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.     

‘Fresh attractions’: white slaveryand feminism in New Zealand, 1885–1918

Abstract

New Zealand women participated in an international debate over white slavery from the late nineteenth century. Features of that debate were common to several countries, but local commentators drew upon New Zealand's colonial position to evoke images of old-world ills in a new country. Ironically, however, New Zealand women were not convinced of the existence of white slavery in their country. As part of a catalogue of men's sexual and social oppression of women, the portrayal of gender relations in the anti-white slavery campaign was stark, but deliberate. In their demands that men take responsibility for ensuring that women had the right to walk the streets in safety, New Zealand feminists deployed the rhetoric of white slavery to argue for women's sexual and social freedom.     

To ‘Better the Breed of Men’: women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1900–1935

Over the past decade the relationship between feminism and eugenics has become an increasingly important site of research. This relationship, however, remains to be examined in New Zealand. This article interrogates the ways in which female reformers, colonial feminists and female health and welfare workers engaged in eugenic debates in New Zealand during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It situates the 1924 Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders in New Zealand and the sterilization debate of the 1930s as representative of women’s role as both the agents and subjects of eugenics in this period. Eugenics offered women a discourse of moral and social reform that fitted neatly with the ideals of colonial feminism and, by extension, enabled them to participate in national debates about racial health. However, in their testimony before the 1924 Inquiry and in the subsequent debates surrounding sterilization, women articulated and prescribed eugenic solutions for ‘deviant women’ and cast themselves as the ‘mothers of the race’. As authors of eugenics for other women, white middle‐class female reformers, health professionals and colonial feminists complicate the history of eugenics in New Zealand.     

The ‘middle peasant thesis’ and the roots of rural agitation in India, 1914–1947

Peasant agitations during the last decades of British rule in India are now receiving increasing attention. Despite a diversity of arguments concerning their origins within the peasantry, one popular model is that developed by Wolf and Alavi of the potential radicalism of a landowning subsistence middle peasantry. The thesis is here examined both in terms of its general analytical value for India and by studying one particular movement, the campaign in Bardoli, Gujarat in 1928. From this, some conclusions are suggested about the nature of successful peasant political action in India and other parts of Asia.     

‘Queen of the Bristol Channel Ports’: the intersection of gender and civic identity in Cardiff,c.1880–1914

This article explores how civic identity could shape, and be shaped by, gender distinctions during the period of commercial and municipal development. It argues that women's relationship to the urban scene was more nuanced than theories of exclusion imply, gender and civic identity being mutually constitutive. Through the case study of Cardiff, the article advocates the need for deeper analysis of the way regional and national complexities permeated gendered civic sentiments. Notions of femininity in Wales had been defined in opposition to England ever since the 1847 ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’. However, Cardiff's relatively anglicised status and aspirations in the local and global urban hierarchy meant there was often a desire by civic leaders to emulate what was occurring elsewhere, or to develop their own definition of Welsh femininity. Consequently, these competing gender ideals underlined Cardiff's civic and national—Welsh and British—identity.     

‘Wearing the Breeches’? Almack’s,the Female Patroness,and Public Femininity c.1764–1848

Almack’s, a mixed-sex establishment run by a group of female patronesses, was a popular meeting place for the aristocracy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, despite its contemporary appeal, the establishment has received little attention from historians. This article addresses this absence, exploring the varying, and often contentious, social, cultural and political functions and meanings the establishment held. Building on recent historiographical developments, this article demonstrates how certain aristocratic women were able to exercise power and influence at the heart of their class. In doing so, it considers the intersections between gender, urban space and political culture. It argues that the activities of the female patronesses were often highly contested, exposing the narrow, and often blurred, line between legitimate and illegitimate action.     

‘Quality’, Cinema and the ‘Superior Woman’ Persona: understanding women’s film criticism in post‐war Britain (1945–59)

Criticism was a particularly buoyant area of film culture in Britain during the post‐war period, a regular feature in newspapers, periodicals, magazines, and BBC radio programmes. What has not been widely recognised is the central role that women played as critics of film at this time, and where their interests differed from those of their male peers. This article recovers the contribution made by women film critics, arguing that middle‐class writers such as C. A. Lejeune and E. Arnot Robertson adopted a form of ‘distanced amusement’ with regard to themes of sentimentality and romance (associated with low‐brow female pleasures). This strategy permitted them to engage with the broader cultures of film‐watching, commenting on subjects such as female crying and character identification, and recognising cinema‐going as a pleasurable activity for women, subjects which male critics did not discuss. These findings expand knowledge about film criticism in the post‐war period and reconfigure received understandings of film culture to account for women’s gendered contribution to the critical field.     

Heirloom rice in Ifugao: an ‘anti-commodity’ in the process of commodification

We analyse the marketing of ‘heirloom rices’ produced in the Cordillera mountains of northern Luzon, the Philippines, as the commodification of a historical ‘anti-commodity’. We contend that, historically, rice was produced for social, cultural and spiritual purposes but not primarily for sale or trade. The Ifugaos were able to sustain terraced wet-rice cultivation within a system of ‘escape agriculture’ because they were protected from Spanish interference by the friction of terrain and distance. ‘Heirloom rice’ is a boundary concept that enables social entrepreneurs to commodify traditional landraces. We analyse the implications for local rice production and conservation efforts.     

‘Hand in hand with the women,forward we will go’: welsh nationalism and feminism in the 1890s

This article explores the history of women's liberalism in Wales in the 1880s and 1890s, during the period of the Liberal nationalist movement known as Cymru Fydd or Young Wales. The Welsh Union of Women's Liberal Associations (WUWLA) was founded in 1892 to provide an important bloc of votes for the Progressive (Suffragist) faction in the Women's Liberal Federation, but its aims combined Liberal, Nationalist and feminist objectives. This article argues that briefly, and uniquely, in the 1890s, the WUWLA was able to bring together feminism and nationalism in British party politics, despite some opposition from its own nationalist members. The active intervention of women ensured that the masculinist language of nationalism shifted to an emphasis on equality of the sexes. In 1895, Cymru Fydd, embodied in the Welsh National Federation, espoused women's suffrage among its objects, and gave women's organisations special representation in its structures. This change is explored both through the writings and the events – a series of meetings and conferences – which led to the formation of both the WUWLA and the Welsh National Federation. But the weakness of liberalism at the end of the 1890s, together with divisions within Wales, meant that the new politics was short lived. The decline of women's national organisation after this period, though not fully explored here, can be linked to those problems, but also to the rifts created between Liberals, women and men, over the issue of women's suffrage in the Edwardian period.     

Beginning an ‘Extraordinary Opportunity’: Eleanor Roosevelt,Molly Dewson,and the expansion of women's boundaries in the Democratic Party, 1924–1934

This article contributes to recent reinterpretations of women's participation in the United States' political system in the 1920s and 1930s by arguing that the years 1924 through 1934 demonstrated an expansion of female boundaries in the Democratic Party. Eleanor Roosevelt became the first agent in this process through her involvement in both the New York State Democratic Party and in social justice feminism. Her protégée, Molly Dewson, continued the expansion as the first full-time director of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, also helping to re-establish social justice feminism's national prominence.     

On being the ‘gender person’ in an academic department: constructions,configurations and implications

The term ‘gender person’ in an academic department is a colloquial expression which refers to someone who researches and/or teaches about gender, but whose primary affiliation is not to a gender studies department or centre. This role has particularly been discussed in relation to international development organisations, but has been neglected in relation to higher education institutions. The article reapplies Lucy Ferguson’s ‘gender person’ framework to academics working as ‘gender people’ in the conditions of contemporary academia. Three cases of different manifestations of the ‘gender person’ role are explored in detail and analysed for the ways in which occupying the ‘gender person’ role impacts upon academic careers and gender knowledge. The article contributes an elaborated concept of the ‘gender person’ in academia and provides empirical evidence of being the ‘gender person’. The article particularly shows that relying on a ‘gender person’ as a form of gender mainstreaming renders both gender academics and academic departments vulnerable in different ways.     

‘No Suggestion of Suffragettism’: the Blue Blouses in Ireland, 1933–1936

In July 1933 membership of the Irish fascist organisation, the Blueshirts, was officially opened to women for the first time. Within a year the Blue Blouses, as the women's auxiliary was colloquially called, became the largest women's political organisation in Ireland. This article examines the group as a vehicle for the politicisation of conservative pro-Treaty Irish women. The Blue Blouses willingly used parades, mass rallies, athletics, and a specific discourse of domesticity to articulate a strategy of political involvement that did not conflict with the patriarchal presumptions of inter-war Irish political culture. As such, this analysis is intended to augment the history of inter-war Irish women politics that to date has focused almost exclusively on feminist organisations.     

‘How the Modern Girl Attains Strength and Grace’: the Girl's Own Paper,sport and the discipline of the female body, 1914–1956

In the first half of the twentieth century there was a great deal of debate about increasing female participation in sporting activities, and changes to the female sporting body and the way in which it was displayed. Magazines for girls played a key role in the construction of the female body, and in mediating for their readers a range of diverse views on the meaning, purpose and benefits or dangers of female physical culture. This article explores the way in which one periodical, the Girl's Own Paper (GOP), disseminated those discourses and allowed its readers to explore different viewpoints. It argues that the way in which GOP presented sport for girls and women was contingent upon the age of the intended readership, and that the coverage of sport within the paper reached a peak in the 1930s when the target readership was aged 12 to 16.     

‘Belles from Bristol and Bournville in New Surroundings’: female confectionery workers as transnational agents, 1918–1928

ABSTRACT

In existing histories of the development of multinational business, women are usually absent. Yet when the British confectionery companies of Cadbury, Fry and Pascall took the bold step to build an entirely new factory in Tasmania in the early 1920s, women workers were important, and mobile, actors. This article draws on business history archives and genealogical material, from both Britain and Australia, to explore how a select group of British women became the ‘pioneers’ of the Cadbury-Fry-Pascall company. It examines why women were key to the formation of an Australian subsidiary, how they influenced, and sometimes challenged, the creation of workplace culture and practice, and the consequences of this mode of female labour migration.     

‘In the case of a woman’ or ‘the headache’: married women’s nationality and Canada’s Citizenship Act at home and Europe, 1946–50

In addition to making Canadian nationality independent of British subjecthood, the 1946 Canadian Citizenship Act made women’s nationality independent of marriage, but did not repatriate women who married aliens before 1 January 1947, when the act became law. This article examines the lobby to repatriate the women, most of them married to European allied soldiers and living in Canada or Europe, and wider contexts involved. Scrutinizing the citizenship claims made by and for ‘ordinary’ but racially privileged white women in a dominion that was both a receiving nation on the cusp of renewed immigration and a neo-colonial state vis-a-vis Indigenous peoples, it acknowledges the woman’s heartfelt sentiments and assesses the lobby against the continuing disabilities imposed on status-Indian women who ‘married out.’ The delayed reform of 1950, which fell short of automatic repatriation, and the absence of feminists from a lobby related to a long-identified feminist issue, are also addressed, as are topics in need of further research.     

The forgotten ‘mateys’: women workers in Portsmouth Dockyard,England, 1939-45

Abstract

This paper is based on nearly 30 interviews with women who worked in Portsmouth Dockyard before and during the Second World War. Their testimonies show that women experienced their wartime work in different ways, with attitudes that were to impinge on employment relations, on calls for equal pay and on the provision of facilities to relieve their domestic responsibilities. Government response to these problems reveal the duality of policy decisions and the difficulties of balancing the need for labour with dominant ideals about the cultural position of women. Shifts in employment practices in wartime conditions highlight the debates around the impact of wartime work on gender divisions in the workplace and perceptions of female paid employment by both men and women at that time.