Sisters in a Fashion: Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth, two US born feminists who came to Australia during two key moments in feminist history, as a way of thinking about the relationship between feminists and fashion. Ansara arrived in Sydney in 1969 carrying women’s liberation literature in her suitcase; she became an important generative figure in the Australia’s women’s liberation movement, particularly as an independent filmmaker and proponent of consciousness raising. Welteroth arrived in 2017 to speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival during a period of international resurgence of feminist activism. She brought with her images of women of colour she had featured in Teen Vogue and she invoked second wave consciousness raising, albeit in a remodelled, corporate-led form when she talked about the title’s plans to bring young girls around kitchen tables to ‘solve’ political problems. The article uses comments both women have made in relation to fashion and beauty, close readings of their works, and a discussion of their respective feminist milieus to suggest a trajectory of feminism’s relationship to the fashion industry that appears to have changed from a position of opposition to one of open embrace. It also complicates this reading by pointing to the resonances between these women of different feminist eras.     

Elizabeth’s Pious Pilgrimage; or the Ghost in the Garden

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the ‘Pious Pilgrimage’ section of Elizabeth and Her German Garden from a psychoanalytical perspective, focusing on the uncanny sense of the spectrality of the living and its connection to gender identity. It also offers an intertextual reading, placing the passage in the context of ‘the ghost in the garden’ as a recurring trope in the English novel. When ‘Elizabeth’ returns to the garden of her childhood, she experiences two spectral encounters: an imagined glimpse of her grandfather’s ghost and an encounter with a doppelgänger in the shape of a real child with her own name, who makes her feel as if, like Shelley’s Magus Zoroaster, she has met her ‘own image walking in the garden’. She is not the only figure in English literature to do so: behind the kitchen garden where Elizabeth has her encounter we can feel the presence of the kitchen garden in Great Expectations, where Pip sees a prophetic vision and encounters a double in the form of a ‘pale young gentleman’. This same encounter with ‘the ghost in the garden which is not a ghost’ resurfaces in a number of later texts, of which the author discusses two instances: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and David Profumo’s The Weather in Iceland. These can be taken as positive and negative conceptions of the spectrality of the living: von Arnim’s ‘ghost in the garden’ is balanced between the two in a passage treading the boundaries of comic realism and Gothic horror.     

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.     

Doris Arnold: the making of a radio star, 1926–1939

ABSTRACT

Doris Arnold (1904–1967) was a BBC radio personality and the UK’s first female ‘Disc Jockey’. She produced and presented the gramophone record programme These you have Loved from 1938. Despite her fame, Arnold is oddly absent from broadcasting histories and little is known about her today. Hers was one of the best known ‘rags to riches’ narratives of the early BBC: a typist whose musical talent propelled her to stardom. This article explores Arnold’s rise to fame through a detailed evaluation of her personal staff files which expose a complexity of gendered issues including status, clothing and pay.     

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.     

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches…’

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz chose to take the veil not only because she had no wish to marry but because in her time the convent was the only environment which sanctioned a woman's desire for a life of study and meditation. However, her brilliant mind ventured far beyond the parameters permitted by her church, for she devoted a large part of her literary activities to secular topics, dared to criticize the male Catholic establishment and questioned the Church's inconsistent—and to her, oppressive—treatment of women. In her autobiographical letter ‘The Reply to Sister Philotea’ (1691) she took her most radical feminist stance and artfully manipulated both Scripture and patristic texts to support her personal ends: the right of women to an education and to an intellectual life.     

A ‘fully bloomed’ existence for women: Miyamoto [Chūjō] Yuriko in the Soviet Union, 1927–1930

As a young woman, the Japanese writer Miyamoto Yuriko travelled to the Soviet Union in late 1927 and was transformed by the experience. In the world’s first and only socialist state, she perceived the possibility of equal relationships between men and women that were both emotionally and intellectually satisfying. In Soviet Russia, a woman could be ‘fully bloomed’: an equal citizen and worker as well as a wife and mother. Through an examination of her two self-narratives based on her time abroad - her diary and the retrospective, autobiographical novel Dōhyō (Signposts) - I will demonstrate how for Yuriko, the political and personal were inseparable. Her whole-hearted endorsement of the USSR and the equality it seemed to offer women was part of the individual journey begun with her love marriage, her divorce, and her relationship with Yuasa Yoshiko, whom she left for Miyamoto Kenji, a committed communist, after her return to Japan.     

Women,Godliness and Personal Appearance in Seventeenth‐Century England 1

This article discusses Lady Jersey's brief sojourn in New South Wales in 1891-92, as the wife of the colonial governor. In the context of colonial anxieties and hopes about the contemporary women's movement, Lady Jersey's aristocratic confidence and imperial authority gave her the appearance of an ‘Advanced Woman’. A published writer and confident public speaker before she arrived in the colony, Lady Jersey took a keen interest in local political affairs, and her demeanour and activity were swiftly satirised in the radical nationalist and frequently misogynist Bulletin. Local feminist groups, perhaps craving some of the legitimate public authority she so readily exercised, sought her patronage and support but were generally doomed to disappointment. The article suggests that Lady Jersey, despite her own conservatism, offered an ambiguous role model for those seeking positive ways in which to imagine female power.     

Detailing Judicial Difference

In January 2004 Baroness Brenda Hale became the first woman to sit on the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. Five years on, she has brought to her judicial role a lightness of touch that belies her increasingly significant impact on the court’s jurisprudence. Early forecasts that she would be “just a bit different” from her male companions have proved prophetic. However such assessments have stemmed primarily from a focus on her decision-making on a case-by-case basis. But what of her jurisprudence as a whole? This paper considers arguments for a more sustained and coherent methodological approach to analyses of Baroness Hale’s (and other judges’) jurisprudence as a framework through which to better understand and explore the potential of judicial difference and to better inform current debates about increasing judicial diversity in England and Wales.     

Elsa Lanchester and Bohemian London in the Early Twentieth Century

Elsa Lanchester (1902–86) is best known today as a character actress in Hollywood, who played the title role in the Bride of Frankenstein. Less well known is her remarkable early life in Britain where she participated in the avant-garde through dance, theatre, film and other forms of performance. This article explores Lanchester's world before her marriage to the actor Charles Laughton in 1929 to investigate aspects of bohemian culture in the early twentieth century. It focuses on Lanchester's artistic nightclub, the Cave of Harmony, on the edges of London's West End. Bohemianism, modern dance and musical comedy opened up new identities and spaces for female self-exploration.     

Fictionalizing Hospitality in Ahdaf Soueif's Short Story ‘Knowing’

Drawing on Derrida's double conceptualization of the ‘la question de l’étranger’, which he utilizes to unpack the notion of hospitality, this paper explores the question of foreignness in Ahdaf Soueif's short story ‘Knowing’, from her collection I Think of You: Stories (2007). Jacques Derrida uses the interrogative mode to examine the diasporic situation by looking at ‘the question of the foreigner’, which ‘is a question of the foreigner, addressed to the foreigner’. To Derrida, the diasporic condition is determined by the type of hospitality offered or withheld by visiting and hosting countries. Likewise, Soueif questions the notion of hospitality as she introduces homes and locales that seem uncongenial to foreign dwellers. In ‘Knowing’, Soueif portrays the foreigner's position as being marked by the presence or absence of hospitality. In this context, the Derridean conditioned hospitality could become invasive as it colours diaspora with its own peculiar brush. As she fictionalizes hospitality, Soueif blurs the line between home and host as well as that between guest and stranger. In the short story, she introduces the insidious effects of the new receiving culture as her fictional girl is not a guest since the host country withholds the Derridean unconditional hospitality; neither is she a stranger as foreignness dictates a sense of cultural dislocation, which is that of not ‘knowing’.     

Editorial

The whole of this issue of Australian Feminist Studies is devoted to the theme ‘Making us Modern’ guest-edited by Alison Ravenscroft. Modernity was, I have argued myself, an essential element of First-wave Feminism. The articles that Alison has brought togetherm show how mutually imbricated are questions raised by a later feminism and modernism. Alison has written her own introduction for this splendid issue. Accordingly, all that I need to do here is extraneous to it. I want to record our regret at the passing of Oriel Gray, one of Australia's first female playwrights. The Playwrights' Advisory Board voted her work, The Torrents, best play in 1955, alongside Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. She wrote a number of stage plays, worked for radio and television, and published an autobiography—Exit Left: Memoirs of a Scarlet Woman (Penguin Books)—in 1985. I want to record our sadness, too, at the death of Glen Tomasetti, singer, song-writer and author. She wrote poetry, articles and reviews, and two novels: Thoroughly Decent People (1976), and Man of Letters (1981). In the Australian Women's Movement she is best known for one of the protest songs that she wrote in the early 1970s; this one, ‘Don't Be Too Polite, Girls’ has often been played as a kind of Women's Movement anthem. As always, I owe thanks to everyone who contributes to this journal—authors, assessors, editorial advisory collective members, review editor Susan Sheridan, assistant editor Mary Lyons, and, for this issue, my very warm thanks to Alison Ravenscroft.     

Jean Rhys,William Orpen and the Frames of Modernist Representation

The female body as artist’s model and its exchange value—both the woman and her painted image—are deployed by Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist art context. This article considers the relation between literary modernism and the visual arts, between text and image, in her unpublished novel Triple Sec and short story ‘Tea With an Artist’. Using the fleeting relationship between Rhys and English painter Sir William Orpen, for whom she posed nude aged twenty-three, as my basis, I examine Rhys’s presentation of the power politics that constrain the female model in the contemporary art world. Her allusions to artists, models and artworks in her texts widen out to issues of frames and framing, where narratives of framed pictures, or the female model’s body within a picture’s frame, speak of social acts of framing, containment and objectification within modernist representational structures.     

Augusta Webster’s Mother and Daughter and the only child debate

The enduring debate about family size has roots in Victorian England, most notably in literary works addressing the issue of balancing motherhood and a writing career. One Victorian writer and activist, Augusta Webster (1837–1894), directly addressed the issue of family size in her uncompleted sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895), which she began when her only child was a newborn. In this posthumous series of 14-line poems, Webster defends her decision to have one child and, in doing so, challenges popular assumptions that only women with multiple children could be considered ‘complete’, socially-acceptable mothers. Despite her efforts, however, and despite the rising popularity of one-child families, the results of numerous scientific studies and the lingering critiques of mommy blogs make it clear that challenges to mothers of ‘onlies’ remain.     

Marketing edwardian feminism: Dora Marsden,votes for women and the freewoman

Although Dora Marsden had resigned from the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and repudiated the principles of the women's suffrage movement by the time she founded The Freewoman in 1911, she recognised the marketing potential of her suffragette persona. Thus, despite envisioning her journal as a post-suffragist ‘little magazine’, she used her status as a famed WSPU organiser prior to The Freewoman's publication to garner suffragette subscribers and advertisements for women's goods and services. After The Freewoman's debut, Marsden lost most of her original advertisers and subscribers, many of whom accused the editor of having misled them as to the nature of her journal. The author argues that Marsden's rejection of the journalistic model provided by the mainstream suffrage press and willingness to allow The Freewoman to slide into bankruptcy signalled a strategic bid for the ‘cultural capital’ that accrues to writers who forego mass readerships in order to gain avant-garde reputations     

Simone signoret (1921–1985)—The body political

In this article I examine the multifaceted nature of the French actress Simone Signoret, an international star whose film career spanned 40 years (1945–1985). This study investigates the different ways in which her performances and her body-as-performance can be read. It also takes on board the complex intertextuality of this star, who was not just a textual embodiment of the political and historical times in which she lived, but also a woman who was before her times, and as such, was extremely modern. The article argues that for this reason she was a star who disturbed and that her performances, throughout her long career, challenged the perceived notions of femininity and the place of women in society. As such, Signoret offered a new set of possibilities for women to engage with in terms of their identity within the social order of things, possibilities that suggested that identities, including sexual identity and agency, need not be fixed, but are constantly able to be negotiated and rethought.