Thecla is the heroine of the Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla (=ATh), a book describing the life of the Apostle Paul and Thecla. She has been revered as a female apostle and the first female Christian martyr. This article examines her decision, depicted in the baptism scene.

Although the text has been well known since ancient times, feminist historians only began to use it as a source in the 1980s, stressing its depiction of women’s resistance to the patriarchy or the struggle for independence. In the 1990s, Kate Cooper countered those interpretations, arguing that ATh is an account of the superiority of Christian ascetic morals over those of the pagans.

Susan Hylen’s A Modest Apostle (2015) follows this latter school of interpretation reconsidering ATh within the wider social contexts of the Roman world. However, she sought to discern not only the male author’s intentions, but also to reflect the roles of female leaders in traditional Mediterranean societies. Using examples from historical records, literature, and stone inscriptions she argued that women were able to enter the public space and lead others if they were “modest.” Hylen suggested that Thecla was one of these traditional female leaders. Hylen’s approach opens up a new way to view the ways in which women in ancient times were able to participate in history.

However, Hylen’s research does not distinguish Thecla from the traditional female leaders in the Roman world. I argue that we can see these differences clearly in the baptism scene, where Thecla independently and publicly swears her loyalty before Jesus Christ. In this scene we can see a woman facing God and making her own decision; this scene must have been a good example for many other women facing difficulties in their lives.

Female hairdressers started to appear on the pages of women’s magazines in the late Meiji period. They also appeared on the stages of hairdressing events where women from the upper- and middleclasses as well as geisha came to see them. The popularity of female hairstylists among female clients came to be recognized in society at large. In this article, I argue that the popularity of female hairdressers can be read as a negative response by women of different classes to the teachings of enlightened modern family and “home” and female roles within it.

The popularity of female hairdressers in late Meiji is worth noticing since they had been attacked by enlightened intellectuals, mostly men, for exercising a bad influence on women, whose homes they visited to do their hair. Male intellectuals attacked female hairdressers through their writings, trying to discourage the practice of home visits, since they closely associated the female hairdressers with nightlife and the geisha culture.

The fact that many women came to the hairdressing events shows that women did not accept the derogatory views of female hairdressers promoted by male intellectuals. How did these women see their hairdressers, then? In their attacks, enlightened male intellectuals suggested that the position of female hairdressers was very low status. On the other hand, women referred to female hairdressers with respect and a sense of intimacy. I argue that the sense of distance thus articulated is quite similar to the kind of female lesbianism among female high school students of that time.

Hairdressing events became popular during this period of commercialization and industrialization, as women were discovered as consumers. Does this mean that the intimate relationship between female hairdressers and female clients was commercially appropriated? I argue that it was partly so, but female hairdressers could re-appropriate the opportunities for their own ends.

The “Legends of the Taima Mandala” (Taima mandara engi emaki; owned by Kômyô-ji Temple, 13^th century), a two-scroll set, depicts aristocratic woman who attain enlightenment through the act of weaving a mandala of the nirvana in lotus threads. This paper examines the second and the third scenes of the first scroll which depicts women spinning and dyeing lotus threads. From these scenes we can see that the scroll encouraged women to produce copies of the mandala, one of the good deeds leading to enlightenment, which was particularly promoted by the Seizan Sect in Kyoto. The uniqueness of the Kômyô-ji Temple scrolls is highlighted through a comparison with depictions in the Taima mandala engi, a hanging scroll owned by Taima-dera Temple. The Taima-dera Temple scroll emphasizes the emperor’s support for women’s spinning, while the Kômyô-ji Temple scrolls merely hint at the emperor’s presence, describing the women’s spontaneous, vigorous acts to gain the emperor’s support. I also point to another work, a copy of a mandala, which suggests that its donor was a woman, as we can see from records concerning the Seizan Sect. Moreover, it is noteworthy that, while the Taima-dera scroll simply depicts the well in Taima village where women dye threads, the Kômyô-ji version shows the deep connections of the well with Emperor Tenji, thereby celebrating and mystifying women’s act of dyeing lotus threads. The depiction re-narrates the conventional meaning of aristocratic women’s handiwork as domestic services to their husband and reinforces their work as a story of women’s agency. Thus, the Kômyô-ji scrolls should be understood as a reflection of the Seizan Sect’s missionary activities to appeal to women and encourage them to copy mandalas.

This study reviews some of the recent trends and developments in the gender-based historiography of Latin America. The first section describes the slow progress of gender-based historical research produced in Spanish and Portuguese languages. Although several important works on women’s history were published in the 20^th century, there was a reluctance to adopt the concept of gender until the turn of the century. Several explanations can be found for this reluctance, such as the presence of military dictatorships in South America and the limited impact of Anglo-American historiographies. The second part discusses three factors that have facilitated the significant expansion of historical gender studies. One factor was the emergence of the publication of several edited volumes on women’s history. The second factor was the intensification of scholarly exchanges between historians based in Latin America and researchers from the rest of the world, especially from Anglo-American institutions. One such example was a series of colloquiums on Mexican gendered history organized by Mexican and AngloAmerican historians. The third factor can be attributed to the more explicit application of gendered analysis. The last part of the text is dedicated to the introduction of several historiographical trends that emerged from the renewed environment created by all these factors. One such trend is the rise of revisional interpretations of the Mexican Revolution from the perspective of gendered struggles. Another new and innovative field is the analysis of the historical construction of masculinity. Many scholars have also begun to pay more attention to the equivocal and negotiated characteristics of honor, which had once been considered as an imperative and monolithic value inherent to the Iberian-Atlantic world. The concluding remarks emphasize the importance of continuous efforts in maintaining an international collaborative environment favorable to these innovative studies.