‘A sort of land debatable’: female influence,civic virtue and middle-class identity,c 1830-c 1860[1]

The recent emphasis on the bourgeois public sphere as a predominantly masculine space means that the wider meanings and interpretations of respectable women's presence at public occasions have been ignored or misunderstood. This article addresses the contribution of urban middle-class women to the public construction and expression of middle-class identity in the mid-nineteenth century, and examines the way in which women were written into civic narratives as champions of public virtue. It is argued that the notion of ‘female influence’ allowed women to expand their public roles, and even to participate in potentially subversive political activities. However, it also effectively contained such activities by distancing ‘respectable’ women from the potentially corrupting arena of political controversy.     

The economic role of middle-class women in Victorian Glasgow

Abstract

It has long been recognised that working-class women in the nineteenth century participated in waged labour, albeit dependent on marital status, stage in family life cycle, and locality. Middle-class women's economic role has been less fully explored, although it has been acknowledged that they played an informal, ‘hidden’ role in the economy. This article examines the extent of middle-class women's economic activity and independence by looking in detail at a residential area of Glasgow in the period 1850-1914. The authors demonstrate that women could negotiate the parameters of a gendered and limited labour market, the legal constraints on their property rights, and social constraints on their economic freedom, in order to achieve considerable economic autonomy and influence     

Women with(out) class: social workers in the twentieth-century United States

This article examines women's work culture in professional-managerial labor in the twentieth-century United States through a history of social workers, an occupation particularly well suited to examine how race and gender shape work cultures. It suggests a chronology for understanding the changing ways in which social workers adopted middle-class identities that draw upon both professionalism and unionism. Imaging themselves variously as workers and ‘middle-class’ professionals, each identity had implications for their ability to understand and respond to the changing working conditions at both the beginning and end of the twentieth century that threatened to undermine them. Middle-Class Worker and Professional Worker identities in the 1930s and 1960s armed male and female social workers to defend their unions and fight for their clients against economizing bosses, and miserly state politicians. At the end of the century, however, the rush of social workers into the role of therapists gave them a work identity that relatively disempowered them to deal with the welfare cutbacks or the new work of deindustrialization with ‘jobless recovery’.     

A Transnational Project? Women and Gender in the Social Sciences in Australia, 1890–1945

This article presents a broad overview of the gendered regimes which shaped the development of social scientific knowledge in Australia, and the position of women within the field, from 1890 to 1945. It particularly explores the local desire to emulate developments in Europe and the United States. Australian women were prominent in early ‘amateur’ social science, which was strongly linked to social reforming activities. However, the social sciences developed exceedingly slowly within the Australian academy and rather continued to be sustained largely by the social reform movement. The continuing lack of formal institutionalisation, well into the twentieth century, provided considerable scope for some (privileged) women to create themselves as social scientific experts. Indeed, it was largely the interests of women social reformers who eventually drove professionalisation of the social sciences from the 1930s. Nevertheless, when professionalisation and institutionalisation did finally come in the 1940s, Australia followed remarkably similar patterns to those seen in the United States and United Kingdom nearly 50 years earlier. Women were largely regulated to the lower‐status, applied, feminine field of social work while men took over the new and more prestigious academic arena.     

The ‘Civilizing Mission’: The Regulation and Control of Mourning in Colonial India

The control of women's public form of mourning in India was undertaken in the colonial era by male social reformers. The article argues that this was both a part of the process which enabled the consolidation of colonial rule – since laments were repositories for the social memory of the dead which could lead to vendettas – and that this fed into the construction of a specific domestic ideology. The latter was predicated on the privatization and interiorization of grief, whereby women were enjoined to bear themselves with rectitude. The taming of the transgressive form of mourning, whereby women who had earlier exhibited their grievances in a spectacular form through lament, took to more quietist (devotional) forms, has reconfigured the relationship to death and mourning. However, this has been a partial phenomenon, limited to the upper-caste, middle-class milieu. Where women continue to hold a dependent position within community, nation-state and international economy, the article suggests that, in contexts of modern conflicts and warfare, where death runs ‘wild’, the exhibitionist and ‘wild’ forms of showing grief and anger continue to be demonstrated by women as an appropriate public response.     

adventurers,foreign women and masculinity in the Colombian Wars of Independence

This paper examines changing conceptions of honour and masculinity during the Colombian Wars of Independence in the early 19th century. It explores the position of the foreign women who accompanied British and Irish expeditions to join the war against Spanish rule, and shows how colonial, imperial and republican conceptions of masculinity were affected by the role that women played in these volunteer expeditions and in the wars in general. The paper considers women's experiences during war and peace, and examines their experiences in the light of changing conceptions of masculinity at home, in the British empire and in Hispanic America in the early nineteenth century. The social mobility of the Wars of Independence shifted the ground on which these concepts rested for all groups involved. The participation of foreign women alongside male adventurers was a further ingredient in this disorientating period.     

Risky or Relaxing? Exercise during Pregnancy in Britain,c.1930–1960

This article investigates the ways in which exercise and movement became an increasingly important aspect of the antenatal experience in mid-twentieth-century Britain. This theme is explored through the experiences of women who attended fitness classes in the mid twentieth century, and the impact which these all-female spaces had upon their physicality and embodiment during pregnancy. It uses oral history testimony to argue that these exercise classes had a hand in the gradual spread of the idea that gentle exercise during pregnancy was safe for mother and baby, and this played a part in encouraging pregnant women to reject the discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which suggested that the middle-class pregnancy should be primarily sedentary. These all-female fitness classes played a role in developing ideas about the pregnant female body; educating women about their physiology; and encouraging women to safely maintain sporting identities throughout every stage of their lives.     

Fact,fiction and method in the early history of social research: Clementina Black and Margaret Harkness as case-studies

The development of social science research methods by women reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a largely buried history. This article examines the work of Clementina Black and Margaret Harkness, two British reformers who conducted many social investigations using a wide range of research methods. They also crossed genres in writing fiction, which was an accepted method at the time for putting forward new ideas about social conditions. Black and Harness were part of a vibrant network of women activists, thinkers and writers in late nineteenth century London, who together contributed much to the growing discipline of social science and to imaginative forms of writing about social issues.     

sexual freedom and the promise of revolution: Emma Goldman’s passion

This article explores the contributions to a history of sexuality, capitalism and revolution made when we consider the work of anarchist thinker and activist Emma Goldman (1869–1940). I suggest that Goldman's centring of sexual freedom at the heart of revolutionary vision and practice is part of a long tradition of sexual politics, one which struggles to make sense of how productive and reproductive labour come together, and to identify the difference between sexual freedom and capitalist opportunity. Goldman's concern with the significance of kinship in holding together capitalism, militarism and religion, as well as sexual feeling's capacity to disrupt those relationships, echoes across more than a century to resonate with Marxist, feminist and queer scholars' engagements with similar issues. But where contemporary scholars often tend to retain the opposition between culture and society, representation and the real, making it difficult to produce a materialist analysis of sexuality as transformative rather than always already overdetermined, Goldman's energetic insistence on sexual connectivity as freeing provides an important vantage point. Not only does Goldman consistently situate sexuality in a broad political context of the sexual division of labour, the institutions of marriage and the church, consumerism, patriotism and productive (as well as reproductive) labour, she frames sexual freedom as both the basis of new relationships between men and women, and as a model for a new political future.     

The Missionary Narrative as Coercive Interrogation: seduction,confession and self‐presentation in women’s ‘letters home’ 1

This article takes as its starting point the late nineteenth and early twentieth century missionary discourse of feminine self‐denial, and attempts to chart the ways in which it became a subversive theme in women missionaries’ ‘letters home.’ It argues that in the simultaneously public and private act of letter writing, women missionaries created complex sexual and political self‐narratives. By co‐opting the imperial rhetoric of a threatening, violent East, and then setting up their letters as conversations with an invisible interrogator, missionary women repeatedly forced their audiences to discover the various ways in which they had been seduced by this East, and had thereby deviated from accepted feminine norms. In the process, they both reinforced imperial notions of race and civilization and undermined the likewise imperial notion of protective domestic space.     

The Corporatist Regime,Welfare State Employment,and Gender Pay Inequity

Mainstream economics conceptualizes wages as determined by market forces and reflecting productivity and investments in human capital made by individuals. These views, which have become taken-for-granted explanations of what wages are, hide the underlying dynamics of the gender pay gap and place responsibility on individuals instead of gendered social structures. This article proposes viewing gender pay inequity through a sociological lens, which implies acknowledging the complex societal dynamics and roles of institutions and actors in shaping wages. The Nordic welfare states are often considered women-friendly, providing female citizens with social policies and services that have enabled their extensive participation in paid employment. Simultaneously, the Finnish welfare state has relied heavily on inexpensive labour provided by women, thus actively contributing to the formation of a secondary female-dominated labour market. The secondary status of reproductive work conducted within the public sector has been further strengthened and institutionalized by the Finnish corporatist system via collective agreements. In policy-making, the central actors defend their vested interests through non-decision-making, limiting the scope of decision-making to non-threatening issues. This article discusses the dynamics of the Finnish corporatist regime, welfare-state employment, and the impact of both on gender pay equity in Finnish society.     

Left Activism,Succour and Selfhood: the epistolary friendship of two revolutionary mothers in 1970s Britain

At the height of mass activity on the Left, the ascendancy of the women's liberation movement (WLM), and the beginnings of real social and personal change for men and women, the 1970s are increasingly seen as the decade when sixties permissiveness began to be truly felt in Britain. This article draws upon a personal archive of correspondence from this turbulent decade, between two revolutionary women, Di Parkin and Annie Howells. It argues that the women's letters form an important contribution to new understandings about the construction of the post-war gendered self. The letters represent an interchange of motherhood, domesticity, far-left politics, and close female friendship. The article will show how the women's epistolary friendship offers intimate insight into female self-fashioning at a breakthrough social and political moment in 1970s Britain. As they reflected on some of the key political and social themes of the decade—class, labour, race and gender relations, as well as international politics—Di and Annie sought to negotiate themselves in relation to shifting discourses and social patterns. Writing as relational female subjects and individuals, the women's letters became simultaneously a private and shared space in which to compose themselves as women, revolutionaries and feminists, and autonomous sexual subjects. As a result, this article will show, the epistolary lives of these two radical women inform valuable understanding about some of the complex ways in which post-war individuals used available cultural and political resources to find meaning in their lives.     

Neither worker nor housewife but citizen: BBC’s Woman’s Hour 1946–1955

This article investigates BBC radio’s Woman’s Hour in the post-war period. It explores Woman’s Hour’s focus and insistence on educating women listeners about their role as citizens, and the tensions this caused particularly between broadcasters and different groups of women. The article documents the programme’s development of public and outward looking items, such as the reporting and covering of current affairs, public debates and national politics, women’s party political conferences, and further introducing women MP’s to the microphone. This gave the programme a public and arguably political dimension. The article thus places Woman’s Hour within the broader historiography of the women’s movement in this period, and illuminates the changing role and expectation of women, particularly the middle-class housewife.     

‘That splendid body of women’: nursing,professional registration,and suffragette militancy

ABSTRACT

In the decades before World War One, a group of women fought for their right to control their own futures, claiming that their governance was in the hands of men whose interests lay in keeping women subservient. Initially articulated by an educated, middle-class few, the women's demands were embraced by widening numbers of both women and men. They saw their hopes dashed on several occasions by political manoeuvring, and only after WWI did their demands begin to be met. This is not an account of the women’s suffrage movement, but rather of the fight for the registration of trained nurses. Both movements claimed the right of women to be actors in their public lives and both faced public condemnation for transgressing social boundaries. The two movements interacted, with nurses connecting their struggle to the wider call for women's rights, and with the suffrage movement foregrounding nurses as disenfranchised women professionals.     

The History of Gendered Social Science: a personal narrative and some reflections on method

The history of the relationships between social work, social reform, social policy and social science contains an important story about the contributions of men and women, and about the ways in which masculinist social science and policy came to dominate the activities of women reformers and social scientists. This article focuses on a moment in this history, a conflict at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the 1950s about the future of social work education. A key figure in this was the author's father, Richard Titmuss. The article draws on biography, autobiography and intellectual/institutional history, raising some methodological issues about this approach to uncovering hidden stories; it also argues that the conflict at LSE, a painfully remembered episode in the history of social work, cannot be understood except in the context of the gendered story of ‘the socials’.     

Trade union censorship

This article describes the author's experience of commisioned reseach, outlining its main findings and the response of the funding body to the final report. The research examined the effects of shiftwork on women. It was found that the sexual division of labour within the family in Britain makes it difficult for women to work certain hours, including the ‘normal’ full-time day hours, and so hours of work can discriminate against women with responsibility for young children. Protective legislation is not the cause of inequality in wages and affords some protection to women from certain hours of work in industries that are covered by these laws. Trade union attitudes and practices towards women at local level help to reinforce rather than transform the sexual divisions of labour within the workforce and within the family.The final report contained three pages specifically on trade unions and their attitude towards women and shiftwork. The trade union group at the evaluation colloquium demanded their exclusion from the final report, virtually accusing the researchers of fabrication.     

class and feminine excess: the strange case of Anna Nicole Smith

Cultural concerns about race, class and beauty often intersect with mass-mediated depictions of the female body. Drawing on Foucault's theories about disciplining the public body, this article examines the changing public perception of Anna Nicole Smith from an ideal beauty to a white trash stereotype. This analysis argues that Smith's very public weight gains, her outrageous behaviour and her legal battle for her late husband's fortune is presented in the media as an example of inappropriate conduct for a white beauty ideal and thus is repositioned as white trash culture. Central to this repositioning is the constant tabloid depiction of Smith as an ‘out of control’ grotesque. This article argues that contrary to the optimistic understanding of female grotesques as effective agents of cultural criticism and social change, Smith represents the female grotesque as an agent of cultural control that instructs middle-class women on how to avoid committing classed, racial and gendered transgressions. The article concludes that the case of Anna Nicole Smith functions as a cautionary tale that reinforces cultural standards of normalization.