Women's Orients--English women and the Middle East, 1718-1918 : sexuality, religion, and work
"In this original new study Billie Melman recovers the unwritten history of the European experience of the Middle East during the colonial era. She focuses on the evolution of Orientalism and the reconstruction--through contact with other cultures--of gender and class." "Beginning with the eighteenth century Billie Melman describes the many ways in which women looked at oriental people and places and developed a discourse which presented a challenge to hegemonic notions on the exotic and "different." Their contact with, and observation of, Middle Eastern people, especially women, created a reassessment of Western domestic and sexual politics and even a solidarity of gender, which cut across race and religion. Billie Melman examines the writings of famous feminist writers, travellers, ethnographers, missionaries, archaeologists, and Biblical scholars, many of whose writings are studied here for the first time. Women's Orients, by introducing gender and class into the ongoing debate on relations between colonial politics and culture, challenges traditional interpretations of Orientalism and other forms of cross-cultural representation."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 1992
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1992
Biography
xix, 417 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
9780472103324, 0472103326
24318721
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Orientalism, travel and gender
A prosopography of travel, 1763-1914
The women's harem: autonomy, sexuality and solidarity
Harem literature, 1763-1914: tradition and innovation
The eighteenth-century harem (1717-89): Lady Montagu, Lady Craven and the genealogy of comparative 'morals'
Exorcising Sheherezad: the Victorians and the harem
The haremlik as a bourgeois home: autonomy, community and solidarity
Evangelising the orient: women's work and the evolution of evangelical ethnography
Evangelical travel and the evangelical construction of gender
The women of Christ church: work, literature and community in nineteenth-century Jerusalem
'Domestic life in Palestine': Evangelical ethnography, faith and prejudice
Feminising the landscape
A secular geography of the orient: authority, gender and travel
Harriet Martineau's anti-pilgrimage: autobiography, history and landscape
Queen Hatasu's beard: Amelia Edwards, the scientific journey and the emergence of the first female ' orientalists'
An 'orientalist' couple: Anne Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and the Pilgrimage to Najd