Gender

Question 1

Historian who wrote about women’s experience during the Italian Renaissance

Answer 1

A. Iacob

Question 2

How does jacob argue women were able to distinguish themselves?

Answer 2

art patrons, writers, orators and generally women of intellect.

Question 3

what would being a nun provide a woman with?

Answer 3

a humanist education, a life involving a certain level of intellectualism

Question 4

What was different about marriage within the Renaissance?

Answer 4

political instability, marriage used as political asset, return to antiquity, Roman concept of women being child bearers was weaponised

Question 5

What important fund was established in 1425?

Answer 5

Monte Della Doti

Question 6

What was the Monte Delle Doti?

Answer 6

an investment fund, a mechanism to assist families in affording to give large dowries whilst also functioning as a war fund against Milan. thus, women were seen as a type of currency or asset.

Question 7

What was the Renaissance view of family?

Answer 7

legal framework failed to protect women, male members of family set to protect females purity and innocence as to protect the family name and reputation

Question 8

What was Alberti’s comment on family at the time?

Answer 8

indicated that family prevailed as a social institution in a time when political and social instability was common

Question 9

which Historian writes of women and the new world?

Answer 9

Kathleen M. Brown

Question 10

What is Brown’s critique of feminist history during the new world?

Answer 10

a large concern of some of the critical movements of feminist scholarship with historicising experience and identity reflect a rejection of essentialism - “new cultural history”

Question 11

Historicising Sex

Answer 11

to recognise the different experiences from culture, history and individuality

Question 12

What are the ancient theories of sexual difference?

Answer 12

men’s and women’s roles explicitly determined interpretations of their anatomies - women’s subordinate role in political and intellectual life.

Question 13

What did Aristotle believe about women?

Answer 13

that their bodies were incomplete and inferior versions of men’s

Question 14

What of Aristotle’s beliefs that resurfaced during the Renaissance

Answer 14

Notion that women were lusty, cold and slipper sex, akin to men except for the humoral imbalance that made them passionate and subject to dramatic bodily changes and purges of fluid

Question 15

How does Richard Dunn explain the relationship between slave owner and female slave?

Answer 15

1. Planters perceived Female slaves as tools to be used physically and sexually
2. they saw female slaves as labourers as well as sexual mistresses or companions.
3. in both cases planters believed that female slaves were their property to control and use.

Question 16

Why is female slave experience historiographically deficient?

Answer 16

1. Lack voices from these women
2. only evidence we have is from travellers/missionaries and authors who visited the plantations.

Question 17

Ian Drummond explains Barbados was highly different to other sugar-cane producing colonies post-emancipation, why is this?

Answer 17

because of the size and singular development, relatively little opportunity existed for slaves to leave plantations and engage in some form of subsistence agriculture. Virtually all of the land on the island belonged to the estates and there was no virgin areas to which freed slaves could migrate.

Question 18

What was the role of Gender in the trafficking of Africans?

Answer 18

1. sought men as thought stronger
2. African men came to Americas as disproportionate rate
3. African Women more readily available and cheaper
4. men took on specialised work and women replaced them in field work

Question 19

Role of Gender in Chattel Slavery

Answer 19

1. prevalent on large plantations where labour structures were more complex
2. Women took on roles typically performed by a wife; sewing, cooking, cleaning, and supervising children

Question 20

Role of Women’s Reproduction in the New World Slavery

Answer 20

1. Question of legal status - colony of Virginia introduce legal code 1662 which deemed children would rake on the status of their mothers and become enslaved themselves.
2. Slaveholders encouraged reproduction, knowing it would increase their number of enslaved persons.

Question 21

What were the benefits and draw backs of being a female slave

Answer 21

Benefits: whilst pregnant received more food and fewer working hours
Very bad: less likely to attempt to escape to not leave children behind, few but still happened women ended their children’s lives to spare them a life of enslavement.