The introduction offers an overview of the book and discusses why studying first ladies matters.

This chapter emphasises the multifaceted influences that impact individuals as they initiate, sustain, and terminate relationships. These relationships extend beyond the immediate couple, involving broader kinship and societal frameworks. People make nuanced distinctions between various relationship forms and the roles and responsibilities assigned to partners. The chapter highlights the significance of local terminologies in conveying the manifestation of pleasure, different relationship forms, and emotional dynamics. While the fluidity of contemporary relationships in Freetown may appear less burdened by inequality than rural marriages, they encounter their own set of challenges. Such relationships lack reliable foundations, potentially collapsing and leaving individuals without the support of family or community. Additionally, violence can emerge from power imbalances, manipulation, and the complex interplay of emotions and entitlement. This chapter sheds light on how love and relationships are intricately interwoven with societal expectations, personal aspirations, and economic constraints, ultimately shaping the emotional landscape of Freetown.

Bitch lurked in the English language for centuries, but then it emerged as an everyday word. Why? Bitch changed along with the changing social roles of women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the mid 1900s, the use of bitch had exploded; its meteoric rise was a backlash against feminism. In response it was reclaimed by feminists – to some extent, that is. In modern times, bitch is still an insult for a woman who is considered to be unpleasant, disagreeable, or malicious. But in the word’s evolution it has also come to mean a woman who is revered (or reviled) as tough, strong, and assertive. For better or for worse, bitch is interwoven with the history of feminism. It is a word that represents both feminism and anti-feminism at the same time.

The ‘sexual body’ is at once the sexed body identified as male, female, or non-binary, and the body that engages in sexual acts, experiences desire, and is perceived as an erotic object. This chapter explores a wide range of ideas about and experiences of the sexual body in pre-modern European, Native American, Chinese, Islamic, Jewish, Pacific, Māori, and West African cultures. It argues that to take a global historical perspective on sexual bodies it is necessary to consider a wide range of discourses and representations. It begins with sexual bodies in mythology: narratives of human origin from ancient Greek, Native American, Judeo-Christian and Islamic, Chinese, Māori, and West African cultures. Creation stories purvey ideas about sexual difference, desire, beauty, and gender relations that reflect a culture’s deepest belief-systems. Second, it examines sexual bodies in the medical discourses of Western and Chinese history, summarising ancient Western concepts of sex difference as a matter of moisture, heat, and anatomy, and ancient Chinese theories of qi, yinyang, and beauty. Third, it examines sexual embodiment in lived experiences of gender roles and puberty rites, showing that many Indigenous cultures historically accepted people of nonbinary gender.

Focused on metropolitan consumer centres in which new sexual identities were bought and sold, this chapter explores how mass-market businesses stimulated, satisfied, and contained female desires, often at the same time. Consumer behaviours are a nexus of bodily and psychic desires understood through a language of seduction. Since the mid-nineteenth century, businesses have channelled, commodified, and promoted female sexuality to sell new products, shopping spaces, and leisure activities. Cities offered both licit and illicit, sexual and consumer pleasures. Their urban geographies are the living proof of our argument that in modern capitalist societies, sexuality is a commodity, commodities often are erotic, and the spaces and communities in which they are exchanged contribute to the making of consumer and sexual subjectivities. The marketing of eros therefore did not simply emerge with the twentieth-century sexual revolution, but rather was central to the history of modern capitalism. By examining the overlapping histories of the marketing of female consumer and sexual pleasures in diverse places, this chapter explores the role of sex and sexiness in the modern marketplace and challenges liberal assumptions about agency, liberation, and progress embedded in the history of the sexual revolutions of the late twentieth century.

This article analyzes women’s access to divine dreams in the Jewish texts of the Greco-Roman era: the Jubilees, the Liber antiquitatum biblicarum, the Jewish War, Jewish Antiquities, and Against Apion. By evaluating women’s dreams in light of anthropological understanding of divine dreams, that is, dreams that somehow claim to have a divine origin, this chapter aims to offer a new model for understanding women’s dreams in ancient Jewish texts. It is argued that while the preserved literature includes only a few dreams experienced by women, these examples nonetheless provide essential evidence of women being recipients of divine information in ancient Jewish texts.

This chapter introduces relationship initiation, the process by which people come to mutually identify themselves as in a romantic relationship. The chapter first describes how relationship readiness, romantic motives, and sociosexuality affect relationship initiation. Then, the chapter outlines the strategies and tactics that facilitate initiation (e.g., conspicuous consumption, altruistic acts), the gender roles that influence which strategies people use, and the major barriers that hinder relationship initiation (e.g., access to partners, shyness, low self-esteem). The chapter also reviews the stages that often occur as relationships develop, as well as divergent initiation paths. Lastly, the chapter covers the surprisingly influential role that other people play in shaping initiation trajectories and the reasons why most “could-be” relationships do not become relationships (e.g., rejection, ineffective initiation approaches).

Chapter 4 describes the debates that took place in the press immediately after the Balkan Wars (1912–13), which drew attention to the relationship between new concepts of the able body and the militarization of discourses of productivity. In the first Balkan War, the Ottoman armies were soundly defeated, and the empire lost its last landholdings in the Balkans. The perceived infirmities of the “Ottoman body” became a common thread in social critiques calling for all-out mobilization. This chapter traces the relationship between conceptualizations of the healthy, productive, and able body and discourses on the formation of an ideal citizen, as articulated by moralists, journalists, public figures, and memoirists of the Balkan Wars. I expose how calls for a productive body militarized a social issue during a time when Ottomans faced imminent threats of invasion. The militarization that characterized the last decade of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic cannot be understood without first considering the process by which the body of the citizen became a site of national anxiety.

Even though she never traversed the Atlantic to tour or visit the New World, Clara Schumann was a regular subject of the American press in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, her widespread celebrity meant that daily newspapers, trade journals and leisure periodicals fashioned Schumann in many different – and sometimes competing – ways. On the one hand, factual reports informed readers of her professional activities, personal life and European reception. On the other hand, such information could be used by editors like John Sullivan Dwight, critics like George Upton, writers like Aubertine Woodward, and publishers like John Church, to advance their own agendas. As a result, the Schumann depicted in the American press in the aggregate during her lifetime might more accurately be characterized as ‘Schumann’ – a symbolic figure who not only appealed to America’s nascent celebrity culture, but who could also be invoked to shape important aesthetic, social and artistic issues.

Unlike many studies of compliance with civil rights laws, this is a success story – at least in part. The vast majority of the organizations in this study complied with the Lactation at Work Law and created effective accommodations for their lactating employees. This success is mitigated by the amount of employee power; the presence of allies within management; whether the workplace structure includes accessible private spaces; and whether the organizational culture both embraces a norm of flexibility and acknowledges the legitimacy of the Lactation at Work Law and its accommodations. Nevertheless, workplace lactation accommodations can have the effect of reinforcing race and class inequalities: working-class and African American women are less likely to breastfeed; they more often work in jobs that are excluded from the Lactation at Work Law requirements and that provide minimal, if any, lactation accommodations; and they seldom hold enough power to demand necessary lactation accommodations. In addition, while this law successfully enables some women to combine employment and breastfeeding, it actually fails to advance workers’ rights. Moreover, ultimately, it may reinforce traditional gender roles by emphasizing working mothers’ maternal duties and weaken support for other pro–working-parent legislation, such as parental leave and on-site childcare.