Mineke Schipper

Biography

Mineke Schipper is Professor of Intercultural Literary Studies at the University of Leiden. She is the author of numerous books including Imagining Insiders: Africa and the question of belonging, and Unheard Words: Women and literature in Africa, the Arab World, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. She has also published two novels.

Titles

Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet

(Trouw nooit een vrouw met grote voeten, 2004)

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. Continued...