Suchergebnisse

In the beginning of humanitarianism, various agents –businessmen, military physicians, political representatives of the European Empires, as well as some active women in social reform movements- contributed to shaping compassion as an emotion of transnational scope. In this way, compassion is able to connect geographically distant people in order to mobilize the necessary resources to provide effective assistance in the field. In particular, this paper focuses on demonstrating how women participated in the construction of modern humanitarianism by producing a gendered conception of compassion. They achieved this, by identifying this ability to feel other's suffering and to relieve it with the implementation of a set of caring practices, whose exclusively female competences, justified their action in emergency relief operations. Thus, compassion provided them with an agency when creating networks aimed at assisting different types of victims, which are here represented by means of the wounded soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the disabled prisoners during the First World War (1914-9) as well as the refugees resulting from the Republican exile throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) and the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War (1939-1945). This research seeks to retrace those networks, as they promoted the development of a know-how strongly rooted in emotions, notably in love, sympathy and compassion, which women would have cultivated for centuries in the domestic sphere. This know-how will be interpreted here as a situated knowledge that these women humanitarians – ambulance women, nurses, but also other volunteers involved in the protection of victims- have produced throughout the main armed conflicts of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

Although the women of the Paris Commune have frequently been depicted as ferocious fighters, setting fire to the streets of the capital, becoming well known as the pétroleuses; they also played a role in assisting the injured soldiers of the National Guard. Taking this two-month period in French political history as starting point, I will attempt to examine the contribution carried out by this group of women to medical assistance, following the call made by the feminine organization known as l'Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés (The Women's Union for the Defense of Paris and the Treatment of the Injured), on the 11th of April 1871.

Following Donna Haraway's (1988) doctrine of embodied objectivity, I analyze the construction of the notion of woman in the visual culture produced during the Spanish Civil War, by considering different women's roles as militiawomen, political leaders, nurses, and workers in the munitions factories. A selection of photographs of the Republican women during the Spanish Civil War reveals how the modern wars of the first half of the 20th century should not be considered exclusively a male domain because women became publicly visible and a political power in their fight against fascism. As it occurred with other North American and European women during World War I and World War II, Spanish women joined the labor forces with the outbreak of the Civil War, becoming aware of their subjugated position for the first time in history. Therefore, the images depicting Republican women mirrored not only the legal and social rights conquered by women since the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, but they also embodied their emancipation and, furthermore, the roots of Spanish Feminism, a movement which has been repressed for a long-time by Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975).

Does Romanticism really imply a revolt of the affective dimension of the human being above the intellectual, breaking from the beliefs of previous epochs, or can it be better understood as the culmination of a long term process, which started with the 18th century cult of sensibility? Alternatively, should we interpret it as the rise of an "emotional style", which grew out of the suffering and desperation experienced after the Terror in France and relegated feelings and their expressions to the private, while reason became the virtue cultivated in the public sphere? This three-day conference seeks to discuss to what extent the Romantic celebration of feelings involved continuities and discontinuities in the history of emotions by means of analysing the representations of passions, feelings and sentiments in the production of artistic and scientific knowledge, as well as their role in world politics during the period from 1780 to 1840's. The nostalgia of childhood innocence described by the poet Novalis, the dark melancholy represented in Francisco de Goya's Saturn or the most elegiac feeling praised by John Keats in his poetry, the emotional flow in Schubert's or Chopin's music, the resentment expressed by German, British, Italian and Spanish national communities against French cultural hegemony, the intense blushing that characterised the embarrassment felt by Jane Austen's heroines or romantic love as portrayed in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther are only a few examples of the most common feelings shaped by different European Romanticisms.

This paper discusses on one hand, the phenomenon of war through the medical mutations occurred within the First World War, the moment in history which inaugurates the "Total War", characterized by the implication of all civil society in the conflict. On the other hand, the transformations in medical sciences are approached as a whole of knowledges and practises during the Great War, since the development of certain techniques as the electro-diagnostic, emerged in response to the appearance of unexpected pathologies, as the "shell shock". In this way, it is showed how medical sciences improve certain epistemic and technological developments that would not be visible in peaceful times. This analysis allow us to perceive the evolution in electrotherapy domain and how it became a military tool for distinguishing the shell shock patients, from others who simulated to be incapacitated to keep on fighting. Furthermore, the example of shell shock proposes the larger philosophical discussion about the historical and cultural aspects in defining pathologies in the history of medicine.