At its November meeting the Board of Directors approved the Status of Women prize awarded each year to undergraduate students studying on New Brunswick campuses. This year's 1st/2ndyear winner is Ptricia McFadgen and the 3rd/4th year winner is Margaret Anne Hoyt.
Patricia's McFadgen's essay is on the Impact of Mother and Daughter roles in "The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity" and "Lai La Fresne".
Margaret Anne Hoyt wrote her essay about "Healing and Middle Eastern Dance: A, Ethnography of 'Bellydance' among North-American Women".
A synopsis of Corinne Gillroy's essay titled "Romance Fighting Reason" follows:
The 18th Century Gothic novel often includes supernatural elements, a dominating male nemesis and requires a heroine of sensibility - a woman who is vulnerable to her environment, easily influenced and copiously emotional. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft states that she believes her female contemporaries to be of similar disposition, lacking mental fortitude and any substantial education. The heroine of Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, however, is emotional and intelligent, educated and sensible. Radcliffe has created a heroine that fulfills the virtues set forth by Wollstonecraft, while remaining true to the Gothic form.
In Romance Fighting Reason, the author explains that while Radcliffe's Emily is praised for her beauty, she is also admired for her intelligence and compassion. Wollstonecraft feared that these traits were direct opposites in the late 1700s, and that intelligent women were often disliked. She observed that 18th Century women only seemed to gain worth through marriage, though Emily is considered virtuous even while denying any number of proposals. Wollstonecraft believed that women of the late 1700s were trained into insignificance from a young age, yet Emily is raised with a formal education in literature, languages and science, and taught to have a strong mind. Radcliffe does, however, allude to the fact that Emily's father is perceived as unorthodox. Romance Fighting Reason reveals that the heroine of Mysteries of Udolpho carefully conforms to the 18th Century societal rules that Mary Wollstonecraft deplores, while melding them to her advantage.
A synopsis of Katia Grubišic essay "The Sublime in Emily Dickinson's 'The Wind begun to rock the Grass' "
In her poem "The Wind begun to rock the Grass", Emily Dickinson at once quantifies and mimics the storm with which this poem is concerned, taking on the tension of the summoned squall and evoking at once the Emersonian, predominantly romantic, sublime of her era and the sublime as described by the neo-structuralist Canadian poet Don McKay over a century after Dickinson's death. The two extant versions of the 1864 poem each reflect a different stage the metaphorical development and also reveal a movement from the quantitative to the romantic sublime.
Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that the "primal warblings" of poetry hold an innate wild spirit which elevates the poem to a natural level. For Emerson, wilderness is not only the dominion of the natural or supernatural, but also the by-product of human creation, a dimension of the sublime demonstrated gesturally in the earlier version of Dickinson's poem. However, although Dickinson, is undoubtedly portraying a greater presence, and although the commonplace elements in this poem are certainly threatened by that presence, they are not merely subsumed into Emerson's "great order".
Don McKay, meanwhile, maintains that language embodies a wilderness - "the capacity of all things to elude the mind's appropriation" - which, though it functions as creative matériel, is also as an entity outside of perception. For McKay, the act of putting thought and observation into words is an act of transcription which threatens the essential wilderness of language. In Dickinson's poem, the domestic and corporeal imagery are the touchstones of human appropriation; Dickinson is taming the looming storm, making it home. In McKay's terms, home is the poetic point of juncture between human expression and wilderness; "[i]t turns wilderness into an interior and presents interiority to the wilderness". This sublime duality implied by the idea of home would have been corroborated by Dickinson, believing as she did that home was a place of "Infinite power".
Emerson's and McKay's theoretical thoughts on the sublime are useful not to attempt to ascertain sources for the transcendence
of Dickinson's poetry but to establish points of reference, comparison and explanation for her metaphysical poetry. Dickinson contrasts
and conflates the quotidian and the divine in incarnating the divergent but connected aspects of the sublime. In seeking a universal
natural balance between creation, destruction and preservation, the poet undergoes a poetic and personal metamorphosis and becomes
the looming storm her poem describes.
At its August meeting the Board of Directors approved the Status of Women prize awarded each year to undergraduate students studying on New Brunswick campuses. This year's winner is Kanika Bhattacharya of Mount Allsion University and Andrea Smith of St. Thomas University.
The abstract to Kanika Bhattacharya's essay entitled "Struggling to be born: the oral contraceptive industry in India" follows:
Soon after its independence in 1947, India, the second most populous nation in the world, realized that the chief impediment to its economic and social growth as well as its struggle for gender equality was its high rate of population expansion. Despite an early start to national family planning--the nation's first family planning programs started in the 1950s--awareness and availability of modern birth spacing techniques--specifically, the oral birth control pill--is sparse. India's oral contraceptive industy remains in a largely embryonic stage, despite the colossal need for its product by urban and rural women. This essay attempts to investigate the problems and constraints faced by this industry, and recommend governmental, industrial and social directions to improved the current situation.
Andrea Smith's essay entitled "For Whose Health: Feminist Critiques of Epidemology" is summarised below:
Since the mid-1980s, there has been growing concern with the efficacy and implications of traditional epidemiological methods with their emphasis on individuals' risk factors. Several new theoretical frameworks have been proposed which strive to account for the impact of social relations on the health status of populations; however, there has been little attention paid to feminist critiques of science and their relevance to epidemiology. Drawing from explicit and implicit feminist examinations fo epidemiology, feminist critiques of science, and insights from the women's health movement, the author presents a feminist critique of epidemology. Possible directions for further theoretical and methodological developments of a feminist epidemiology are proposed.
At the August 24 meeting the Board of Directors approved the Status of Women prize awarded each year to undergraduate students studying on New Brunswick campuses. This year's winners are Trisha Gallant of UNB St. John.
Trisha Gallant's essay titled "Evaluating Pay and Eployment Equity: Why so little impact?" evaluates the impact of pay equity legislation, equal employment legislation and equal opportunities policies on the gender-based wage gap in Canada. It examines both the impetus for equality legislation and the history of its evolution in Canada. It compares the situation of Canadian women in the labour force both before and after the implementation of pay equity, employment equity legislation and equal opportunities policies. The results suggest that equality legislation in Canada is very weak and limited in application, thereby reducing the gender-based wage gap by very little.
At its August meeting the Board of Directors approved the two Status of Women prizes awarded each year to undergraduate students studying on New Brunswick campuses. This year's winners are Jane Howard of St. Thomas University and Maggie Atkinson-Lamb of Mount Allison University .
Jane Howard 's essay, titled "Oral History", features interviews with three generations of female members of her own family woven into the context of the historical and sociological conditions prevailing in the family, in education and in the labor market during this century. Her essay illustrates the gradual breakdown of social and ideological barriers that limited women's lives in the past and some of the difficult choices women face in the present.
Maggie Atkinson-Lamb's essay "Rediscovering Richier " provides a positive, feminist interpretation of the work of French post-war sculptor Germaine Richier. A number of art critics, particularly male art critics, had seen death and destruction , even a streak of masochism, in the corrosive texture of Richier's sculptures . Feminists, on the other hand, have challenged the conventional interpretations and found in Richier's sculptures the expression of living form, metamorphosis, gestation, growth and change. Maggie Atkinson-Lamb takes this perspective one step further, proposing that Richier's sculptures portray powerful, hybrid goddesses who convey the idea of rejuvenation and renewal. She bases her interpretation on Richier's diaries and writings in which Richier expresses a keen interest in mythology, folktales and nature, particularly in the insect world.
The student essay prize will be held again during the coming academic year. Guidelines for the contest are available at the FNBFA office and on the web page http://www.fnbfa.ca/english/SWC_Prize.html.