Dr Ivy Williams: inside yet outside

ABSTRACT

Dr Ivy Williams was the first woman to be called to the Bar of England and Wales. Despite this, she never took up the practice of law and after this historic moment Dr Williams returned to her life as a legal academic. This article examines Dr Williams’ journey in legal life, aiming to uncover her motivations for becoming admitted and her subsequent turning away from life at the Bar. Prior to her admission, Dr Williams had suggested that women might practise as ‘outside lawyers’. With that in mind, this article will consider Dr Williams’ scholarship and her contribution to legal academia and seek to answer whether this path can be seen as an alternative legacy to the women in law.     

“I have never met the normal woman”: Stella Browne and the politics of womanhood

Abstract

F. W. Stella Browne (1880–1995) and her views on female sexuality have been much discussed of recent years. These discussions have tended to rely on a limited number of her copious (if often hard-to-find) writings, and have also failed to take into account where Stella, as an individual woman, was coming from. In the light of ongoing researches into her life and career, this article locates her writings in her life of activism in a wide variety of causes. It argues that her opinions about women's needs do not conform to a simplistic model of a ‘New’ feminism of difference, and that her relationship to the thought of contemporary male sexologists has been presented in a one-dimensional and misleading way. Her tripartite commitment to feminism, socialism, and individualism is illustrated, drawing on a wide range of her writings and statements between 1912 and 1937. In her crusade to celebrate and liberate the “variety and variability of women” Stella sought constantly to overthrow concepts of a monolithic female nature as well as to reject the Double Moral Standard: ‘normality’ to her was an instrument for the oppression of women. Consideration is also given to the wider influence of her ideas.     

Thwarted ambitions: the biography of Auvergne Doherty,an aspiring female barrister

ABSTRACT

Auvergne Doherty was the first woman from the Commonwealth to be admitted and called to the Bar of England and Wales.?In the first part of this article, Doherty's family background, education, legal training, and post-Bar experiences are set out. The second part analyses her profile compared with the other women called to the Bar in 1922 and considers why Doherty may not have gone on to practise as a barrister. This article argues that Doherty’s biography is important because it evidences how vital it was to have the necessary financial means and networks to be able to forget a career at the Bar. It was precisely the lack of these factors that impeded Doherty to fulfil her career as a barrister.     

Sybil Campbell,first woman judge and supporter of higher education for women

ABSTRACT

Sybil Campbell was appointed a Metropolitan stipendiary magistrate in 1945, the first woman to become a full-time judge in the courts of England and Wales. She sat for 16 years, at Tower Bridge Magistrates’ Court, where she met with a great deal of opprobrium from the national and local press, trade unionists and individuals, much of it directed to the fact that she was a woman dispensing justice, with some severity, in a working-class community. She weathered the criticism with indifference and continued until her retirement, in 1961. Her pioneering example, however, did not encourage the appointment of other women to a judicial role until the appointment of Elizabeth Lane as a county court judge in 1962. This article examines her judicial career and her work for the British Federation of University Women, of which she was Honorary Secretary and its honorary vice-president.     

Black Feminist Voices in Politics

Abstract

Nearly 80 years after they gained entry to the legal profession in England women remain greatly underrepresented in the judiciary. This article examines the career of Sybil Campbell, England's first full-time woman judge. It explores the criticisms of her appointment as stipendiary magistrate at Tower Bridge in 1945 and the press campaign against her severe sentences which followed. It concludes that, while she was not esteemed a success by the authorities, the main reason for the long gap before the appointment of the next female judge (in 1962) was the control of practically all appointments     

Afterword: challenging women in the British professions

ABSTRACT

Places the first women lawyers in the context of the experiences of women in other professions in Britain as their access gradually grew, also within the wider history of women and women’s movements, including for the vote, in the time period covered by these articles. It examines the challenges women faced in all professions and in the wider world, especially of sexist discrimination, and how they themselves challenged them, increasingly with professional support from women lawyers. It assesses the changes they achieved and failed to achieve, and the obstacles.     

‘We must give them an education,large, liberal and comprehensive’. Catherine Vale Whitwell: teacher,artist, author,feminist and Owenite communitarian

This article was provoked by the author’s conviction that its subject was a great deal more significant than a marginalised woman on the fringes of Owenism, the reformist movement promoted by Robert Owen during the early nineteenth century. It examines the life of Catherine Whitwell, formally identified in studies of Owen and in histories of education as teacher cum artist in the school at New Lanark, Owen’s factory community in Scotland, and also one of several women writers on astronomy. Otherwise little was known of her activities or the contexts in which they occurred. There are many gaps in the record and her footprint is often illusive, but much new information in widely dispersed archives, periodicals, digitised newspapers and secondary sources helps cast further light on her background, a career embracing work as proprietor of girls’ schools, author of works on astronomy and mathematics, promoter of sciences for women, advocate of women’s education, artist and communitarian. The context of Whitwell’s work is reviewed with reference to recent relevant literature and followed by a case study explaining her association with Owen, speculating on her role in visualising his plans for communities of co-operation designed to relieve distress and create greater equality, then describing her teaching career both at New Lanark and later at Orbiston, the first British Owenite community near Glasgow. The study concludes with a brief review of her post-Owen work running girls’ schools and an assessment of her role in the development of education and disseminating knowledge, particularly for young middle class women and working class children in the first half of the nineteenth century.     

Political Life in the Shadows: the post suffrage political career of S. Margery Fry (1874–1958)

Drawing upon research on the working life of the penal reformer and educationalist S. Margery Fry (1874–1958) and her role as a policy-maker, this article argues that there were alternative ways in which women could participate in post-suffrage political culture, other than through elected office or party politics. The article positions Margery Fry both as a feminist and a public intellectual and argues that the First World War and the granting of women's suffrage allowed a step change to take place in Fry's career, taking her from a regional political stage to a national and international one. It also contends that she was able to wield considerable power ‘in the shadows’ as a policy advisor.     

Helena Normanton: legal crusader or myth Maker? ‘[S]urely the one thing history teaches us is that we cannot generalise,or even worse,categorise individual humans into saints and sinners,or heroes and villains’

ABSTRACT

Helena Normanton aspired to become a lawyer at a time when women were prohibited from entering the legal profession. This aspiration became a reality when, on 24 December 1919, she became the first woman to be admitted to an institution of the legal profession after the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, thus enshrining her place in legal history. Her achievement was, without doubt, remarkable. She has become the ‘face’ of women’s entry to the legal profession, but what was her contribution to the opening the legal profession to women? How should history remember her? This article will examine her role in this history and compare it to her own narrative. Further it will consider how we reconcile her trailblazing challenge to the male exclusivity of the Bar with the difficulties her behaviour often presents to us. Helena Normanton: saint or sinner? And does it matter?     

Lydia Becker's ‘school for science’: a challenge to domesticity

Lydia Becker (1827-1890) is known as a leader of the Women's Suffrage Movement but little is known about her work to include women and girls in science. Before her energy was channelled into politics, she aimed to have a scientific career. Mid-Victorian Britain was a period in which women's intellect and potential were widely debated, and in which the dominant ideology was that their primary role in life was that of wife and mother. Science was widely regarded as a ‘masculine’ subject which women were deliberately discouraged from studying. The author concentrates on the two main areas in which important contributions were made, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Manchester School Board     

Eleanor Roosevelt and radio in early Cold War France

ABSTRACT

The American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a prolific writer, public speaker and broadcaster. She appeared on her own radio programs in the 1930s, 40s and 50s and those of others, both in the US and abroad. In many of her daily newspaper columns over the years, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke of the importance of international radio and seemed to suggest there was a unique role for the medium as a way to reach ordinary men and women. Of the Voice of America, she said it played a vital role in spreading understanding of the American way of life and American democracy. This paper looks at American broadcasting to France in the early Cold War and considers two broadcasts Mrs. Roosevelt made while in France with the United Nations: a 1948 episode of the program Changement de Decors and a series of weekly talks about the UN for the French service in 1951–52.     

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.     

‘I am … but a pawn in your chess board’: letters,self-presentation,and the making of a lady missionary's career

This article explores the epistolary exchanges of a female medical missionary, Mary Ann ‘May’ Harriet Allen, who served with the British Anglican Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in Zanzibar between 1875 and 1882. In particular, it focuses on two sets of letters—the first is set of letters Allen wrote to her father, which he subsequently published in their local newspaper. The second set comprises letters Allen exchanged with her colleagues at the mission. In the first set of letters, Allen cast herself as the protagonist in an African drama typical of Victorian-era missionary publications, a move that obscured the struggles that Allen was facing in her work on Zanzibar, and about which she wrote in letters to her colleagues. Reading these letters against one another offers insight into the techniques of self-actualization available to women in the nineteenth-century mission field, the strategies some women employed to negotiate the contemporary evangelical and patriarchal hierarchies, and into the interior life of a British ‘lady missionary’ navigating her career in the African mission field.     

The Double Play of Mirrors: Anna Kavan,Autobiography and Self-Portraiture

Abstract

Better known as the author of complex visionary novels of female experience, it is important to note that Anna Kavan was not only a writer, but also an artist, painting throughout her adult life in tandem with her writing. This article considers the nature of the relationship between her literary life and her artistic life, and what her novels tell us about her relationship to the cultivation of her self-image. Famously destroying her personal archive, shirking notable correspondents and recapitulating a mental disquiet across many of her paintings and prose works, it is of little surprise that Kavan’s enigmatic presence often figures more prominently than serious discussion of her literary and artistic achievements. How did this mercurial relationship to identity shape the ways in which Kavan explored her self-image?     

Testimonies in Light: Nan Goldin: Devil's Playground

Nan Goldin: Devil's Playground, recently shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, represents the first retrospective in the United Kingdom for this American photographer who has lived, and photographed, internationally. Renowned for her photographs of the intimate lives of her friends-herself and the queer and drugs/bohemian communities-Goldin has taken a startling aesthetic/pictorial turn in her new photography. Prosser evaluates Goldin's career and the changes in it, and considers where her photography leaves the documentary tradition from which she arose. Charting in particular a trajectory towards light in her oeuvre, and working with the notion of testimony rather than documentary, Prosser suggests that Goldin has moved from an empathetic but critical representation of gender roles to a spiritual, accepting and visionary perspective on life and loss. His readings of photographs are focused on those from the exhibition and the curating of the exhibition is considered.     

‘We who strive for the foundation of a principle’: feminism and suffrage in the biography of Bessie Parkes Belloc

ABSTRACT

Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Belloc, 1829–1925) was a central figure in British women’s rights activism during the 1850s and 1860s. She was founding editor of the feminist English Woman’s Journal and one of the organisers of the pioneering 1866 petition for women’s suffrage. She lived long enough to witness some women gaining the vote in 1918, by which time her children, Marie Belloc Lowndes and Hilaire Belloc, were themselves public figures who had taken up opposing positions on women’s suffrage. This article takes as its starting point 1866, a pivotal moment in nineteenth-century agitation for women’s suffrage and in Parkes Belloc’s individual biography, before moving to a longer view of her feminist life before and after this date. It demonstrates the value of a biographical approach to exploring the diversity of perspectives and experiences of women within first-wave feminism and the suffrage movement.     

‘This fair lady,in her laces’: Margaret Howie Strang Hall,the first woman in Scotland to try to become a lawyer

ABSTRACT

Margaret Howie Strang Hall was the first woman in Scotland, and the youngest woman in the UK, to try to become a lawyer through the same formal process open to her male contemporaries. This examination of Hall’s attempt aims to set it in context, using contemporary court documents and newspaper reports, while expanding on what is known of her life. Hall’s story is an important one in the struggle for equal professional opportunities and her experience in the Scottish legal system provides a counterpoint to the better-known English examples.