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.     

The angel of freedom[1]: Dora Marsden and the transformation of the freewoman into the egoist

The article discusses the suffrage periodical press and shows how the disjunction between ‘the public face of suffrage’ and the aspirations of feminist dissidents led to the publication of a new feminist paper, The Freewoman, edited by two disenchanted suffragettes, Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe. The Freewoman and its successor, The New Freewoman, had a symbiotic relationship to the women's suffrage movement. But Marsden's literary interests and her interest in philosophical individualism resulted in a decisive break with the Edwardian women's movement. The Egoist, which evolved out of The Freewoman, severed all earlier connections with feminism, suffrage and progressive politics.     

Homework

This article explores how plays in the 1890s engaged with an aspect of evolutionary theory that had become particularly vexed—namely, the idea of gender essentialism: whether motherhood was the true calling for women; whether the bond with the infant was inevitable and instinctive; whether, as Shaw's teleological, progressive vision would have it, the woman's evolutionary role was to be the ‘life force’, selecting the superior mate for the continued improvement of the species. Considering this question can deepen our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in this period, and also usefully complicate the narrative often told about the figure of the New Woman in drama. Two plays of this period address particularly well the question of what is ‘natural’ maternal behaviour: James A. Herne's Margaret Fleming (first staged in 1890) and Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell's Alan's Wife (first staged and published in 1893).     

The Woman on the Postage Stamp

Class(room) wars

The Taking Liberties Collective, Learning the Hard Way: Women's Oppression in Men's Education (Macmillan, Women in Society, 1989) £25 hardback, £7.95 paperback.

Ann Thompson and Helen Wilcox (eds) Teaching Women: Feminism and English Studies (Manchester University Press, Cultural Politics Series, 1989), £27.50 hardback, £7.95 paperback.

The past before us: twenty years of feminism

Feminist review, spring 1988

Ania Loomba, gender, race, renaissance drama

Cultural Politics Series, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1989

The perpetuation of myth

Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, Viking, £15.95     

Nancy Cunard's English Journey

This essay analyses Nancy Cunard's contribution to the struggle for racial justice in England and her work with the black communities in Liverpool and London (whose histories and experiences differ radically from their counterparts in the United States) in the 1940s. It chronicles for the first time her campaign to safeguard the African collections in the Liverpool Museum and her specific contribution to the archive of black British history. This includes not only the monumental the Negro Anthology (1934) but also the tract, The White Man's Duty (1943) arguing for an end to British imperialism and for race relations legislation. Cunard is situated within a history of the Communist left in Britain and the United States. Her insistence on the primacy of race differentiates her from other white left activists in her day for whom issues of gender and race were or secondary importance compared to those of class (Cunard, 1944). Using unpublished archive material from the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas I show that Cunard's work constitutes one segment in the rich and varied mosaic of black cultural activity in the 1930s and 1940s and discuss how Cunard knew and worked alongside some of the key figures in the black British politics of her day including Una Marson, Learie Constantine, John Carter, Harold Moody, Rudolph Dunbar and Paul Robeson. A prolific writer, publisher and political activist, Cunard presented a white readership with documentation which prompted them to question their own prejudice and rendered problematic the imaging of black people as fixed embodiments of a Eurocentric sense of reality. Cunard's work in the 1930s and 1940s predates the sailing of the Empire Windrush and the accelerated immigration to Britain from the Commonwealth after the Nationality Act of 1948. It adds to our knowledge of earlier black history, narratives, settlements, and anti-racist struggles.