storytelling; tradition-bearer Folktale collections: American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress (Lindahl 2003), 250; The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Carter 1979), 253; Children’s and Household Tales (Grimm Brothers), 79; Cinderella Cycle (Rooth 1951), 78; Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World (Ragan 1998), 251; Folks Do Get Born (Campbell 1946), 477; The Girl Who Cried Flowers and Other Tales (Yolen 1974), 253; Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales (Hamilton 1995), 251; Il Pentamerone (The Story of Stories or the Entertainment of the Little Ones), 79; Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (Donoghue 1997), 253; La Bella Angiola (Zipes), 251; Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon:

INDEX 743

Himalayan Foothill Folktales (Narayan and Sood 1997), 664; North Carolina Folklore (Brown), 477; Novel Pastimes and Merry Tales (des Pe´riers 1501), 78; The Robber With a Witch’s Head (Zipes), 251; Snow White, Blood Red (Windling and Datlow 1993), 253; Tales of My Mother Goose (Perrault), 79; Tatterhood and Other Tales (Phelps 1978), 251; The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales (Musick 1965), 355; Treasury of Mexican Folklore, A (Toor 1947), 555; Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography (Uther 2004), 249; Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography (Aarne and Thompson 1961), 249; Virago Book of Fairy Tales, The (Carter 1990), 251; A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales (Windling and Datlow 2001), 253 Foodways, 256–62; in the Caribbean region, 528–29; in the Central American region, 533; in the Central Asia region, 538; diet culture and, 129–30; dolls and, 135; in engagements, 145; in family folklore, 159; folk customs and, 210; immigrants and, 323; in the Mexican region, 555, 558; pregnancy and, 477–78; recipe books and, 514; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 575; urban legends and, 358–59; as women’s work, 241. See also recipe books Formaneck-Brunell, Miriam, 135 Fortune-teller, 111–12, 131, 262– 63, 549, 705. See also divination practices Fosgate, Blanchard, 19–20 Foster, George, 154 Fournier, Lise, 525 Four Women (Simone 1966), 507 Fowke, Edith: Canadian ballad collections, 29; Folklore Studies Association of Canada and, 246; on folk music, 225, 526–27;

jump-rope rhymes, 340; public folklore and, 493 Fowler, Mary, 585 Fox, Jennifer, 661 Franklin, Aretha, 638–39 Fraser, Mary L., 526 Frazer, James George, 279, 380, 428, 655 Frederickson, George, 503 Freud, Sigmund, 315, 339, 436, 669 Fricker, Sylvia, 228 Friedan, Betty, 11, 378, 628 Friedman, Debbie, 334 Frisch, Michael, 454 Fromm, Erich, 401 Fulmer, Jacqueline, 136 Gaddon, Elinor W., 280 Gadsby, Jane, 286 Gagnier, Regenia, 306 Gaiman, Neil, 126 Galibova, Rena, 541 Gamson, Joshua, 486 Garcia, Cristina, 529 Garcia, Sara, 29 Garcı´a-Canclini, Nestor, 87 Gardens, 164, 241–42, 265–66, 519 Gardner, Emelyn Elizabeth, 29 Gardner, Gerald, 700–701 Garland, Mary Magdalene, 227 Garner, Lucille, 718 Garnham, Emilia, 567 Garrett, Kim, 157 Garza, Fermina de la, 554 Gaskin, Ina May, 305 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 346, 552 Gaunt, Kyra D., 303 Gay and lesbian: Barbie dolls and, 33–34; engagement of, 144; erotic expressions and, 146; family folklore, 160; gender roles and, 270; processional performance in, 483; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 576; transgender folklore and, 666; weddings and, 696. See also lesbian Geertz, Clifford, 135 Geller, Jaclyn, 103 Gender, 266–71; children and, 275–76, 295–96; child’s literature on, 73; cross-dressing and, 110; cursing and, 114; dolls and, 135; fashion and, 166, 167; in festivals, 180–81; in folk art,

143, 475–76, 625, 691; in folk dance, 212; in folk drama, 216; in folklife, 238, 240–41; in folklore fieldwork, 184; in folk poetry, 233–34, 237; folktales and, 251, 253; foodways and, 256; gardens and, 265; gossip and, 285; in hip-hop culture/rap, 302–3; housekeeping and, 308, 726; naming practices and, 442; in religious legends, 353; within rhymes, 596; sexism and, 628–29; stereotypes of in cyberculture, 115–19; in storytelling, 248; in transmission of family folklore, 159; wage work and, 687 Gender, regional: Central Asia, 537; Eastern Europe region, 547; Pacific Islands, 564–65; Southeast Asia, 570–71; SubSahara Africa, 575–76; United States, 73, 581–82, 583 Gentlemen Prefer Blonds (Loos 1925), 316 Gentry, Jane Hicks, 28, 30 Georgia Sea Island Stingers, The (Hawes 1974/1963), 186 Gershon, Gina, 189 Gilbert, Dennis, 83–84 Gilbert, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, 554 Gilbert, Ronnie, 227 Gimbutas, Marija, 279, 403–4, 589 Ginat, Joseph, 561, 562 Ginsberg, Ruth Bader, 267 Ginwright, Shawn A., 303 Girl Scouts/Girl Guides, 207, 271–72, 434. See also camplore Girls’ folklore, 272–75; babysitting, 23–24; Bloody Mary, 53–54; cliques and, 92–93; handclapping games, 295; princesses, 480 Girls’ games, 275–77; about marriage, 385; Barbie dolls, 32–33; Bloody Mary, 53–54; cheerleading, 69–70; erotic expressions of, 147; friendship books, 622; girl scouts and, 271–72; handclapping games, 295–96; jump-rope rhymes, 340; as preparation for courtship roles, 101–2; sexuality and, 631; telling of urban legends, 357. See also ryhmes

744 INDEX

Girls’ games collections: American Children’s Folklore (Bronner 1988), 295; Children’s Handclaps (Stoeltje 1978), 295; ‘‘Girls’ Handclapping Games in Three Los Angeles Schools’’ (MerrillMirsky 1986), 295; Pizza-Pizza Daddy-O (Hawes 1968), 295 Gladden, Texas, 30 Glass ceiling, 277–79, 663, 726 Glasser, Ruth, 530 Glenn, David, 627 Gluck, Sherna Berger, 455 Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe (Castillo 2000), 680 Goddess worship, 279–84; in the Central Asia region, 537, 538; Cult of the Virgin and, 680; differences in Saint veneration, 616; in the Eastern European region, 548; Indian Maiden and, 325; in Maiden, Mother, Crone lore, 381–84; in matriarchical societies, 403–4; menopause and, 413–14; Mother Earth, 426–27; in the South American region, 568; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 577. See also Wicca and Neo-Paganism Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 401–2 Gold, Julie, 229 Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, The (Frazer 1890), 279, 380 Goldstein, Diane E., 205, 413, 526 Gomme, Alice B., 275–76, 594 Gonzales, Alicia, 492–93 Gonzalez, Alicia Marı´a, 558 Gonzalez, Jovita de Mireles, 554 Gonzalez, Sonia, 188 Gonzalez, Yolanda Broyles, 558 Gonzalez de Morales, Jovita, 492 Gonzenbach, Laura, 252 Good People, The (Narva´ez 1991), 355 Goodwin, Joseph, 160, 362, 364, 365 Gordon, Susan, 252, 650 Gosling, Mauren, 188 Goss, Linda, 649–50 Gossip, 96, 257, 285–86, 561. See also rumor Gottleib, Alma, 415–16 Graffiti, 286–87. See also tagging Grahn, Judy, 438 Grammy awards, 226, 229, 230 Gramsci, Antonio, 219

Grandma Moses, 196, 197 Grandma Riddle, 585 Grandma’s Bottle Village: The Art of Tressa Prisbrey (Light 1982), 187 Grandmother, 287–89, 383, 514, 548. See also elder care Granger, Sue Ellen, 718 Granny Riddle. See also Riddle, Almeida (Granny Riddle) Graves and gravemarkers, 289–90. See also death; roadside crosses Gray Panthers, 11 Greek mythology: Amazons, 506, 711; couvade in, 104; in cyberculture, 115; death and, 125; divination practices and, 131; hair and, 293; in Maiden, Mother, Crone lore, 382; race and, 506; in the United States region, 583; women in, 153; women warriors, 710–12 Green, Rayna, 325, 480–81, 493, 509, 582 Greenaway, Kate, 194, 652 Greenhill, Pauline, 213, 527 Greenleaf, Elizabeth Bristol, 29, 526 Greenwood, Susan, 701 Grella, Christine, 85 Grenander-Nyberg, Gertrud, 593 Griffin, Susan, 284, 444 Griffith, Nanci, 230 Grimm Brothers (Jacob and Wilhelm): Children’s and Household Tales, 79, 249; Cinderella story, 78, 79, 122; emphasis on beauty, 10; Hansel and Gretel, 638; Juniper Tree, The, 638; Red Riding Hood and, 516; sisters in, 638; Sleeping Beauty, 640; on stepmothers, 431; tradition-bearers used, 664; women in folktales, 251, 463–64, 592, 677 Grugeon, Elizabeth, 276, 340, 596 Gryzbek, Peter, 490 Guerilla Girls, 474 Guerrero, Margarita, 14 Guilbert, Lucille, 524 ‘‘Gulag in Memory, The’’ (Sherbakova 1998), 455 Gullah Women’s folklore, 291–92 Gunning, Sarah Ogan, 30, 227 Guthrie, Woodie, 227, 228

Haase, Donald, 249, 254 Habermas, Ju ¨ rgen, 471

Hackers, 117–18 Hagen-Smith, Lisa, 483 Hair, 293–95; Barbie dolls and, 33; for cheerleading, 69–70; lesbian, 365; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 578; veiling, 675; women’s work in, 100. See also makeup artists Haley, Alex, 158, 622 Hall, Nor, 104 Hall, Vera, 225 Hallstein, Lynn O’Brien, 391 Halpert, Herbert, 216, 526 Hamblett, Theora, 196 Hamilton, Virginia, 251 Hand, Wayland, 135, 655–56 Handclapping games, 275, 277, 295–96. See also jump-rope ryhmes; ryhmes Handler, Richard, 660–61 Handler, Ruth, 32–33 Handweaver’s Pattern Book, A (Davison), 691 Handy, Jamileh Jeanne, 47 Hansen, Robin, 344 Harems, 560–61 Haring, Lee, 252 Harries, Elizabeth W., 254 Harriman, Mary, 467 Harrison, Jane E., 217 Hart, Mechthild, 427 Hawaiian-Americans, 200 Hawes, Bess Lomax: Almanac Singers and, 227; on folk music, 225; Georgia Sea Island Stingers, The, 186; Pizza-Pizza Daddy-O, 295; public folklore and, 493 Hawes, Butch, 227 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 671 Hays, Brooks, 428 Hays, Lee, 227 Hayward, Sue, 278 Head, Bessie, 577 Healers. See also folk healers Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine, The (Austen 1990), 283 Hearts and Hands (Ferrero 1987), 187 Heinlein, Robert A., 700 Hellerman, Fred, 227 Helms, Mary W., 531 Helpmate, 152–53, 296–98 Henken, Elissa, 357, 656

INDEX 745

Henna art/Mehndi, 298–99; as a cosmetic, 99; films about, 187; in the Middle East region, 562; in Muslim women’s folklore, 433–34; as rite of passage, 41, 330–31; as a ritual, 606. See also body modification and adornment Herbs, 299–301; as an aphrodisiac, 18; for breastfeeding, 60; in the Caribbean region, 529; for childbirth, 72; to induce abortion, 1–2; for infertility, 326; for menopause, 412; in the Mexican region, 556; old wives tales and, 453; in the South American region, 568; through gardening, 266; used by curanderas, 111–12; used by First Nations people, 191–92; used in folk medicine, 220–21; for wedding rituals, 694. See also old wives tales Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 661 Here Comes the Bride (Geller 2001), 103 Herna´ndez, Amalia, 555 Hernandez, Lea, 480 Hero with a Thousand Faces, The (Campbell 1949), 437 Herrera, Petra, 554 Herrera-Sebok, Maria, 26, 29, 87, 554 Herrold, Christine, 218 Hester, Caroline, 228 Hicks, Nathan, 28 Hidatsa tribe, 191 Hildegard of Bingen, 471–72 Hill, Lauryn, 638 Hill, Mildred, 51 Hinduism, 617 Hip-hop culture/rap, 96, 301–4, 662–63 Hippocrates, 415 Hirsch, Marianne, 232 Hmong American, 200, 322–23, 507, 573 Hobbs, Holly, 581 Hobby Horse and Other Animal Masks, The (Alford 1978), 217 Hobsbawm, Eric, 660 Hoffman, Eva, 322 Hofstader, Douglas, 628 Hogarth, William, 162 Hogeland, Lisa Maria, 98 Holbek, Bengt, 664 Holidays, 242, 458, 699 Home altar. See also altar, home

Home birth, 49–50, 70–73, 304–6, 422–23 Home Economics: A Documentary of Suburbia (Cool 1994), 188 Homeless in Contemporary Society, The (Bingham, et al 1987), 307 Homeless women, 306–7 Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, 90 Hooks, bell, 86, 149, 170, 509 Hopi, 190 Hopkinson, Nalo, 253 Hormone replacement therapy (HRT), 410, 412 Horney, Karen, 669 Hostetler, Agnes F., 15 Housekeeping, 307–12; mother-inlaw and, 428; ‘‘pink collar’’ work, 89; religious meanings of, 552; as women’s work, 397–98, 726–28. See also laundry House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros), 587 Howard, Dorothy, 340, 492 Howland, Esther, 672 How to Make an American Quilt (1995), 187 Hufford, David J., 19, 406 Hufford, Mary, 240 Huggins, Louisa Caroline, 73 Humor, 312–19; in African American folktales, 251; of the Australia and New Zealand region, 518; in ballads, 26–27; beauty contest parodies, 180– 81; in coming out stories, 363; in the Deaf community, 123; erotic, 146–48; feminists and, 172–74; local characters and, 371; in menopause, 413; menopause and, 414; military women, 423–24; mock weddings, 697; in photocopy lore, 461; through graffiti, 286– 87; used in crime-victim stories, 107. See also jokes Hunt, Marjorie, 187 Hunter-Paulk, Janis, 418 Hurston, Zora Neale: on Caribbean folklore, 530; folklore fieldwork and, 184; Mules and Men, 251, 492, 586; on myths, 435; on storytelling, 649; on superstition, 656 Hussey, Greta, 515 Hutton, Ronald, 701 Hyde vs. Hyde (1866), 387

Hygiene and Morality (Dock 1910), 486 Hymes, Dell, 660 I, Rigoberta Menchu´: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Menchu ´ 1984), 531 Ice, Joyce, 7, 200, 662, 716 I Ching, 130–31, 262 Idea of the Holy, The (Otto 1917), 439 Identity: in Canadian region, 520; in the Caribbean region, 529; Deaf community and, 123; differential, 85; in festivals, 176, 180; folk costumes for, 208; in folktales, 250; foodways and, 323; indicated by fashion, 166; in the Middle East region, 563; race and, 504, 509; sexual, 362–63; through proverbs, 489–90; in the United States region, 584; in the Western European region, 590 ‘‘If Men Could Menstruate: A Political Fantasy’’ (Steinem), 314 Illich, Ivan, 240–41 Illness and disease, 169, 300, 486 I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional (Kaminer 1992), 623 ‘‘I’m Gonna Be an Engineer’’ (Seeger 1979), 228 Immigrants: from the Central American region, 531, 535; from East Asia, 545; from the Eastern European region, 549; ethnicity and, 151; folk music and folksong of, 223; hate groups and, 508; Hmong American, 573; housekeeping jobs and, 311; midwifery and, 420; piecework and, 462; use of folk dance and, 213 Immigration, 321–24 Indian Maiden, 324–26, 481, 712. See also First Nations of North American; warrior women Indian region. See also Southeast Asia region Indigenous populations: class status of in Mexico, 87; fashion and, 166; feminism and, 174; Mayan, 532–33; of the South American region, 567. See also First Nations of North American

746 INDEX

Indigo Girls, 230, 370 Infertility, 326–27 Infibulation. See also female genital cutting (FGC) Informant. See also tradition-bearer Ingram, Moses, 515 Initiation, 327–31; cheerleading, 69; into groups, 599; in occupations, 451; sororities, 640–41; through beauty contests, 43–44; through body modification, 56; into Wicca covens, 702. See also rites of passage In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), 174 Internet: adoption and, 6; Barbie dolls and, 33–34; belly dance and, 47; diet culture and, 129; e-zines, 119, 393; Folklore Feminists Communication (FFC), 245–46; folk medicine and, 222; foodways and, 258; knitting and, 344; Lizzie Borden websites, 59; male dominance in, 392–93; menopause support groups, 413; miscarriage support groups, 426; women’s movements and, 722; in the workplace, 451. See also cyberculture Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud 1900), 436 Iron and Gold (Vaughan), 591 Iroquois, 190, 192 Islam, 434, 537, 617 Ives, Burl, 227 Ivins, Molly, 508 Iwasaka, Michiko, 353 Iwerks, Ub, 80

Jackson, Aunt Molly, 30 Jackson, Mahalia, 645 Jacobi, Mary Putnam, 74 Jacobs, W. W., 128 Jahner, Elaine, 649 Jamanova, Roza, 540 James, E. O., 401 James, Thelma, 29 Jameson, Anna, 525 Jane, Calamity (Martha Jane Cannary), 63–64 Jaramillo, Cleofas, 554 Jarvis, Anna, 429

Jennings, Paula Dove, 192 Jensen, Robert, 511–12 Jessey, Eva, 645 Jewish women’s folklore, 333–36; Adam and Eve, 152–53; bat mitzvah, 37–39; brideprice, 61– 62; cursing and, 114; death and, 127; dolls and, 136; folk costumes in, 207; identity of, 150; for infertility, 327; Lilith story, 369; on menstruation, 408, 416, 417; rites of passage and, 600 Jhally, Sut, 392 Jingle dress, 336–37 Joan of Arc, 616, 713 Johnson, Bernice Reagon, 492 Johnson, Robbie, 184 Johnson, Terrol Dew, 260 Jokes, 337–39; about women religious, 710; among immigrant women, 322; blonde, 313; feminists and, 172–73; lesbian, 363–64; menopause and, 414; mother-in-law, 428; nursing and, 448; princesses and, 479–80; prostitution and, 483–84; rape and, 512; sexuality and, 631–32, 635–36; in sororities, 641; used in family folklore, 160; women and, 316; in the workplace, 451. See also humor Jolicoeur, Catherine, 246, 525 Jones, Bessie, 225 Jones, Michael Owen, 90, 308 Jones, Rickie Lee, 229 Jordan, Rosan, 11, 88, 581, 656 Jorgenson, Marilyn, 296 Joseph, Jenny, 718 Journal of American Folklore, 15, 395, 581 Joy Luck Club, The (Tan 1989), 545–46 Joy Unspeakable (Lawless and Peterson 1981), 187 Juana Ine´s de la Cruz, Sor, 553 Judaism, 38, 472 Juliano, Dolores, 569 Jump-rope rhymes, 339–41; in film, 186; girls’ games, 274–75; as preparation for courtship roles, 101; sexuality and, 631; in the United States region, 587. See also handclapping games; ryhmes Jung, Carl Gustav, 16, 401, 436

Kachman, Geneva, 416, 418 Kadi, Joanna, 563 Kaeppler, Adrienne, 212 Kalcˇik, Susan, 15, 98, 459–60, 512, 717 Kalevala, 592 Kaminer, Wendy, 623 Kaplansky, Lucy, 229 Karmel, Marjorie, 305 Karpeles, Maud, 28, 29, 526 Kaufman, Gloria, 314 Kealiinohomoku, Joann, 212 Keddie, Nikki, 559 Keening, 127, 235, 289. See also lament Kell, Susan, 188 Keller, Helen, 52 Keloiding, 56 Kennedy, Elizabeth, 364 Kerr, Jean, 315 Keyes, Cheryl, 302, 663 Killer Princesses (Simone and Hernandez), 480 Kinaalda´, 416 Kincaid, Jamaica, 529 King, Carol, 229 King, Stephen, 128 Kingston Trio, 227 Kinsey, Alfred, 267 Kippot, 39 Kirkendall, Lester, 486 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 399, 490 KISS (KIsekae Set System), 136 Kissing the Witch (Donoghue), 79 Kittredge, George Lyman, 25 Klassen, Pamela E., 205 Klein, Barbro, 593 Klein, Bonnie, 188 Klein, James, 187 Kligman, Gail, 662 Klonoff, Elizabeth A., 630 Knapp, Herbert, 296 Knapp, Mary, 296 Knapton, Carol, 182 Knitting, 167, 343–44, 399, 519, 717. See also rugmaking Knott, Sara Gertrude, 30, 179, 492 Knox, Robert, 505 Kodish, Debora, 4 Kolker, Andrew, 85 Ko ¨ nga¨s-Maranda, Elli, 524 Korson, Rae, 29 Kos, Miriam, 39, 335 Kristeva, Julia, 509

INDEX 747

Laboure´, Catherine, 680 Labrie, Vivian, 246, 525 Lacemaking, 346–48, 568 La Chola, 567 Lacourcie`re, Luc, 524 LaDuke, Winona, 509 Ladurie, Emmanuel, 469 Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-theNight (Turner 1976–1983), 281 Lakoff, Robin, 269 La Leche League, 60 La Llorona, 345–46; Bloody Mary and, 54; in the Central American region, 533; death and, 128; elements of Aztec mythology, 551–52; family folklore and, 160; in the United States region, 582 La Malinche, 465, 552, 582 Lamaze method (accouchement sans douleur), 76, 305 Lament, 127–28, 348–50, 538, 605–6, 662. See also keening La Mocuana, 533 Lampell, Millard, 227 Lancaster, Roger, 534 Landrine, Hope, 630 Landry, Bart, 308 Lange, Dorothea, 492 Langlois, Janet, 160, 358 Language of Flowers, The (Greenaway 1885), 194 Lanser, Susan, 309 Laqueur, Thomas, 270 Larkin, Margaret, 29 Laso de la Vega, Luis, 682 LaTaconuda, 533 Latifah, Queen, 303, 370 Latina women, 84, 90, 198, 199 Latino folklore: activism and, 321, 465; Central American region and, 535; hip-hop culture/rap and, 301–3; menopause and, 413; midwives in, 420; rites of passage and, 600; stereotyping and, 507; vaginal serpent tales, 671 Laundry, 187, 308, 310, 350–51. See also housekeeping Lavitt, Wendy, 135 Lawless, Elaine: on abused women, 677; on family folklore, 160; on folk beliefs, 205; Joy Unspeakable, 187; on personalexperience narratives, 460; on reciprocal ethnography, 184; on

religion, 584; study on women ministers, 716; on women’s friendship groups, 717 Laws, G. Malcolm, Jr., 25 Lea, Aurora Lucero-White, 492, 554 Leary, Timothy, 115 LeBlanc, Barbara, 212, 246 Legend. See also assault, supernatural Legend, local, 351–52; Calamity Jane, 63–64; erotic, 146; Lizzie Borden, 58–59; Ma Barker, 34– 35; in the Mexican region, 553; Rabi’a, 617; sexuality and, 633– 35. See also local characters Legend, religious, 352–54; Adam and Eve, 152–53; adoption, 4; of the bat mitzvah, 39; from Eastern Europe, 546; Lilith, 369; of Saints, 615; St. Valentine’s Day, 672 Legend, supernatural, 354–56; the banshee, 31; birthdays, 51; Bloody Mary, 53–54; compared to memorate, 407; in the Eastern European region, 548; of the First Nations of North American, 190; food traditions and, 260; La Llorona, 128, 345– 46; Lilith, 369; from the Mexican region, 552; Navajo, 612; from the Pacific Island region, 564– 65; in the Southeast Asian region, 571; vampires, 673–74; walled-up wife, 688–89; women warriors, 711. See also assault, supernatural Legend, urban/contemporary, 356– 59; babysitting, 21; from the Canadian region, 523; castrating vagina, 669–70; cross-dressing, 110–11; rape and, 511; sexuality and, 632; superstition and, 654; Vanishing Hitchhiker, 54 Le´ger, Lauraine, 525 LeGuin, Ursula K., 474 Lehr, Genevieve, 526 Leland, Charles Godfrey, 700 Lemus, Felicia Lua, 552 ´ n, Nicola´s, 554 Leo Leroi, Armand Marie, 504 Lesbian: coding and, 95, 96; in film/television, 473; friendship groups and, 717–18; on goddess worship, 283–84; humor and, 318; jokes about, 636; non-

verbal coding, 663; stereotypes of, 174; weddings and, 696. See also gay and lesbians Lesbian and queer studies, 281, 359–62 Lesbian folklore, 362–68 Levin, Judith, 90, 308 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 437–38 Levitas, Susan, 187 Lewin, Ellen, 184, 367 Lewontin, Richard, 503 Lieberman, Marcia K., 81 Liebow, Elliot, 306 Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, The (Fields 1989), 90 Life expectancy. See also aging Light, Allie, 187 Lilith, 20, 297, 368–69. See also assault, supernatural Lilith Fair, 179, 370–71, 391 Lincoln, Bruce, 329 Lindahl, Carl, 250 Linders, Jeanie, 414 Linnaeus, Carl, 505 Linnekin, Jocelyn, 660–61 Linscott, Eloise Hubbard, 29, 182 Lippard, Lucy, 7–8 Literature: about immigrant women, 322; best friends and, 48; for children, 73, 80; cliques in, 93; death mythology and, 126; dime novels, 63, 105; folktales and, 248; native tradition, 729; Paganism and, 700; on prostitution, 486; romance novels, 390, 471; stepmothers in, 646; vampires and, 674; women’s friendship groups, 718–19; women’s humor in, 313–14, 316 Literature, regional: Canada, 523; Canadian, 520; Caribbean, 529, 530; Mexican, 87; United States, 585–86 Livingston, Jennie, 187 Lobato, Josephine, 198 Local characters, 58–59, 63–64, 371–72. See also legend, local Local legends. See also legend, local Lock, Margaret, 411 Locke, John, 622 Lockhart, James, 553 Lomax, Alan, 186, 225, 492 Lomax, John, 225 Long, Eleanor, 29

748 INDEX

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 524 Loos, Anita, 316 Lord, Albert, 659 Lorde, Audre, 435 Louv, Richard, 65 Lovedog, Cheri, 189 Lovelace, Lady Ada (Byron), 115–16 Low, Juliette Gordon, 271 Low, Margaret, 525 Lubavitcher Hasidim, 38 Lucas, Tad, 105 Luker, Kristen, 486 Lullaby, 372–73 Lupton, Mary Jane, 416 Luxton, Meg, 309–10, 727 Lynn, Bright, 585 Maart, Rozena, 577 Mackenzie, W. Roy, 524 Madonna (singer), 391 Maddox, Jerald, 232 Magazines, women’s and girls’, 375–79; controversial issues and, 390; cosmetics and, 100; crafting, 106; diet culture in, 129; promoting beauty, 42; quilting, 498; samplers and, 619. See also mass media Magic, 379–81; aphrodisiacs and, 18; beadwork and, 39–40; divination practices and, 130– 32; of dolls, 135; embroidery and, 143; in folktales, 248; menopause and, 412; of midwives, 72–73; nagualism, 533; in the Southeast Asian region, 571; superstition and, 654–55; tales of, 247; through cursing, 112–13; witchcraft and, 705 Magliocco, Sabina, 702 Maiden, Mother, Crone, 381–84 Maiden name, 443 Maillet, Antonine, 525 Makeup artists, 100. See also beauty salons Malinowski, Bronislaw K., 437, 659 (sometimes listed as Bronislav Malinovski) Malleus Maleficarum, 20, 354, 707 Malloy, Doug (Richard Simonton), 55 Malone, Annie Minerva Turnbo, 99 Malone, Jacqui, 214 Mancini, Francesca, 598 Manley, Kathleen E. B., 29

Manny, Louise, 526 Mansfield, Grace Yarrow, 29, 526 Marketing strategies: engagement rings, 145; fans, 162; feed bags, 164; magazines and, 376–78; Mother’s Day flowers, 429–30; for sewing patterns and machines, 625; spa culture, 642; Valentine’s Day, 672 Marriage, 384–89; in ballads, 25–27; beauty rituals for, 41–42; in the Central Asia region, 538; charivari ritual, 66–67; divorce and, 132–34; dolls and, 136; engagement, 144–46; ethnicity and, 151; as factor in folklore fieldwork, 184; female genital cutting for, 168–69; foodways and, 257; gay and lesbian, 160; jokes about, 636; quilting and, 498; rhymes and, 595; as a rite of passage, 600; in the Southeast Asian region, 571–72; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 578; traditions in Australia and New Zealand, 519; veiling and, 675 Martinez, Denise, 278 Martinez, Julian, 476 Martinez, Maria, 476 Marx, Karl, 401 Mary Kay Cosmetics, 99 ‘‘Mary Medusa’’ (Dempsey and Millan 1998), 318 Marzolph, Ulrich, 249 Massignon, Genevie`ve, 525 Mass media, 389–94; beauty and, 41–42; folk music and, 222; gender and, 268; hair and, 294; homeless women and, 306–7; proverbs in, 489; sexism and, 630. See also films; magazines Material culture, 394–400; basketmaking, 36–37; beadwork and, 39–40; crafting, 106–7; Deaf community and, 123; embroidery, 144; fans, 162; fashion and, 165; folk art and, 194–95; in the Middle East region, 560; paperfolding and papercutting, 458; rugmaking, 612–13; scrapbooks, 621–22; of the Southeast Asian region, 572– 73; traditions and, 661; of the Western European region, 593 Mathias, Elizabeth, 353 Mathieu, Jocelyne, 246, 524, 527

Matriarchy, 400–405. See also feminisms Matrilineal societies, 150, 241, 279, 578–79, 589 Mayan, 532–33, 568 Maynard, Lara, 358 Mayor, Adrienne, 583 Mbande, Nzingha, 577 McAllister, Carlota, 534 McCafferty, Geoffrey, 553, 568 McCafferty, Sharisse, 553, 568 McCarthy, William B., 159 McClung, Nellie, 651 McGarrigle, Anna, 229 McGarrigle, Kate, 229 McIntosh, Peggy, 508–9 McLaughlin, Sarah, 179, 370 McLin, Lena Johnson, 645 McNeil, W. K., 21 Mead, Margaret, 186, 435 Medicine woman, 507, 607 Medwidsky, Bohdan, 526 Memorate, 406–7. See also assault, supernatural Menarche stories, 53–54, 408–9, 416. See also menstruation Menchu ´ , Rigoberta, 531 Mendoza, Lydia, 30 Mendoza, Vincente, 555 Menopause, 109, 222, 409–14, 601–2 Menopause: The Musical (Linders), 414 Menstrual Health Foundation, 417 ‘‘Menstrual Monday,’’ 416, 418 Menstruation, 415–19; cursing and, 113; customs from East Asia region, 544; female genital cutting and, 169; First Nations of North American view of, 191; food traditions and, 258; and Jewish rituals, 38–39; in Maiden, Mother, Crone lore, 382; Red Riding Hood story and, 516; as a rite of passage, 599; sexuality and, 632, 637; tied to death, 126. See also menarche stories Menzies, June, 521 Mernissi, Fatima, 560–61 Merrill-Mirsky, Carol, 295 Merrit, Justine, 466 Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren 1943), 186 Messenger, Betty, 593 Messing, Debra, 315

INDEX 749

Metamorphoses Book IV (Ovid), 16, 511 Mexican Folkways, 555 Mexican region, 551–59; activism in, 465, 651; ballads, 25, 29; Cinderella story in, 81; death traditions in, 125–27; dolls and, 135; festivals of, 177, 178, 180; folk art of, 457–58, 475; folk dance, 481; identity of, 150–51; processional performance in, 482; Quincean˜era, 499–500; rape statistics, 510; women warriors in, 712 Mexican region studies: Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora (Prieto 1997), 556; La Fiesta de los Tastoanes (Na´jera-Ramı´rez 1997), 556–57; Mexican Tales and Legends from Los Altos (Robe 1970), 557–58; Oaxacan Ceramics: Traditional Folk Art by Oaxacan Women (Wasserspring 2000), 557; Translated Woman (Behar 2003), 556 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, 366, 474, 725 Middle America: A Culture History of Heartland and Frontiers (Helms 1975), 531 Middle Eastern region, 559–63; activism in, 465; beauty rituals in, 41; belly dance and, 46–47; Cinderella story in, 81; cursing and, 114; dowry, 139; folk art in, 457; naming practices, 442; poetry from, 234, 236; prostitution in, 485; rape statistics, 511; veiling, 675; women’s movement in, 722 Middle Eastern region studies: Dreams of Trespass (Mernissi 1994), 560; Food for Our Grandmothers (Kadi 1994), 563; Guests of the Sheik (Fernea 1969), 559; Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2005), 560; Language of Baklava (Abu-Jaber 2005), 560; Middle Eastern Women Speak (Fernea and Bezirgan 1977), 561; Opening the Gates (Badran and Cooke 1990), 560; Women and Family in the Middle East (Fernea 1985), 559; Women in

the Muslim World (Beck and Keddie 1978), 559 Midwest Womyn’s Festival, 725 Midwifery, 419–23; abortion and, 1–2; divination practices and, 132; doulas and, 138; home births and, 305; medical profession and, 50, 73–74, 76; in the Mexican region, 556; nursing and, 421; in the United States region, 71–73, 584; use of birth chair, 50. See also doulas; folk medicine Midwives’ Alliance of North America (MANA), 305, 421 Mieder, Wolfgang, 490 Mikhail, Mona, 561–62 Military women’s folklore, 423–25, 714, 717 Millan, Lorri, 318 Miller, Kim, 159 Millicent Min: Girl Genius (Yee 2004), 49 Mills, Margaret, 220, 252 Miranda, Elisha, 188 Mirshakar, Zarrina, 541 Miscarriage, 425–26 Misogyny: in ballads, 26; Eve story and, 297; in folk poetry, 236–37; humor and, 312–13; menopause and, 410; in the military, 424; in mythology, 669; in recitation, 515; rumors and, 614; stepmother, 646; witch hunts and, 707 Miss Universe pageant, 43 Miss World pageant, 43 Mitchell, Carol, 184, 316 Mitchell, Joni, 229 Mitchell, S. Weir, 76 Modleski, Tania, 390 Mogulescu, Miles, 187 Mohammed, Elijah, 434 Moll Cutpurse, 713 Money, John, 267 Mo’Nique, 315–16 ‘‘Monkey’s Paw, The’’ (Jacobs), 128 Moodie, Susanna, 525 Moore, Dorothy Rudd, 645 Moore, Sally, 605 Moore, Undine Smith, 645 Morales, Rosario S., 649 Morgan, Jim, 278 Morgan, Joan, 302

Morgan, Kathryn L., 158 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 401 Morley, Linda, 29 Morris dancing, 151, 180, 213 Morrison, Toni, 577 Mosbacher, Dee, 725 Moses, Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma Moses), 196, 197 Mother Earth, 265, 282, 426–27, 701 Mother Goose, 427–28. See also ryhmes Mother-in-law, 386, 428–29 Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World (Bachofen 1861), 279 Mother’s Day, 429–31 Mother’s folklore, 431–33; breastfeeding, 60; childbirth and childrearing, 70–78; infertility and, 326–27; La Llorona, 345–46; lullaby, 372–73; Ma Barker, 34–35; the mother-in-law, 428; stepmother, 646 Mother Teresa, 709 Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Thompson 1955), 135, 249, 597, 646 Motz, Lotte, 401 Motz, Marilyn, 206 Mountaingrove, Jean, 281 Mountaingrove, Ruth, 281 Mourning, 127, 235, 289 Mulan, Hua, 544, 712 Muldaur, Maria, 228 Mummer’s plays, 216–17 Murdock, George P., 402 Murray, Hilda Chaulk, 241 Murray, Margaret A., 282, 700–701, 708 Musafar, Fakir, 55 Music District, The (Levitas 1996), 187 Musick, Ruth Ann, 355 Muslim women’s folklore, 433–35; Adam and Eve, 152–53; brideprice, 62; in the Central Asia region, 539; ethnicity and, 323; folk costumes in, 207; girl scouts and, 271–72; henna art and, 298; in the Middle East region, 561; purdah, 494–95; Rabi’a, 617; rites of passage and, 600; veiling, 675

750 INDEX

Myerhoff, Barbara, 605 ‘‘Myth’’ (Rukyser), 629 Mythologiques (Le´vi-Strauss 1964–1971), 437 Mythology: Amazons, 506, 711; Aztec, 345, 551–52; in the Central Asia region, 537; on death, 31, 125–27; divination practices and, 131; First Nations of North American, 584; Mayan, 532; Mother Earth in, 426–27, 444; of the Pacific Island region, 564–65; from the South American region, 568; in the Southeast Asian region, 571, 572; transgender folklore and, 666; in the United States region, 583; vagina dentata, 669; virginity and, 684; weaving, 690, 691; women warriors, 710–12; Yoruba, 616 Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Skinner 2003), 71 Myth studies, 190–92, 435–40 Nahachewsky, Andriy, 526 Na´jera-Ramı´rez, Olga, 555, 556–57, 581 Naming practices, 387, 441–43, 600. See also folk customs Narayan, Kirin, 664 Narayan, Uma, 509 Narcocorrido ballads, 25 Narrator. See also tradition-bearer Narva´ez, Peter, 355 Nash, Julie, 558 Nashat, Guity, 560 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 651 National Association of Black Storytellers, 650 National Black Women’s Health Project, 417 National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 300 National Folk Festival, 492 National Network for Folk Arts and Education, 492 National Women’s Music Festival, 474, 725 Native Americans. See also First Nations of North American Nature/culture, 60, 443–45

Nature of Magic, The (Greenwood 2005), 701 Navajo: creation legend, 190; herbal use, 300; material culture and, 395; weaving and, 199, 612, 691 Navas, Gregory, 535 Nawooksy, Clydia, 494 Nazarkhan, Sevara, 541 Near, Holly, 229 Needlework, 40, 143–44, 346–48, 445–47, 462. See also quilting; sampler; sewing Neshat, Guity, 561 Nettl, Bruno, 29 Neumann, Erich, 401 Neustadt, Kathy, 183 Newall, Venetia, 211, 354 Newbury, John, 428 Newel, William Wells, 594 New Methods of Making Common Place Books (Locke), 622 Nichter, Mimi, 129 Ni Duibhne, Eilis, 591–92 Niggli, Josefina, 492 9/11 Terrorist attacks. See also September 11 attacks Nineteenth Amendment, The, 464, 651 Nobel, Frances Khirallah, 561 Nobody Wants to Hear Our Truth: Homeless Women and Theories of the Welfare State (Ralston 1996), 306 Nohl, Mary, 202 None on Record (Thiam 2007), 576 Noor, Queen, 560 Nordin, Ulla, 198–99 Norovbanzad, Namjiliin, 541 Norrick, Neal R., 490 North American Registry of Midwives, 421 Not a Love Story (Klein 1981), 188 Nuns. See also women religious Nurpeisova, Dina, 540 Nursing, 141–43, 423, 447–49. See also folk medicine Nursing homes, 142 Nwapa, Flora, 577 Nyanjir, Mary Muthoni, 577 Nyro, Laura, 229 Nzegwu, Nkiru, 404

Oakley, Ann, 267 Occupational folklore, 451–52; babysitting, 24; beauty queens and, 45–46; blindness and, 52–53; cowgirls in, 104–5; folk costumes for, 208; housekeeping, 90; photocopylore, 461; in the Western European region, 593; women and class and, 88–90; women’s traditional role in, 243; women’s wage work and, 687– 88. See also wage work O’Connell, Anne, 303 Odetta (folksinger), 645 O’Donnell, Rosie, 316 Ogilvie, J. S., 21 O’Grady, Kathleen, 408 Ojibwe, 191, 193, 336 Ojim, Madam Nwanyeruwa, 577 Old wives tales, 452–53; breastfeeding, 60; childbirth and, 71; coding and, 96; magic of, 380; on mothers, 432; pregnancy and, 477; wisdom of, 11. See also folk medicine; herbs Olney, Marguerite, 29 Omolade, Barbara, 435–36 ‘‘On Coming of Age in the Sixties’’ (Kodish), 4 Ondaatje, Michael, 160 Opie, Iona, 51, 340, 655 Opie, Peter, 51, 340 Oppenheimer, Lillian, 458 Opposite of Fate: Memoirs of a Writing Life, The (Tan 2003), 322 Oral history, 453–56; assisted through photography, 232; in the Caribbean region, 529; of folk medicine, 222; of folk music, 222; foodways, 257; in Jewish women’s folklore, 335; lullaby, 372–73; memorates, 407; in the Middle East region, 561; mother/daughter relationship, 122; riddles and, 597–98; rumors, 613; in the South American region, 567; in the Southeast Asian region, 572; from the Sub-Sahara African region, 576–77; tales of magic, 250; tradition of, 662; in the United States region, 585–86

INDEX 751

Origami, 458 Orr (Preston), Cathy Makin, 461 Orso, Ethelyn, 534 Ortner, Sherry B., 268–69, 401, 444 Osborn, Lawrence, 711 O’Shea, Elena Zamora, 554 Otero-Warren, Nina, 554 Otto, Emma, 286–87 Otto, Rudolph, 439 Out of Place: Homeless Mobilization, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes (Wright 1997), 307 Ovid, 16, 511 Owen, Mary Alicia, 491 Ozark Mountains, 420, 477, 581, 671 Pacific Island region, 150, 563–66 Pagter, Carl R., 461 Painted Bride, The (Dargan and Slyomovics 1990), 187 Painting (folk), 196–97 ´ , Zsuza´nna, 664 Palko Panttaja, Elisabeth, 80 Paperfolding and papercutting, 457–59, 672 Paredes, Ame´rico, 28, 553–54 Paris is Burning (Livingston 1990), 187 Parker, Diana, 493 Parker, Dorothy, 316 Parker Bowles, Camilla, 621 Parks, Rosa, 465 Parrish, Essie, 192 Parry, Milman, 659 Parsons, Elsie Clews, 530, 557, 581, 584 Passerini, Luisa, 454 Passover: A Celebration (Sherman 1983), 186 Pastinelli, Madeleine, 525 Patai, Daphne, 88, 455 Patriarchical society: in the East Asia region, 543; father/daughter relationship in, 121; feminism and, 172; folklife and, 241; gender views and, 269; goddess worship and, 279; influence on women and dieting, 129–30; myths and rituals of, 438, 444; naming practices and, 387; in the South American region, 567; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 578–79; view of natural world

by, 265; view on women’s hair, 293; women as helpmates in, 297 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 75 ‘‘Peace Work out of Piecework’’ (Pershing), 3 Peiser, Judy, 186 Pellowski, Anne, 649 Pennsylvania Folklife Society, 395 People Like Us: Social Class in America (Alvarez and Kolker 2001), 85 Pe´rez, Leonor Xo´chitl, 663 Performances. See also processional performance Perrault, Charles, 78, 79, 428, 516 Perron, Marie-Louise, 526 Perry, Julia, 645 Pershing, Linda, 3, 468, 662 Personal-experience narratives, 459–60; about blindness, 53; among immigrant women, 322; in the Central American region, 535; for consciousness raising, 97–98; crime-victim, 107–8; on dieting, 129; on elder care, 142; erotic folklore and, 147; in family folklore, 160; of farm women, 163–64; of homeless women, 306; on housekeeping, 309; humor in, 337; lesbian, 363; on life in the British colonies, 525; memorate, 406–7; on menarche, 408; from the Middle East region, 560; from Muslim women, 434; nursing, 448; as oral history, 454; rape and, 512–13; on religious legends, 353; of transgender people, 666; used in folklore films, 188; from the Western European region, 592. See also storytelling Peter, Paul and Mary, 227 Peterson, Betsy, 187 Pet Semetary (King 1983), 128 Phelps, Ethel Johnston, 251 Photocopylore, 313, 356, 460–61 Photography, 492, 621–22, 696 Piecework, 461–63, 625. See also needlework Pike, Sarah, 702 Pillow Talk, 685 Pink collar workers, 83, 90 Pinn, Anthony B., 302 Pipkin, Mrs. Frank, 30

Pitre`, Giuseppe, 664 Pitts, Victoria L., 512 Plaskow, Judith, 280 Plato, 16, 435 Pliny the Elder, 415 PMS (premenstrual syndrome), 417 Pocahontas, 325, 582 Pocius, Gerald, 613 Poetic Origins and the Ballad (Pound 1921), 25 Politics, 463–69; abortion and, 2; among First Nations people, 192; consciousness-raising groups and, 97; croning and, 109; Deaf community and, 124; divorce and, 134; elder care and, 142; ethnicity and, 149; feminism and, 172–73; folklife and, 243–44; folksongs and, 226, 228; of folktales, 254; in hip-hop culture/rap, 303; mock weddings, 697; processional performance in, 482–83; quilting and, 244; suffrage movement and, 651–52, 720–21; transgender and, 667; veiling, 676. See also activism; midwifery Politics, regional: Canada, 521; Central American, 534, 535; Central Asia, 541; South American, 568 Politics of Ending Homelessness, The (Yeich 1994), 307 Popular culture, 469–75; aphrodisiacs and, 18; beauty and, 41–42; belly dance and, 47; Calamity Jane, 63–64; cliques and, 92–93; cosmetics and, 99– 100; cross-dressing in, 110–11; cyberculture and, 117–18; diet culture and, 129–30; divination practices and, 132; divorce and, 134; dolls and, 136; fairy tales in, 250; festivals, 179; fortuneteller, 262; girl scouts, 271–72; hair and, 294; the Indian Maiden and, 325; language of flowers and, 193–94; scandals and, 621; standards of beauty, 41; supernatural assault, 20; vagina dentata motif in, 670; vampires and, 674; virginity and, 685 Portelli, Alessandro, 454 Posada, Jose Guadelupe, 458 Posener, Jill, 287

752 INDEX

Possessing the Secret of Joy (Walker 1992), 169 Postfeminism, 172 Pote, J., 428 Pottery, 201, 475–76, 557, 568, 584–85 Poulin, Anne-Marie, 525 Pound, Louise, 25, 29 Poundstone, Paula, 316 ‘‘Practical Aesthetics III: Homelessness as an ÔAesthetic IssueÕ’’ (Gagnier 1999), 306 ‘‘The Practice of Belief’’ (Motz), 206 Pratchett, Terry, 700 Prayer: altars and, 14; during basketmaking, 36; for conception, 327; for croning ceremonies, 109; First Nations and, 190, 199; with a jingle dress, 336; in the Middle East region, 561–62; as a ritual, 610 Pregnancy, 476–79; beliefs about, 632–33; in the Central Asia region, 538; couvade and, 104; death during, 126; doulas and, 137–38; in the Eastern European region, 548; the evil eye and, 154; First Nations of North American view of, 191; food traditions and, 259; history on laws surrounding termination of, 1–2; marriage and, 388; old wives tales and, 452; rhymes and, 595; as a scandal, 620–21; sex determination, 626–27; vaginal serpent tales, 671. See also childbirth Preloran, Jorge, 188 Preloran, Mabel, 188 Premenstrual syndrome (PMS), 417 Preston, Cathy Lynn, 254 Preston, Michael James, 461 Pretenders, 370 Pretty Baby, 685 Pretty Woman (1990), 73 Prey for Rock n’ Roll (2003), 189 Pride parade, 362, 365, 366, 483 Prieto, Norma Inglesias, 556 Primiano, Leonard, 611 Princess, 479–81 Prior, Maddy, 638 Prisbrey, Tressa, 202 Processional performance, 481–83. See also festivals; perfomances

Propp, Vladimir, 248 Prostitution/sex work, 483–88, 544, 667, 728 Proverbs, 428, 431–33, 488–91, 631 Psychics, 131–32 Public folklore, 3–4, 491–94. See also folklife Purdah, 494–95 Purkiss, Diane, 355 Pyrenean Festivals Calendar Customs, Music and Magic, Drama an Dance (Alford 1937), 217 Queen of the Damned (Rice), 674 Quiltmaking, 497–99 Quilting, 497–99; aesthetics and, 7; African American, 8, 200, 201; for AIDS, 160, 467–68; in Australia and New Zealand, 518–19; coding and, 95, 96, 498, 653; films about, 187; as folk art, 200–201; folklife and, 244; Freedom Quilting Bee, 167; material culture and, 396; revival of, 399; Sunbonnet Sue, 652–53; traditions and, 661–62; in the United States region, 583; women’s friendship groups and, 717. See also embroidery; needlework Quilting Women (Barret 1976), 187 Quilts in Women’s Lives (Ferrero 1980), 187 Quincean˜era, 499–501; Barbie doll for, 33; birthday rituals, 51; dolls and, 135; folk costumes in, 207; tradition of, 663 Quintero, Sofı´a, 188 Qvigstad, Just Knud, 592 Rabson, Ann, 410 Race, 503–10; beauty and, 42–45; feminists and, 172; in hip-hop culture/rap, 301–4; marriage and, 388; menopause and, 411; superstition and, 653; women’s movements and, 722. See also ethnicity Radical Cheerleaders, 722–23 Radical Harmonies, 725 Radner, Joan N., 252, 260, 314, 413

Radway, Janice, 390, 471 Rael, Juan, 28 Ragan, Kathleen, 251 Raging Grannies, 722–23 Raib’a (Saint), 617 Rakkasah Middle Eastern Dance Festival, 47 Ralston, Meredith, 306 Ramı´rez, Sabina, 569 Randall, Margaret, 534 Randoph, Vance, 60 Ranger, Terence, 660 Rape, 510–13; against African American women, 508; consciousness raising about, 107, 512; crisis centers and, 107–8; culture of in music videos, 392; date rape drugs, 18, 634; menstruation and, 637; prostitution and, 485, 487; Red Riding Hood and, 517; as a scandal, 620; using rumor against, 614; view on in the East Asian region, 544. See also violence Raspa, Richard, 353 Ray, Amy, 230 Reading in the Dark (Deane), 270 Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 3, 645 REAL (Realistic, Equal, Active for Life) Women of Canada, 720 Real Magic (Bonewits 1972), 698 Recipe books, 257, 323, 399, 513– 14, 555. See also foodways Recitation, 515–16. See also folk poetry Recycling, for folk art, 200, 201, 396, 518–19 Redfield, Margaret Park, 554 Redfield, Robert, 554 Red Flower: Rethinking Menstruation (Taylor 1988), 417 Red Hat Society, 11, 209, 483, 718 Red Riding Hood, 141, 251, 288, 511, 516–17 Reese, Florence, 3 Region: Australia and New Zealand, 517–20 Region: Canada, 520–27 Region: Caribbean, 528–31 Region: Central America, 531–36 Region: Central Asia, 536–42 Region: East Asia, 542–46 Region: Eastern Europe, 546–51 Region: Mexico, 551–58 Region: Middle East, 559–63 Region: Pacific East, 563–66

INDEX 753

Region: South America, 566–69 Region: Southeast Asia, 569–74 Region: Sub-Saharan Africa, 574–80 Region: United States, 580–88 Region: Western Europe, 588–94 Reichard, Gladys, 199, 435 Reichart, Julia, 187 Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion, Culture (Amadiume 1998), 404 Religion: Adam and Eve, 152–53; Cult of the Virgin, 678–82; festivals for, 176; folk beliefs in, 205; folk costumes in, 207; folk drama in, 215; hair and, 293; infertility and, 326; poetry and, 233; popular culture and, 471–72; processional performance in, 482; purdah, 495; rites of passage surrounding, 600; rituals of, 608–9; scandals and, 620; Wicca and Neo-Paganism in, 699–700. See also women religious Religion, regional: Caribbean, 530; Central Asia, 537; East Asia, 542–44; Mexican, 552–53; Middle East, 561–62; Southeast Asia, 570–71; Sub-Sahara African, 577; United States, 584 Religious legends. See also legend, religious Renwick, Roger, 27, 234–35 Researches into the Early History of Mankind (Tylor 1865), 103 Rey-Hannigsen, Marisa, 592 Rhymes, 594–97; autograph books and, 21–22; best friends and, 48; in cheerleading, 69–70; in courtship, 101; as erotic expression, 146–47; folk beliefs in, 204; on gender, 267; in girls’s games, 273; Lizzie Borden, 58; for wedding rituals, 692–93, 693; women’s movement and, 723. See also folk poetry; girls’ games; handclapping games; jump-rope ryhmes; Mother Goose Rice, Anne, 674 Richardson, Ethel Park, 29 Riddle, 597–98 Riddle, Almeida (Granny Riddle), 30, 225, 585 Riefenstahl, Leni, 186 Rieti, Barbara, 677

Riggs, Marlon, 507 Rinzler, Ralph, 492 Ritchie, Jean, 28, 30, 225 Rites of passage, 598–603; bat mitzvah, 37–39; in the Central Asia region, 538; courtship and, 101–2; croning, 108; death, 289, 348–49, 602; divorce as, 133; dolls and, 33, 135; East Asia region and, 545–46; engagement, 144–46; folk customs and, 210; initiation of, 328; marriage, 61–62; menarche, 408; menopause, 409–14; pregnancy and, 476; Quincean˜era, 499–501; recorded in rhymes, 595; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 579; through body modification, 55; in the United States region, 584; wedding, 598–99, 692; women’s role in, 242. See also rituals Rites of Passage (Van Gennep 1909), 210 Rituals, 603–11; of best friends, 48–49; birthdays, 50–52; Bloody Mary, 53–54; camplore and, 64– 65; in the Central Asia region, 538–39; charivari/shivaree, 66– 67; couvade and, 104; death and, 127–28; in the East Asia region, 544–45; in the Eastern European region, 548; in family folklore, 160; foodways and, 258; in girls’s games, 273; of initiation, 43, 327–28; in Jewish women’s folklore, 335; jingle dress, 336; during menstruation, 417; in the Middle East region, 562; in Muslim women’s folklore, 433–34; from the Pacific Island region, 564–65; processional performance in, 482; relationships to myths, 437; ‘‘ring shout,’’ 644–45; sacrifice, 689; in sororities, 641; wife sales, 703–4. See also rites of passage; tradition Ritual to Romance (Weston 1920), 217 Rivera, Diego, 555 Rivera, Virginia Rodrı´guez, 555 Roach, Susan, 661–62 Roadside crosses, 611–12. See also graves and gravemarkers Robbins, Alexandra, 641 Robe, Stanley, 557–58

Roberge, Martine, 525 Roberts, Helen Heffron, 225, 492 Robertson, Pat, 174 Robinson, Sylvia, 302 Roby, Betty, 718 Roe v. Wade, 2 Role models, 39, 250 Roman Catholic Church: abortion and, 2; Cult of the Virgin, 678– 82; divorce and, 133; lace and, 347; religious legends, 353; veiling and, 675; women and, 615–16 Romance ballads, 25 Ronstadt, Linda, 229 Rooth, Anna Birgitta, 78 Roots (Haley 1977), 158, 622 Rosa M., 552 Rose, Stephen, 84 Rose, Tricia, 303 Rosenbaum, Brenda, 558 Rosh Hodesh, 334 Rosie the Riveter, 90 Ross, Andrew, 117 Rowe, Karen E., 81, 252, 640 Roy, Carmen, 247, 526 Royce, Anya Peterson, 212 Rubin, Gayle, 121, 267, 726 Rubin, Lilia, 11 Rubini, Luisa, 252 Rugmaking, 612–13; in the Canadian region, 396–97; of the Central Asia region, 539–40; in the Mexican region, 557; in the Middle East region, 560; in the Pacific Island region, 565. See also knitting; weaving Rukyser, Muriel, 629 Rumor, 58–59, 613–14. See also gossip Russ, Joanna, 474 Russell, Ian, 218 Rymbaeva, Roza, 540

Sacred Hoop, The (Allen 1986), 729 Sadikova, Salamat, 541 Saffire: The Uppity Blues Women, 410 Sahagu ´ n, Bernardino de, 552, 671 Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 228 Saints, 177, 615–18. See also women religious Saliers, Emily, 230, 364 Salomonsen, Jone, 702 Salt-N-Pepa, 392

754 INDEX

Salt of the Earth (Herbert 1954), 90 Sampler, 143–44, 396, 618–19. See also crafting; embroidery; needlework Sanday, Peggy, 404 Sandman (Gaiman), 126 Sanschagrin, Marie-Ursule, 525 Santiago, Esmeralda, 529 Sapir, Edward, 659 Sara and Maybelle (Cohen 1981), 188 Saraf, Irving, 187 Sargent, Helen (Child), 25 Sasaki, Sadako, 458 Sati/sutee, 617–18 Sawin, Patricia, 585 Sayers, Peig, 96 Scandal, 620–21, 641–42, 653 Scarborough, Dorothy, 29, 225, 586 Scarification, 55 Scarr, Sandra, 23 Schapiro, Miriam, 14 Scheiberg, Susan, 159 Schimmel, Nancy, 649 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 429, 672 Schmitz, Nancy, 246, 525 Scholastica, Saint, 709 Schoolcraft, Henry R., 191 Scrapbooks, 621–22. See also autograph book; crafting Screen Painters, The (Eff 1988), 187 Seager, Joni, 427 ‘‘The Secularization of Religious Ethnography and Narrative Competence in a Discourse on Faith’’ (Goldstein), 205 Seeger, Charles, 226 Seeger, Mike, 226 Seeger, Peggy, 226, 228, 466 Seeger, Pete, 226, 227 Seeger, Ruth Crawford, 29, 226 Segua (Cegua), 533–34 Self-help, 426, 623–24 Self-mutilation, 56 Sen, Amartya, 627 September 11 attacks, 243, 323, 433–34, 512 Sepu ´ lveda, Marı´a Luisa, 567 Seriff, Suzanne, 584 Sewall, Samuel, 72 Sewing, 40, 346–48, 624–26, 727. See also needlework Sex determination, 132, 626–27. See also divination practices Sexism, 627–30; Barbie dolls and, 32–33; beauty and, 41–42; in

humor, 313, 316; in photocopy lore, 461; reverse, 402; wife sales, 703–4 Sexson, Lynda, 439 Sexton, Anne, 80, 253 Sexual harassment, 628 Sexuality, 630–37; Adam and Eve, 153; adolescent, 274; aphrodisiacs and, 18; beauty and, 41–42; belly dance and, 46; chastity and, 67–68; in cheerleading routines, 70; cosmetics and, 99–100; dolls and, 136; in erotic folklore, 146– 48; explored in Lesbian/Queer studies, 361; exploring through rhymes, 596; father’s scrutiny of daughter’s, 121; female genital cutting and, 168, 169; of folktales, 254; food metaphors and, 259; gender and, 269–70; hair and, 293; of the Indian Maiden, 325; magazines and, 375; of the Mother (Maiden, Mother, Crone), 383; purdah and, 495; scandal and, 620; in the Southeast Asian region, 572; superstition and, 656; television and, 391; transgender people and, 666–67; urban legends and, 357 Sexually transmitted disease (STD), 633 Shadow Women: Homeless Women’s Survival Stories (Bard 1990), 306 Shamshutdinova, Maira (Magira), 540 Shange, Ntozake, 282 Sharp, Cecil, 27–28 Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, 302, 303 Sheehan, Cindy, 464, 721 Sheehy, Gail, 410 Shekhinah, 335 Sherbakova, Irina, 455 Sherman, Sharon, 186, 187, 188 Sherman, Susan, 158 Shivaree. See also charivari Shocked, Michelle, 229 Shoemaker, Alfred, 240, 395 Shostak, Natalia, 526 Shulimson, Judith, 200 Shuman, Amy, 661 Shutika, Debra, 322 Silent Passage, The (Sheehy 1995), 410 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 586, 729

Silly Sisters (Prior and Tabor), 638 Silverman, Deborah Anders, 353 Silverman, Eliane, 122 Simon, Carly, 229 Simon, Chris, 188 Simone, Gail, 480 Simone, Nina, 507 Simpson, Jessica, 685 Sims, James Marion, 506 Single women, 85, 86 Sirirathasuk, Pang Xiong, 494 Sister, 637–39. See also sorority folklore Sister Marie-Ursule, 525 Sisters are Doin’ It for Themselves (Franklin and the Eurythmics), 638 Sketch of the Analytical Engine, A (Lovelace 1845), 115 Skjelbred, Ann Helene Bolstad, 592 Skultans, Vieda, 412, 413 Slavery, 506, 644–45 Slayton, Tamara, 417 Sleeping Beauty, 511, 639–40 Sleep Psychologically Considered with Reference to Sensation and Memory (Fosgate 1850), 19–20 Slyomovics, Susan, 187 Smith, Ade B., 27 Smith, Irene Britton, 645 Smith, Joan, 465–66 Smith, Margaret, 260 Smith, Mary Winslow, 182 Smith, Patty, 51 Smith, Paul, 461 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, 492 Smithsonian Institution, 160, 228, 492–93 Smyth, Mary W., 29 Social birth, 71–72 Songcatcher (2000), 189 Sood, Urmila Devi, 664 Sorority folklore, 69–70, 609, 640–42. See also sister Sorority Life (MTV), 641 Sorrels, Rosalie, 228 Souls of Black Folks, The (Du Bois 1903), 509 South American region, 566–69; beauty rituals, 41; birthday rituals, 51; divorce in, 133; identity, 150–51; poetry of, 233, 234; processional performance in, 482

INDEX 755

South American region studies: Arts and Crafts of South America (Davies and Fini 1995), 568; Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (Weismantel 2001), 567; Crafting Gender: Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean (Barta 2003), 567 Southeast Asia region, 569–74; beauty rituals, 41; divorce in, 133; processional performance in, 482; rape in, 620 Southern Womyn’s Music Festival, 178 Spa culture, 42, 99–100, 642–43 Sparks, David, 284 Sparks, Mariya, 284 Spears, Britney, 685 Spinning, 643–44, 727 Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, The (Starhawk 1979), 283 Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, The (Fadiman 1997), 322–23 Spirits in the Wood (Sherman 1991), 188 Spirituality, 334, 427, 570 Spiritual Midwifery (Gaskin 1976), 305 Spirituals, 644–45 Spock, Benjamin, 77 Stages of life, 242 Staiman, Mordechai, 353 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 49, 651 Starhawk (Miriam Simos), 283, 700, 701 Steele, Fanny Sperry, 105 Stefani, Gwen, 392 Stein, Diane, 283 Steinem, Gloria, 314 Steiner, Jaqueline, 225 Stekert, Ellen, 493 Stephen, Lynn, 557 Stepmother, 81, 646–47 Stereotypes: about feminists, 173– 74; acceptance of, 391; in the hip-hop culture, 303; in humor, 315–18; mass media and, 376, 378, 389, 393; proverbs and, 489; race and, 504, 506–8; sexuality and, 636; witches and, 707

St. James, Margo, 486 Stoeltje, Beverly, 295, 297, 484–85, 582 Stoker, Bram, 20, 674 Stone, Elizabeth, 160 Stone, Kay F.: American Folklore Society, 15; on the Cinderella story, 81; Folklore Studies Association of Canada and, 246; on folktales, 250; ‘‘Misuses of Enchantment,’’ 251; on storytelling, 252, 650 Stone, Lucy, 442–43, 651 Stone, Merlin, 280 Stone Carvers, The (Hunt and Wagner 1985), 187 Storer, Horatio Robinson, 2 Story, G. M., 216 Storyteller (Silko), 586 Storytelling, 647–51; about violence, 677; in ballads, 24–27; in the Central Asia region, 539– 40; communication through, 583; in consciousness raising groups, 98; in the Deaf community, 123; in the Eastern European region, 546; in family folklore, 160–61; fieldwork in gathering, 183–85; in hip-hop culture/rap, 303; jokes and, 337–38; by local characters, 371; menarche and, 408; menopause and, 412; in the Mexican region, 558; in the Middle East region, 561; Mother Goose, 428; myths and, 438; nursing and, 448–49; in the South American region, 567; through folk art, 199, 200, 201; through folk drama, 215; through scrapbooks, 621–22; through self-help books, 623; traditions in, 662; urban/ contemporary legends, 358–59; in the Western European region, 592; women’s friendship groups and, 717; Yellow Woman/Irriaku stories, 729–30. See also folktales; personal-experience narratives; tradition-bearer Strange, Molly, 418 Stranger with a Camera (Barret 2000), 189 Strassmann, Beverly, 415 Strickland, Mabel, 105 Strmiska, Michael, 699

Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC), 418 Sub-Sahara African region, 574–80; farm women in, 165; female genital cutting in, 168, 169; politics in, 466; prostitution in, 485; reverence of the grandmother, 287; rituals in, 605; women warriors in, 713 Subversion: coding and, 95–96; cross-dressing in, 110–11; in the Deaf community, 124; feminism and, 173; in festivals, 366; folklore of, xlvii–lix; in folktales, 249; foodways and, 260; in humor, 315, 317; mock weddings, 697–98; in nursing, 448; photocopy lore and, 460; in popular culture, 470, 474; of rhymes, 596; riddles and, 597; through Barbie dolls, 32–34; through body modification, 54–55; through fashion, 167; through folk art, 201; through hip-hop culture/rap, 301–3; through housekeeping, 309; through humor, 312, 314 Suckow, Ruth, 239 Suffrage movement, 651–52, 720. See also women’s movement Sunbonnet Sue, 95, 201, 652–53, 662 Supernatural assault. See also assault, supernatural Superstition, 653–57; about blindness, 52–53; aphrodisiacs and, 18; banshees and, 31; in the Central Asia region, 538; dolls and, 135; evil eye, 153–54; female genital cutting and, 169; folk belief and, 203, 654; folk customs and, 210–11; knitting and, 344; against midwives, 71; vampires and, 673; in wedding rituals, 692, 694. See also folk belief Sutton-Smith, Brian, 340, 594, 595 Suzie saga, 595 Sweet, Jill Drayson, 212 Sweet Honey in the Rock, 229, 645 Sweet Secrets: Stories of Menstruation (O’Grady and Wansbrough 1997), 408 Sword Dance and Drama (Alford 1962), 217–18

756 INDEX

Sydow, Carl Wilhelm von, 665 Symbols of Transformation (Jung 1911–1912, 1952), 436 Tabor, June, 638 Tagging, 301, 303. See also graffiti Tallit, 39, 335 Tan, Amy, 322, 545–46 Tangherlini, Timothy, 591 Tannen, Deborah, 285, 676 Taoism, 543 Tarot cards, 130–31 Tastanbekqyzy, Sara, 540 Tatar, Maria, 251 Tatem, Moira, 655 Tatting, 347–48 Tattooing, 56. See also Body Modification and Adornment Taylor, Archer, 490 Taylor, Dena, 417 Tedlock, Barbara, 130, 436, 607 Tekakwitha, Kateri, 684 Television, 185–90; cliques in, 93; cowgirls and, 105; cyberculture and, 116; Deaf community and, 124; death and, 128; divorce and, 134; feminist, 391; gender and, 268; menarche stories in, 408–9; the mother-in-law in, 428; on naming practices, 442; popular culture and, 472–74; portrayal of best friends in, 49; portrayal of lesbians, 364; stereotypes of women in, 390; vagina dentata motif in, 669; vampires and, 674; women’s humor in, 315–16; women warriors, 713–14. See also films Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women (Liebow 1993), 306 Tene´pal, Malintzin, 465 Tepper, Sherri S., 474 Teresa, Mother, 709 Teresa, of Avila, Saint, 616 Text, 659–60 Textiles. See also material culture Thank You, Dr. Lamaze (Karmel 1959), 305 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston 1937), 492, 586 Thelma and Louise (1991), 317 Therese, 710 The´re`se, de Lisieux, Saint, 616 Thiam, Selly, 576 Thibault, Martin, 526

Thomas, Jean, 29 Thomas, Jeannie Banks, 398 Thompson, E. P., 593 Thompson, Stith: on folktales, 247; Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, 135, 249; on riddles, 597; on the South American region, 566; Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, 249 Thompson, William Irwin, 402 Thoms, William J., 523 Thomson, Lucy, 613 Thorne, Barrie, 276 Three Theories of Sexuality (Freud 1905), 436 Tigarmiut, 191 Ting, Nai-tung, 78 Titon, Jeff Todd, 659 Todd, Charles L., 30 Toelken, Barre, 353, 665 Tomb Raider (Lara Croft), 118, 392 Tomko, Linda, 212–13 Toor, Frances, 555 Toth, Emily, 416 Tracy, Linda Lee, 188 Tradition, 660–64; activism and, 3–4; adoption rituals and, 6; basketmaking, 36–37; in the Central Asia region, 539–40; in cheerleading, 70; in death, 125, 127; of dressing, 207; embroidery, 143; in ethnicity, 150; in family folklore, 160–61; First Nations, 190–91; folk art and, 195, 199, 202; Jewish, 333, 334; language of flowers and, 193–94; in occupations, 451; pottery, 475–76; pregnancy and, 476–78; purdah, 494–95; quilts and, 497; Quincean˜era, 499– 501; regarding adoption, 4–5; religious altars, 12–13; in sororities, 641; through body modification, 55–57; in weddings, 385, 693–96. See also rituals Traditional artist. See also traditionbearer Traditional birth attendants (TBA), 419 Tradition-bearer, 664–65; among First Nations people, 193; basketmaking, 36–37; in the Caribbean region, 529–30; in the Central Asia region, 537;

curanderas, 111–12; folk costumes and, 207; girls as, 276; the grandmother, 288; jumprope rhymes, 340; menarche and, 408; in the Middle East region, 561; public folklore and, 491–94; recipe books and, 513– 14; in the Southeast Asian region, 573; storytelling, 647; in the Western European region, 591; of women’s folklore, 183. See also folktales; storytelling Traill, Catherine Parr, 525 Transgender folklore, 17, 110–11, 665–67. See also androgyny; cross-dressing Transvestites, 110 Travers, Mary, 227 Tringham, Ruth E., 280 Truesdell, Barbara, 716 Truth, Sojourner (Isabella Baumfree), 442 Tuan Ch’eng-shih, 78 Tucker, Elizabeth, 407 Tucker, Judith E., 560, 561 Tulegenova, Bibigil, 540 Tulepova, Shamshat, 540 Turina, Pepita, 567 Turner, Ian, 340 Turner, Kay, 7, 281, 584 Turner, Victor W., 210, 328, 365, 605 Tye, Diane, 246, 526, 527 Tylor, Edward B., 103, 219 Tyrell, William Blake, 711

United States region, 580–88; folk music and folksong in, 228 United States region studies: Chicana Traditions (Cantu ´ and Na´jera-Ramı´rez 2002), 581; ‘‘Signs and Superstitions Collected from American College Girls’’ (Beckwith 1923), 581; Two Guadalupes (Weigle 1987), 585; Women and Folklore (Farrer 1975), 581; Women of Old-time Music: Tradition and Change in the Missouri Ozarks (Hobbs 2003), 581 ‘‘Universal Soldier’’ (Sainte-Marie 1969), 228 Urban legends. See also legend, urban/contemporary

INDEX 757

Urlin, Ethel, 211 Uther, Hans-Jo ¨ rg, 249 Utsi, Ellen, 592 Uzmanova, Yulduz, 541 Vagina dentata, 669–70 Vaginal serpent, 656, 671–72 Vagina Monologues, The (Ensler 2002), 474 Valde´z, Ildefonoso Pereda, 566 Valentine’s Day, 21, 101, 146, 258, 672–73 Vampire, 20, 547, 673–75 Van Gennep, Arnold, 210, 328–29 Van Leeuwen, Richard, 249 Van Slyke, Abigail, 65 Vaughan, Hilda, 591 Va´zsonyi, Andrew, 407 Vega, Suzanne, 229, 230 Veiling, 67, 675–76, 694 Velarde, Pablita, 196–97 Verville, Simonne, 526 Viehmann, Dorothea, 664 Violence, 676–78; against African American women, 508; in ballads, 26; Bridget Cleary murder, 204; in the Central American region, 531, 534; against gay and lesbians, 363; La Llorona, 345–46; Lizzie Borden, 58–59; local legends and, 352; in music videos, 392; over ethnicity, 151–52; prostitution and, 485, 487; against transgender people, 666; in the United States folklore, 582; in urban legends, 358; in videogames, 392; White Ribbon Campaign against, 720. See also crime-victim stories; rape Viramontes, Helena Maria, 346 Virgin, Cult of the, 678–82; altars and, 14; honor of, 615; naming practices honoring, 441; processional performance for, 482; supernatural visits from, 355; ultimate mother, 432 Virginity, 168, 631, 683–85. See also chastity Virgin Mary. See also Virgin, Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, 13–14, 535, 553, 582, 682–83 Volsunga Saga, 712 Von Franz, Marie-Louise, 16 Von Sydow, Carl Wilhelm, 406–7 Voyer, Simonne, 247, 525

Wachs, Eleanor, 459, 716 Wadley, Susan Snow, 459 Wage work, 687–88; babysitting, 23–24; class and, 84; of farm women, 164; glass ceiling and, 277–78; housekeeping, 307, 311; laundry, 350; in magazines, 378; makeup artists, 100; material culture and, 394, 397, 398–99; in the Mexican region, 557; midwifery, 419; ‘‘pink collar,’’ 90; sewing, 625; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 577; through foodways, 259–60. See also occupational folklore; women’s work Wagner, Paul, 187 Wakeford, Nina, 117 Walker, Alice: Everyday Use, 586; Possessing the Secret of Joy, 169; In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), 174–75 Walker, Barbara, 649 Walker, Madam C. J., 99 Wallace, George, 465 Walled-Up Wife, 688–89 Walraven, Ed, 160 Walsh, Stephanie, 169 Walt Disney, 10, 78, 80, 480, 544, 646 Wang, Frances Ai-Hwa, 601 Wansbrough, Paula, 408 Ward, Jim, 55 Ward, Nancy, 192 Waring, Marilyn, 728 Warner, Anne, 28 Warner, Karen, 306 Warner, Marina: From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, 252; on the Cinderella story, 79, 81 Warrior women: in folk poetry, 236; Joan of Arc, 616; in the Mexican region, 551; in patriarchical society, 401; in popular culture, 473–74; in the Southeast Asian region, 572. See also Indian Maiden Wasserspring, Lois, 557 Weavers, The, 227 Weaving, 690–92; backstrap, 552; basketmaking, 36–37; beadwork, 40; of the Central Asia region, 539–40; as folk art, 199; in the Mexican region, 557; in the Middle East region, 560; in the

Pacific Island region, 565; in the South American region, 568; as women’s work, 727. See also rugmaking Weaving the Visions (Plaskow and Christ 1989), 280 Wedding, 692–96; brideprice and, 61–62; in the Central Asia region, 537, 538; charivari ritual, 66–67; chastity until, 66–67; costs of, 102–3; divination practices and, 132; dolls and, 136; engagement, 144–46; film/ television about, 189; folk beliefs in, 204; food traditions and, 258; henna art and, 298; jump-rope rhymes, 340; laments for, 348; magazines and, 377; in the Middle East region, 562; mock, 101; poetry and, 233, 235– 36; as a rite of passage, 598–99, 692; same-sex, 160, 366–67; in the Southeast Asian region, 571– 72; symbols of virginity, 684 Wedding, mock, 697–98 Weeping women. See also lament Weigle, Martha, 252, 583, 585 Weismantel, Mary J., 567 Welch, Wendy, 650 Wells, Evelyn Kendrick, 28 Welsh, Christine, 527 Welty, Eudora, 586–87 West, Hedy, 228 West, Mae, 315 Westenhofer, Suzanne, 364 Westerman, William, 535 Western Europe region, 588–94. See also under individual main topics ‘‘Westernized’’ views: of the Barbie doll, 32–33; of beauty, 10, 41– 45; cosmetics industry and, 99; fairy tales, 254; fashion, 166; gender roles and, 267; in magazines, 378; on transgender peoples, 666. See also cultural differences Weston, Jesse L., 217 Whatley, Mariamne, 656 Whedon, Joss, 485, 674 Whisnant, David, 88 WHISPER (Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt), 487 White, George, 645 White, Marilyn, 158, 509 White collar workers, 83

758 INDEX

Whitney, Annie Weston, 653–54 Wicca and Neo-Paganism, 282–83, 698–703; altars and, 12–13; in Maiden, Mother, Crone lore, 381–84; in Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, 366; Mother Earth and, 426; popular culture and, 471; Wicca and Neo-Paganism (continued) rites of passage and, 329–30; rituals of, 605, 608; Shekhinah and, 335. See also goddess worship Wicca and Neo-Paganism studies: Coming to the Edge of the Circle (Bado-Fralick 2005), 701, 702; Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (Pike 2001), 702; Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (Salomonsen 2002), 702; Introduction to Pagan Studies (Davy 2006), 700; Modern Paganism in World Cultures (Strmiska 2005), 699; Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan WItchcraft, The (Hutton 1999), 701; Witchcraft Today, 701; Witch Cult in Western Europe (Murray 1921), 700–701; Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (Magliocco 2004), 702 Wiener, Norbert, 116 Wife sales, 703–4 Wiggins, Ella May, 226–27 Wilde, Lady, 653 Wilk, Richard, 534 Williams, Delores S., 280 Williams, Lucinda, 230 Williams, Raymond, 302, 469 Wilson, Robert, 410 Wilson, William A., 159, 353 Wind, The (Scarborough), 586 Windling, Terri, 253 Winninger, John, 187 Wiser, Charlotte, 464 Wiser, William, 464 Witchcraft, historical, 704–9; aphrodisiacs and, 18; belief of in Central American region, 533– 34; beliefs in, 204; curanderas and, 111; divination practices and, 132; in the Eastern European region, 548–49; in

film, 189; goddess worship and, 282–83; hair and, 293; magic and, 380; midwives and, 72–73; Salem witch trials, 351; as supernatural legend, 354; superstition and, 653; in the Western European region, 591; Wicca and, 700, 702 Witch-Cult in Western Europe, The (Murray 1921), 282 Witch Figure, The (Newall 1973), 354 Wojcik, Daniel, 232 Wolf, Kate, 228 Wolkstein, Diane, 650 Woman and Nature (Griffin 2000), 444 Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Cisneros), 587 Woman in the Shaman’s Body, The (Tedlock), 607 Womanist. See also feminists WomanSpirit (Mountaingrove 1974–1984), 281 Womanspirit Rising (Christ and Plaskow 1979), 280 Women and Culture in GoddessOriented Old Europe (Gimbutas 1989), 279 Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (Sanday 2002), 404 Women Leading (Hayward), 278 Women religious, 709–10. See also religion; saints Women’s Christian Temperance League, 651 Women’s clubs, 714–16. See also folk groups; women’s friendship groups Women’s folklore: xxiii–xxxv; aphrodisiacs and, 18; fieldwork in gathering, 183–85; foodways, 256; herbs and, 300; poetry about, 235–36; vaginal serpent tales, 671–72; violence and, 676 Women’s folklore films: Angel that Stands By Me: Minnie Evans’ Paintings, The (Light 1983), 187; Clotheslines (Cantow 1981), 187; Grandma’s Bottle Village: The art of Tressa Prisbrey (Light 1982), 187; Hearts and Hands (Ferrero 1987), 187; How to Make an American Quilt (1995), 187;

Kathleen Ware, Quiltmaker (Sherman 1979), 187; Painted Bride, The (Dargan and Slyomovics 1990), 187; Quilting Women (Barret 1976), 187; Quilts in Women’s Lives (Ferrero 1980), 187; Story of the Weeping Camel, The, 539; Union Maids (Reichart, Klein and Mogulescu 1976), 187 Women’s friendship groups, 716– 19; aging and, 11; best friends and, 48–49; in the Central Asia region, 539; on childbirth and childrearing, 76; for crafting, 106–7; croning and, 108–9, 602; elder care, 142; farm women, 164; gossip and, 285–86; initiation into, 599; knitting, 344; miscarriage and, 426; for quilting, 200, 498; in religion, 471–72; Rosh Hodesh, 334–35; scrapbooks and, 622; sororities, 640–41; storytellers, 648–49; in the Sub-Sahara African region, 576; voicing fears of anger and violence, 677. See also folk groups; women’s clubs Women’s movement, 719–24; Anthony/Stanton contributions to, 49; beauty and, 42; in the Canadian region, 521; in the church, 472; divorce and, 134; Jewish traditions, 333; processional performance in, 482; in the Western European region, 590–91; women’s friendship groups and, 717. See also Red Hat Society; suffrage movement Women’s music festivals, 724–26 Women’s Spirituality Book, The (Stein 1987), 283 Women’s Words (Gluck and Patai 1991), 455 Women’s work, 726–28; babysitting, 23–24; Barbie dolls and, 32–33; basketmaking, 36– 37; beadwork, 40; beauty queens, 45–46; in beauty salons, 42, 100, 294; cowgirl, 104–5; in early Mexican region, 553; elder care, 122, 141; embroidery, 143–44; farm women and, 163– 65; feminist view of, 171; folk art and, 195; foodways, 256;

INDEX 759

gardening, 265–66; glass ceiling and, 277–78; the house and, 396–98; housekeeping, 90–91; Jewish ritual objects and, 39; knitting, 343–44; lacemaking, 346–48; lamenters, 349; making dowry items, 139; material culture and, 394; midwifery, 71–73; in the military, 423–24; needlework, 445–47; nursing, 448; photography, 231; pottery, 475–76; sewing, 624; spinning, 643–44; traditional, 241; weaving, 690–91; in the Western European region, 593. See also wage work Women warriors, 710–14; among First Nations people, 193; crossdressing and, 110, 712; in death, 126; in the East Asia region, 541; Indian Maiden and, 325 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum), 253 Wonder Woman, 713

Worell, Judith, 9 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 492 World Health Organization (WHO), 168, 300, 419 World Trade Center Memorial Quilt Project, 244 Wright, Talmadge, 307 Xena: Warrior Princess, 473, 480, 713 Yaa Asantewa, 577 Yang Guifei, 544 Yarbrough, Tyrone, 506 Yazzie, Sybil, 196–97 Yee, Lisa, 49 Yeich, Susan, 307 Yellow Woman (Silko 1980), 729 Yellow Woman/Irriaku stories, 729– 30 Yocom, Betty, 718 Yocom, Margaret, 158, 159, 493, 649, 660

Yoder, Don, 395 Yolen, Jane, 80, 253 Young, M. Jane, 7 Yulchieva, Munadjat, 541 Yurchenco, Henrietta, 558

Zar dancing, 608 Zeigler, Charles, 72 Zeitlin, Steven, 158, 160 Zell, Tim, 282 Zhanabergenova, Elmira, 540 Zhubanova, Gaziza, 541 Zinn, Maxine Baca, 86 Zipes, Jack, 80, 251, 252, 592–93, 640 Zittel, Carolyn, 408 Zlolniski, Christian, 322 Zulay, Facing the 21st Century (Preloran 1993), 188 Zulu Nation, 301 Zumwalt, Rosemary Le´vy, 296 Zuni Mythology (Benedict 1935), 436

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ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Janice Ackerley, MEd, Children’s Literature, Charles Sturt University, Australia, has been published in Play and Folklore, Children’s Folklore Review, and New Zealand Memories. She is a high school teacher, children’s literature tutor, and children’s folklorist from Canterbury, New Zealand, and was a recipient of the American Folklore Society’s W. W. Newell Award in 2003. Elizabeth T. Adams is director and associate professor of Liberal Studies at California State University, Northridge. She received her PhD in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California at Los Angeles and has published on topics ranging from lesbian folklore to Presbyterian history to Las Vegas buffets. Penina Adelman, MA, MSW, is an affiliated scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University. She has published in The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She is the author of Praise Her Works: Conversations with Biblical Women (2005), The JGirl’s Guide (2005), and Miriam’s Well: Rituals for Jewish Women (1986). Maria Teresa Agozzino, PhD, in Folklore and Celtic Studies, University of California, Berkeley, is associate director of the American Folklore Society, and adjunct professor in the English Department at the Ohio State University. Her research interests and publications center on folk belief, calendric customs, Wales and the Welsh diaspora, Arthuriana, and the history of folkloristics. David A. Allred, assistant professor of English at Snow College, has published articles in The Folklore Historian and The Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin. He has also published reviews in Western Folklore and the Journal of American Folklore, and has contributed to The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore. Julia Arrants is a poet, storyteller, and licensed therapist in private practice. She has published in The South Carolina Encyclopedia and The North Carolina Folklore Journal, among others. Her works include Searching for Susannah: Cheraw’s Forgotten Murder (2003) and A Silent Pardoner (staged in 2001 in Savannah, Georgia).

762 ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Andrea Austin teaches aesthetics, cybercultures, and popular culture at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has published in the journal Text Technology, and has articles in anthologies including Electrifying Experiments: Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (2008) and 21st-Century Views of Romance Novels (2006). Cristina Bacchilega is professor of English at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. The review editor of Marvels & Tales, she authored Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997) and Legendary Hawai’i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism (2007). She also co-edited Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale (2001). Nikki Bado-Fralick, assistant professor of Religion and Women’s Studies at Iowa State University, has published Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual (2005), a chapter on K ukai and Wiccan ritual in Educations and Their Purposes: A Conversation among Cultures (2007), and articles in Folklore Forum. Amanda Carson Banks, MA, PhD in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, is president/CEO of the California Biomedical Research Association, an advocacy organization. She is author of Birth Chairs, Midwives, and Medicine (1999) and editor of The Olden Time: Stories for Betty (2005). She is currently working on a text on the history of water worship and healing traditions of wells and spas in Western Europe and America. Mary C. Beaudry, professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at Boston University, has published in Historical Archaeology, Ceramics in America, World Archaeology, and Post-Medieval Archaeology, among others. Her books include Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (2006) and The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (coedited with Dan Hicks, 2006). Betty J. Belanus, MA and PhD in Folklore from Indiana University, has served as a curator and education specialist at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage since 1987. Her current projects include curating a program on Wales for the 2009 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. She is the author of the novel Seasonal (2002). Aija Veldre Beldavs, PhD Folklore and Ethnomusicology, has written articles and reviews or presented papers on virtual communities, knowledge networks, myth, humor, and daina-songs, for example, at the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies Conferences and in the Journal of Folklore Research. She is working on Baltic devil-spirits and shaman deities, and preparing a book on Latvian women’s ritual insult songs. Katherine Borland is associate professor of Comparative Studies in the Humanities at Ohio State University at Newark. She has published in the Journal of American Folklore, the Radical History Review, and several edited volumes. Her books include Creating Community: Hispanic Migration to Rural Delaware (2001) and Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival (2006).

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS 763

Joanna Bornat is professor of Oral History at the Open University, United Kingdom. She is joint editor of Oral History and has researched on remembering in late life in publications including Ageing and Society, Oral History Review, Women’s History Review, Oral History, and Generations. Cynthia Boyd, PhD candidate, Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, has published in Culture & Tradition, Ethnologies, Material Culture Review, and Resources for Feminist Research. Cora M. Bradley is a graduate student at the University of Central Oklahoma (English Creative Studies). She has been published in the New Plains Review and in the Women’s Crime Encyclopedia. Teri Brewer is an external member of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations at the University of Glamorgan in Wales. She has published in the Journal of American Folklore, Folklore in Use, and elsewhere. She edited The Marketing of Tradition (1995) and was a co-editor of The Women’s Studies Reader (Jackson et al, 1982). Benita J. Brown is an associate professor of Dance at Virginia State University. Her research interests include the study of performance of spiritual and social dance throughout the African diaspora. Her recent productions include A Tribute to Duke Ellington: A Dance Drama; Everything’s Copasetic: The Bojangles Exhibit; and Stormy Weather: A Theatrical Dance and Lecture Demonstration. She has published in The Virginia Journal and in the Philadelphia Folklore Project’s Works in Progress. Charlene Brusso is a science fiction author and freelance writer based near Rochester, New York. She has contributed to Supernatural Fiction Writers and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders (2005). Anne Brydon, associate professor and chair of Anthropology at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, and has published in Anthropological Quarterly, Ethnos, Journal of Canadian Studies, Ethnologies, and Space and Culture, among others. With Sandra Niessen, she co-edited Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational Body (1998). Carol Burke is a professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent book, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High and Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture (2004) and her Vision Narratives of Women in Prison (1992) examine the folk life of individuals who live and work in closed institutions. Norma E. Cant u, professor of English and U.S. Latina/o Literatures at the University of Texas at San Antonio, has published in various scholarly journals. Her books include the novel Canı´ cula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la frontera (1995), and she co-edited, with Olga Najera-Ramı´rez, Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change (2002). Sarah Catlin-Dupuy is an instructor at Stephens College and a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri. She has worked as an intern at the

764 ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Missouri Folk Arts program and served as convener of the American Folklore Society Women’s Section multiple times. Nathalie Cavasin is a visiting researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo and has eleven years of academic experience in Japan. She holds a PhD in Geography-Planning from the University of Toulouse (France) and has pub€ Wirtschaftsgeographie, and L’Inlished in Regional Studies, Zeitschrift fur formation G eographique, among others. Rachel R. Chapman is assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her writing and research addresses issues of gender, race, and reproductive health inequalities in the urban United States and southern and eastern Africa, especially the impact of neoliberal policies on HIV/AIDS, prenatal care, birth, interpersonal violence, resilience, and social justice. Weidong Cheng, PhD, principal engineer and project manager of Parsons Brinckerhoff Energy Storage Services in Houston, Texas, has published in the Journal of Adhesion, Aerosol Science and Technology, Proceedings of the Joint STLE/ASME Tribology Conference, and Proceedings of the Joint ASME/STLE International Joint Tribology Conference, among others. Alina Autumn Christian labors at the library of the University of California, Berkeley. Erin Clair recently earned her PhD in English from the University of Missouri. She is a visiting lecturer of English at Arkansas Tech University. Gwenda Beed Davey, PhD, Research Fellow in the Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the Pacific, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, has published in the Journal of Australian Studies, Australian Folklore, and National Library News. Her books include (co-authored with Graham Seal) A Guide to Australian Folklore: From Ned Kelly to Aeroplane Jelly (2003) and Women Who Write on Walls (2007). Robbie Davis-Floyd, PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin, has published in the Journal of American Folklore, Social Science and Medicine, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Medical Anthropology. Her books include Birth as an American Rite of Passage (1992, 2004) and the co-edited collections Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (1997); Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots (1998); and Mainstreaming Midwives: The Politics of Change (2006). James I. Deutsch is a program curator for the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and an adjunct professor of American Studies at George Washington University. He has also taught American Studies (including Folklore) classes at universities in Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Germany, Kyrgyzstan, Norway, Poland, and Turkey. M onica Dı´az received her PhD from Indiana University in 2002. She is an assistant professor in Latin American Colonial Literature at the University

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS 765

of Texas-Pan American. She has authored several articles on Mexican women’s literature. Claire Dodd has a master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She was most recently published in the Aberystwyth Writing Project literary magazine. Sandra K. Dolby, professor of Folklore, director of the Folklore Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, has published in American Quarterly, Fabula, Journal of Folklore Research, and Western Folklore, among others. Her books include Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative (new edition 2008) and Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them (2005). Joanne M. Donovan is an audiovisual and photography cataloger at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Carolyn Dunn, poet, playwright, scholar, wife, and mom, is the author of two books of poetry and co-editor of the anthologies Through the Eye of the Deer (with Carol Zitzer-Comfort, 1999) and Hozho: Walking in Beauty (with Paula Gunn Allen, 2001). Her fiction has appeared in many anthologies, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California, where she is an Irvine Fellow. A. E. Edwards, associate faculty of Drama at Northwest Arkansas Community College, Bentonville, has published works in Arkansas Literary Forum and Poesia. Her plays have been produced at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, DC, the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and at Dad’s Garage Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. Susan Eleuterio, an independent folklorist and educator, has published essays in the Encyclopedia of Chicago History and the Encyclopedia of American Folklore. Her work includes Irish-American Material Culture: A Directory of Collections, Sites, and Festivals in the United States and Canada (1988). Holly Everett, assistant professor in the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, has published in Culture & Tradition, Contemporary Legend, Ethnologies, Folklore, The Folklore Historian, Journal of Folklore Research, and Popular Music and Society. Her book, Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture, was published in 2002. Ann Ferrell is a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University with an expected completion date of spring 2009. She has published in Tributaries: The Journal of the Alabama Folklife Association and has published reviews in the Journal of American Folklore and Oral History Review. Judith Fletcher is associate professor of Archaeology and Classical Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She has published in numerous journals including the American Journal of Philology, Helios, Ramus, Mosaic, and Phoenix. She is co-editor of Virginity Revisited:

766 ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Configurations of the Unpossessed Body (2007) and Horkos: The Oath in Greek Society (2007). Jacqueline Fulmer teaches Celtic, African, and Irish American Literature, Women’s Studies, and Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and at San Francisco State University. Her works include Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Nı´ Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin (2007) and articles in the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin and the Journal of American Folklore. Lisa Gabbert is assistant professor of Folklore and American Studies at Utah State University. She has published in the Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, Contemporary Legend, Midwestern Folklore, and other journals. Maribel Garcia, assistant professor of Women’s Studies at California State University San Marcos, San Marcos, California, has published in Cultural Dynamics. Her coursework and research interests involve the study of feminist approaches to border studies, Chicano/a culture studies, feminist political theory, critical race theory, U.S. third-world feminist theory, and cultural anthropology. Rachel Gholson, associate professor of English and Folklore at Missouri State University, has served as editor for Ozarks Watch: The Magazine of the Ozarks, the director of the Ozarks Studies Institute, and has written for the Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature. Recent research includes midwestern tripping legends and the history of Ozarks Judaica. Lisa Gilman, assistant professor of Folklore and English at the University of Oregon, has published on gender, performance, and politics in Malawi in the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, and Africa Today. She is currently examining the musical practices of U.S. soldiers involved in the U.S.-Iraq War. Thomas A. Green, associate professor of Anthropology at Texas A&M University, has published in the Journal of American Folklore, Semiotica, Western Folklore, and other academic journals. His books include The Greenwood Library of American Folktales (2006), Martial Arts in the Modern World (2003), and Folklore: An Encyclopedia (1997). Pauline Greenhill is professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, a not-wife, and a never-mom. She has published in Atlantis, Canadian Journal of Cardiology, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Canadian University Music Review, Canadian Woman Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnologies, Fabula: Journal of Folktale Research, The Folklore Historian, the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Canadian Studies, Journal of Folklore Research, Journal of Ritual Studies, Marvels & Tales, Manitoba History, and Signs (with Stephanie Kane), among others. Her books include Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada (co-edited with Diane Tye, 1997), Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS 767

Canadian Culture (1994), and True Poetry: Traditional and Popular Verse in Ontario (1989). She has completed a book manuscript on four historic Canadian charivaris, is currently co-editing an anthology on fairytale film with Sidney Eve Matrix, and is conducting queer and transgender folktale research with Kay Turner. Susan Charles Groth is professor of General Education at DeVry University in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. Her publications include work in Children’s Folklore Review, The Encyclopedia of New Jersey, and Religion in Life: Girls, third edition (a program for Girl Scouts). Miri Hunter Haruach, PhD, is a scholar, actor, and singer/songwriter. She has toured nationally with her one-woman shows ‘‘Grandmothers of the Universe’’ and ‘‘The Queen of Sheba? Yes I Am.’’ She is president of Project Sheba and Founder of the Institute for Cultural and Spiritual Studies. She lives in Southern California. Marcie G. Hawranik is currently a graduate student in the Masters of International Relations Program at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She is a board member of the Winnipeg branch of the United Nations Association of Canada. Elissa R. Henken, professor at the University of Georgia, has published articles in Contemporary Legend, Journal of Folklore Research, and Western Folklore, several books on Welsh folklore, and (with coauthor Mariamne H. Whatley) Did You Hear About the Girl Who . . . ?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, and Human Sexuality (2000). Lisa L. Higgins is the director of the Missouri Folk Arts Program, a program of the Missouri Arts Council located at the University of MissouriColumbia. She has published in Western Folklore, Missouri Folklore Society Journal, and Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States (Greenwood, 1993). Laurel Horton, independent scholar at Kalmia Research in Seneca, South Carolina, is an internationally recognized authority on quiltmaking traditions. She is the author of Mary Black’s Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life (2005), numerous articles, and editor of Uncoverings, the annual research papers of the American Quilt Study Group. Suzanne Godby Ingalsbe, doctoral student in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, authored Opportunity Within the Walls: Factors Facilitating Musical Contributions by Italian Nuns of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1999) and co-authored with Bridget Edwards Math and the Mercantile: Problems Derived from the Andrew Wylie Family Accounts (2006). Bonnie D. Irwin, professor of English and dean of the Honors College at Eastern Illinois University, has published in Oral Tradition and the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council. She studies the 1001 Nights and the writings of Arab American women.

768 ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Zainab Jerret, president and project director for African and Canadian Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, Inc., has published in Culture & Tradition, Ethnologies, the Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, and the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, among others. Rosan A. Jordan received her PhD in Folklore from Indiana University and taught in the English, Folklore, and Women’s and Gender Studies programs at Louisiana State University for many years. She currently lives in New Orleans. She was a founding editor of Folklore Feminists Communication and her articles have appeared in the Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, Southern Folklore, and Signs, among others. With Susan J. Kal^cik, she co-edited Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture (1979), and is also co-author (with Frank de Caro) of Re-Situating Folklore: Folk Contexts and Twentieth Century Literature and Art (2004). Her interests include folklore and literature, identity, Mexican folklore, and Americans in Mexico. Jessica Grant Jørgensen, a PhD candidate in Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, is completing a dissertation on vernacular theater in the small British Columbian community of Kersley. She currently resides in Denmark, where she has discovered the delights of curried, pickled herring on rye bread, topped with slices of red onion. Raven Kaldera is a transgendered intersex FTM (female-to-male) activist, shaman, homesteader, founding member of the First Kingdom Church of Asphodel, and author of many books, including Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook (2002). He is a self-educated high school dropout whose prolific writings are now taught to college students. ‘Tis an ill wind that blows no minds. Julia Kelso, MA in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland, has published in Canadian Folklore canadien (now Ethnologies), and Culture & Tradition. She served as managing editor of Culture & Tradition from 1998–2000 and as an editor from 1996–1997. She has taught Folklore and History classes and is currently pursuing a degree in Information Science. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain is senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Elizabeth Arveda Kissling, professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and of Communication at Eastern Washington University, has published in Feminism & Psychology, Sex Roles, Women’s Studies in Communication, Journal of Applied Communication, and other publications. She is the author of Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation (2006). Andrea Kitta is a PhD candidate in the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has been published in Culture & Tradition, Voices, and The Newfoundland Quarterly. She is writing her dissertation on the anti-vaccination movement and vaccine discourse. Natalie O. Kononenko is Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, Ukrainian Program,

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS 769

University of Alberta. Her books include the award-winning Ukrainian Minstrels: And the Blind Shall Sing (1998) and Slavic Folklore Handbook (2007). She is currently preparing a book of Ukrainian epic poetry and writing about Ukrainian weddings. She hopes to supplement her work on weddings with a database of songs. Denise Kozikowski received her PhD in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2004. She received a Fulbright-Hays grant to study women, breast cancer, and ethnomedicine in the Czech Republic, and has recently team-taught the humanities seminar at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Alma Kunanbaeva, visiting professor of Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University, has published in New Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Ethnography Musical Academy, Artes Populares, Musical Horizons, and Saudi Aramco World, among others. Her books include (co-authored with Wayne Eastep as photographer) The Soul of Kazakhstan (2001) Linda J. Lee is a PhD student in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, and holds an MA in Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include gender issues in folklore and folkloristics, women’s popular fiction and folklore, and Italian popular tradition Jennifer E. Livesay received her PhD in Folklore from Indiana University. She resides in Bloomington, Indiana, where, among her other activities, she has taught childbirth education and counseled women experiencing perinatal loss. Liz Locke has a MA and PhD in Folklore from Indiana University and served as assistant professor and director of graduate and undergraduate Interdisciplinary Studies at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado from 2000–2004. Currently a lecturer in Expository Writing at Oklahoma University, she has taught American Folklore classes at Indiana State University and Indiana University, Columbus, and in Oklahoma University’s Department of Anthropology and Religious Studies Program. She guest edited Folklore Forum’s 1997 special issue on myth; her work appears in Folklore Feminists Communication and online at New Directions in Folklore (http://www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/ journal_archive.html). Her ongoing research interests include classical Mediterranean myth, feminist classics; race, class, and gender theory; film semiotics; superhero comics; and the persistence of myth in U.S. political and popular cultures. Lucy M. Long, PhD in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania, teaches International Studies and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her books include Culinary Tourism (2004); she has also published on the food, music, and dance traditions of Appalachia, the Midwest, Ireland, and Spain. Suzanne P. MacAulay, chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, has published in the

770 ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Journal of American Folklore, Transformations, Ars Textrina, Art New Zealand, and Oral History in New Zealand, among others. Her books include Stitching Rites: Colcha Embroidery Along the Northern Rio Grande (2000). Marsha MacDowell is curator of Folk Arts at Michigan State University Museum, professor in Michigan State’s Department of Art and Art History, and coordinator of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program. She has published extensively, including books, exhibition catalogues, and articles appearing in the Journal of Museum Education, Uncoverings, Folk Art, Western Folklore, and Museum Anthropology Review. Mary Magoulick, associate professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies (including Women’s Studies) at Georgia College & State University, has published in The Journal of Popular Culture, Midwestern Folklore, and in various books and encyclopedias. She has significant international experience, including living and working in France, Senegal, Sweden, and Croatia. Elena Martı´nez is a folklorist at City Lore in New York City. She is the co-producer of the PBS documentary From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale and a contributor to Latinas in the United States: An Historical Encyclopedia (2006), edited by historians Virginia Sanchez Korrol and Vicki L. Ruı´z. M. Elise Marubbio, assistant professor of American Indian Studies, Film Studies, English, and Women’s Studies at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, Minnesota, has published in The Journal of American & Comparative Culture, Film & History: CD-Rom Annual, Polemics: Essays in American Cultural and Historical Criticism, and Red Ink. Her recent book is Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women and Film (2006). Sidney Eve Matrix is assistant professor and Queen’s National Scholar in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She has published in Animation, Storytelling, Topia, Canadian Children’s Literature, Ethnologies, and other journals. Her recent book is Cyberpop: Digital Lifestyles and Commodity Culture (2006). Kristin M. McAndrews, associate professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, has published in Culinary Tourism, Teaching Literary Research, Folklore, Marvels and Tales, and Etudos de Literatura: Gender and Literary Studies East and West. Her book Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West was published in 2006. William Bernard McCarthy (d. June 27, 2008) was professor emeritus, Pennsylvania State University, and author of The Ballad Matrix (1990), Jack in Two Worlds (1995), Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales (2007), and articles in Marvels & Tales, Mid-American Folklore, Western Folklore, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, Choice, and other journals. Jacqueline L. McGrath is associate professor of English at the College of DuPage, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Her work has been published in the Journal of American Folklore, Southern Folklore, Western Folklore, and Pif

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Magazine. Her textbook, co-authored with David A. Allred and David Todd Lawrence, Folklore Studies, Composition, and Literature: An Interdisciplinary Approach, is forthcoming in 2010. Montana Miller, assistant professor in the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, is a folklorist and ethnographer who studies youth cultures and risk-taking performances. She is the co-author (with Kathleen Cushman) of Circus Dreams: The Making of a Circus Artist (1990). Patricia Monaghan is associate professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at DePaul University and the author of more than a dozen books on women’s spirituality, including The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog (2003). Her Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines is forthcoming from Greenwood, and her edited volumes on Goddesses in World Culture are forthcoming in 2010. Camilla H. Mortensen has her MA in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. She researches and publishes on the ethics of ethnography, is currently the environmental reporter for the Eugene Weekly newspaper, and teaches at the University of Oregon. Karen Munro is the e-Learning Librarian at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published articles in College & Research Libraries News, College & Undergraduate Libraries, and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature (2005). Ruth Olson, associate director at the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, University of Wisconsin-Madison, has published in Encyclopedia of the Midwest, Journal of Museum Education, The Midwest, Midwestern Folklore, Wisconsin Academy Review, and Wisconsin Folk Art. With Mark Wagler and Anne Pryor, she coauthored Kid’s Field Guide to Local Culture (2004). Gilda Baeza Ortego, University Librarian at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico, is noted for her presentations on Latino literature and library services. She authored articles for Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States (2005) and a chapter in Library Services for Hispanic Children (1987). Solimar Otero is assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University. Her work has appeared in Western Folklore, Africa Today, The Black Scholar, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Atlantic Studies. Her interests include Afro-Caribbean spirituality and Yoruba traditional religion in Cuba and the United States. € urkmen, trained in Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, is Arzu Ozt€ currently teaching at Bogazici University in Istanbul. She is the author of Turkiyede Folklor Ve Milliyetcilik (Folklore and Nationalism in Turkey, 1998) and has published articles on the intellectual history of folklore, oral history, history of national holidays, and dance in Turkey. Her current research is a multisited historical ethnography on Tirebolu, a Black Sea Town.

772 ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Nancy Piatkowski (d. July 12, 2003), was an American Polish folklorist who made contributions to the discipline of Folklore through her work on the folklore and folklife of Buffalo, New York. A Web site where she served as Webmaster remains on the Internet in her memory at http://buffalolore.buffalonet.org. Sandra Mizumoto Posey, assistant professor of Interdisciplinary General Education at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, has published in Western Folklore, Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, Amerasia Journal, Encyclopedia of American Folklife, and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her books include Rubber Soul: Rubber Stamps and Correspondence Art (1996). Cathy Lynn Preston is a folklorist in the English Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is past editor of the journal Contemporary Legend and current president of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. Her publications on legend, joke, fairy tale, and song have appeared in the Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, Lore and Language, Marvels & Tales, and Contemporary Legend. She is the editor of Border Crossings: Legend, Literature, Mass Media, and Cultural Ephemera (2000), Folklore, Literature and Cultural Theory (1995), and The Other Print Tradition: Essays on Broadsides, Chapbooks, and Other Ephemera (1995; co-edited with Michael J. Preston). Michael J. Preston, professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has published in Folklore, Lore & Language, Bibliotheck, Comparative Drama, Western Folklore, American Folklore, Computers & the Humanities, Anatomical Record, and others. His books include (with Cathy Orr [Preston]) Urban Folklore from Colorado: Typescript Broadsides and Photocopy Cartoons (1976). Anne Pryor, Folk Arts Education specialist, Wisconsin Arts Board, has published in Language Arts, Journal of Museum Education, Smithsonian Folklife Festival 1998, and Wisconsin Folklife. Her books include Quilting Circles, Learning Communities (with Nancy Blake, 2007), and The Kids’ Field Guide to Local Culture (with Mark Wagler and Ruth Olson, 2003). Joan Newlon Radner, professor (emerita) at American University and PhD in Celtic Languages and Literature from Harvard University, has published in the Journal of American Folklore, Southern Folklore, Celtica, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, and Mankind Quarterly. Her books include Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture (1993), Irish Drama 1900–1980 (1990), and Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (1978). She has been president of the American Folklore Society, 1998–2000; board of directors and chair of the National Storytelling Network, 2002–2008; co-founder of the Middle Atlantic Folklife Association; and is past president of Celtic Studies Association of North America. Her research interests include oral narrative, coding, literacy and orality, New England history, and storytelling performance. Lisa S. Rhein has an MA in Anthropology and German from California State University, Chico.

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Tamara Robbins-Anderson is academic compliance advisor for the National Collegiate Athletic Association at the University of Central Oklahoma. Miriam Robinson Gould is a doctoral candidate in Folklore/Public Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research investigates the social impact of tourism on a heritage site in Marrakech, Morocco. She has published in Cultural Analysis and has forthcoming articles in Western Folklore and Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore. Rachelle H. Saltzman, PhD, has been the folklife coordinator for the Iowa Arts Council since 1995. She has authored numerous Public Folklore publications as well as articles in the Journal of American Folklore, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Folklore Research, New York Folklore, Southern Folklore, Southern Exposure, and edited collections. She has been the recipient of Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture funding for Iowa place-based foods, and works with communities and individuals to provide assistance with multicultural and diversity issues, project development, event planning and implementation, presentation of traditional arts and artists, grant writing, and curriculum content. With Seven Oaks Audio, she produces the radio series Iowa Roots. Since 1982, she has worked in the field of Public Folklore and has directed folklife festivals, organized conferences, curated exhibits, conducted research, and received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities as well as from state and non-profit organizations. David A Samper, PhD in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania, teaches in the Expository Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma. He has published several articles in African Identities and Africa Today based on his research on youth, language, and identity in Nairobi, Kenya. He is currently working on the connection between Kenya’s satanic panic and local concern over youth culture, praxis, and identity. Theresa Schenck is associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches courses on American Indian folklore and American Indian women. Her publications include The Voice of the Crane Echoes Afar (1997), My First Years in the Fur Trade (2002), and William Whipple Warren: The Life, Letters, and Times of an Ojibwe Leader (2007). She has also published in the Michigan Historical Review, the North Dakota Quarterly, and Papers of the Algonquian Conference. Jessica Senehi, PhD, is associate director of the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. She is assistant professor in the PhD program for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manitoba. Her research and writing focus on the role of culture and storytelling in social movements and intercommunal peace-building. She has served as a community mediator and conflict resolution trainer and has taught youth leadership. Ethan Sharp, PhD in Folklore from Indiana University, is assistant professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, Texas. He is the author of a chapter in Language and Religious

774 ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Identity: Women in Discourse (2007) and the forthcoming book, No Longer Strangers: Mexican Immigrants, Catholic Ministries and the Promise of Citizenship (2008). His current research is focused on men’s narratives of drug addiction and recovery in Mexico. Sharon R. Sherman, professor of Folklore and English at the University of Oregon, has published in the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Minjian Wenhua Luntan [Forum on Folk Culture], Revista de Investigaciones de Folkl oricas, and Western Folklore. She is coeditor of Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture (2007) and author of Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video, and Culture (1998). Her videos include Inti Raymi in Quinchuqui (2006). Pravina Shukla, associate professor of Folklore at Indiana University, has published in Midwestern Folklore, Western Folklore, Material History Review, Indian Folklore Research Journal, and Indian Folklife. Her book, The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India, was published in 2008. Amy E. Skillman, vice president, Institute for Cultural Partnerships, has produced numerous recordings with one Grammy nomination; consulted on Mone’s Skirt, a film about Lao weaving; and curated Our Voices: Refugee and Immigrant Women Tell Their Stories. Her publications include articles, exhibition catalogues, and The Art of Community: Creativity at the Crossroads of Immigrant Cultures and Social Services. Moira Smith, Librarian for Folklore, Anthropology, Sociology, and Social Work at Indiana University, Bloomington, holds a PhD in Folklore and has published in the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Folklore Forum, International Folklore Review, Culture & Tradition, and Library Trends. She is editor of the Journal of Folklore Research. Kathleen Staples is an independent scholar with a BA in Religious Studies from Lawrence University and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published in the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts and ANTIQUES. She is author of British Embroidery: Curious Works of the Seventeenth Century (1998) and has contributed to and edited a number of volumes on aspects of the history of Western textiles and embroidery. Erin Stapleton-Corcoran is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. Her research interests lie in the music of immigrant, minority, and ethnic communities in North America and Europe, festival culture, music revivals, and applied ethnomusicology. She is currently writing a dissertation on contemporary Irish-language music. Beverly J. Stoeltje is professor of Anthropology and Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University, Bloomington. She has published in the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Western Folklore, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review. She co-edited Beauty Queens on the Global Stage (1996) with Colleen B. Cohen and Richard Wilk.

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS 775

Martha Swearingen, associate professor of Language and Culture in the Department of Languages and Communication Disorders at the University of the District of Columbia, has published in the Journal of American Folklore, Studies in Language, and the Southwest Journal of Linguistics, among others. Wade Tarzia is an associate professor at Naugatuck Valley Community College and has published in Emania, The Journal of Folklore Research, and Assemblage. His work also appears in Religion and Culture: An Anthropological Focus, Second Edition (2008). Jeannie Banks Thomas, professor of English and director of the Folklore Program at Utah State University, is the author of several books and articles, including Featherless Chickens, Laughing Women, and Serious Stories (1997), Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender (2003), and Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore (co-authored with Diane Goldstein and Sylvia Grider, 2007). Barbara Truesdell, assistant director of the Center for the Study of History and Memory at Indiana University, recently published on oral history methodology in Finding Indiana Ancestors: A Guide to Historical Research (2007), and co-authored a study of the Statue of Liberty for the National Park Service. Elizabeth Tucker, associate professor of English at Binghamton University, has published Campus Legends: A Handbook (2005) and Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (2007). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of American Folklore, Contemporary Legend, Children’s Folklore Review, Western Folklore, and other journals. Kay Turner holds a PhD in Folklore and Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her publications include Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (1999) and Baby Precious Always Shines (1999), an edited selection of love notes between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. She is adjunct professor in the Performance Studies Graduate Program at New York University, and director of Folk Arts at the Brooklyn Arts Council. Diane Tye, associate professor of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, has published in Ethnologies, Journal of Canadian Studies, and Fabula, among others. With Pauline Greenhill she is co-editor of Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada (1997). Audrey Vanderford is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Oregon. Her work examines the performances of political activists; she has published on pie-throwing, political protest, and other forms of street theatre. Theresa A. Vaughan, PhD in Folklore from Indiana University, has served as managing editor of Folklore Publications Group and editor of Folklore Feminists Communication. She has been active in the American Folklore Society Women’s Section since 1991 and has served as a judge for the

776 ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Elli K€ ongas-Maranda prize in Women’s Folklore. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, American Ethnologist, The Digest, and Folklore Forum. Her research interests include medieval women, women and foodways, and folk art. She is currently associate professor and chair of the Department of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma. Eleanor Wachs, PhD in Folklore, Indiana University, has written several articles on crime-victim stories, personal experience narratives, and urban legends. She is the author of Crime Victim Stories: New York City’s Urban Folklore (1988). Her interests also include women’s needlework traditions. She lives in Sarasota, Florida. Suzanne Waldenberger earned a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University after studying with eminent folklorists at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Utah State University. She currently teaches courses in humanities and religion at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, where she is folk arts coordinator for the annual folk festival, Tucson Meet Yourself. Kristin Harris Walsh is a lecturer in Folklore/Social Cultural Studies at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College and a PhD candidate in Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has published in the areas of vernacular dance, foodways, and material culture in Dancing Bodies, Living Histories, Ethnologies, Material History Review and Dance Studies Quarterly, among others. Linda S. Watts, professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Washington, Bothell, is author of Rapture Untold: Gender, Mysticism, and the ‘‘Moment of Recognition’’ in Writings by Gertrude Stein (1996), Gertrude Stein: A Study of the Short Fiction (1999), and Encyclopedia of American Folklore (2006). Marta Weigle, a University Regents Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of New Mexico, has written or edited more than twenty books, among them: Spiders & Spinsters: Women and Mythology (1982, reprinted 2007), and Creation and Procreation: Feminist Reflections on Mythologies of Cosmogony and Parturition (1989). Most of her work focuses on the American Southwest/New Mexico. Wendy Welch, Appalachian Studies adjunct at the University of Virginia at Wise and development director for the American Red Cross, Northeast Tennessee, has published in Western Folklore, Storytelling World, Ethnologies; in the anthologies Traditional Storytelling Today (1998) and Healing Heart—Communities (2003); and the newspaper column ‘‘Porchlore.’’ Her first book was From Paradise to Puddledub (2003). Mariamne H. Whatley, professor of Women’s Studies and Curriculum and Instruction at University of Wisconsin-Madison, co-authored (with Elissa Henken) Did You Hear About the Girl Who . . .? Contemporary Legends, Folklore and Human Sexuality (2001) and co-edited (with Nancy

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS 777

Worcester) five editions of Women’s Health: Readings on Social, Economic, and Political Issues. Marilyn M. White is professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, where she has taught since 1985. She teaches Cultural Anthropology and African American Studies courses. She previously taught at Western Kentucky University for eight years. She received her PhD in Anthropology (Folklore) from the University of Texas at Austin, her MA in Folklore from Indiana University, and her BA in English from Hampton University. She has served as a panelist for several agencies on the state and national level; she has been a board member for state, regional, and national folklore societies; she has also served the American Folklore Society on several committees and task forces. Her research interests include family folklore, African American folklore, jokes and humor, and social stratification; she has been conducting research in Little Cayman for the past several years. Jian Anna Xiong, assistant professor of Library Affairs at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and has published in Journal of Academic Librarianship, The Electronic Library, Documents to the People, The Charleston Advisor, and Magazines for Libraries, among others. Margaret R. Yocom, associate professor of English at George Mason University, has published in Journal of American Folklore and Western Folklore, in edited books on spontaneous shrines, and on feminist folklore. Her books include Logging in the Maine Woods: The Paintings of Alden Grant (1994). Kristi A. Young is the curator of the Wilson Folklore Archives at Brigham Young University. She has published many articles and chapters on courtship topics. Izaly Zemtsovsky, visiting professor of Music and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University, has published in Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, New Grove’s Dictionary of Music & Musicians, Musical Academy, Yearbook for Traditional Music, and Ethnomusicology, among others. His books include Russian Folk Songs Performed by Anna Stepanova (1975), Folklore and the Composer (1978), and From the World of Oral Traditions (2006). Melanie Zimmer has been a storyteller for fourteen years, and is a member of the League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling. Her book Central New York and the Finger Lakes Region: Myth, Legend and Lore is slated for publication in 2008.