Sylvia Pankhurst,Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War

The article traces the committed reaction of the author’s mother, former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, to the Italian fascist invasion and occupation of Ethiopia and to the Spanish Civil War.     

Militant Women: representations of Charlotte Corday,Louise Michel and Emmeline Pankhurst

This article contains a cross-cultural comparison of constructions of politically militant women, beginning with Charlotte Corday of the French Revolution, continuing with Louise Michel of the 1871 Paris Commune, and concluding with Emmeline Pankhurst and the British suffragettes. The study reveals that as Michel's opponents attempted to ridicule and discredit her, they resurrected representations of Corday, modifying and aging them to fit her. The suffragettes' opponents similarly resurrected representations of Michel to ridicule them, but not as successfully. In response, Pankhurst's and the suffragettes' self-representations skillfully countered the anti-suffragists' dated and inaccurate representations of militant women as unhappy and unattractive spinsters.     

Spinsters,war widows,and wounded soldiers: the Great War novels of Berta Ruck

Although a prolific romance novelist of the early twentieth century, Berta Ruck (1878–1978) has garnered very little critical attention or appreciation, in no small part due to the seemingly generic and conventional narratives of her dozens of novels. This article rejects the dismissive approach taken to Ruck’s work by focusing on her novels written during and immediately following the First World War and examining them in the context of contemporary debates about gender. In particular, these novels frequently challenge strict pre-war and wartime gender binaries as stifling, favoring instead a more inclusive approach to gendered ideals. Spinsters, widows, and war widows are granted agency rather than pity as Ruck responds to concerns surrounding Britain’s ‘surplus women’ during and after the war in order to challenge traditional categories of femininity. Likewise, physically and psychologically wounded soldiers are employed to critique a static and limiting idealization of masculinity that was promoted during the war.     

‘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.     

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.     

troublesome threesome: feminism,anthropology and Muslim women's piety

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency.     

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     

History,texts and feminism: An interview with Genevieve Lloyd

In 1993, the Social Democratic Party in Sweden adopted the zipper system, a gender quota system whereby women and men are placed alternately on all party lists. The National Federation of Social Democratic Women had, however, as early as in 1928 proposed that the Social Democratic Party introduce gender quotas so that women would be placed in safe positions on the party lists. In this article, the struggle of The National Federation of Social Democratic Women for an increased parliamentary representation of women and its demand for gender quotas during the period 1970–1993 is analysed. Its strategies to put the issue of women's under‐representation on the political agenda are outlined as well as the major discursive frames that the debate was embedded within. The article suggests that the discursive controversies over gender quotas can best be understood in the context of competing conceptions regarding historical development, equal opportunity, local autonomy and cooperation between women and men. One main point is that the zipper system, despite its radical institutional effect, can be seen as a discursive solution to the norm of cooperation.