Women's history: a study in continuity and change

In this response to Bridget Hill's viewpoint published inWomen's History Review, 2, pp. 5-22, Judith Bennett argues that her position is more subtle and more nuanced than Hill's critique would suggest. Bennett defends the historiographical importance of re-assessing the place of continuity in women's history; she emphasizes the legitimate place of generalization in women's history; and she argues that patriarchy is a critical subject of investigation for feminist historians.     

Women and radio: sounding out new paths in women's history

ABSTRACT

Since its early introduction in the domestic sphere in the 1920s, radio has been used as a medium for the expression of women's voices, needs and concerns. In this introduction we would like to mobilise an understanding of radio as a vital source for doing women's history. Women's radio programming, women broadcasters, and women listeners provide a lens through which a number of histories can be analysed. This introduction provides an overview of the historical relationship between women and radio. It is further dedicated to research that explores the overlapping spaces of radio and women's history, and in particular, points to how radio-related source material can provide new points of departure for women's history.     

Black geographies of struggle and pleasure in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes

In Nona Faustine’s photo series of self-portraits, White Shoes, the artist’s body becomes the agent in exposing the instability of racialized historical geography. Faustine revisits New York City’s landmarks to address what is missing or made invisible: a slave ship, a fugitive woman’s rebirth, or African burial grounds. Making herself visible where she is supposed to remain invisible, she highlights the unacknowledged connection between national wealth, nationalism, geography, and black labor. She discloses the topography of her travels as a changeable terrain, where one slips from the national iconic to ambiguous and finally, to the sacred. I suggest that Faustine doesn’t seek to democratize the extant historical maps, but to shift the terms of reading the city’s geography. She lifts the boundaries between the polarized pathways of knowing – the secularized and the sacred, the living and the dead, the verifiable and the missing. This shift is also made possible by the medium of photography and a feminist turn towards pleasures in one’s body. As Faustine comes to terms with the psychic and cultural inheritance of the diaspora, she moves from the collective body of pain towards black women’s pleasure in their own bodies without purging the history of sexual trauma.     

Surpassing the word: Aileen Wuornos

This article explores the dynamics of Richard Move's drag performance of the late Martha Graham. Drag dance is remarkably self-aware as historiography, and it employs a rhetoric of bodies becoming other bodies: channeling, paying homage, re-embodying, reliving, being possessed. This article argues that drag dance has a historical project for dance history; specifically, that drag bodies can become a new medium through which aesthetic/kinetic histories are transmitted. In the case of Richard Move, the exaggeration and excess of the ageing Martha Graham become modalities that align with the ‘wrongness’ of his body. This is drag dance as a strategy of re-embodiment after the original body has been lost, and Richard Move presents his performance as a ‘haunting,’ much like the feeling Martha Graham describes as the result of a dancer's “first death,” when she watches someone else dance a role she had originated. Ballets like Graham's Lamentation and Cave of the Heart give Move the opportunity to portray Graham's struggle to continue to dance after this “first death,” using drag as a strategy to show up the eerie perfection of voice against the hollowness of the ageing dancer's body. Combining vaudeville and séance, moving from the restless gay “underworld” of the Meatpacking District to the right to presume himself the heir to the mother of modern dance, Richard Move first embodies and then moves beyond Susan Sontag's camp “etc etc” of Graham's self-performance.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Gail Braybon 1952–2008: an appreciation

This obituary of Gail Braybon, whose name is known to many as a pioneer of the history of women in the First World War, and who died in 2008, is written by her friend and former co‐author, Penny Summerfield. It focuses on Gail’s distinguished record of historical research and writing, the more remarkable since she worked as an independent historian outside the groves of academe.     

A Christian Challenge: Chō Takeda Kiyoko and feminist thought in modern Japan

References to Christian women in the English-language scholarship on the history of Japanese feminism have typically focused on one organisation, the Japan Christian Women's Reform Society. Chō Takeda Kiyoko's 1985 book, Fujin kaihō no dōhyō (Milestones for Women's Liberation), offers a more comprehensive and nuanced image of the contributions of Christian women to the elevation of women's status in pre-World War II Japan, by offering case studies of Christian women. These highlight the widespread influence of Christianity among educated men and women, the broad associational networks of the Christian community, the mutually-reinforcing connections between women's activities in the fields of education and journalism, and the personal struggles of Christian women to create a fairer and more moral society. Takeda portrays the Women's Reform Society as a foundational organisation in the history of feminism, but not the sole avenue through which Christian women worked for women's liberation.     

Portraying history and heroism in Rebecca West's The sentinel

Rebecca West's early interest in the suffragette movement gives us a strong sense of her development as a writer and feminist thinker, as her feminist perspective shifts from impassioned and enthusiastic supporter of the suffragettes in her incomplete novel, The Sentinel, to the more measured assessments in her early journalism. This article discusses some of the ways in which the imagery, iconography and militant discourse of suffragette writing and public speaking shaped the imagination of the young Rebecca West. It also shows how her celebration of female heroism in The Sentinel, often conveyed through detailed depictions of the women she admired, creates a vivid and informed version of feminist history.     

American Dance Pioneer Martha Graham and the Ghosts of Feminism

Abstract: The essay explores the mutual haunting between American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham and feminism. This troubling arises from the confusion between what can be considered the predominantly feminist character of Graham's life and work coupled with Graham's outright rejection of a feminist consciousness. The author suggests that this ambivalent situation allows for an ever increasing complex but fruitful discussion of Graham's possible feminist identifications and their effects. The essay first argues for the performanative force of ‘doing’ a feminist identity as a foil for Graham's public written reputation of feminism. It then charts both the changing cultural and social beliefs of and about women in the twentieth century alongside Graham's specific geographical, social, cultural and historical placement in that history and its possible impact on her processes of identification. The essay then makes a close contextual reading of one of Graham's works of the early 1930s, Primitive Mysteries (1931), to illustrate its radical conception of the female body both at the time of its premiere and over subsequent reconstructions. The author finishes by arguing that the question of Graham's feminism is an important one because it remains unanswered.     

The Subversive Stitch: Female craft,culture, and ecriture

By making an embroiderer her central narrative voice and embroidery both the structural and the thematic focus of her most recent novel (Le Passé empiété [The Back Stitch]), Marie Cardinal complements Rozsika Parker's efforts (The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine) to trace the parallel histories of embroidery and femininity through the novel. For both Parker and Cardinal, embroidery figures the creative tension between conformity and subversion that Cardinal posits as common to all women and that results in Le Passe empiete in a complex reevaluation not only of the female artist herself but of both the traditional and the feminist critical context within which she currently creates. In particular, Cardinal explores the relationship between women's traditional domestic tasks and their artistic production, and she uses the specific qualities of embroidery to rethink common assumptions about literary influence and authority, the writing process, and the mythic tradition.     

Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs Humphry) and the opposition to women's suffrage[1]

This article analyses the tensions and contradictions in the work of the conservative writer and social reformer, Mary Augusta Ward and her role in the development of a constructive anti-suffragism designated as the ‘forward policy’. Ward's representation of the suffragette in her novel, Delia Blanchflower (1915), is discussed. Concentrating on Ward's principled support for women and her reforming imagination, the article shows how she shared much in common with feminists of her day and suggests ways in which her writing may be mined by historians and literary scholars interested in the history of women's suffrage.     

Successful female aging for beginners: Carolyn Heilbrun/Amanda Cross and perspectives of gendered aging in The Players Come Again

Although Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926–2003) is best known for her best-selling mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction which evidence an intense reflection upon female aging as well as her long-standing commitment to feminism. Works such as Reinventing Womanhood (1979), The Representation of Women in Fiction (1983), Writing a Woman's Life (1988), and The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997) explore the ways in which women in general and the author in particular experience the changes that maturity involves as an enriching process rather than as a path into decay and loss. This paper contends that these might perhaps shed a new light into her fiction as Amanda Cross, which includes The Players Come Again (1990). Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis, my aim was to reveal the extent to which Heilbrun's commercial mystery novels represented a springboard to the theories she put forward in her essays, which vindicated the difficulties as well as the joys involved in a gendered experience of aging.     

Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen: 'Rape' and 'Love' as (Feminist) Social Realism and Romance

Mary Wollstonecraft's argument for female reason in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) remains an iconic text for thinking through the his-torical struggle between claims to 'equality' and 'difference' for women. Wollstonecraft herslf embodies the antinomy within European Enlightenment thought exposed by simply being female . Jane Austen's writing career, following on from Wollstonecraft's death, offers a quite distinct mode of writing reason for women in her narrative work. While Wollstonecraft's narratives and theoretical arguments can be shown to raise as textual symptoms the deep struggle between female-embodied subjectivity and Enlightenment reason, Austen sublimates her own magnificent claims to reason in writing itself. Wollstonecraft's novels subsume narrative form to analytical content, dramatizing the sufferings of the female subject of Enlightenment 'patriarchy'. Both her principal characters, Mary and Maria, are as good as dead by the end of their narrative struggles, and these narratives founder on their own analysis of autonomous, rational female subjectivity as 'impossible'. Wollstonecraft projected a historical desire to repudiate the humiliations of femininity under Enlightenment patriarchy. Her work engendered a history of feminist reasoning to answer its painful questions. Austen's work, by contrast, seems to have floated effortlessly to the pinnacle of narrative literary achievement, while remaining uncompromisingly feminocentric. Austen's novels have a tendency to resist feminist theorizing or to fit the paradigms of feminist argument only indirectly. Tauchert explores this apparent polarity between Wollstonecraft and Austen as contrasting origins for distinctive modes of female reason in writing. Wollstonecraft's tortuous textual displays of female reason in writing offer a familiar mode of thinking about the historical and personal enlightenment of women, sustained in a tradition of feminist materialist analysis; Austen's pure narrative offers a hitherto more opaque alternative.     

Women and War

Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black (1983) is a radical example of women's Gothic horror. It is a popular ghost story that has been successfully adapted for the London stage. In addition, it offers a social critique of motherhood and contemporary rhetoric surrounding the family. Scullion interprets the novel from several critical perspectives: feminist, psychological, biographical, generic and intertextual. Principally, however, she offers a reading of the novel that engages with its immediate historical context. The contention is that Hill's novel mediates women's anxieties about motherhood and autonomy during the early 1980s when the institution of the family in Britain was an ideological battleground. Set primarily during the 1860s, The Woman in Black exposes Victorian hypocrisy towards the unmarried mother, and indirectly probes the quasi-Victorian values promulgated in the 1980s, during the first term of a Conservative right-wing government. The protagonist of the novel, the eponymous woman in black, resists the lot of the so-called fallen woman. In her physical form, she refuses to submit to Victorian patriarchal values by attempting to reclaim her illegitimate child. In spectral form, she repeatedly inflicts suffering on families by causing the death of their children. Her excessive revenge knows no compassion, and recognizes no boundaries of place and time. Her ghost is never laid to rest. Neither is order restored by the closing pages. Thus the novel, as well as being a popular ghost story, challenges assumptions about women's 'natural' acquiescence and their unconditionally generous responses to husbands, partners and children. Shaped by the social climate in which it was written, The Woman in Black suggests that mothers under extreme pressure have the potential, like any other members of the family, for cruelty to children. Through its forceful rejection of either idealized or derogatory stereotypes of women, this novel belongs to the genre of radical Gothic horror.     

Women in Fascist Biopolitics: The Case of Olive Hawks

The historical chapters of Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape deserve close attention. Her view of rape as a crime of violence and aggression has received some corroboration from recent historical .studies. Her view of rape as a property crime in ancient societies can not only be seen in the laws of the Hebrews and Babylonians, which she considers, but in other early legal codes as well. Rape was defined in them not as an offense against the victim, but as a crime against the male under whose authority she lived. Brownmiller perceives a breakthrough in this dismal history of rape laws occurring in thirteenth‐century England with the Statute of Westminster (1285). This interpretation does not hold up under close examination. It can be shown that the first real advance in rape laws took place in the work of church lawyers of the twelfth century who began to distinguish rape from property crimes and include it among crimes of violence against persons. If historians will set aside the angry, polemical statements in Against Our Will, they will find many intriguing ideas which require further investigation and thought.     

The Archive Function

As Joan Wallach Scott warns in The Fantasy of Feminist History, the danger of depositing one's personal papers in an archive is that one's papers then become open to misinterpretation. In this article, Scott's fears are enacted in relation to another feminist theorist's archival collection, that of prominent Canadian scholar Barbara Godard who died before she could complete the process of donating her papers to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University. Drawing on personal memories and eclectic textual traces, this article attempts to recover Godard's theory of the archive—a theory she never fully articulated in her lifetime, despite dedicating much of her time and energy to collecting and preserving her own words and the words and papers of her students and collaborators.     

exorcizing the past: the slave narrative as historical fantasy

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred is a hybrid text: part historical novel, part science fiction/fantasy and part slave narrative. The story transports a contemporary black heroine into 19th-century Maryland in order to explore, recreate and connect with African American narratives of identity. Providing two narrative strands, one in 19th-century Maryland and the other in 20th-century California, the text is able to juxtapose the realities of slavery with its legacy. Conflating these time-periods, Kindred aims to interrogate the marginalization of African American history, but specifically the role black women played in that history, in America's bicentennial year. While Butler adapts what has been regarded as the quintessential African American literary mode of the slave narrative, her fiction consciously draws upon a literary heritage that foregrounds narratives written by black women. Consequently, Kindred highlights the issues and concerns that directly affect the construction of black femininity and its role in the community of slaves as well as examining the historical pressure brought to bear on the configuration of contemporary African American womanhood. In doing so, Butler's fiction articulates the right of black women to intervene in their own construction and to inscribe the existence of black women in stories of originary identity. What this article seeks to explore is how Butler's fiction develops and extends the traditional slave narrative, how this is utilized in order to interrogate the ‘realities’ of both slavery and contemporary US society, and how effective the text is in challenging stereotypical representation of white and black femininity.