Takamure Itsue: The first historian of Japanese women

Takamure Itsue was born in a small mountain village on the southern island of Kyushu. Cherished by her parents as a child given by Kannon Buddha, she was educated to be a teacher. Her stormy marriage to Hashimoto Kenzo paralleled her career as a poet, writer, and anarchist. Through a spiritual crisis she came to the decision to study the history of Japanese women. Exchanging a pledge with her husband who promised to support her in every way possible, she engaged in the task of identifying the path that Japanese women had taken. From the day in 1931 when she was 37, till the day she died, she literally dedicated herself to this goal by never leaving her study. Her findings about the matriarchal tradition of Japan were revolutionary and provided a unique historical framework for feminists of the 60s and 70s as well as an invaluable legacy for historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. Both because of her scholarly achievements and the poignant relationship she wove with her husband. Takamure Itsue remains a star that Japanese women seek in the dark sky.     

Captivity,Confrontation, and Self‐Empowerment: identity in Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry

In modern Iranian literature, Forugh Farrokhzad, undoubtedly, occupies a pivotal position. Her poetry presents the singular voice of an Iranian woman who dared to challenge the social and patriarchal boundaries imposed on Iranian women for centuries. Farrokhzad’s pioneering artistic career and her bold lifestyle created an unprecedented legacy for the woman artist in Iran. Her work defies all categories as she not only confronted the stereotypes forced on Iranian women’s identity, but she also challenged the long‐established tradition of the classic Persian poetry. In both arenas, Farrokhzad proved herself resilient and uncompromising. Her unique poetic voice articulates inclusion in literary and social activism and subversion from the mainstream male‐dominated literary circles. Confronting the individual and collective definitions of identity, and sexual and textual territories, Farrokhzad broke many boundaries and expressed the need for self‐awareness and affirmation of female identity. This study is an attempt, in part, to explore and investigate Farrokhzad’s rebellion against the confinement of self in the bondage of conformity and subjection and the delineation of her arduous journey to liberation and self‐empowerment.     

Results of a misspent youth: Joan Jett's performance of female masculinity

The article maps Joan Jett's performances from her days with the Runaways in the mid-1970s through her successful solo career in the 1980s to her recent affiliations with the riot grrrls in the 1990s. Unlike some critics, who, while acknowledging Jett's influence on generations of female rock performers, dismiss Jett as an inferior copy of male rock musicians, the author argues that Jett's various performances of female masculinity challenged conventional understandings of masculinity and femininity. The article explores how Jett's interest in punk enabled her to carve a space for herself in a male-dominated genre. It is further contended that as more spaces opened for women in the early 1990s, Jett's performances took a more aggressive stance on traditionally feminist issues and enabled her to use her sexuality as an offensive weapon.     

Heteroqueer ladies: some performative transactions between gay men and heterosexual women

As theories of performativity struggle to disentangle and reconfigure the relationships between act and identity, a heterowoman who relishes the performance of femininity is still aware that she can be read as reactionary. Her choice of sexual partners seems to undermine the efficacy of similar strategies constructed by femme lesbians. One queer option for a heterosexual woman is to ‘act’ like a gay man. As more than one cultural commentator has pointed out, it appears that only a male drag queen can be a ‘lady’ these days. This particular woman does not want to change her biological sex to ‘be’ a gay man. She has learned how to be a ‘lady’ from the ‘feminized fags’ who may have learned from her mother. Their ironic distancing, camp connoiseurship, and parodic appropriation of the notion of a stable gender identity came as part of the package. As a result of this transaction, she acts as if she has balls under her dress. Such mimetic masquerades can be most easily recognized as resistant when performativity is ‘bound’ into a formalized performance. It is implicit that this artifice is not sustainable, nor is this desirable. ‘Doing’ queer means possessing the agency to defy and destabilize gendered behaviours, sexes, and sexualities through continuing and conscious decisions. This article explores the efficacy of heterosexual femme performances that attempt to challenge and subvert ideological normativities through their transactions with gay men.     

Endings and Beginnings …

How women remember, represent and write about their own lives and each other's lives is a central problem in the field of feminist auto/biography. Eglantyne Jebb (1876–1928) did not live long enough to write her own life story, but she is known as the founder of the Save the Children Fund in 1919 and as the author of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which was adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. Women who had a great deal invested in the telling of Jebb's life story provide the only accounts we have of her life. This article contributes to the field of feminist auto/biography by providing a fuller depiction of the life of Eglantyne Jebb. Today, the value of Jebb's private writing lies in its wit and honesty. Her letters and diaries illustrate the familiar hard and heroic struggle to accommodate to the ordinary and extraordinary demands of family relationships, the search for adult intimacy, the desire for a meaningful career and the acceptance, in the final years of her life, of new challenges and possibilities whereby Eglantyne Jebb became a notable humanitarian and children's rights activist.     

Give Me One Good Reason to Marry a Japanese Man: Japanese Women Debating Ideal Lifestyles

This article explores how contemporary Japanese women, as they confront issues of marriage and employment, play with images of the liberated West, traditional Japan, and spoiled Japanese men. For this purpose, I investigate the works of popular non-fiction writer Matsubara Junko and recent online debates. I argue that Matsubara's writing is supported by women not because of her sometimes blatant idolization of the West, but because she exposes her own vulnerability. Like the online respondents, Matsubara struggles to come to terms with the realization that when a Japanese woman seeks a lifestyle beyond the role of homebound wife/mother, she inevitably enmeshes herself within the larger identity politics of modernity.     

Ethel Bright Ashford: more and less than a role model

ABSTRACT

There is a tendency to position the first women lawyers as role models for today’s young women. This article argues, through an exploration of the life and career of Ethel Bright Ashford, that these women are better recognised as pioneers or foremothers than promoted as role models. Ashford was one of the first women barristers, a long-serving borough councillor, and tireless activist for civic causes. Nonetheless, aspects of her career and politics pose problems for purely celebratory accounts. Yet there is real value in considering her biography: she offers both an alternative definition of a successful professional life and the reassurance that imperfection is not equivalent to failure. Ashford therefore illustrates the vital importance of a more nuanced and historically situated consideration of the first women lawyers.     

‘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.     

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.     

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.     

Conversations with Lil: A play with Alzheimer's in five scenes and a couple of phone calls

Editors’ note – Elinor Fuchs's family memoir, Making an Exit, the story of her mother Lillian's unusual career and later memory loss, was published in 2005. Since that time Elinor has been invited to speak before many different groups on her experience as a caregiver. On occasion, instead of a talk, she has offered a performance, spliced together from the fragments of conversation she taped with her mother over several years. In these conference performances, Elinor performs both her own words and her mother's, and reads all notes, scene titles, asides, and “stage directions.”     

The Day I Will Never Forget: an interview with Kim Longinotto

The documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto talks to Catherine Fowler about her latest film The Day I Will Never Forget (2003) about female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa. Longinotto’s films have consistently interrogated our understanding of womens’ place in the world, and her latest film is no exception. She discusses how she found her subjects: Fardohsa, a midwife who has been campaigning against FGM, a group of girls who have (successfully) taken their parents to court in order to prevent FGM being practised, and Fouzia, a girl of nine who reads a poem that she wrote the day after she was circumcised, asking her mother to explain why she put her daughter through such a painful experience. Longinotto also discusses the ethical issues raised by her filming of a circumcision of two sisters, and the wider issues that her film engages: the powerless position of women in African societies, the confusion of religion and culture in discussions of FGM, and the impact of saying ‘no’ to this practice.     

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     

What Was Margaret Thatcher's Legacy for Women?

This article considers the legacy for women of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), Britain's first and to date only woman prime minister. It is suggested that although Thatcher had to struggle against many of the sexist prejudices of her day to achieve her political ambitions, she was no feminist. The hard ladder up which she had climbed was drawn up and not extended to other women. Yet for some women, such as the Spice Girls, she was the pioneer of their ideology of girl power. Overall, it is concluded that Thatcher was a polarising figure whose legacy is one of much divisiveness, in which the divisions between women is only one of many strands.     

Rhythms of resurrection: The comebacks of Ruth St. Denis

Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) had one of the first and longest careers as a professional modern dancer. At age 62, she embarked on a “comeback” that lasted nearly three decades, appearing on stage and screen in the dances that had made her an international star earlier in her career. This essay examines the relationship between her well-known “Orientalism,” her feminism, her spirituality, and her perspective on aging and ageism. In particular, it brings into relief her innovative efforts to redefine dance as a feminist project at the intersection of aging and modern dance history. St. Denis converted “oriental tradition” into a feminist dance praxis, thus, staking a claim for the aging dancer under the banner of feminist politics.     

Deconstructing the Boundaries: Gender and Genre in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden,Norway and Denmark

ABSTRACT

In her 1796 travelogue, Wollstonecraft combines the main elements of many different genres, blending together the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements. The journey through the Scandinavian countries turns out to be more than a business travel. It takes the shape of an inner route, a rediscovery of herself and of her experiences, including motherhood. The ability to dismantle the boundaries of the travel writing genre in such an innovative way is the same ability she shows when subverting the literary gender stereotypes that saw women marginalized inside the domestic sphere. What emerges from this extraordinary epistolary collection is a woman capable of the greatest sentimentality and, at the same time, of the smartest rationality, an active woman who does not deny her femininity but who strongly refuses the passivity society has always attributed to the female.     

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.     

‘When Two Loving Hearts Beat as One’: same‐sex marriage,subjectivity and self‐representation in the Australian case of Marion‐Bill‐Edwards, 1906–1916

This article focuses on the Australian case of Marion‐Bill‐Edwards who lived most of her adult life in male attire. It examines three bursts of publicity Edwards encountered, a 1906 criminal trial, her 1908 autobiography and a 1916 court case in which she was a witness. The case is significant because it makes an important contribution to understandings of the sexual subjectivity of women (especially women of the lower classes) who had same‐sex relationships in the early years of the twentieth century. The article explores changes in Edwards’ self‐representation and subjectivity in this pivotal period in which (research has indicated) new models for modern sexual identities began to emerge.