‘I Won't Go Back to It’: Irish Women Poets and the Iconic Feminine

This paper explores the dynamic interaction between contemporary Irish women poets and the notion of tradition in Irish poetry. Looking at the work of Eavan Boland, Susan Connolly, Paula Donlon, Mary Dorcey, Paula Meehan and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, the paper suggests that women poets today are subverting tradition and destabilizing a conventionally accepted fusion of the feminine with the national. This is achieved through direct challenge, through dislocation and through establishing a dialogue between the mythical and the real in the context of the lived experience of women in Ireland. Finally, the paper suggests the potential for civil and social effect of the work of women who engage consciously in the process of giving women an active voice.     

‘Older Sisters Are Very Sobering Things’: Contemporary Women Poets and the Female Affiliation Complex

If, as history indicates, the directions of poetry are determined by its inheritance – that is, its perception of its past – in looking at literary records such as poems, reviews and other critical texts, it is possible to anticipate how twentieth-century women's poetry will come to be defined and the extent to which it will have value and authority. This in its turn will formulate the nature and status of women's poetry in the twenty-first century. In surveying twentieth-century poetry in Britain, the signs are that just as the label ‘poetess’ was a handicap to the self-perception of a woman at the beginning of this century, so the label ‘woman poet’ will shackle her in the next, largely because her end-of-the-twentieth-century predecessors will have become mythologized as a literary underclass, undermined and overlooked. One reason for the pattern of the last three hundred years, where women publish and then slip from literary histories, is that they do not receive proper attention from male-dominated literary criticism. Although women now seem to be sufficiently published to make segregation unnecessary, there is still a case for positive discrimination or their names will disappear from the records. Positive discrimination in the form of gendered segregation is, however, opposed by poets because of their uneasy relationship with one another. Women poets need an alternative line of development to the ‘masculinity complex’ whereby they unsuccessfully seek recognition within the male traditions, or the ‘female affiliation complex’ which prevents them from identifying themselves with one another. It will be argued that there is an emerging tendency in recent poets to plunder and appropriate the associations of the male tradition and that feminist critics need to theorize this aesthetic and make connections between poets so that they become positive role models for poets of the future.     

Survival and song: Women poets of the Harlem Renaissance

This paper concerns Black women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Considered by modern critics to have adopted anachronistic subject matter and to be out of step with the militant race‐consciousness of the period, these poets have been largely neglected in discussions of the 1920's, despite the fact that this was the most significant flowering of Black women's writing until the 1960's. I provide an interpretive model that reveals the rebellious messages in this verse, one that helps explain the poets’ imaginative choices by placing them in their historical context and linking them to a female poetic tradition. This approach makes clear the affirming nature of Renaissance poetry by women and makes it accessible to us today, anticipating as it does contemporary issues and forging a modern sensibility.     

Women Poets on the Left: Lola Ridge,Genevieve Taggard,Margaret Walker. Nancy Berke. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2001.

Nancy Berke offers a cogent and convincing argument to include radical women poets within the canonical texts of modernist poetry. Unlike the broad overview texts commonly used in academic settings, Berke's Women Poets on the Left places Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, and Margaret Walker within the context of the political and social histories that shaped their lives and consciousness. This work complicates poetic analyses, challenges white male dominance in the field, and provides a critical feminist take on poetry produced by women on the left during the twenties and thirties. Moreover, Berke's inclusion of Margaret Walker, whose work falls between two critical periods, the 1940s and 1960s, contextualizes how the poetry of activist women provides multivalent perspectives and demonstrates a continuum of radical modernist poetry in the United States.     

Dilemmas and Developments: Eavan Boland Re-examined

In ‘The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma’ (1986–7), the Irish poet Eavan Boland argued that women poets were obstructed on the one hand by traditional ideas of femininity and poetry, and on the other by the demands of separatist feminism. In ‘Dilemmas and Developments: Eavan Boland Re-examined’ Sarah Maguire argues that in recent years women poets have clearly achieved greater confidence as a result of changes in their audience. However, the underlying dilemma facing a woman poet – that of the tension between the demands of femininity and the role expected of a post-Romantic lyric poet – continues to remain unresolved.     

‘Great Expectations’: Rehabilitating the Recalcitrant War Poets

Formulating a definition of ‘good’ poetry is, and should be, impossible. Yet women's poetry of the First World War seems generally to have been condemned as ‘bad’. It inspires an ambiguous response from readers who recognize the value of its historical, social and psychological content, but shudder at the limitations of its form. However, I believe that a much more fruitful reading of these ‘recalcitrant’ texts is possible. It is not my intention to deny either their problematic nature, or the diversity and complexity of male responses to the war, but rather to emphasize that women's experience of the First World War was radically different from that of men, and we should not therefore be constrained by the traditional parameters of 1914-18 criticism when we explore these works. This article examines a selection of this poetry in the light of the psychological processes of grief and bereavement, and in so doing indicates other areas in which constructive readings of these texts might be made.Why do we expect the articulation of a radically new and uniformly consistent poetic voice from what was a large and diverse group of women? The expectations of modernism ironically have created a literary ‘mainstream’ out of a selection of experimental, and largely male, writing. I hope to show that the ‘failure’ of these women to conform to our textual ‘great expectations’ is irrelevant. The single most characteristic feature of these women's experience of war was isolation. Their position had neither the homogeneity of the trenches, nor the intense intellectualism of experimental circles. Predominantly middle class, alienated by absence and bereavement, they attempted to articulate the unprecedented nature of their experience. That their experiments were not wholly successful is perhaps indicative of the near impossibility of the task they undertook.     

Preventing ‘robotised women workers’: women,sport and the workplace in Scotland 1919–1939

This article examines a new area of women's leisure; women's participation in work-related sport. The growth and development of industrial welfare in Scotland in the interwar period will be discussed. Within broader studies, Stephen Jones, Helen Jones and Melling have all indicated that there was a growth in industrial welfarism in Britain from the turn of the twentieth century. This development of welfarism, which included provision of educational classes, pensions and medical support, increasingly also encompassed a variety of sports and physical activities. By looking at case studies, developments in provision across a range of industries will be examined. This discussion will draw on a wide range of sources from a variety of women's employment, from factories to clerical positions and from the retail sector to the civil service. This article will examine the types of sporting opportunities open to women through their workplaces, including organised welfare schemes and independent employee-led activities. Moreover, it will explore working women's experiences of these activities and the ways in which they chose to participate in sport.     

Anjela duval: Breton poet, peasant and militant

In 1981 Brittany lost one of its national heroes, a self-educated woman of extraordinary vision and talent, an adamant defender of her native Breton language, and a full-time farmer. Anjela Duval began writing poetry when she was in her early fifties, and within 10 years was recognized by many of her compatriots as one of the most accomplished and powerful poets of the language. A frequent theme of her poetry was the necessity for Bretons to reclaim their language and their culture from the encroachments of the French: as has literary fame spread, so did her prominence as a leader in the cultural and linguistic revival in Britanny during the 1960s and '70s. Her modest farm became a mecca for poets, writers, singers, and other artists and intellectuals committed to the promotion of the Breton language and culture: her literary and emotional impact on contemporary Bretons has been enormous.This article sketches in the main outlines of this unusual woman's life, filling them in with selected examples of her copious poems (which the author has translated from the Breton). A brief consideration of Duval from a feminist perspective is provided in the final section.     

Women's experience of world war one: Suffragists,pacifists and poets

The period of 1914–1918 was a time of immense change for women in Britain. The Suffragist movement, begun in 1867, gained irresistible force, culminating in the Act of 1918 in which women were given the vote at thirty and men at twenty-one. It was not until the 1928 Act that for the first time in the history of Britain there was full adult suffrage, granting the vote to both sexes at twenty-one. The picture is a complex one; Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel identified their movement with the war effort, indeed their pre-war militancy became militarism. Mrs Fawcett, an avowed non-militant suffragist before the war, who believed in the verbal power of argument over revolutionary tactics, also supported the war effort and nationalism. However, there were other suffragists such as Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Hobhouse, Catherine Marshall, Helena Swanwick, Olive Schreiner and Kate Courtney, who were opposed to the war. Mrs Pankhurst believed if women couldn't fight, they shouldn't vote. The pacifists believed that this view simply gave in to the argument for physical force. They also saw militarism as yet another version of the strong oppressing the weak and thus an emphatic form of patriarchy. However, although the suffragists were bitterly divided in their moral view of the war, they were united in the cause of women's emancipation.The war itself provided all classes of women with important opportunities to work outside the home, as munition workers, land-army workers, police-women, doctors and nurses. The experience of change caused by the suffrage movement, together with the effect of the war upon women's lives, transformed women's image of themselves in radical and irreversible ways.My paper draws on some 125 poems by 72 women poets; Scars Upon My Heart is the first anthology of its kind and testifies to women's involvement in the war and the impact it had upon their lives. The anthology is necessary reading, together with the soldier poets like Owen, Sassoon, Blunden and Rosenberg, whose war poetry has been known to us for the past sixty years, for a full understanding of the significance of war for women and men.     

Structures of feeling: contemporary research in women’s film and broadcasting history

ABSTRACT

This special issue is the second volume originating from the ‘Doing Women’s Film and Television Histories III’ international conference held at the Phoenix Cinema, Leicester, England, in May 2016. It connects with concerns and questions of women’s production histories related to the constructed nature of history and how we write a ‘history from below’ to foreground the hidden, marginalised or forgotten histories of our women ancestors. This collection captures something of the dominant ‘structures of feeling’ of women’s film and broadcasting history scholarship in the contemporary period ranging from considerations of women working in both above and below-the-line roles in film, television and radio, to those whose labour fell outside of mainstream cinema production, as in the instance of the amateur film in the UK between the 1930s and 1980. Together, these case studies span from 1926 to the contemporary period, providing particular flashpoints of women’s history across the UK, North America, Italy and Australia.     

Rethinking the political: Ottoman women as feminist subjects

This article examines late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Muslim Ottoman women’s journals. Drawing attention to the historical and social phenomenon of Ottoman Muslim women’s print culture, the author argues that women’s writings and activism around these journals functioned as a significant feminist public sphere that built a community of women’s discourse. Women’s journals established a real community of intellectual women writers and readers who overtly promoted a feminist agenda in the public sphere. Thus, they envisioned and created alternative roles for upper middle class and middle class Ottoman women. Contrary to the conventional narrative of Turkish feminism that identifies its origin with the Republican period, it was Ottoman women’s periodicals and associations that laid the groundwork for future feminists in the Republican period. In providing an analysis of these magazines, the author explores a class of now nearly forgotten publications that, she argues, created a feminist discourse in their time.     

Shifting Foundations: women economists in the Weimar Republic

This article draws on a biographical case study of the first women to obtain doctorates in economics at the University of Berlin between 1900 and 1925. Their educational opportunities and experiences were linked to the networks that tied the women’s and social reform movements, as well as to the disciplinary differentiation of the German social sciences and the development of social work. These connections allowed them to exploit particular employment niches before and during the First World War, but the foundations of the expertise upon which women economists could call did not hold in the new political and institutional context of the Weimar Republic. What these early graduates patched together in response reveals a complex of opportunities and limitations presented by their simultaneous exploitation of essentialist and expertise‐based arguments.     

Provisional pleasures: the challenge of contemporary experimental women poets

This article is an introduction to contemporary experimental poetry by women. It considers the reasons for the resistance to such work in this country. It refutes arguments made against it, for example that avant-garde writing is elitist or not related to women's experience. It further suggests why this writing, in particular in its complex engagement with issues of language, subjectivity and gender, should in fact be of great interest to the woman/feminist reader. In particular, it suggests parallels between the concerns of this work and those of feminist poststructuralism. Above all, throughout the piece, it attempts to introduce the ‘provisional pleasures’ of the contemporary avant-garde to the reader, introducing, quoting and providing multiple interpretations of the work of several diverse writers in this tradition. It aims to provide a sense of the linguistic and formal innovations of these writings, alongside a sense of their relevance to questions of female subjectivity and of women's relationship to the dominant discourses of our time.     

Justifying Gender Equality on the Bench: WhyDifference Won't Do

The case for gender equality on the bench wouldseem too uncontroversial to requirejustification. Yet the practical realities ofthe slow progress of women towards equality ofparticipation both quantitative and qualitativein the judiciary testifies to the continuingneed to argue the case for change. To date, theprimary rationale for promoting gender equalityhas been that women will bring a uniquecontribution to the bench as a result of theirdifferent life experiences, values andattitudes. Such arguments derived fromdifference theory have had a strong appealsince they appear to give legitimacy to theundervalued attributes traditionally associatedas feminine while also promoting the meritprinciple by claiming to improve the quality ofjustice. However, this article argues thatdifference theory arguments are theoreticallyweak, empirically questionable andstrategically dangerous. Instead, it argues forthe adoption of a rationale for gender equalitybased on equity and legitimacy; that equalparticipation of men and women in the justicesystem is an inherent and essential feature ofa democracy without which the judiciary willlose public confidence. This approach, thoughless immediately appealing, is ultimately moresound.     

Silenced narratives of women’s participation in labour and political struggle in Spain, 1960–1975

ABSTRACT

This article studies women’s participation in the struggle against the dictatorship in Spain (from 1960 to 1975). Drawing on life stories of women activists from el Marco de Jerez, it examines their repertoires of actions, their frames, and the lack of recognition from both academic and political spheres. A Gramscian approach and the perspective of hegemonic masculinity contribute to explain how women organized, how represented their collective action, and why their memories have been silenced. The theoretical approach has helped to identify relations of hegemony within feminist studies and political movement.     

Academic women,affirmative action,and mid-America in the eighties

Drawing on her personal experiences as an affirmative action officer for seven years in a large midwestern state university, the author contends that academic women fare much better now than a decade ago. She speculates as to why, in spite of significant progress, many women continue to feel like second-class citizens in academe. She also seeks to predict the future for women in higher education in the eighties.     

The ‘Wrongs’ of Women: Sex and Sexuality in Irish American Women's Writing

A key trait distinguishing the writing of Irish American women from that of their male counterparts is a strong feminist bent often expressed in stories featuring sex and sexuality. In ignoring these characteristics, Irish studies scholars have disregarded a trait established by Irish women writers in oral traditions as early as 600 and in written English since 1685. Much of this material was categorized as the ‘Wrongs of Woman’, a phrase used to describe stories about physical and sexual abuse. These same themes can be traced in the writing of Irish American women since the late nineteenth century. By focusing on these ‘wrongs’, Irish American women have not only carried on the tradition begun by their foremothers; they have also battled patriarchal bonds on three fronts: religion, which created such bonds; society, which reinforced them; and politics, which tries to recreate and re-impose them. A complete understanding of Irish American writing therefore depends on recognizing and adding the contributions of these women to the definition of the literature. This essay defines that cohort, then provides a historically contextualized examination of their literary attempts to address the ‘wrongs’ of women inflicted by religion, society and politics from 1899 to the present. In so doing, this discussion demonstrates the role played by Irish American women writers in promoting, protecting and perpetuating the rights of women in the United States and around the world.     

Single and Married Women in the Law of Israel – a Feminist Perspective

This paper examines the ways Israeli law differentiates betweensingle and married women. The first section explores the littlewe know of single women and single mothers' realities. The secondsection analyses Israeli laws related to military service,housing assistance, homemakers' status in the social securitysystem, ways of becoming a mother, and public support formothers. The legal analysis reveals complex distinctions betweensingle and married women ranging from ignoring single women whenthey have no children and encouraging them to marry, toambivalence towards single women who want to conceive, and ontosubstantial public support for single women who are alreadymothers. The article points to directions of change needed so thelaw will adequately address single women's choices and needs.