From ‘Dearest Mama’ to ‘Dear Mother’: changing styles in early twentieth-century letters from daughters to mothers

In this article, the author looks at two sets of letters sent home to mothers by travelling daughters in the early twentieth century. Both sets of letters come from the Strachey family: one from Philippa Strachey written during the visit she made to India in 1901, the other from her niece, Elinor Rendel, during the period she spent with the Scottish Women's Hospital on the Eastern Front in the First World War. But the letters come from two different generations of women and there are very marked differences between them in style and in content. Both women used their letters as ways to express and to negotiate independent lives while still remaining close to their families, and the author suggests that the differences in their epistolary style serves as much to reflect contrasting approaches to expressions of sentiment and to the appropriate style for writing letters as they do to suggest different relationships between them and their mothers.     

Equity’s treatment of sexually transmitted debt

She was to a degree the tool of her husband. However, despite the fact she was under his influence to a degree she cannot escape if the Bank took all reasonable steps to ensure that she had appreciated and understood what she was signing. It may be that Mrs Wright-Bailey did not have an adequate comprehension of the nature of the charge... [E]ven if she did not, the Bank did take all reasonable steps I wish to thank Hilary Astor, Brian Cahill and the anonymous readers from FLS for their helpful comments and suggestions.     

Academic Achievement and the Self-Image of Adolescents with Diabetes Mellitus Type-1 and Rheumatoid Arthritis

A total of 69 adolescents, 21 with diabetes mellitus type-1 (DM), 24 with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and 24 controls matched for sex, age, social background, and living environment, were compared by means of their school grades and the Offer Self-Image Questionnaire. The ages of the children at the time of the diagnosis of the disease and its subsequent duration were the same in the DM and the RA groups. Results show that the academic achievement of adolescents with DM who are well balanced and adolescents with RA with mild or moderate symptoms are equal to those of their healthy peers. In the OSIQ scales there were no statistically significant differences between the groups. In the groups of controls, there were more significant correlations between the OSIQ scores and the school grades than those with the DM or RA adolescents. The direction was positive. The correlations of the 3 groups did not differ significantly from each other. In case of adolescents with various kinds of chronic diseases, it is important to support their motivation for learning and planning the future.Medical doctor, specializes in child and adolescent psychiatry. Since gaining her PhD at the University of Turku in 1987, she has also specialized in hospital administration and adolescent psychotherapy. Since 1982, she has been the senior doctor of the Child Psychiatric Clinic of Satakunta Hospital District. Currently she is the head of the Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic, Turku University Hospital. She has trained both child psychiatrists and adolescent psychiatrists. During the years 1990–1992 she has participated as a postdoctoral fellow in the Clinical Research Training Program for Adolescents sponsored by the NIMH.Experienced Psychologist and Researcher. She received her PhD in neuropsychology at the University of Turku. She is currently a clinical psychologist at the Adolescent Psychiatry Unit of Turku University Central Hospital. She is an expert on neuropsychological test methods and also responsible for teaching their application.     

Hungarian adolescents' self-concept

Hungarian and United States adolescents' self-image was studied using the Offer Self-Image Questionnaire (OSIQ). In Hungary, 1,163 younger and older male and female adolescents were studied using a Hungarian translation of the OSIQ. Analyses of endorsement patterns of OSIQ items showed that Hungarian and American adolescents endorsed many items in the same way. Similarities in endorsement patterns were much more common between the two countries than were differences. Analyses of OSIQ scales showed that for most scales younger Hungarian adolescents reported better adjustment than younger American adolescents. Differences were not as great or reversed in the older age groups. Implications for cross-cultural studies of adolescent self-image were drawn based on these results.Received M. D. from the Semmelweis Medical university in Budapest. Research interest is complex somato-mental health care of adolescents.Received M. D. from the University of Chicago. Major interests are concepts of mental health and the developmental psychology of adolescence.Director, Forensic Psychology, Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center. Received J. D. from the University of Chicago School of Law; received Ph. D. in human development from the University of Chicago. Research interests are adolescence and delinquency.Professor of Psychology, Northwestern University. Received Ph. D. in psychology from the University of Chicago. Major interests are psychotherapy research and adolescence.     

Further Evidence of an Engagement–Achievement Paradox Among U.S. High School Students

Achievement, engagement, and students’ quality of experience were compared by racial and ethnic group in a sample of students (N = 586) drawn from 13 high schools with diverse ethnic and socioeconomic student populations. Using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), 3,529 samples of classroom experiences were analyzed along with self-reported grades. Similarities and differences in achievement, engagement, and quality of experience among white, black, Latino, and Asian students were examined. The most marked differences found were between black and white students. Consistent with several previous studies, an engagement–achievement paradox was found in which black students reported higher engagement, intrinsic motivation, and affect in classrooms, but lower GPA relative to white students. A similar engagement–achievement paradox was found for students from low SES communities compared to those from high SES communities. Analyses also revealed racial and ethnic differences in the relationship of engagement with on-task behavior and contextual factors. Being on-task when in classrooms had a more positive effect on the engagement of black students relative to white students. The contextual effect of being in school versus home or in public on engagement was also more positive for black students than white students. Contextual factors and measurement issues are emphasized in the interpretation of findings and suggestions for future research.

'Dat Var Negressen Walaida Snow'

This essay is about the jazz musician and black variety stage artist Valaida Snow and the years she spent caught in Nazi occcupied Denmark. Despite rumors that she was held in a concentration camp, this essay argues that she may in fact have been shielded from the occupiers by the Danes. This essay argues that a masculinist bias in popular cultural/jazz studies obscures the histories of black women expressive artists and limits theoretical possibilities in the study of performance. It argues that the study of black women performers demands the development of more supple analytical models that attend to the heterogeneity of black expressive forms.     

biting the hand that feeds: Australian cuisine and Aboriginal sovereignty in the Great Sandy Strait

Wilhelmina (Mina) Rawson (1851–1933) is lauded in both academic and popular circles as the author of the first uniquely Australian cookbooks, which she wrote between 1876 and 1895. Rawson was a prolific writer and stressed that she was the first white woman settler at Boonooroo in the colony of Queensland, where she was ‘beholden to the blacks’ to show her what to eat (Rawson, 1895, p. 54). Rawson’s cookbooks famously codified how to use Australian non-human animals, including wallaby, parrot and goanna, as meat, and her published memories of this time detailed the context in which she implemented and refined these recipes. Rawson organised and policed racialised frontier space as a white woman, claiming British sovereignty over Butchulla country in order to profit from and teach other settlers to profit from the coastal land and waterways. This paper draws on ecofeminist and postcolonial theory and works to explore how Rawson organised food production to exercise violent colonial claims to sovereignty as a white woman, explicitly advising other settlers to do the same.     

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.     

Constance Maynard's Life-Writing Considered as Spiritual Autobiography

Viewing Constance Maynard's unwieldy life-writings within the tradition of spiritual autobiography reveals many of the irresolvable tensions with which she wrestled. Although she chose to see her public role as spearheading a crusade against modern rationalism, her inner life was as much concerned with the struggle to repudiate her parents’ ascetic Evangelical piety in favour of a more emotionally intense spirituality. Her conviction of conversion's centrality fostered a sense of mission which bolstered a sense of her own exceptionality as a ‘prophet’ chosen by God. This in turn nourished her belief that she was justified in exempting herself from the roles and relationships conventionally assigned to her gender, by pursuing same-sex desire and sexless motherhood.     

Memories of menarche: Age,preparation, and prior knowledge as determinants of initial menstrual experience

The relationships between age at menarche, preparation for menarche, and initial experience of menarche, were assessed in a retrospective questionnaire administered to 97 college-aged women. The more knowledgeable a girl was prior to menarche, the more adequate she perceived her preparation for menarche to have been; and the older she was at the time of menarche, the more likely she was to report a positive initial experience. These data support clinical anecdotes describing initial responses to menarche, and provide information about the factors which can moderate the extent to which menarche is experienced as a traumatic and disruptive event.Portions of this research were presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Hartford, Conn., April 1980.Received Ph.D. in psychology from Tufts University. Major interests are psychobiology and adolescent development.Received Ph.D. in psychology from Clark University. Major interests are clinical psychology and personality development.Received Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. Major interest is cognitive development.     

Autonomy as a disposition to non-domination in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

In this paper I argue that there is a notion of autonomy which can be extrapolated from Wollstonecraft’s work: central to this notion is the need for us all to adopt a disposition to non-domination.Thus, an individual is autonomous when she is not dominated but also, how she behaves towards others is significant, for she is only truly autonomous if she does not dominate others. I argue that such a disposition can be read in Wollstonecraft as something which cuts across the public/private divide. It is based on the notion that individuals are always capable of being rational in both of these spheres. There must be a disposition to non-domination because Wollstonecraft demonstrates how domination is corrupting, and when this disposition is lost we find ourselves faced with myriad concerns from slavery to multiple forms of social oppression. Domination creates relations of dependency. It is arbitrary and contingent and makes us relate to each other with a marked lack of compassion. Instead, Wollstonecraft stresses we have a duty to treat others as equals and key to this duty is the need to not dominate others. Finally, I highlight how Wollstonecraft suggests such a disposition is to be gained through education.     

Stevie Smith's Myth-Kitty

Abstract

Although Stevie Smith's poetry is in many ways very close to the laconic and less-deceived tone characteristic of Philip Larkin, there is one aspect of her work in which she differs strikingly from him and from the general features of Movement poetry: that is, in her use of what Larkin, in his 1956 ‘statement on poetry’, contemptuously called a ‘common myth-kitty’. In this chapter, I attempt to examine the treasures of Stevie's myth-kitty, not merely with the aim of distancing Smith from the Movement, but of reassessing her relationship with modernism and other poets of the generation which came to prominence in the 1930s, in particular, W. H. Auden. Smith's closest connection with modernism has often been seen to be her use of a stream-of-consciousness technique, as deployed in Novel on Yellow Paper—a technique which is inevitably compared to and dismissed as inferior to that of Virginia Woolf. Instead, I will put forward the claim that Smith's relationship to modernism should also be seen in her use of intertextuality, in the classical and other mythic fragments which, despite considerable differences of tone, place her work in the same tradition as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot. I attempt to demonstrate how she draws on this ‘myth-kitty’, especially ?n her poetry, focusing on her treatment of female mythical figures, and argue that the key figure in Smith's oeuvre—the counterpart and equivalent of Eliot's Tiresias—is the figure of Persephone on her journey to the underworld.     

Sybil Campbell,first woman judge and supporter of higher education for women

ABSTRACT

Sybil Campbell was appointed a Metropolitan stipendiary magistrate in 1945, the first woman to become a full-time judge in the courts of England and Wales. She sat for 16 years, at Tower Bridge Magistrates’ Court, where she met with a great deal of opprobrium from the national and local press, trade unionists and individuals, much of it directed to the fact that she was a woman dispensing justice, with some severity, in a working-class community. She weathered the criticism with indifference and continued until her retirement, in 1961. Her pioneering example, however, did not encourage the appointment of other women to a judicial role until the appointment of Elizabeth Lane as a county court judge in 1962. This article examines her judicial career and her work for the British Federation of University Women, of which she was Honorary Secretary and its honorary vice-president.     

At the Back of the Class. At the Front of The Class: Experiences as Aboriginal Student and Aboriginal Teacher

This is a personal account of an Aboriginal woman who went through the education system in Australia to obtain finally her law degree.Aboriginal people experience many hurdles in the education system. Many Aboriginal children feel alienated within the legal system which until recently focused on a colonial history of Australia, ignoring the experiences, indeed the presence, of indigenous people in Australia.The Australian government had a policy of not educating Aboriginal people past the age of 14. The author was one of the first generation that could go straight from high school to university. She speaks of the debt she feels towards the generations of her people that fought for her right to access to higher education.The author went on to become the first Aboriginal person to be accepted into Harvard Law School which brought different personal challenges and allowed for reflection on comparisons of the sensitivity towards race in both education systems.When the author returned to Australia, she took a position teaching at the University of New South Wales. She had to come to terms with working within a system that she had felt alienated within as a student. Her position at the front of the class has created a sense of empowerment that she can pass on to her Aboriginal and female students.     

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.     

Histoire/histoires: special issue in honour of claire duchen

Claire Duchen died on 15 March 2000 after a long and very brave struggle with ovarian cancer. She died aged 45, but already with an established reputation as a leading scholar of French feminism. As Siân Reynolds wrote in her obituary for The Guardian newspaper, Claire was central to a global network of feminist scholars as a writer, translator, research coordinator, and for over 10 years, from 1987–1997, regional editor for Africa and Europe of Women's Studies International Forum. Her particular areas of specialism, in which she published widely were French Studies, especially French feminisms on which she published two well-known books, Women's Studies, and contemporary French and European Women's History, on which she published her last book this year.² She was respected as a scholar and valued as a colleague and a friend by many women and men around the world.     

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     

Gender troubles,Redux

Thirty years ago, women's history written from a feminist standpoint was the revolutionary force, challenging androcentric thought and definitions of experience. Today, gender has become the more threatening moniker to those who would maintain patriarchal power and suppress knowledge. While not new, recent attacks on ‘gender ideology’ by conservative, often labeled right-wing governments, threaten the continuation of degree programs, as in Hungary, and pose manifold dangers to scholars world-wide. In the context of women's and LGBTQ movements, twenty-first century globalization, and political and economic changes, those who cling to the gender binary simplify the subject of women's history.     

Sisters,not demons: the influence of british suffragists on the American suffrage movement

British suffragettes were an important, if controversial, influence on the American suffrage movement, for the successful achievement of the franchise in 1920 was helped by the adoption of the suffragettes' militant tactics in the final stage of the campaign. When Harriot Stanton Blatch returned to the USA in 1902 after living for twenty years in England, she found that the suffrage movement her mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had helped to found was stagnant. Blatch energized the movement in New York City by recruiting working-class women and organizing colorful parades and other dramatic events, strategies she had learned from Emmeline Pankhurst. Blatch arranged a successful tour of the USA for Pankhurst in 1909.