This article examines the shifting nature of gender relations in eighteenth-century New England by looking at the Edwards family’s shared views on marriage and divorce. Rooted in Puritan and Reformed notions, the Edwards family shared an ideology that challenged patriarchal double standards surrounding gender and sexuality. The article looks at writings and private correspondences from the Edwardses to bring to light their vision of marriage as a covenant of companionship that coercion or abuse might dissolve. It particularly examines Hannah Edwards’s writings on gender, female–male relations, and what she termed the male tendency to “domination,” in order to reveal how an elite colonial woman challenged gender norms. The Edwards family fought to broaden the grounds for divorce and emphasized women’s agency rooted in the “law of self-preservation.” With the 1744 “Bad Book” affair and the 1746 Eleanor Gray divorce, the Edwardses resisted legal and social biases favoring men, while also contesting the patriarchal nature of eighteenth-century New England. By drawing on Reformed predecessors, the Edwardses preserved Puritan ideals of equal souls and unequal bodies while opposing the era’s increasingly patriarchal sexual politics.

Studies of ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations focus on contested gender policies such as abortion, same-sex marriage and sex education. Who engages in these protests and why is less known. We argue that conservative women organise to defend religious beliefs and agendas against a perceived threat that targets not only religious institutions but also their own identities as wives and mothers by offering alternatives to conventional family structures. This argument applies to the secularisation threat of the early twentieth century as well as the policy demands of liberal social movements in the early twenty-first century. Focusing on Chile and Mexico, we highlight continuity and change in conservative–religious women’s activism.

This article brings a critical feminist phenomenological lens to a central pillar of the international humanitarian law regime – the proportionality rule – and reflects on how the narrow, masculine orientation of the norm fails to accommodate women’s experiences of incidental mental harm. While women disproportionately experience double the rates of post-traumatic stress disorder in response to trauma events than do men, the proportionality rule does not expressly include mental harm within its ambit, exposing the rule to conservative interpretation and exclusionary applications for gendered mental harm. Some interpretations of the temporal constraints of the rule (concerned with the legality of single strikes, absent their latent, reverberating effects) reflect a dominant event-based legal model at odds with women’s experiences of mental harm that are protracted, cumulative and repercussive. Studies reveal women’s fear as a product of constructions of masculinity and femininity, structural inequity, and fear conditioning. This article offers a reparative response through a gendered and temporal alignment of the principle of proportionality with women’s experiences of mental harm in armed attacks.

The increasing participation of women in the labour market has highlighted significant advancements but also inequalities that negatively impact women’s happiness and job satisfaction. This study aims to analyse the existing literature on women’s workplace happiness through a bibliometric review, identifying trends, leading authors, research areas, and critical gaps. Employing a systematic bibliometric review methodology, 307 scientific articles published between 2010 and 2024 in the Web of Science Core Collection database were examined. Findings underscore a growing focus on factors external to the work environment, such as gender roles, double shifts, stress, and mental health. Furthermore, the results reveal considerable fragmentation in scientific production and a lack of established academic benchmarks. Conclusions stress the urgent need for organizational approaches that comprehensively address these inequalities, promoting policies of reconciliation, intersectional inclusion, and emotional well-being programmes. The study offers directions for future research and practical applications for fostering more equitable organizational management.

How can everyday entertainment shape gender politics in authoritarian regimes? Despite autocrats’ heavy control over media, political scientists studying authoritarianism largely neglect television programming. Particularly surprising given their target demographics, cooking shows are absent in political science gender analyses. Drawing from over 600 hours of Turkish cooking show content, I introduce conservative gender edutainment to capture the mechanisms by which TV shows facilitate authoritarian regimes’ gender construction projects. Using quantitative analysis of cooking show content, I first identify two complementary pedagogies — modeling and othering — that respectively teach adherence to, and vilify deviation from, regime-specified behavioral norms. I then use intertextual analysis to extract content that engagingly instructs viewers in the ideal woman in “New Turkey,” the neoconservative vision articulated by Turkey’s ruling (Justice and Development Party) AKP. Findings provide novel insight into vernacular channels of gender construction, while underscoring the added value TV-as-data holds for studies of identity politics in authoritarian contexts.

Empirical studies cast doubt on the efficiency assumption made in standard economic models of household behavior. In couples, the allocation of time between activities remains highly differentiated by gender. In this paper we examine whether couples deviate from efficiency in household production, using an experimental design. We compare the allocation of gendered vs. gender-neutral domestic tasks. Our results show that women in the household overspecialize in “feminine tasks” and men in “masculine tasks” compared to what their comparative advantage would require, hence revealing the influence of gender roles and stereotypes on the couples’ behavior.

This article details how Plautus’ Casina has been used in a general education comparative gender history class over multiple semesters. Since Casina was based on an Athenian New Comedy play (The Lot-Castors by Diphilus), it incorporates elements of late fourth/early third century BCE Athenian ideas on gender, gender roles, and sexuality as well as Republican Roman views on these same areas from approximately a century later. For an introductory comparative gender history course which is designed for a wide time span, this play therefore offers the opportunity to look at two related cultures in just one work. The article highlights areas of the play emphasising those cultures’ ideals and values, and also deals with which areas students have most commented on and which ones are often ignored, in terms of characters, gender roles, and sexualities. The role and representation of slaves in those societies and within the play are also remarked upon.

Civil wars are not only destructive: they can also generate new, long-lasting social, political, and economic structures and processes. To account for this productive potential and analyse post-conflict outcomes, I argue that we should analyse civil wars as critical junctures. Civil wars can relax structural constraints, opening opportunities for wartime processes to generate changes or to reinforce, rather than transform, the status quo. Changes or stasis may then be locked in by conflict outcomes, creating path dependencies. Studying civil wars as critical junctures allows for a clearer understanding of what variables mattered and interacted at different points in the conflict process, and the varying roles of structure and agency in producing institutional change or reinforcing pre-existing conditions. I explore the potential benefits of a critical juncture approach in the civil wars literature on different aspects of post-conflict politics and illustrate them in analysing the literature on women’s empowerment during and after civil wars. Applying the critical junctures framework to civil wars’ effects on institutions and socio-behavioural patterns can provide analytical clarity about complex processes and contexts, can facilitate comparison across cases and studies, and draws critical attention both to what civil wars change and to potential pathways not taken.

Does gender influence how candidates in the United States present their prior political experience to voters? Messaging one’s experience might demonstrate a history of power-seeking behavior, a gender role violation for women under traditional norms. As a result, men should be more likely to make experience-based appeals than women candidates. For evidence, we analyze the contents of 1,030 televised advertisements from 2018 state legislative candidates from the Wesleyan Media Project. We find that ads sponsored by experienced men are significantly more likely to highlight experience than ads sponsored by experienced women. However, we find that women’s and men’s ads are roughly equally likely to discuss work experience, suggesting that men’s greater emphasis on experience is limited to prior officeholding. The results contribute to our understanding of gender dynamics in political campaigns, the information available to voters, and how advertising shapes the criteria voters use to assess candidates.

In October 2020 the South African Astronomical Observatory celebrated 200 years of existence as an astronomical observatory by organizing a virtual symposium “Beyond 200 Years of Astronomy”. The theme of that symposium covered a wide range of topics, among which African ethnoastronomy and indigenous knowledge, history of astronomy in Africa, astronomy in recent decades, and astronomy and society. Focus Meeting 6 at the XXXIInd General Assembly centered on people, instruments, and projects during the past two centuries – that is, the period since the establishment of the South African Astronomical Observatory in 1820.