"Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet"
Lecture / Discusssion in English
Wisdom about women from around the world
by Professor Mineke Schipper
University of Leiden (The Netherlands)
Wednesday June 13 2007 at 6:30
Reyum Institute
47 Street 178
P.O. Box 2438
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
023 217 149
With the support of the Albert Kundstadter Family Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development
“ A woman who loves her man says: ‘I look up to you.” (Twi, Ghana)
“ A dog is smarter than a woman: he does not bark against his boss.” (Russian)
“ A woman who knows Latin will never find a husband nor come to a good end.” (All over Europe)
“Women ask woman smarter than he is.” (English, USA)
“ A man, even a man of small size, will be called great in comparison to women.” (Arabic)
“A good woman goes without a head.” (Dutch/Flemish)
“ Wives and shoes are better when old.” (Japanese)
“ A woman's beauty makes fish sink and wild geese fall from the sky.” (Chinese)
“ The name of the father is the secret of the mother.” (Creole, Jamaica)
All women have in common the shape of their bodies and their bodily functions. And this holds no less for men. In cultures all over the globe, sex and gender issues have been expressed in the world's smallest poetic genre, the proverb. This oral wisdom is full of revealing insights into the male and female conditions across centuries and continents. Over the years Mineke Schipper collected and studied more than 15 000 proverbs and sayings about women from around the world. Those vivid and earthy proverbs reflect women's phases of life: from girl to bride, to wife or co-wife; from daughter to mother, mother-in-law, widow and grandmother; the joys and sorrows of love, sex, and childbearing; women's work, their talents, and their power. In spite of the many differences among cultures, those numerous tiny texts reveal some striking patterns in their ideas about men and women transmitted from generation to generation in hundreds of languages across the globe. The bewildering views of men and women in this intriguing cross-cultural ‘traditional’ history of humanity have to do with all of us.
Mineke Schipper
Professor of Intercultural Literary Studies at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands. She is the author of numerous academic books including Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet. Proverbs about Women from Around the World (Yale University Press 2004). This book has been or is being translated into many languages around the world, including Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese (also in Latin America), Russian, German, Chinese, Arabic etc. Her third novel Vogel valt vogel vliegt (‘Bird falls bird flies’) appears this spring in Amsterdam.
posted by Jinja @ 9:12 AM
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