Dr Mary Louisa Gordon (1861–1941): A Feminist Approach in Prison

This article discusses the work of Dr Mary Louisa Gordon, who was appointed as the first English Lady Inspector of Prisons in 1908, and remained in post until 1921. Her attitude towards and treatment of women prisoners, as explained in her 1922 book Penal Discipline, stands in sharp contrast to that of her male contemporaries, and the categorisation of her approach as ‘feminist’ is reinforced by her documented connections with the suffragette movement. Yet her feminist and suffragist associations also resulted in the marginalisation and dismissal of her work, such that Mary Gordon and Penal Discipline are virtually unknown today. Nevertheless, her insights into the position and needs of women prisoners retain a striking contemporary relevance.     

Some problems of constructing and reconstructing a suffragette's life: Mary Richardson,suffragette, socialist and fascist

Abstract

Drawing on recent work on feminist autobiography, this article discusses the ways in which a range of autobiographical writing was used by Mary Richardson, a former suffragette, at different stages of her life. It considers the ways in which autobiography was rewritten to fit various political circumstances and to suggest political continuity and cohesion. The article explores the role of the historian in analysing her writing and raises questions about the use of autobiography in history.     

Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War

Abstract: This article explores the construction of Andrea Dworkin as a public persona, or a ‘feminist icon’, revered by some and demonized by others. It argues that in both her fiction and non-fiction, Dworkin engaged in a process of writing herself as an exceptional woman, a ‘feminist militant’ as she describes herself in the subheading of her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak. The article illustrates Dworkin's autobiographical logic of exceptionalism by comparing the story told in Heartbreak to the story of Dworkin's major novel, Mercy, which features a heroine, Andrea, who shares Dworkin's name and significant biographical details. While Dworkin has insisted that Mercy is not an autobiographical novel, the author undertakes a reading here of Mercy as the story of Dworkin if she had not become the feminist icon of her own and others' construction. In Mercy, Andrea unsuccessfully attempts to escape the silent, victimized status that Dworkin has insistently argued is imposed upon women. In her repeated victimization, Andrea functions for Dworkin as an ‘everywoman’ who both embodies Dworkin's world-view and highlights how Dworkin's own biography exists in tension with some of her central assumptions about women, gender and contemporary society.     

Fashionable ‘Formation’: Reclaiming the Sartorial Politics of Josephine Baker

ABSTRACT

This article historicises Josephine Baker’s use of fashion in terms of contemporary black stage performers, particularly Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s evolving black feminist politics. It examines Beyoncé’s references to Baker as an inspiration for her own black feminist art and argues that they offer an opportunity to re-examine Baker’s legacy in our own contemporary moment. Using Beyoncé’s arguments about Baker as a starting point, the article examines Baker’s fashions and costumes and argues that she used them to manipulate her relationship to the models of white supremacy that attempted to structure her identity and relationship to the public sphere. Using contemporary black feminist criticisms of respectability politics, it argues that Baker’s fashions produced a politics of disrespectability, where clothing and body worked together to carve out space for black feminist experimentation. By constantly changing the terms through which her audiences and the public read her, Baker carved out a subjective space where she could become in relation to her clothes without restraining herself to the identity categories normatively allotted to black women.     

An echo in France of the British women’s suffrage campaign

ABSTRACT

The reputation of the suffragettes and the Pankhurst family in France was often considered to be too militant for the French journal La Française. This feminist journal praised the suffragettes whilst keeping a distance from such ‘trouble-makers’. This was a complex acceptance. In particular, from 1912, when some suffragettes engaged in violent tactics, the journal began calling for non-violent actions. After the Representation of the People Act was passed in 1918, La Francaise waited ten months to rejoice in this news. Now it began to suggest that British women were showing French women how to win their own enfranchisement, which was not granted until 1944. A few weeks before the 1928 Equal Franchise Act, the journal praised more and more Emmeline Pankhurst's radical spirit. This article suggests that the British suffragette movement had an influence on the women’s suffrage campaign in France although often in complex and contradictory ways.     

Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism

“Spaces of self-consciousness” examines three environments created by the Italian artist Carla Accardi in light of an emerging feminist politics. Though better known as a painter, Accardi created these three-dimensional works during an era of political and social upheaval in which her own commitment to the Italian feminist movement began to take shape. Her environments were deeply imbricated both with her own experience of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, as well as with radical design proposals that rejected the current state of civilization. This article examines how these environments functioned as prototypes of the transient, anti-institutional spaces that she would later create as co-founder of Rivolta femminile, a historic Italian feminist collective, and examines a previously obscure moment in Carla Accardi's career.     

'Deeds and Words': The Woman's Press and the Politics of Print

The political and constitutional impact of the early twentieth-century British women's suffrage movement has been the subject of extensive research since the advent of second-wave feminism, yet the broader cultural impact of the movement remains a developing scholarly area. Murray examines the role of the Woman's Press, the publishing house established in 1907 as a strategic component of the Pankhursts' influential Women's Social and Political Union. The press is located within multiple and interpenetrative analytical contexts: examined in turn are its role in the various power struggles of the WSPU and the broader British suffrage movement; its significance as an independent means of cultural production around the contested site of the suffragette; and its ambiguity as a feminist publishing house run by male pro-suffragist and lobbyist, Frederick Pethick Lawrence. The Woman's Press and its central London retail outlet figured prominently in WSPU administration as a material concern-as literature packing department, revenue raiser and recruiting centre. Yet, symbolically, the Woman's Press was also integral to the campaigning of the WSPU to an extent that has generally remained under-examined. As an independent publishing house the press constituted a vital conduit guaranteeing the entry of suffrage arguments into public discourse, and a crucial tool for appropriating and refashioning the contested image of the suffragette in the wider politico-cultural landscape of the day. Acknowledging the significance of the Woman's Press provides both a necessary historical context for the post-1970 feminist press boom, as well as a counterpoint to the ongoing political-financial conundrums that beset its modern descendents.     

Sylvia Pankhurst's last words on christabel: an unpublished letter of February 1958

The conflict in the Edwardian suffragette movement between Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst has raised questions as to the relationship between the two sisters in later life. To throw light on this question the author in 2001 published in Women's History Review the text of twelve letters written from 1953, when the correspondence began, to 1957, when it ended some six months before Christabel's death. This correspondence may be supplemented by a recently discovered brief assessment of her sister written by the author's mother in February 1958, in reply to a letter of condolence sent by his parents-in-law on the occasion of Christabel's death.     

Woman to Woman: Australian Feminists’ Embrace of Radio Broadcasting, 1930s–1950s

This article demonstrates the crucial importance of the radio medium in the post-suffrage era as a space in which women could expand their sphere of influence and enact their responsibilities as citizens. It challenges previous scholarship which has argued that during the early decades of radio women were confined to the world of the everyday and the domestic. In the interwar years, Australian feminist organisations were quick to take advantage of the still-developing radio medium, which they used to publicise their activities to mass audiences. One such organisation was the United Associations (UA), founded in Sydney in 1929 by Jessie Street and Linda Littlejohn. Perth feminist Irene Greenwood was introduced to radio broadcasting as a member of the UA in the 1930s, and she later drew on these media skills and her extensive feminist networks to create her own innovative and interactive radio program in Western Australia, Woman to Woman (1948–1954). Correspondence between Greenwood and her audience shows that the program provided women from diverse backgrounds with the opportunity to engage publicly with significant political debates, to create a new imagined community of listeners, to communicate across geographical and class boundaries, and to become media producers themselves.     

A footnote in history? Mary Gawthorpe,Sylvia Pankhurst,the suffragette movement and the writing of suffragette history[1]

In 1931, the Suffragette Fellowship invited several ex-suffragettes to contribute biographical statements and material to their archive to create a ‘Book of Suffragette Prisoners’ which would introduce the women who had been to prison in pursuit of the vote. In response, the suffragette Mary Gawthorpe, a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) committee between 1906 and 1911, deposited a series of testimonies describing her political activity beyond the WSPU. Gawthorpe's actions were partly prompted by her recent representation in Sylvia Pankhurst's text The Suffragette Movement which dismissed her as having ‘emigrated to America, [taken] up journalism and married’. This article draws on material from Mary Gawthorpe's papers, recently deposited in the Tamiment Library, New York, to investigate Gawthorpe's response to Pankhurst's text. From this perspective, it considers some of the circumstances which provoke autobiographical responses to history.     

Marketing edwardian feminism: Dora Marsden,votes for women and the freewoman

Although Dora Marsden had resigned from the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and repudiated the principles of the women's suffrage movement by the time she founded The Freewoman in 1911, she recognised the marketing potential of her suffragette persona. Thus, despite envisioning her journal as a post-suffragist ‘little magazine’, she used her status as a famed WSPU organiser prior to The Freewoman's publication to garner suffragette subscribers and advertisements for women's goods and services. After The Freewoman's debut, Marsden lost most of her original advertisers and subscribers, many of whom accused the editor of having misled them as to the nature of her journal. The author argues that Marsden's rejection of the journalistic model provided by the mainstream suffrage press and willingness to allow The Freewoman to slide into bankruptcy signalled a strategic bid for the ‘cultural capital’ that accrues to writers who forego mass readerships in order to gain avant-garde reputations     

Love and Marriage: Ellen Key and Hiratsuka Raichō Explore Alternatives

This article provides a case study of how maternal feminist ideas traveled across national and cultural boundaries in the early twentieth century. It briefly examines Swedish feminist Ellen Key's (1849–1926) ideas on love, marriage, and motherhood and then explores the impact these ideas had on Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971). Encountering Key's writings early in her career had a lasting impact on Raichō's thought, writing, and activism. It also shows how Raichō drew on the modern, universal aspects of Key's thought to promote women's rights and influence in an increasingly nationalistic Japan. The condition of all development is, not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action. —Ellen Key, Love and Marriage 3.     

Ideology and feminism: Why the suffragettes were ‘wild women’

Opposition to women's suffrage from the 1860s to 1914 was structural and ideological. The dominant ideology concerning women's position was articulated more clearly as the feminist movement mobilized. Ideological opposition to feminism in general and the women's suffrage movement in particular operated on the basis of ideas of ‘natural’ womanhood against which feminist activity was frequently viewed as deviance. Female suffrage speakers were caricatured as ‘unwomanly’, and subjected to a subtle process of ‘role stripping’. Militant activity by the suffragette movement after 1905 invoked a wider range of social control agents, but the particular ideological opposition to feminism continued to be important.     

Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition with a Difference

Abstract

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.     

Sisters in a Fashion: Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth, two US born feminists who came to Australia during two key moments in feminist history, as a way of thinking about the relationship between feminists and fashion. Ansara arrived in Sydney in 1969 carrying women’s liberation literature in her suitcase; she became an important generative figure in the Australia’s women’s liberation movement, particularly as an independent filmmaker and proponent of consciousness raising. Welteroth arrived in 2017 to speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival during a period of international resurgence of feminist activism. She brought with her images of women of colour she had featured in Teen Vogue and she invoked second wave consciousness raising, albeit in a remodelled, corporate-led form when she talked about the title’s plans to bring young girls around kitchen tables to ‘solve’ political problems. The article uses comments both women have made in relation to fashion and beauty, close readings of their works, and a discussion of their respective feminist milieus to suggest a trajectory of feminism’s relationship to the fashion industry that appears to have changed from a position of opposition to one of open embrace. It also complicates this reading by pointing to the resonances between these women of different feminist eras.     

Never late: Unwelcome desires and diasporas in Chavela Vargas’ last works

Theodor Adorno, and Edward Said after him, theorized late style as a discrepant musical orientation at odds with what is expected, desired, or current. Late work is musical work formulated by an older subject that refuses to retire quietly and with docility. While Adorno and Said discuss Classical-period music, the author is interested in engaging this concept in thinking about the recalcitrant rancheras and boleros of a lesbian, migrant, and aged musical performer of the early twenty-first century, Chavela Vargas (1919–2012). She examines a couple of Vargas’ last works, Cupaima (2006) and ¡Por mi |Culpa! (2010), paying particular attention to how her aesthetic choices continue to de-form the classic repertoire of rancheras and boleros. The entwining of beloved, familiar lyrics and melodies with details that recall invisible and hyper-visible subjects, namely migrants and indigenous communities, result in unexpected, repellent musicality. Inspired by feminist and queer theory, the author examines how her later body of work conveys an unbearable sonic assessment of contemporary struggles of those unwelcome, despised, and outside neo-liberal chronology.     

‘Not Simple,Not Pure’: Revisioning of Mythical Wicked Women in the Stories of Sara Maitland

The British novelist, feminist and religious thinker Sara Maitland (b.1950) is renowned for her short stories, many of which involve the rewriting of fairy tale and classical and biblical myth. This article situates Maitland's retellings within the contemporary feminist tradition of literary revisioning, but emphasises that her retelling of old tales is distinguished by a deep—and often discomforting—engagement with questions of morality. This is rooted in Maitland's political commitment and Christian faith, and is particularly evident in her treatment of mythical female evil. Her short stories take a morally ambiguous approach, paying attention to the moral and psychological complexities of the wicked stepmothers in fairy tale, gorgons and child-killers of classical myth, and temptresses of the Hebrew Bible. Maitland's feminist revisioning of mythical wicked women does not flinch from their darkness, or impose simple ethical lessons, but at the same time she is (sometimes horribly) aware of their moral significance. This article examines the portrayal of feminist theology's concept of the ‘female sin’ of passivity in Maitland's revisioning of Delilah (in Daughter of Jerusalem, 1978) and ‘Helen of Troy's Aerobics Class’ (in On Becoming A Fairy Godmother, 2003); how the crimes of mythical wicked women are retold as being motivated by revenge against men in ‘Deborah and Jael’ (Daughter of Jerusalem), ‘Siren Song’ and ‘The Swallow and the Nightingale’ (Far North and Other Dark Tales, 2008). The latter of these raises issues of women's conflicting loyalties, which is also considered in ‘The Swans’ (2008). The taboos of incest and child abuse are explored powerfully and sensitively in ‘Jocasta’ (2003) and ‘The Wicked Stepmother's Lament’ (A Book of Spells, 1987), and resistance to simplistic moralising is encapsulated in the story of a menopausal Eve, in ‘Choosing Paradise’ (2003).     

Borders,Conflict Zones,and Memory: scholarly engagements with Luisa Passerini

A substantive historiographical as well as introductory essay to this issue in honour of Passerini's important scholarship, the article highlights such themes as subjectivity and intersubjectivity; transformations in oral history and memory studies prompted by attention to such issues as the role of myth, collaboration, autobiography, and the imaginary. It documents Passerini's early reception among feminist and labour historians; the collaborations researching trauma and memory under totalitarianism; her Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, and work on love and on redefining Europe in more inclusive ways. It also situates the application of Passerini's insights by an international and multidisciplinary line-up of scholars working on diverse projects.     

Reassessing Portia: The Iconic Potential ofShakespeare's Woman Lawyer

This paper considers the adoption ofPortia, the heroine of The Merchant ofVenice, by feminist legal scholars as ametaphor for the woman lawyer. It suggests thatPortia has both captured and is captured by thefeminist legal scholar's imagination, becomingat once an idol, myth and icon. She is to somethe personification of the woman lawyer'sperceived difference, a mouthpiece for mercyand `the different voice' and to others, a shamor myth, her idolised reputation sullied, her`difference' rejected. Yet ultimately thisconstant and simultaneous idolisation andvilification of Portia threatens not only tosilence and constrain conversations about thewoman lawyer, but also to eclipse her promiseand potential. Thus in the final section of thepaper, Portia is established as an icon. Assuch her story, understood as a myth or fairytale, is seen to reveal previously unimaginedpossibilities for change, as an iconicunderstanding of Portia becomes a windowthrough which feminist legal scholars can lookonto alternative understandings of lawyeringand adjudication.     

Act Natural: Dubious Proposals in The Mill on the Floss,The Pastor’s Wife,Vera and Rebecca

Abstract

Following George Eliot, Elizabeth von Arnim showcases a male rhetoric of naturalness. Her men cultivate and punish their women when they resist naturalizing. Without denigrating the intelligence of women, von Arnim shows their unwitting complicity in their subjection. In The Pastor’s Wife (1914) and in Vera (1921), the highly literate women have read the wrong books or missed the unfriendly truths about relationships in those they have read. The husbands and lovers make shallow use of philosophical and scientific reasoning to justify their control and enforce female uniformity deemed ‘natural’. Darwin is misappropriated by the tyrannical Wemyss: evolutionary theories support his imperious dismissal of Lucy’s aunt and friends. Wemyss’s most monstrous actions suggest an atavistic patriarchal dominance like the hereditary reversion theorized by Samuel Butler as unconscious memory. Wemyss brings up the issue of England’s inheritance, and a disturbing vision dawns as the philistine and self-appointed natural man subdues Lucy. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) follows Vera’s plot, but it does not interrogate naturalness in the same way. Entrapped in her husband’s vision of a natural woman, the narrator registers Rebecca’s wild transgressiveness as more powerful and universal than her own tamed naturalness.