Hi, ladies!!
It is Monday, October 20, 2008, today, and comfortable autumn weather.
Rose, I’ve once heard Jero's song on TV, and also impressed by his beautiful, emotional voice. He can show us fantastic borderless music world, can’t he?
Well, can you tell me the names of Norwegian public figures? Ibsen, Grieg, Amundsen, Gaarder (author of Sophie’s world)…I have known just a few names. Since I became big fan of a-ha, 80’s Norwegian pop singers, again, I have begun researching about their mother nation. In fact, I had completely forgotten that I studied about Norway’s political situation at last year’s summer seminar…! It is probably because I learned only about the social system, not about people’s lives at all at that time. Even now I don’t know how Norwegian people really feel about their nation’s high-quality welfare system or quota system. I can just see their organization.
I got little information about Norway despite my searching on the Net. I’d like to know something deep as well as their magnificent nature and stylish design.
So, see you later, bye!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Hello, flowers
How did you enjoy a splendid autumn sunlight over the weekend?
Plum, that's a surprise to know that Kuniko san invites me to the Conference. It's my honor to accompany with her, of course. The word 'Japanese literature' sounds nostalgic to me now. Honestly, I'm not sure I deserve to attend the conference, though. However, it'll be something, I think.
I'm going to continue my halfway report on writings.
The second writing is Anne Summers (1979) essay (A Home from Home: Womenﾕs Philanthropic Work in The Nineteenth Century). She analysis womenﾕs charitable work from a feministﾕs viewpoint, while Prochaska describes it in a comparatively level tone. She asserts that the tasks of feminist history is to rescue womenﾕs work from oblivion and ridicule and demonstrate the effort, motivation and skills which a male-dominated society exploits and takes for granted. Therefore, the massive practice of house-to-house visiting in the nineteenth century must be understood in the specific context of social changes. Changes are as follows: (1) growing separation of rich and poor residentially and socially. (2) a rise in the working-class population to the urban area that caused deterioration of living conditions and led to social instability. (3) the economically unstable early decades of the nineteenth century. Under these conditions, the visiting benevolent was considered to be effective to ease political menace by isolating the poor each other.
According to Summers, the reason why these social functions had fallen to the women of the upper and middle classes to perform is important. They were hired not because their boredom in daily life but their being available. She points out that many Victorian males of the leisured classes took up Parliamentary careers, while those of the middle classes do business. She asserts that it is belittling and insulting to suggest that women had only a negative motivation for their actions like ﾔfrom boredom.ﾕ Another factor that drove women to engage themselves in visiting charity was their involvement in the evangelical movements that had extended its sphere of influence by having prayer meetings in the laborersﾕ cottages.
Standing on the premises above, Summers shows concrete examples to explain; the Workhouse visiting Society (founded in 1860 by Louisa Twining) and Octavia Hill and the Charity Organization Society (1869) are among them.
Firstly, she displays how the visiting work developed, then undermined the Poor Law administration by its improvement movement, and finally strengthened the middle classes by propagating their values in a wider sphere, which brought changes in the class consciousness in society.
In earlier stages, the Poor Laws (1834~) intended to reduce/abolish out relief (it meant the destitute sent to workhouses unconditionally), but the workhouse improvement movement of Workhouse Visiting Society functioned against the lawsﾕ principle unintentionally. An example is the success of the movement to board out orphan children.
Given a demographic change in urban area, Octavia Hill and the Charity Organization Society (1869) formed a new framework for the old work of visiting based on the spirit of self-help, which provided the poor with residence and supervised their life in order to make them pay the rent.
Summers concludes that social charity work at the time failed to emancipate women fully since the organization persisted in the ﾔwomenﾕs roleﾕ and ended up providing voluntary workers to the state offices, which prevented women from becoming professional paid social workers. Summers points out an old-and-new problem of reconciling their family relationships and domestic identity (the ideal womanhood) with their work for a wider social good as well.
In this article, Summers discusses the significant effect of womenﾕs visiting work on history, focusing on the relationship between a series of female charitable activities and the state administration.
So far for today,
This blog rejected me again. I'm tired. Bye.
Hi, ladies!!!
It has been another beautiful autumnal day today, hasn’t it?
It is good to hear, Peach, that you felt much better after making a small complaint about your husband in this blog. It is something like “killing two birds with one stone”: you feel better and your English makes a big improvement. Then, keep writing about your husband and make a lot of complaints. I am a good listener, being discreet and reliable.
Last weekend, my husband and I went to Kiyose, Tokyo, and visited the National Hansen’s Disease Museum for my making some research about the history of patients of the disease in this country. The place stands next to Zensho-en, one of the public lepro-sariums in Japan.
After our making a quick tour around the museum, I commenced researching in the library while my husband, without doing anything particular, made several tours inside and outside the museum. Poor my husband!!! By the end of the first day, Saturday, he was so familiar with miscellaneous displays and interviews with patients living in various lepro-sariums on DVDs.
I saw several books on Kensuke Mitsuda, and, browsing through the contents of 20 or 30 volumes of the International Journal of Leprosy, found his short pathological article on leprosy written in English, which was too professional for me to comprehend. One of the interesting books on K. Mitsuda was the one authored by Dr. Mamoru Uchida, another medical doctor specialized in leprosy, perhaps, active in Kumamoto after the end of the Pacific War. I noticed millions of phrases and words praising Mitsuda for his deep affection and mercy for lepers, to say nothing of his pioneering medical research and practice.
It was, thus, definitely true that he was the most respectable leprosy doctor in his time. But now, due to the increasing social acknowledgement of human rights and the freedom of choice on the side of patients, he was pushed into oblivion despite his great medical achievement. This is the impression I got while looking through various books on his miraculous authority.
I discovered a very useful collection of catalogues called Rai bunken mokuroku: shakai-hen published by Aisei-en in 1999, which is a reprinted edition of, perhaps, the same title in 1957. It might be useful to both of you, Cosmos and Rose.
Well, it is time to get ready for going to bed. Sweet dreams, my precious friends.
Hello, beautiful & mature flowers.
It’s nice to post my comments again after a week spell.
I had a series of family events such as a thirteenth anniversary of my mother-in-law’s death in Kobe and my DH’s undergoing an operation. It’ll take about three weeks for him to leave the hospital. But please don't worry about him. I'm expecting he'll be all right.
Today I intended to write a bit about Mary Wollstonecraft. To my sorry, I have little time to do so. I promise I’ll write it tomorrow. Until then,good-night, my precious friends.
I'm out of energy to continue writing.
Post a Comment