Women's Citizenship and the First World War: general remarks and a case study of women's enfranchisement in Austria and Germany

Historians' views about the impact of World War I on women's citizenship have diverged. Some scholars have emphasized that the war changed cultural understandings of suffrage due to women's patriotism and dedication to the war effort. Others have underlined that the politics of electoral reform determined whether or not women attained voting rights. Based on the cases of Austria and Germany where women were enfranchised in the context of revolutionary unrest triggered by the war, this article argues that the political process was in fact crucial. However, the claim of women's suffrage during the war is to be contextualized within a general understanding of republican citizenship and the concept of the ‘citizen soldier’. This discourse was essential to keeping the issue alive during the war. Nonetheless, further studies are still required to assess the war's impact on women and citizenship in the subjective sense of participation.     

The awakened instinct: vegetarianism and the women's suffrage movement in Britain

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which vegetarianism was found in the militant and non-militant strands of the women's suffrage movement, and looks at some of the other movements contributing to vegetarian and suffrage thinking. The arguments linking the two movements are discussed, ranging from the psychological identification of women with animals as victims of male brutality, to the empowering idea that women confined to a homemaker's role could still help to create a new and more compassionate world by adopting a vegetarian diet. Vegetarianism and the women's movement are seen as linked with each other, and also with theosophy and socialism, as complementary ways of creating that longed-for new world.     

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.     

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.     

New woman meets Shakespeare woman: the struggle over the figure of Portia in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

Approaching the material from the perspective of cultural history, this essay explores the ways in which England, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, witnessed considerable debate about the character of Portia from Shakespeare'sThe Merchant of Venice. Feminists seized upon her appearance as a lawyer to argue for Shakespeare's advocacy on behalf of women's emancipation. Anti-feminists stressed the character's acquiescence to male control of her affections and her estate. Thus for many readers and viewers of the play concern about the status of the New Woman, civic maternalism, married women's property rights, and women in the professions, overrode their interest in the play as a text about Christians and Jews.     

Women and Lancashire Conservatism between the Wars

The activism of women Conservatives helped Tory democracy to adapt and survive in inter-war Lancashire at a time when it was under strain due to the arrival of Labour as a significant electoral force. This article utilises the surviving records of the party in Lancashire to examine the various ways that women entered, navigated, justified and expanded their membership and function in inter-war Conservatism. It acknowledges the limits on women's advancement and influence, but it also highlights how some women made significant progress in rising through the party structures, and how women's branches facilitated this political mobility. It challenges the assumption that women Conservatives were preoccupied with sociability and discussing domestic issues, and reveals their contribution to the electoral success of the party at local level, and interaction with Lancashire's distinct tradition of Conservatism.     

Women's Refuges and the State in Victoria,Australia: a campaign for secrecy of address

The development of women's refuges in Victoria, Australia emerged within the context of emergency accommodation for women being the province of charity-based organisations, whose interventions into women's lives were often disempowering and autocratic. Feminist refuges argued against this charity-based approach to women and drove a process of conceptualising and responding to domestic violence in new ways. Following a formal request for the addresses of Victorian refuges by the Minister for Community Services in October 1979, the refuge movement united to keep their addresses secret, and launched a much publicised and protracted campaign in opposition to the state's demands. This resulted in a commitment from the then Department of Community Welfare Services (DCWS) to support the refuge program to operate in unique and radical ways, and in doing so gave recognition to the importance of gender in the provision of welfare.     

Cause for concern: young women and leisure, 1930–50

During the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s the leisure of young women attracted much interest from youth workers, psychologists and educationalists. Indeed, in 1939 their leisure became an organised and respectable focus of state intervention. This article addresses how, and in what ways, the leisure of young women came to acquire significance as an issue of concern, object of analysis, and sphere of intervention. The argument developed here is that public approaches to young women's leisure need to be understood in terms of the ways in which ‘leisure’ was discursively constructed during the inter-war period as a social phenomenon of considerable significance, and how this intersected with discourses on female adolescence within a framework of concern for the stability of British society and democracy. Such concerns about society were strong throughout the inter-war period but were intensified during and immediately after the Second World War. The interconnection of these three themes of ‘leisure’, ‘adolescence’ and societal stability are illustrated with reference to discussions in the 1930s and 1940s about what constituted the problem of young women's leisure and suggestions concerning young women's leisure needs.     

Left Activism,Succour and Selfhood: the epistolary friendship of two revolutionary mothers in 1970s Britain

At the height of mass activity on the Left, the ascendancy of the women's liberation movement (WLM), and the beginnings of real social and personal change for men and women, the 1970s are increasingly seen as the decade when sixties permissiveness began to be truly felt in Britain. This article draws upon a personal archive of correspondence from this turbulent decade, between two revolutionary women, Di Parkin and Annie Howells. It argues that the women's letters form an important contribution to new understandings about the construction of the post-war gendered self. The letters represent an interchange of motherhood, domesticity, far-left politics, and close female friendship. The article will show how the women's epistolary friendship offers intimate insight into female self-fashioning at a breakthrough social and political moment in 1970s Britain. As they reflected on some of the key political and social themes of the decade—class, labour, race and gender relations, as well as international politics—Di and Annie sought to negotiate themselves in relation to shifting discourses and social patterns. Writing as relational female subjects and individuals, the women's letters became simultaneously a private and shared space in which to compose themselves as women, revolutionaries and feminists, and autonomous sexual subjects. As a result, this article will show, the epistolary lives of these two radical women inform valuable understanding about some of the complex ways in which post-war individuals used available cultural and political resources to find meaning in their lives.     

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.     

Rural women migrant returnees in contemporary China

This essay focuses on the experiences of female returnees in rural–urban migration in contemporary China. Based on in-depth interviews with women migrants, returnees, their family members, friends and fellow villagers in both sending and receiving areas, the research examines rural migrant women's return migration process. It investigates rural migrant women's decision-making in the process, the ways women returnees construct their lives in the countryside, their identity negotiation as returnees and the impact of patriarchy on women's experiences of the return and resettlement process. The author argues that despite women's active involvement in migration and the ‘empowerment and agency’ gained through migration, the patriarchal power relations within rural households remain intact and continue to shape rural female returnees' life in their villages.     

Book Review: Work,children and gender equality

The motivating concern behind this article is that women, in the diversity of their ages, life situations, cultural traditions of gender and actual sexual connections to men, are still marginalized by prevailing approaches to HIV and AIDS. Safe sexual practices for women, within social contexts and actual sexual relations with men, are not being approached in ways that engage women's (or their male partners') active involvement. Conventional heterosexual distinctions between women's and men's sexuality disables prevention processes. Categories and perspectives which prevail in ''interpreting'' the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, inhibitions and assumptions framing sexual safety information, and cultural narratives of gendered love/desire/sex, converge into two highly problematic outcomes: a dissociation of heterosexually-defined men who have sex with women from central responsibility for HIV prevention, and marginalization of women who have sex with men from concern about women's sexual safety.     

Connecting Women's Histories: the local and the global

ABSTRACT

The articles in this Special Issue are drawn from some of the contributions to a conference held at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, from 29 August to 1 September 2013 titled ‘Women's Histories: the local and the global’. The articles reflect on diverse aspects of the entangled histories of women across the world, mainly, but not exclusively, during the twentieth century. They explore the range of ways in which women's history, international history, transnational history and imperial and global histories are interwoven.     

Grand Dames and Gentle Helpmeets: women and the royal honours system in New Zealand, 1917–2000

This article focuses on black and white Christian women's groups in the Anglican and Methodist churches in twentieth-century South Africa. While the Mothers' Union was exported from the metropolitan heartland to the colonial Anglican periphery as a nominally multiracial organisation, Methodist women set up racially divided women's groups, which, nevertheless, intersected in various ways. By the 1960s, Africans dominated the Mothers' Union, and white and mixed-race Anglican women turned to a more liberal alternative, while Methodist women faced growing pressure to form one united organisation. Democratic transition in South Africa found female church groups still wrestling with historic divisions which were not simply racially based, but the black ‘periphery’ was now clearly numerically, if not always organisationally, dominant while its spiritual style constituted the heartland of South African ‘mission’ Christianity.     

Narratives of Irishness and the Problem of Abortion: The X Case 1992

This paper considers the ways in which discourses of abortion and discourses of national identity were constructed and reproduced through the events of the X case in the Republic of Ireland in 1992. This case involved a state injunction against a 14-year-old rape victim and her parents, to prevent them from obtaining an abortion in Britain. By examining the controversy the case gave rise to in the national press, I will argue that the terms of abortion politics in Ireland shifted from arguments based on rights to arguments centred on national identity, through the questions the X case raised about women's citizenship status, and women's position in relation to the nation and the state. Discourses of national identity and discourses of abortion shifted away from entrenched traditional positions, towards more liberal articulations.     

Public history and popular memory: issues in the commemoration of the British militant suffrage campaign

Drawing on Raphael Samuel's work on the construction of historical knowledge, this article argues that British militant suffrage feminists had a strong sense of their role in history. Once the vote was won, militants became the first public historians of their own suffrage history by collecting ‘relics’ of the campaign and commemorating suffrage events. The work of curators, especially at the Museum of London and National Library of Australia, Canberra, also enabled wider access to the movement's ephemera. Subsequent generations have ‘remembered’ suffrage in different ways, including depiction in fiction, film, local histories and the physical landscape. An exploration of such depictions might help us start to understand the continuing fascination with this aspect of women's history.     

Historicising the Women's Liberation Movement

ABSTRACT

The Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s emerged out of a set of economic and social circumstances where women collected together in disparate groups and contexts to express their dissatisfaction with their role and position in society. Through consciousness-raising and activism women raised their voices, profiles and visibility. This important moment of women's history is revisited in this collection of essays, which look afresh at the diversity of the movement and ways in which we might historicise the feminism of the time.     

‘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.     

The Women's Party of Great Britain (1917–1919): a forgotten episode in British women's political history

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the Women's Party, founded by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst in November 1917 at a time when Britain was still fighting in World War One. It examines the origins and aims of the Women's Party which, with the slogan ‘Victory, National Security and Progress’, conflated the winning of the war with the women's cause. It is contended that global politics on the world stage as well as local politics at home shaped the agenda of the Women's Party in many differing ways.