Eileen Power's Asian journey, 1920-21: history,narrative, and subjectivity

Abstract

This article analyses the travel writings of the British medieval historian, Eileen Power (1889-1940), during her year-long journey around the world in 1920-21 as the first and only female awarded a travel fellowship administered by the Trustees of the University of London in the years following the First World War. Drawing upon a comparative reading of her official Report to the Trustees and her private diary record of her ‘Tour du Monde’, we examine the various dimensions of subjectivity and identity evident in her narrative of the journey, interrogating the difference which gender makes in the relationship of European travellers to empire. In addition, we examine how the narrative of her journey and subsequent historical narratives were part of those Orientalist forces/discourses which produced and were produced by the West's relationship to the East in the first half of the twentieth century.     

Elspeth Huxley: gender,empire and narratives of nation, 1935-64

Abstract

This article explores the impact of empire on narratives of the British nation during a period of decline of British colonial rule through a study of Elspeth Huxley's successive reworkings of such narratives between 1935 and 1964. It sets Huxley's work in the context of post-1945 anxieties about national decline and their connections with the loss of imperial power, and looks at the difficulties surrounding the articulation of national identity as virile and masculine in post-imperial Britain. Although anxieties about masculinities were often addressed through a misogynistic discourse which showed women emasculating men, Huxley's work suggests the significance of a counter-theme. It indicates not only her own attachment to an imperial identity but also the ways in which this continued to be articulated in the midtwentieth century as an identity with a wide appeal to a metropolitan audience, and one through which women could be incorporated into the story of nation. In exploring the terms of this incorporation, the article considers the opportunities open to women to claim to embody exemplary national qualities through the figure of the doughty, intrepid, imperial female pioneer, and the particular resonance and appeal this figure acquired in the context of the end of empire.     

Imagined more than women: lesbians as hermaphrodites, 1671-1766

In texts circulating in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women who had sex with women were often denounced, mocked, and exiled from womanhood; one of the most common strategies was to call them hermaphrodites. There was constant slippage between concepts of sexual deviance at this time, but two ideas in particular – lesbian desire and hermaphroditical anatomy – became tightly bound into the figure of the tribade, a woman whose phallic ‘member’ (whether a prolapsed vagina or an enlarged clitoris) was thought to enable her to have penetrative intercourse with women. This essay follows the hermaphroditical tribade through children's compendia, gynaecological handbooks, neoclassical satires, love poems and anti-masturbation treatises. Though the writers were generally hostile, their debates over anatomy and motivation, and the tonal ambiguities in their treatment of these freakish heroines, make these texts rich sources for lesbian history.     

Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation

This article re-evaluates the widely held view that Soviet peasants responded only or predominantly with resistance to collectivization and work in Soviet collective farms. It analyses key examples of the evidence for this 'resistance interpretation' to show that the evidence is not representative of most peasants' actions. It presents new evidence and analysis to show that peasant responses cannot be reduced to resistance, that more often they adapted to the new system, and that they worked hard within the system to overcome famines.     

Fashioning Readers: The avant garde and British Vogue , 1920-9

Mahood explores both the work of modern writers and work about modern writers as published in British Vogue during the 1920s. She demonstrates how a familiarity with trends in modern literature was presented as but one of the de rigeueur activities of the modern woman au fait with contemporary tastes. In doing so, the role of non-literary, or non-specialist, magazines in contributing to the rise of a common reader familiar with the practitioners and practices of modernist art is examined. Furthermore, she shows how the perceived 'restricted' value (or appeal) of modernism, in addition to the movement's palpable concern with modernity, became the very means by which modernism entered into the literary and cultural mainstream during the 1920s.     

The forgotten ‘mateys’: women workers in Portsmouth Dockyard,England, 1939-45

Abstract

This paper is based on nearly 30 interviews with women who worked in Portsmouth Dockyard before and during the Second World War. Their testimonies show that women experienced their wartime work in different ways, with attitudes that were to impinge on employment relations, on calls for equal pay and on the provision of facilities to relieve their domestic responsibilities. Government response to these problems reveal the duality of policy decisions and the difficulties of balancing the need for labour with dominant ideals about the cultural position of women. Shifts in employment practices in wartime conditions highlight the debates around the impact of wartime work on gender divisions in the workplace and perceptions of female paid employment by both men and women at that time.