Mineke Schipper
Mineke Schipper (b. 1938) was Professor of Intercultural Literary Studies at the University of Leiden. She has professorships in Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and China. She received a Dutch knighthood for ‘building intercultural bridges nationally and internationally, inside and outside the academy’ and continues her scholarly work at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. She wrote 'Widows' as a recent widow herself.
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More Mineke Schipper
Hills of Paradise
The female body has been admired, used and abused since time immemorial. Despite the symbiotic relationship between the sexes, men have always ended up with more power than women and the female anatomy seems to lie at the root of this inequality. We can find clues in art and literature; male narrators, artists and scholars have shown an eternal fascination for those body parts they lack: breasts, wombs and vulvas. Yet this fascination is often far from healthy.
Adam and Eve Everywhere
God created Adam and Eve and so, according to the Bible, humanity began. The Koran likewise points to Adam and his wife as the first people. The creation story as referred to in their Holy Book by Jews, Christians and Muslims is the best known version, but there is astonishing variety of other stories about Adam and Eve. They have been passed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next, in all parts of the world. Mineke Schipper’s book is the first to deal with these mostly unfamiliar stories.
Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet
Countless ideas about women have been recorded over 27 the centuries in the most concise of all literary genres, the proverb. Mineke Schipper’s impressive study examines more than 15,000 sayings about women, drawn from 150 countries and more than 240 languages. They appear on crockery, tiles and clothing as well as in books, but most are passed on by word of mouth. Schipper arranges them by theme: the female body, the phases of a woman’s life as a girl, bride and wife and later as a mother and grandmother, and the joys and sorrows of love, sex and childbearing.
Widows - The Untold Story
Widows have always been more numerous than widowers, who usually remarry fast, almost always with younger women. For this and other reasons (such as war), men die sooner than their wives. According to a recent estimate, there are more than 258.5 million widows on earth and one in ten of them lives in extreme poverty. From ancient texts onwards, the need to represent women as weak and dependent is persistent, and widowhood has long been associated with an empty life.