‘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).     

Body and Self: learning to be modern in 1920s–1930s Britain

Observing the divergent tracks taken by historians of the ‘modern self’ and those of the ‘modern body’ the article focuses on health and fitness movements in Britain, c.1920s–1930s. Asking whether there is a place for the body in the history of women performing ‘the self’ in this context, the article suggests a way in which contemporaries found a way to have a ‘self’ in the body. Contemporary notions of the body emphasised its interdependence with ‘the mind’, health and happiness being functions of each other. In the language of health and beauty was a language of inner vitality and outer radiance, a modern formulation of the individual as a ‘self’ equipped to embrace the exciting but uncertain possibilities of the ‘modern world’. Popular print culture on ‘healthy living’, reports by the BMA and the National Fitness Council are considered along with more extensive discussion of the Women's League for Health and Beauty founded in 1930 by Mollie Bagot Stack and inherited by her daughter, Prunella, ‘Britain's Perfect Girl’, in 1935.     

Understanding Women in Scotland

This article explores obstacles to understanding the history and contemporary experiences of women in Scotland, and to the development of feminist research in Scotland. It is argued that explanations which invoke Scottish male chauvinism and misogyny alone are insufficient, and that the marginalization of women in Scotland is produced both by male domination within Scotland, and by English cultural and political hegemony within the UK. The article comments on the relationship of the concept of ‘Britishness’ to that of ‘Scottishness’ (and other identities within the UK) and illustrates how the frequent confusion of ‘British’ with ‘English’ serves to obscure Scottish experience. It is also argued that the place of Scotland within the British state has led to the creation of an institutional framework that disadvantages women, and a system of government that excludes women. This implies that feminist debates on the state in Britain require a specific focus on the form of the British state, and in the context of constitutional change in particular this is important for the development of future strategies. It is argued that the double marginalization of women in Scotland is not just a problem in relation to the development of feminist research, but is also a political problem in that it contributes to a degree of alienation from feminism in England. The article concludes by arguing for the necessity of recognition of difference, but also for dialogue, as the basis for feminist alliances in different parts of the UK.     

‘Getting Out and Getting Away’: Women's Narratives of Class Mobility

This article is concerned with the ways in which women narrate a move from a ‘working-class’ position to a position marked (in however fragmentary and complex a way) as ‘middle class’. While such a move might be seen in terms of a straightforward escape from a disadvantaged social position, I argue here that what has to be analysed is the pain and the sense of estrangement associated with this class movement.Drawing on the class narratives of a group of seven white British women, the article uses Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic capital and habitus to explore the cultural and symbolic configurations of class. These configurations may be inscribed into the self, so that the self, itself, is class marked. Since working-class selves are frequently marked in pathological terms, this raises particular difficulties for the idea of an ‘escape’ from such a position. Class in this sense is embedded in people's history and so cannot be so easily ‘escaped’. The usual conventions of life-narratives – in which the self remains the same entity from birth to death and later events are a culmination of earlier ones – are also disrupted in this case.But if a working-class position is marked as pathological, so too is taking on the markers of middle-class existence. To do so is not only to risk ‘getting it wrong’, but it is also to risk the scorn attached to ‘pretentiousness’. There is a particular jeopardy here for women, since it is women who have been especially associated with desires for artefacts associated with bourgeois existence. The article argues for a focus for classed desires and class envy, not in pathological terms, but in terms of a coherent response to political and social exclusions.     

The Feminist Art of Self-Education

Abstract

Sociologist Elizabeth Long has charted the emergence of women’s reading groups in nineteenth-century America. ‘The women who founded literary clubs’, Long (2004, 337) tells us, ‘were aflame with the then revolutionary desire for education and self-development, which they called “self-culture”.’ Comparable aspirations continued to fuel a drive amongst women to organize together within reading and publishing groups, usually outside of official institutions, well into the twentieth century. This ‘revolutionary desire’ for self-education has also been evident in the UK women’s art and art history movement, although it has not been addressed in thorough detail. This article therefore seeks to situate an overlooked history of artistic reading and publishing communities in relation to an established body of theory in literary and cultural studies. These theoretical materials will illuminate the importance that reading and self-education (either in person or as part of a periodical network) had in establishing solidarity, and generating debate, within a flourishing art and art history movement. The second half of this article focuses on a specific case study. FAN: Feminist Art News (1980–1993) was an independent, grassroots publication that grew out of the Women Artists’ Newsletter in London. Temporary editorial collectives published themed issues on a quarterly basis. This article contends that it is no coincidence the subject of art education formed the focus of the periodical’s first issue, as well as a subsequent issue four years later. This indicates the significance of a reflexive auto-didacticism to second-wave feminism, as well as gesturing towards the long history of ‘education and self-improvement’ that has fuelled women’s reading and study groups since the nineteenth century.     

Giving Afghan Women a Voice: women's writing in Afghanistan

This article considers how far women's rights have improved in Afghanistan since the intervention by the international community in 2001. It examines this question through the author's experience of working with an Afghan women's writing group. It looks at the tension between allowing Afghan women to voice their experiences, and the danger of their writing embracing depictions of the female as ‘victim’. It concludes that while depictions of Afghan womanhood may appear to promote ‘negative’ images, the women themselves offer positive role models.     

Women Worthies and Feminist Argument in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The practice of celebrating exemplary women has had a hallowed if contested place in the history of feminism, but this essay argues that recent scholarship has not recognized just how profound a role the discourse of women worthies has played in the feminist thought of eighteenth-century Britain. By examining several major texts, including Mary Astell's writings and the ‘Sophia’ tracts, this analysis demonstrates the continuity and resilience of this discourse across the length of the eighteenth century. The female worthies managed to survive the challenge of newer feminist idioms such as Cartesianism, Scottish four-stage theory, and natural rights philosophy, and in fact appeared alongside them in the very same texts. Even when Mary Wollstonecraft dismissed the worthies, her colleagues restored them to debates over ‘the rights of woman’.     

Why Women Don’t Win Literary Awards: The Saltire Society Literary Awards and Implicit Stereotyping

The purpose of this analysis is to consider the Saltire Society’s Book of the Year and First Book of the Year Awards in relation to wider issues pertaining to media representations of Scottish literary and publishing culture. Through a statistical analysis of the Society’s Book of the Year and First Book of the Year shortlists and winners between 1988 and 2014, this examination shows the extent to which the Society’s Literary Awards reflect, as opposed to subvert, historic and existing gender imbalances in Scottish literary and publishing culture. Indeed, despite critics arguing that there was a change in tide in the late 1980s and early 1990s regarding the balance in gender representation in Scottish literature, this analysis suggests that Scotland’s book award culture, and in turn, literary culture more widely, remains dominated by men. Perceptions of the apparent ‘balancing’ of the gender disparity in Scottish writing do not align with the statistics discussed here, a fact further evidence by misconceptions held by members of the Society’s own Literary Awards judging panels. Accordingly, this article contends that such inconsistencies lend credence to the argument that the Society’s judges have participated in implicit stereotyping based upon culturally pervasive stereotypes’ that Scottish women writers play a ‘minor’ role in Scottish literary and publishing culture.     

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.     

blogging solo: new media, ‘old’ politics

This article focuses on the blogosphere as an oppositional field where the meanings around contemporary Western women's singlehood are contested, negotiated and rewritten. In contrast to dominant narratives in which single women are pathologised, in the blogs by, for, and about single women analysed here, writers aim to refigure women's singleness as well as providing resources, support and a textual community where others can intervene and contribute to the re-valuation of single women. These blogs also function as alternative forms of knowledge, seeking to (re)legitimise women's singleness and to trouble their aberrance and social liminality. Rather than only considering the form in isolation from its content, this article analyses the discourses deployed by bloggers and within blogs and how women bloggers publicly perform their very singleness as part of a personal and political strategy of re-signification. In this way, while cautious not to overestimate the democratic potentialities of the so-called blogosphere, it underscores the important cultural – and indeed political – work being undertaken by single women therein. Moreover, by demonstrating how these blogs use discursive tactics commonly associated with feminism's second-wave – women's consciousness-raising; identity politics; deploying and reiterating the famous feminist dictum: ‘the personal is political’; naming discrimination; and empathy and community-building – it argues that they are using so-called ‘new’ media for what is now problematically believed to be ‘old’ (feminist) politics.     

‘inebriates’, ‘heathens’, templars and suffragists: Scotland and imperial feminism c. 1870-1914

This article examines the extent to which the British Empire was central to the women's suffrage debate within the Scottish Christian Union. This analysis follows two trends in the historiography of Britain and of women's suffrage: an integration of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘imperial’ in the historiography of Britain; and a recognition of internationalism within women's suffrage. This discussion points to regional diversity within Great Britain and to the influence of imperialism and evangelicalism on women's activism in the so-called Celtic fringe. In so doing, this article aims to contribute to a more complex representation of middle-class women's participation in Britain's temperance and women's suffrage movements.     

Faith,Fetes and Domesticity in Australia

To feminists in the 1970s the fete symbolised women’s marginalisation in church and society but in the nineteenth century its respectability was far from assured. This article uses the shifting history of the fete and other forms of women’s fund‐raising over the years between the 1880s and the 1970s to examine changes in ‘ordinary’ women’s subjective and practical experiences of domesticity. It shows how women used the fete to carve out a place for themselves on the borders of the public and private spheres and, in the process, ‘created and sustained communities’; how churchmen overcame their reluctance to allowing women into the public gaze because of the church’s financial need and how, as women came to envision a greater role for themselves in the church from the early twentieth century, a strand of resistance to being ‘used’ as fund‐raisers emerged. The history of women’s fund‐raising for the church offers insights into the under‐researched area of women and domesticity.     

Showdown at Nissan: the 1989 campaign to organize Nissan in Smyrna,Tennessee, and the rise of the transplant sector

In July 1989, workers at Nissan’s plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, voted 1622 to 711 against being represented by the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW). At the time, many reporters saw the well-publicized Nissan vote – dubbed a ‘showdown’ by the New York Times – as a defining moment in modern labor history. The election deserves further exploration, especially as it played a key role in establishing the non-union ‘transplant’ sector. UAW leaders blamed the Smyrna loss on Nissan’s anti-union tactics, while the company claimed that workers did not need a union because they were already well paid (although this was largely due to the UAW’s presence). This article is the first to provide a detailed analysis that draws on the union’s records of the campaign, as well as many other sources. While the factors cited publicly were important, the article demonstrates that there were additional reasons for the union’s defeat, including internal divisions, unanticipated staffing problems, and the logistical challenge of organizing such a big – and new – facility. Although Nissan workers had many grievances, the company also fostered loyalty by not laying off workers, and by expanding the plant. Finally, it secured a high level of community support, and drew off the conservative political climate of the era.     

Nothing Special? Propaganda and Women's Roles in Late First World War Britain

Women's roles and work did not dramatically change during the First World War; their contributions as citizens simply received greater recognition. This article explores women's roles as subjects, objects and producers of National War Aims Committee propaganda in Britain during 1917–18. It examines differing representations of, and outlines the production of, ‘special’ propaganda for women, discussing women's interactions with and employment by the Committee. Finally, it analyses a series of articles which mixed patriotic rhetoric, practical domestic tips and observations on women's ‘new’ work. Far from uncritically accepting their ‘special’, separate place, the evidence suggests that women, as both objects and producers of propaganda, engaged with it on their own terms as British citizens.     

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.     

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.     

Women as Active Citizens: Glasgow and Edinburgh c.1918–1939

This article examines evidence of active political engagement by women in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the inter-war years of the twentieth century. While discussing the wider context of women's political activities in this period, in terms of party politics and the range of women's organisations in existence, it focuses in particular on Women Citizens’ Associations, Societies for Equal Citizenship and Co-operative Women's Guild branches. Comparing interventions by such women's organisations in the two cities around the selected themes of political representation, housing, ‘moral and social hygiene’, and contraception, the article demonstrates that women's organisations participated in public debates and campaigns to advance what they perceived as women's interests. Temporary alliances around issues such as the regulation of prostitution and provision of contraceptive advice brought together a range of women's organisations, but class differences in perspectives became increasingly apparent in this period, particularly in Glasgow. The issues addressed by women's organisations covered the spectrum of ‘equal rights’ and ‘welfare feminism’, although they did not necessarily identify as feminist. Common to all organisations, however, was a commitment to active citizenship, with women becoming a recognised part of local political networks in this period, although they remained poorly represented in parliament.     

Looking for Lela Simone: Singin’ in the Rain and microhistories of women’s sound work behind the scenes and below-the-line in Classical Hollywood Cinema

ABSTRACT

Despite her contribution to some of classical Hollywood’s most renowned musicals, the largely unknown Lela Simone exemplifies one of Hollywood’s ‘anonymous movie workers’ (Leo Rosten) working in the shadows of film history. As music co-ordinator for MGM’s Arthur Freed Unit (1944–1957), Simone’s exacting technical supervision of sound and music recording and post-production ensured films such as The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Gigi (1958) achieved perfect synchronisation and polished production values. Drawing on archival sources this article engages with the methodological and conceptual challenges of making visible the labour of women, like Simone, working below-the-line in technical roles. Taking Simone’s work on sound and music in the iconic ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ number as a case study, the article illustrates how a micro-historical focus can bring a previously invisible realm of women’s labour, and agency, into view.     

Surpassing the word: Aileen Wuornos

This article explores the dynamics of Richard Move's drag performance of the late Martha Graham. Drag dance is remarkably self-aware as historiography, and it employs a rhetoric of bodies becoming other bodies: channeling, paying homage, re-embodying, reliving, being possessed. This article argues that drag dance has a historical project for dance history; specifically, that drag bodies can become a new medium through which aesthetic/kinetic histories are transmitted. In the case of Richard Move, the exaggeration and excess of the ageing Martha Graham become modalities that align with the ‘wrongness’ of his body. This is drag dance as a strategy of re-embodiment after the original body has been lost, and Richard Move presents his performance as a ‘haunting,’ much like the feeling Martha Graham describes as the result of a dancer's “first death,” when she watches someone else dance a role she had originated. Ballets like Graham's Lamentation and Cave of the Heart give Move the opportunity to portray Graham's struggle to continue to dance after this “first death,” using drag as a strategy to show up the eerie perfection of voice against the hollowness of the ageing dancer's body. Combining vaudeville and séance, moving from the restless gay “underworld” of the Meatpacking District to the right to presume himself the heir to the mother of modern dance, Richard Move first embodies and then moves beyond Susan Sontag's camp “etc etc” of Graham's self-performance.     

Ouch! Western Feminists' ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Prostitute’

‘Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking.The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have con.gured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘traficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world traficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘traficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation.