• Economic Autonomy, Networks, and Co-optation
• Sandie Holguín and Jennifer J. Davis

The Journal’s editors invite readers to consider three themes that undergird the articles in this issue: economic autonomy, networks, and state co-optation of women’s liberation movements. The articles traverse levels of scale from the individual and community to nation-states and empires.

Two articles provide a nuanced account of women’s roles as economic agents within their families and their communities in medieval Europe and early modern Asia. The authors recover some of the ways that women manipulated laws and custom to manage economic failures and fortunes. The key? Women’s skillful use of networks.

Ellen E. Kittell uncovers economic relationships by analyzing naming practices of two fourteenth-century communities in Flanders. Deploying an innovative methodology in,“What’s in a First Name? The Correlation of Personal Identity with Economic Autonomy in Medieval Flanders,” Kittell carefully sifts through two bailiffs’ accounts that recorded taxable items upon people’s deaths. Known as mortmain or best items, these records enable this intrepid researcher to make informed observations about the level of women’s economic and social autonomy, depending on whether or not the record identified her by name. Naming practices differed in each town, however. Courtrai, an urban commercial center for linen production, referred to many women by their first name, but this naming practice did not indicate a woman’s marital status. In Tielt, a rural community near Courtrai, the bailiff identified women through their embedded family relationships—the unnamed “wife of,” “daughter of,” or “mother of.” Kittell concludes that the naming practices in Courtrai reflected women’s greater economic autonomy, whereas those of Tielt demonstrated women’s nested economic identity within their families. Kittell considers whether these naming practices in the records reveal differences between urban and rural communities, or if they reflect differing levels of imposed patriarchal authority, and invites scholars to conduct further research, for she contends that the “methodology of research pioneered here is replicable for other times and places.”

In contrast to the fourteenth-century communities Kittell studies, the economic world Aske Brock examines is utterly transformed by three centuries of European colonial expansion. In the interim, trade networks and family economic relationships widened extensively in scale. In “Martha Parker’s Trial’s: Women’s Networks in the East India Company Trade,” Brock pores over one thousand petitions women sent to the British East India Company (EIC) that detail how they “challenged norms and institutions.” Using the case study of Martha Parker, a wealthy English merchant’s daughter [End Page 5] who became the wife of a hapless merchant for the EIC, Brock shows how women like Parker maneuvered between family and commercial networks to create economic wealth, and, in some cases, to stave off debtors. Brock carefully traces how Parker, as a woman entrepreneur, employed these family networks—especially after her indebted husband’s untimely death—and how she used her knowledge of the power structure and quotidian operations of the EIC to navigate this vast economic system. Women like Martha Parker helped engender new types of “business practices and networks that would shape the structure and significance of private trade within the East India Company’s activities.” Moreover, Brock contemplates just how extensively women of the merchant classes had knowledge of their husbands’ economic activities and how steeped they were in private and corporate trade within Britain’s nascent empire in Asia.

Networks and changing family economic structures also play a major role in Theresa Iker’s, “‘All Wives are Not Created Equal’: Women Organizing in the Late Twentieth-Century Men’s Rights Movement.” Three centuries and many continents away from Brock’s study, Iker’s article asks, “who is family, and who has the right to manage the shape and economy of that family?” Iker focuses on the “second wives” of men active in the men’s rights movement in the United States. The movement emerged in the 1960s as a response to what some men perceived to be discriminatory laws. These men battled in state courts to change divorce, alimony, and custody laws to redress what they viewed as a biased family court system that favored...

• 经济自治、网络和增选
• Sandie Holguín 和 Jennifer J. Davis

该杂志的编辑邀请读者考虑支撑本期文章的三个主题：经济自主、网络和国家对妇女解放运动的拉拢。这些文章跨越了从个人和社区到民族国家和帝国的规模层次。

两篇文章对中世纪欧洲和近代早期亚洲的女性在其家庭和社区中作为经济代理人的角色进行了细致入微的描述。作者恢复了女性操纵法律和习俗来管理经济失败和财富的一些方式。钥匙？女性熟练使用网络。

艾伦·E·基特尔 (Ellen E. Kittell) 通过分析法兰德斯两个 14 世纪社区的命名实践来揭示经济关系。在“名字中有什么？”中部署创新方法。个人身份与中世纪佛兰德斯经济自治的相关性，”基特尔仔细筛选了两个法警的账户，这些账户记录了人们死亡时的应税项目。被称为mortmain或best items, 这些记录使这位勇敢的研究人员能够根据记录是否通过姓名识别出她，从而对女性的经济和社会自主水平进行有见地的观察。然而，每个城镇的命名做法各不相同。Courtrai 是亚麻制品生产的城市商业中心，很多女性都直呼其名，但这种命名方式并不表明女性的婚姻状况。在 Courtrai 附近的一个农村社区蒂尔特，法警通过她们根深蒂固的家庭关系来识别女性——未具名的“妻子”、“女儿”或“母亲”。Kittell 总结说，Courtrai 的命名实践反映了女性更大的经济自主权，而 Tielt 的命名实践则表明了女性在家庭中嵌套的经济身份。

与 Kittell 研究的 14 世纪社区不同，Aske Brock 考察的经济世界已被三个世纪的欧洲殖民扩张彻底改变。在此期间，贸易网络和家庭经济关系在规模上广泛扩大。在“Martha Parker's Trial's: Women's Networks in the East India Company Trade”一文中，Brock 仔细研究了发送给英国东印度公司 (EIC) 的 1000 多份请愿书，详细说明了她们如何“挑战规范和制度”。以一位富有的英国商人的女儿玛莎·帕克 (Martha Parker) 为例[结束第 5 页]成为 EIC 倒霉商人的妻子后，布罗克展示了像帕克这样的女性如何在家庭和商业网络之间游走以创造经济财富，并在某些情况下避免债务人。布罗克仔细追溯了帕克作为一名女企业家如何利用这些家庭网络——尤其是在她负债累累的丈夫英年早逝之后——以及她如何利用她对 EIC 的权力结构和日常运作的了解来驾驭这个庞大的经济体系。像玛莎帕克这样的女性帮助产生了新型的“商业实践和网络，这些实践和网络将塑造东印度公司活动中私人贸易的结构和重要性。” 而且，

网络和不断变化的家庭经济结构也在 Theresa Iker 的“‘所有妻子生来不平等’：20 世纪晚期男权运动中的女性组织”中发挥了重要作用。距离 Brock 的研究三个世纪和许多大陆，Iker 的文章问道，“谁是家庭，谁有权管理家庭的形态和经济？” 艾克关注美国男权运动中活跃男性的“二奶”。该运动出现于 1960 年代，作为对一些男性认为具有歧视性的法律的回应。这些人在州法院为改变离婚、赡养费和监护权法律而斗争，以纠正他们认为有偏见的家庭法院系统，该系统有利于……