Emotional Deviants and the Politics of Love: ‘spiritual friendships’ in late nineteenth-century Christchurch

William Smith, also known as ‘the man with two wives’, and Mary Colborne-Veel's ‘spiritual friendships’ are part of a significant window into the emotional politics of late nineteenth-century New Zealand. This research explores the relationship between the apparently ‘deviant’ emotions expressed by respectable middle-class political reformers like Smith and his second wife Kate Sheppard, and the political nation-state which they sought to reform. It is the contention of this article that emotional ‘deviancy’ was a reflection of the wider contemporary political situation which saw the nation in flux; the early women's movement politicised love and affection, while the fractured nation that that movement unsettled enabled emotional deviance the privilege of social sanctioning.     

Challenging the Biological: The Fantasy of Male Birth as a Nineteenth-Century Narrative of Ethical Failure

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë portrays a fully realized heroine who challenges society's and fiction's conventional roles for women. In order to broaden her heroine's role, Brontë had to go beyond the genres open to her — the novel of manners, the Gothic, and the governess novel — to establish a new genre: the feminist fairytale. In establishing this genre, Brontë pinpoints Jane's specifically female dilemma: how to achieve intimacy and still maintain independence.

At once beautiful and terrible, sustaining and destructive, fire is the perfect element to convey a sense of Jane's often conflicting desires. Brontë carefully establishes hearth fires as an index to how included and “at home” Jane feels. Similarly, Brontë uses metaphors of self‐sacrifice and immolation to indicate times when Jane feels her independence is being threatened.

The hearth fires and the metaphorical fires are overshadowed by the “big” fires in the novel, but their consistent, unobtrusive use allows Brontë to reinforce her theme in the simple details of the story and to maintain an attention to craft that is too often undervalued or ignored.     

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.     

Constructing women's citizenship in the interwar period: the Edinburgh women citizens’ association

As a new stage in women's political participation, enfranchisement brought new efforts to advance gender equality and women's social position and new organisations were formed of women voters, including the women citizens' associations. Concerns with women's and children's welfare and social reform that had been important to sections of the pre-war women's movement were repositioned alongside the pursuit of an equal franchise, equal pay and opportunities and women's representation, in relation to women's new political status. Study of the women citizens' associations in Scotland supports an account of the period 1918-30 as one of considerable political activity, particularly in developing women's role and influence in relation to established political institutions and civil society. It suggests that the division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ feminisms after 1918, mapped onto the binary of equality and difference, was not necessarily a tension for women's organisations. It gives insight into the meaning of ‘citizenship’ for women activists and how the status, rights and responsibilities of citizenship articulated and shaped a distinctive women's politics, bridging political, civil and social rights.     

Lines of confluence in Fredrika Bremer and Charlotte Brontë

This article appiies the concept of “confluence”, rather than “influence”, to the comparative study of two 19th‐century women novelists, Fredrika Bremer (Sweden) and Charlotte Brontë (UK). Although some lines of direct connection between the two writers can be ascertained, a more meaningful pattern emerges from examining their shared interests in women's issues and concerns, namely the marriage plot, domesticity, and women's education. In particular, their social critiques interrogate the interrelation of style and ideology, encouraging us to reassess their mixing of literary conventions (realism, romanticism, gothicism) as well as their tendency to manipulate emotions (melodrama, sentimentality, sensationalism). Ultimately, this argument stresses the linkages among women writers as we “think back through our mothers”.     

Women facing the state: Childcare policy process in Canada and Finland, 1960–90

The examination of women's influence on government policy is an integral part of comparative research into women and the welfare state. Focusing on the process of childcare policy development in Canada and Finland, this article suggests that the degree and nature of women's influence depend on the extent to which women's organizations representing different gender ideologies have established an effective presence in official politics. Furthermore, this study suggests that the political structure and process provide a material basis for the development of alliances and solidarity within the women's movement.     

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.     

Women's political participation in inter-war Poland: opportunities and limitations

Abstract

This article analyses women's participation in public lifewithin the framework of the democratic-parliamentarian Polish state (Poland's Second Republic), rebuilt in the wake of the First World War. It examines the activity of women in parliamentary elections in connection with obtaining political rights equal to those enjoyed by men, as well as the role of women's representation in the two male-dominated chambers of Parliament (the Sejm and the Senate). The minimal presence of women in the state apparatus and in political parties and professional organisations is explained in relation to male hostility towards women's active participation in political life, religious opposition (especially from the Catholic Church) and the unwillingness of women themselves to become engaged in ‘pure politics’. Finally, it examines the rapid growth of women's associations (cultural, educational, cooperative, and professional) which, whilst weakly linked to feminism, bonded with competing political parties and blocks. The associations were divided along the lines of national allegiances within the multiethnic state and, during the 1930s in particular (the era of the authoritarian rule of Pi?sudski and the socalled sanacja camp), succumbed to nationalistic tendencies. Nevertheless, it is possible to see women's growing involvement in education and professional careers as a form of participation in public life.     

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.     

Left Activism,Succour and Selfhood: the epistolary friendship of two revolutionary mothers in 1970s Britain

At the height of mass activity on the Left, the ascendancy of the women's liberation movement (WLM), and the beginnings of real social and personal change for men and women, the 1970s are increasingly seen as the decade when sixties permissiveness began to be truly felt in Britain. This article draws upon a personal archive of correspondence from this turbulent decade, between two revolutionary women, Di Parkin and Annie Howells. It argues that the women's letters form an important contribution to new understandings about the construction of the post-war gendered self. The letters represent an interchange of motherhood, domesticity, far-left politics, and close female friendship. The article will show how the women's epistolary friendship offers intimate insight into female self-fashioning at a breakthrough social and political moment in 1970s Britain. As they reflected on some of the key political and social themes of the decade—class, labour, race and gender relations, as well as international politics—Di and Annie sought to negotiate themselves in relation to shifting discourses and social patterns. Writing as relational female subjects and individuals, the women's letters became simultaneously a private and shared space in which to compose themselves as women, revolutionaries and feminists, and autonomous sexual subjects. As a result, this article will show, the epistolary lives of these two radical women inform valuable understanding about some of the complex ways in which post-war individuals used available cultural and political resources to find meaning in their lives.     

The Australian National Council of Women

This article describes the political style and practice of the Australian National Council of Women (ANCW) as it developed up to 1975. The historical significance of this lies in the fact that, during the first three quarters of the last century, the ANCW was effectively the peak body representing the great majority of women's groups in this country: groups whose activities focused on politics, religion, morality, health, education, the media, philanthropy and also peace, women's economic and political rights, child welfare and legal reform. The Council spoke on behalf of these constituents to all levels of government, and internationally through the International Council of Women. It generally did not represent women associated with trade unions and the Australian Labor Party, and the politically active women amongst its leaders tended to be members of the Liberal Party. The conduct of the Council avoided party politics; its leaders co-operated with trade unionists on issues of women's rights such as equal pay, and worked as willingly with Labor governments as with non-Labor ones. An assessment of the effectiveness of the Council's political activities is therefore an assessment of the political practice and achievements of mainstream Australian feminism before the advent of radical feminism in the 1970s.     

The victorian female civilising mission and women's aspirations towards priesthood in the Church of England

This article analyses the effects of the Victorian female civilizing mission, with its central motif of spiritual womanhood, in shaping women's aspirations towards the Anglican priesthood during the twentieth century. The considerable development of nineteenth-century women's ex officio ministry is documented, and the ensuing clash in early twentieth-century male/clerical and female perspectives on women's appropriate role within church life is analysed. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the legacy of the Victorian civilising mission evident within the post-1960 Anglican debate over women's ordination.     

feminist-nation building in Afghanistan: an examination of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)

Women-led political organizations that employ feminist and nationalist ideologies and operate as separate from, rather than associated with, male-dominated or patriarchal nationalist groups are both significant and under-explored areas of gender, feminist, and nationalism studies. This article investigates the feminist and nationalist vision of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA exemplifies an effective political movement that intersects feminist and nationalist politics, where women are active, rather than symbolic, participants within the organization, and help to shape an ideological construction of the Afghan nation. RAWA subsequently links its struggle for women's rights (through feminism) with its nationalist goals for democracy and secularism. This article also analyses RAWA's use of conservative nationalist methods to reproduce the future of the organization and to develop ‘citizens’ for its idealized nation, while countering existing patriarchal social and familial structures through a re-configuration of women's roles in the family, community, and nation. This inquiry is based on geographic and feminist examinations of RAWA's organizational structure, literature, and political goals obtained through content analyses of RAWA's political literature and through interviews with RAWA members and supporters living as refugees in Pakistan in the summer of 2003 and winter of 2004/05. RAWA is an instructive example of counter-patriarchal and nationalist feminist politics that questions patriarchal definitions of the nation and its citizenry by reconfiguring gender norms and redefining gender relations in the family as a mirror of the nation.     

Monarchical Manoeuvres: Gender,Nation and the Boundary Problem in Post-War Swedish Constitutional Development

In the years following the end of the cold war in 1989, Western feminist scholars and activists expressed disappointment in the failure of the newly democratic Eastern and Central European countries to sustain mainstream women's rights movements and achieve a marked increase in women's participation within the new political parties and political life in general. The authors, historians of Hungarian women's movements with a broad East-West perspective, offer a novel explanation for this phenomenon. Following an outline of the main stages of Hungarian women's movements and women's political participation, they focus on two instances in twentieth-century Hungarian history that resulted in a rapid transition from anti-democratic regimes to liberal, parliamentary systems: the 1918 bourgeois democratic revolution and the 1990 re-introduction of free parliamentary elections. Examining these two turning points in recent Hungarian history, separated by 70 years, as case studies of women's activism, the authors propose a new, critical re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres, offering a timely if co-incidental comment on the recent debate in the Journal of Women's History.² Research for this article had been completed by the time of the publication of the Spring 2003 issue of the Journal of Women's History, 15 (1), devoted to "Rethinking Public and Private".     

‘No Suggestion of Suffragettism’: the Blue Blouses in Ireland, 1933–1936

In July 1933 membership of the Irish fascist organisation, the Blueshirts, was officially opened to women for the first time. Within a year the Blue Blouses, as the women's auxiliary was colloquially called, became the largest women's political organisation in Ireland. This article examines the group as a vehicle for the politicisation of conservative pro-Treaty Irish women. The Blue Blouses willingly used parades, mass rallies, athletics, and a specific discourse of domesticity to articulate a strategy of political involvement that did not conflict with the patriarchal presumptions of inter-war Irish political culture. As such, this analysis is intended to augment the history of inter-war Irish women politics that to date has focused almost exclusively on feminist organisations.     

Lessons from “Around the world with Oprah”: Neoliberalism,race, and the (geo)politics of beauty

On 6 October 2004, viewers went “Around the world with Oprah” and received a rare glimpse inside the lives of 30-year-old women from 17 different countries. When Oprah turned her gaze (and that of middle-class American housewives) eastward, she highlighted South Korean women's penchart for plastic surgery. Oprah's “trip” to South Korea is emblematic of Western discourse surrounding South Korean Women's plastic surgery consumption, most of which focuses on cosmetic eyelid surgery or the sangapul procedure as it is called in South Korea. Given its widespread popularity, the sangapul procedure has come to signify South Korean women's acquiescence to not only patriarchal oppression but racial oppression as well. This essay goes beyond the psychologization of South Korean women in order to ask what such psychological musings obscure about the very political nature of beauty itself. Using “Around the world with Oprah” as a starting point, then, this essay examines beauty at the intersection of race, technology, and (geo)politics in order to show that, in an era of neoliberalism, plastic surgery is often rationalized as an investment in the self towards a more normal, if not better future. As this essay suggests, such a framing of plastic surgery is contingent on Oprah's production of neoliberal feminism based on liberal notions of choice. Given her global reach, these neoliberal feminist subjects are not produced equally, however, but are discursively constructed along a First World/Third World divide.     

Fighting for the ‘Privileges of Citizenship’: the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), feminism and the women's movement, 1928–1945

In 1928 the YWCA welcomed the introduction of the universal suffrage by declaring that women in Britain were now entitled to the full political privileges of citizenship. This article will explore the way in which the YWCA, previously omitted from histories of the British women's movement, sought to educate and inform its members about the rights and duties of democratic citizenship. The involvement of the YWCA in citizenship education and its role in campaigning for the citizenship rights of women will be assessed, with a particular focus on workers’ rights and the appointment of women police. Despite its reluctance to be identified as overtly feminist, the YWCA was determined to ensure that women had access to social and economic rights within a democratic society. The article therefore argues that a new definition of the women's movement is required in order to uncover the full extent of female engagement in politics and public debate in the aftermath of the suffrage.     

Getting Pragmatic

The history of the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) is distinguished by its extensive involvement in electoral politics and public policy. This paper traces WEL's development as part of the broader women's movement, considers its engagement with government and situates it in relation to Australian and international political traditions. It describes WEL's distinctive style of political engagement, through its candidate surveys for the 1972 federal election to the online party scorecards of the 2000s, and the more than 900 policy submissions along the way. Personal connections via the ‘femocrats’ and feminist members of parliament strengthened WEL's policy influence and helped it realise (at least for a time) the goal of a feminist policy machinery across the whole of government at both commonwealth and state/territory levels. WEL has also been part of a broader women's movement, generating tensions as well as inspiration and support. With characteristic pragmatism, WEL members made sense of their place in the movement by working for the ‘preconditions of revolution’ from the reformist end of a ‘continuum of radicalism’. They were aiming to broaden the impact of feminism by making gender equality part of the core business of government. This is a project that was undermined by major changes in political conditions, but which WEL continues to pursue through its particular focus on policy analysis and advocacy.     

Silk dresses and lavender kid gloves: the wayward career of Jessie Craigen,working suffragist

Abstract

Occasional references to Jessie Craigen occur in the literature on the nineteenth-century women's suffrage movement, generally emphasizing her importance as a working-class suffragist. Previously unknown material throws more light on her career, revealing the eddies of love and exasperation which flowed around her. This paper discusses the various representations of Jessie Craigen to be found in letters among her friends, representations which served to paint her – sometimes warmly, sometimes dismissively – as odd, eccentric, undisciplined. It also examines the more positive sense of herself which she attempted to convey in letters to several of her middle-class promoters – as a romantic authentic in the grip of unbrookable, passionate conviction. Her story confirms the existence of a current of radical-liberal opinion within the nineteenth-century women's movement, and the difficulties which confronted those who found themselves among its paid employees