Editor: Marsha R. Robinson, PhD

In 1914, British journalist C. Gascoigne Hartley published the following statements in „The Age of Mother-Power: the Position of Woman in Primitive Society“: “The patriarchal theory stated in its simplest form is this: Primeval man lived in small family groups, composed of an adult male and of his wife, or, if he were powerful, several wives, whom he jealously guarded from sexual advances of all other males… the family is held together by their common subjection to him. As for the children, the daughters, as soon as they grow up, are added to his wives while the sons are driven out from the home at the time they reach an age to be dangerous as sexual rivals to their father.”

“The male attention and energy were fixed chiefly on the destructive activities of warfare… males were chiefly concerned with the absorbing duties of sex and fighting rivals, and also hunting for game… all the peaceful arts of to-day were once woman’s province. Along the lines of industrialism she was pioneer, inventor, author, originator.” C. Gasquoine Hartley (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1914), 51-2, 243-4.

Anyone who cares to listen to the saline siren songs that intersperse the insulating silences around us knows that there is sufficient evidence from the body-fields of female and male victims of rape as a war crime to calcify Mrs. Hartley’s definition.

Enough tears have been shed to dissolve such calcified ideologies. Mrs. Hartley’s definition may describe a pervasive definition of manhood but it is far from universal. All soldiers do not rape. All men do not commit incest. All perpetrators are not male.

There is a global war at the micro-level of society, namely a war against women and it is fought in the body-field. There is another invisible battlefront in this global gender war: the mind-field where some people teach men to hate female family members and neighbors in the name of national patriotism. Patriarchal violence is a weapon built and launched in the mind-field.

This is a call for essay proposals about twenty-first century, micro-level efforts to neutralize patriarchal violence by re-educating men and by re-defining manhood. The volume will be stronger if it contains case studies from around the world about successes in these battles of the mind-field and the body-field in the following categories.

• Post-conflict areas,
• Daily domestic violence in developed and developing nations,
• Issues of social class/caste and in/tolerance of gendered violence, and
• Vignettes (up to 750 words) about veteran hero/ines who re-educate in these mind-fields.

Authors are responsible for complying with the standards of the United States Office for Human Research Protections, including and not limited to regulations regarding informed consent and protection of vulnerable populations. (www.hhs.gov/ohrp/).

To be considered for this volume, please submit an abstract of 750 words or less that describes the subject, event/location, argument/significance, methodology, the type of sources contained in the essay, and an estimated word count of the final essay. Proposals should be submitted as .doc, .rtf, or .pdf documents. They should be sent by May 31, 2013 to ProfMRobinson@gmail.com.

Marsha R. Robinson, PhD; Independent Scholar
Commissioning Editor of the Inverting History with Microhistory Series (Cambridge Scholars Publishing); Prior edited volumes in this series include: Lesser Civil Wars: Civilians Defining War and the Memory of War (2012), Women Who Belong: Claiming a Female’s Right-Filled Place (2013), Purgatory between Kentucky and Canada: African Americans in Ohio (2013); Marsha R. Robinson is a graduate of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and the Ohio State University where she earned her doctorate in history. She is the author of Matriarchy, Patriarchy and Imperial Security in Africa: Explaining Riots in Europe and Violence in Africa (Lexington Books, 2012)

Source: H-WOMEN@H-NET.MSU.EDU