Feminism, suffrage and the nineteenth-century English women's movement

The nineteenth-century English women's movement has usually been studied in terms of its attempts to increase the access of women to the public and political spheres. This approach to the movement ignores the immense concern amongst its members with the private and domestic lives of women. Within the movement there were widely differing views as to how reform in the private sphere and in the public sphere should be integrated.This concern is most clearly evident in the many discussions of marriage which accompanied not only the campaign to reform the legal status of married women, but all the educational, suffrage and employment campaigns as well. These differences came to the fore in the early 1870s in the controversy aroused by the Contagious Diseases Acts. The split within the suffrage movement over this issue reflected differing views as to whether political rights or sexual and moral questions ought to be the primary concern of the movement.     

Sports and women's culture

This article focuses on the fact that women and men belong to two different cultures. Concerning sport participation, there exists a double standard in the way girls and boys are socialized into sport. As a result, sport has never played an important part in many women's lives. This is illustrated by data from different empirical studies that have been done in Norway during recent years.In discussing the future development of women's sport, three approaches are discussed: (1) when women become more and more like men, (2) when women preserve and develop what has been defined as typical female characteristics and activities, and (3) when the androgynous person becomes the normative objective. The author demonstrates that the development so far is the one mentioned in the first point. This is equality on men's terms. The advantage of such a development is questioned. The ideology of society today, which also is reflected in the world of sport, has to be changed. As a consequence, sport should be humanized. It is therefore necessary that women and the central values in women's culture become a strong influence on the development of sport.     

Narratives of family,community and waged work: Latvian European volunteer worker women in post-war Britain

In the mid to late 1940s displaced people in camps in Germany were recruited by the British Government to work in industries in which labour market shortages were severe. This article looks at the recruitment of women who were originally from Latvia for domestic work in hospitals, other institutions and private households and as textile workers. The author argues that as well as reconstructing a sense of belonging to Latvia through the creation of imagined communities in exile, waged work was also a significant part of these women's lives. The author explores the ways in which different types of work influenced the future lives of EVW (European Volunteer Worker) women, both as workers and as members of locally based networks, and discusses the connections between employment and home/community life in the social construction of identity among Latvian women in Britain. The article draws on recent oral testimonies of twenty-five women who came to Britain under the Balt Cygnet and Westward Ho schemes between 1946 and 1949, have lived in this country since then and are now retired.     

feminism,policy and women's safety during Australia's ‘war on terror’

The main argument in this article is that the Australian government in power from 1996 to November 2007 failed women's domestic security by denying the central policy role of women's organizations in the struggle against domestic violence and by successfully expunging public debate on gender issues in Australian governance, while participating in the ‘war on terror’ to guard national security. In bringing together a discussion about the war on terror and the importance of feminism for women's security, key issues about feminism, race and gender are considered. This article also explores the prevalence of violence against women and the social implications of the lack of leadership in public debate about the gendered nature of violence against women. Under the Australian government led by Prime Minister John Howard that gained power in 1996 and was defeated in 2007, women's organizations lost financial support and women's policy infrastructure was decimated. Violence against women, however, continued to increase, reaffirming women's place in Australian society as insecure and dangerous. After more than 30 years of struggle to maintain domestic violence and sexual assault as serious social policy problems, provide services, support and advocacy for women who are victims of violence and assault, women's organizations are coming to terms with a society where there is a blindness to the role of gender in violence against women.     

A local perspective: the women’s movement and citizenship,Croydon 1890s–1939

ABSTRACT

This article will explore the lives of women active in local politics and associational life in Croydon County Borough between the 1890s and 1939. It will argue that a local perspective can reveal the personal, social and political networks that facilitated women’s more expansive public roles. It will note the circumstances which enabled them to assert their citizenship rights and duties and consider how women’s activism developed in the Borough after 1918. It will argue for the importance of context, spatial and chronological, in the formation of political identities and the on-going resonance of these influences in shaping the local women’s movement.     

Gender,nationalism and the colonial jail: a study of women activists in Uttar Pradesh

Abstract

An important aspect of Indian women's political participation in the nationalist struggle against colonial rule was their imprisonment and confinement within the walls of the prison. To counter the difficulty and monotony of their prison existence, women developed strong solidarity networks which not only helped them to adjust to the temporary upheaval in their lives but also resulted in their becoming strong and determined individuals with a nationalist consciousness. These women resisted colonial rule through imprisonment and activities in the jail (such as writing poetry) just as they did through nationalist activities within the domestic sphere (such as spinning and weaving). The jail became a site where identities were continuously shaped and restructured. Feelings of pride, resentment, honour and humiliation were all experienced by women prisoners and were continuously sharpened. Women's entry into male dominated spaces dispelled the British stereotypes about Indian women as subordinate, weak and docile. Women were also aware that by endangering their womanhood on the streets and putting their bodies under risk of attack, they proved that they could share common experiences with their fellow men in the public sphere.     

Assessing the impact of women's movements

Assessing impact of social movements in general is difficult, raising questions about impact on ‘what’ (laws, policy outcomes, culture, people's lives?) and causality (is the social movement the decisive factor in change?). To assess impact, the FEMCIT project on bodily citizenship chose to focus on new public discourses constructed by the new feminist movements over the past decades. Discourses have material effects on institutions, rules, the allocation of goods and values and the formation of new identities. Focusing on two ‘body’ issues, abortion and prostitution, the project analysed how these movements contested the state and the dominant discourses on these issues in four countries: the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden. Feminist groups generally framed abortion in terms of self-determination and autonomy and made a crucial difference to abortion discourse and law. On prostitution feminist groups developed competing discourses about sex work or sexual oppression and were able to affect policy discourses and law in three of the four countries.     

Words as Deeds: debates and narratives on women's suffrage

Abstract

This article is about the experience of menstruation, a function which many women spend much of their lives concealing. It is a topic which many regard as intensely private. Some, men and women, consider it distasteful and others still, historically unchanging and inconsequential. The authors argue that menstruation has played an important role in the twentieth-century construction of ‘womanhood’, and in constituting women as ‘the other’ in the eyes of male non-menstruators. This New Zealand study draws principally on two narratives about women's bodies. One is derived from cultural representations of the modern feminine body through sanitary product advertising, some of it international in origin, covering the time span 1935 to 1969. This is considered alongside the practical lives of bodies, the personal narratives given to us by 50 women relating their experiences of menarche and subsequent periods.     

Scottish women's studies

Abstract

This article outlines the content of the first Women's history course established in Bulgaria, at Sofia University, in 1999. The course focuses on Bulgarian women over the period from 1840 to 1940 and includes discussion of statistical data about Women's lives, the family, education and employment, as well as Women's subjectivities and cultural identities. Attention is also given to the analysis of powerful discourses about Women's role in society and the challenge of the Women's movement to these ideas. Wherever possible, comparative material from other Balkan societies and Western Europe is explored, as well as gender differences between men and women     

Gendered Testimonies: Autobiographies,Diaries and Letters by Women as Sources for Caribbean History

Although history has been one of the main disciplines through which we can understand gender, the paucity of data written or recorded by women makes it more difficult for the historian to research women's lives in the past. In the Caribbean, this task has been made easier by the discovery of a few key sources which allow an insight into the private sphere of Caribbean women's lives. These records of women who have lived in the Caribbean since the 1800s consist of memoirs, diaries and letters. The autobiographical writings include the extraordinary record of Mary Prince, a Bermuda-born enslaved African woman. Other sources which have been examined are the diaries of women who were members of the elite in the society, and educated women who worked either in professions or through the church to assist others in their societies. Through her examination of the testimonies of these women, the author reveals aspects of childhood, motherhood, marriage and sexual abuses which different women – free and unfree, white, black or coloured – experienced. The glimpses allow us to see Caribbean women who have lived with and challenged the definitions of femininity allowed them in the past. It demonstrates that the distinctions created between women's private and public lives were as artificial then as they are at present.     

Women and radio: sounding out new paths in women's history

ABSTRACT

Since its early introduction in the domestic sphere in the 1920s, radio has been used as a medium for the expression of women's voices, needs and concerns. In this introduction we would like to mobilise an understanding of radio as a vital source for doing women's history. Women's radio programming, women broadcasters, and women listeners provide a lens through which a number of histories can be analysed. This introduction provides an overview of the historical relationship between women and radio. It is further dedicated to research that explores the overlapping spaces of radio and women's history, and in particular, points to how radio-related source material can provide new points of departure for women's history.     

Unleisured lives; Sport in the context of women's leisure

This article examines women's participation and non-participation in sport in the wider context of female leisure. It begins by setting out the reason why women's entitlement and access to leisure should be a major area of concern for feminists, comparable to employment and domestic labour. It then goes on, drawing partly on a study conducted by the author in the new city of Milton Keynes, to explore the dimensions of and constraints within which women's leisure operates, showing that for most women sport does not form a sizeable part of that leisure. Next some possible reasons why sport does not play a major role in women's leisure patterns and experiences are considered. Finally there is a brief discussion of some of the ways in which both sport and leisure could be made more accessible and responsive to the needs and interests of women, by changing not only aspects of sport and leisure, but also women's overall position in society.     

‘That splendid body of women’: nursing,professional registration,and suffragette militancy

ABSTRACT

In the decades before World War One, a group of women fought for their right to control their own futures, claiming that their governance was in the hands of men whose interests lay in keeping women subservient. Initially articulated by an educated, middle-class few, the women's demands were embraced by widening numbers of both women and men. They saw their hopes dashed on several occasions by political manoeuvring, and only after WWI did their demands begin to be met. This is not an account of the women’s suffrage movement, but rather of the fight for the registration of trained nurses. Both movements claimed the right of women to be actors in their public lives and both faced public condemnation for transgressing social boundaries. The two movements interacted, with nurses connecting their struggle to the wider call for women's rights, and with the suffrage movement foregrounding nurses as disenfranchised women professionals.     

Woman to Woman: Australian Feminists’ Embrace of Radio Broadcasting, 1930s–1950s

This article demonstrates the crucial importance of the radio medium in the post-suffrage era as a space in which women could expand their sphere of influence and enact their responsibilities as citizens. It challenges previous scholarship which has argued that during the early decades of radio women were confined to the world of the everyday and the domestic. In the interwar years, Australian feminist organisations were quick to take advantage of the still-developing radio medium, which they used to publicise their activities to mass audiences. One such organisation was the United Associations (UA), founded in Sydney in 1929 by Jessie Street and Linda Littlejohn. Perth feminist Irene Greenwood was introduced to radio broadcasting as a member of the UA in the 1930s, and she later drew on these media skills and her extensive feminist networks to create her own innovative and interactive radio program in Western Australia, Woman to Woman (1948–1954). Correspondence between Greenwood and her audience shows that the program provided women from diverse backgrounds with the opportunity to engage publicly with significant political debates, to create a new imagined community of listeners, to communicate across geographical and class boundaries, and to become media producers themselves.     

Highlights from the treasures in the Fawcett Library

The old and rare books, or “treasures” as they are affectionately known, in the Fawcett Library comprise a unique collection of scarce works by and about women dating from 1592. It is the intention here to concentrate on those books which illustrate the position of women through the ages and to highlight a few of the earliest works under the following headings: legal works, the domestic arts, education, and woman's rights. The photographs and quotes used throughout assist in this attempt to demonstrate insights into the lives of women past.     

Political Life in the Shadows: the post suffrage political career of S. Margery Fry (1874–1958)

Drawing upon research on the working life of the penal reformer and educationalist S. Margery Fry (1874–1958) and her role as a policy-maker, this article argues that there were alternative ways in which women could participate in post-suffrage political culture, other than through elected office or party politics. The article positions Margery Fry both as a feminist and a public intellectual and argues that the First World War and the granting of women's suffrage allowed a step change to take place in Fry's career, taking her from a regional political stage to a national and international one. It also contends that she was able to wield considerable power ‘in the shadows’ as a policy advisor.     

Capturing women's lives: A discussion of time and methodological issues

Time is an important underlying concept in life course research and in the use of the “life-line method” an approach that has gained interest among researchers examining women's lives more processually. Notwithstanding, the author argues that time itself is not sufficiently problematised in this context. In the first part of the paper, the question is posed: What do we mean by time? It is argued that the Newtonian mechanical view of time, which is used in social science research and is the basis for the life-line method, limits our ability to capture the complexity of individuals' and especially women's everyday lives. A discussion of theories of time leads to an examination of methodological problems that are inherent in doing and presenting life histories.     

Borders and frontiers in women's history

Abstract

This article, based largely on London material, seeks to explore the interaction of various pressures from home, from school and from domestic education advocates on girls in their last two years at elementary school before leaving at fourteen. It examines in particular the extent and nature of resistance from some teachers and other educationists to overmuch domestic tuition for pupils, seeing this as leading to a narrowed perspective and as an unwarranted interference with the girls' right to a good general education. Given the strong official backing and widespread public agreement in the early twentieth century for the need to domesticate girls at school along approved lines, the determination of teachers and others to uphold the counter-claims of general education deserves detailed study.     

‘Womanish epistles?’ Martha McTier,female epistolarity and late eighteenth-century Irish radicalism

This article examines the epistolary practice of Martha McTier, the sister of the Ulster Presbyterian radical and founding member of the United Irishmen, William Drennan. Drawing on literary analyses of the eighteenth-century epistolary form and Jürgen Habermas's account of the development of the public sphere, it argues that through her personal correspondence McTier was able to construct herself as a political subject, engaging in the oppositional discourse of the radical public sphere. The public reputation which McTier earned as a letter-writer and the fact that her correspondence was subject to government surveillance in the build-up to the 1798 Irish rebellion challenges the designation of the female letter as an essentially private medium, concerned with the personal and domestic, and suggests a more fluid relationship between women, letter-writing and the public and private spheres     

Older women's living arrangements and family relationships in urban Mexico

It is often assumed that in Latin America the family will care for elderly relatives. Yet, older people's dependence on family members should not be regarded as unproblematic. This article reviews the living arrangements of older women in urban Mexico, where, despite widely held beliefs about the special treatment merited by women as mothers, one in nine older women now lives alone. Recent figures suggest the proportion is growing rapidly. We use a life course perspective to explore the reasons for this pattern and examine the implications for the well-being of unmarried women living alone or with married daughters or sons. The article presents findings from a research project on gender and the home using a combination of qualitative and survey research methods in Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city.