Elspeth Huxley: gender,empire and narratives of nation, 1935-64

Abstract

This article explores the impact of empire on narratives of the British nation during a period of decline of British colonial rule through a study of Elspeth Huxley's successive reworkings of such narratives between 1935 and 1964. It sets Huxley's work in the context of post-1945 anxieties about national decline and their connections with the loss of imperial power, and looks at the difficulties surrounding the articulation of national identity as virile and masculine in post-imperial Britain. Although anxieties about masculinities were often addressed through a misogynistic discourse which showed women emasculating men, Huxley's work suggests the significance of a counter-theme. It indicates not only her own attachment to an imperial identity but also the ways in which this continued to be articulated in the midtwentieth century as an identity with a wide appeal to a metropolitan audience, and one through which women could be incorporated into the story of nation. In exploring the terms of this incorporation, the article considers the opportunities open to women to claim to embody exemplary national qualities through the figure of the doughty, intrepid, imperial female pioneer, and the particular resonance and appeal this figure acquired in the context of the end of empire.     

Sexuality and citizenship: the state and girls' leisure provision in England, 1939-45

ABSTRACT

The main feminist conceptualisation of women's close relationships from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century characterises these as ‘romantic friendships’ and argues that a stereotype of ‘the lesbian’ was invented by sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and applied to these relationships in order to condemn them. A number of pieces of primary research are presented which suggest that this approach is highly problematic. In the case of Emily Wilding Davison's close relationship with Mary Leigh there is simply too little historical evidence to be able to draw any conclusions as to its character or its meaning for the women concerned. In addition, Edith Lees Ellis has been seen as a woman whose romantic friendships were ‘morbidified’ as lesbianism by her husband Havelock Ellis, although in this case archival evidence clearly shows that she certainly saw herself as a ‘invert’. And relatedly, the same archival source also shows that some women experienced their sexuality in ‘mannish’ terms in the absence of any evidence of an influence on them of the pejorative writings of sexologists. Rather than premature theoretical generalisation, what is needed is more primary research on particular women's close relationships and the social context in which these were located.

     

The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England

This article uses a case-study of the relationship between the British suffrage organization, the Women's Social and Political Union, and its equivalent on the Irish side, the Irish Women's Franchise League, in order to illuminate some consequences of the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland. As political power was located within the British state, and the British feminist movement enjoyed superior resources, the Irish movement was at a disadvantage. This was compounded by serious internal divisions within the Irish movement - a product of the dispute over Ireland's constitutional future - which prevented the Franchise League, sympathetic to the nationalist demand for independence - from establishing a strong presence in the North. The consequences of the British movement organizing in Ireland, in particular their initiation of a militant campaign in the North, are explored in some detail, using evidence provided by letters from the participants.British intervention was clearly motivated from British-inspired concerns rather than from any solidarity with the situation of women in Ireland, proving to be disastrous for the Irish, accentuating their deep-rooted divisions.The overall argument is that feminism cannot be viewed in isolation from other political considerations. This case-study isolates the repercussions of Britain's imperial role for both British and Irish movements: ostensibly with a common objective but in reality divided by their differing response to the constitutional arrangement between the two countries. For this reason, historians of Irish feminist movements must give consideration to the importance of the ‘national question’ and display a more critical attitude towards the role played by Britain in Irish affairs.