Narratives of race and nation in china: Women's suffrage in the early twentieth century

This paper explores the ways in which the Chinese women's suffrage movement used racializing narratives to alter the boundaries that had excluded women from full participation in politics in the first two decades of the 20th century. It extends existing work on the connection between narratives of race and women's suffrage in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA to explore how “race” was mobilized in China in the late-Qing and early Republican period. The article has three main areas of innovation. First, it explores the deployment of racializing narratives within the broader discourses of modernity circulating in China wherein modernization was premised on a racialized notion of national identity—that is “modernization as Han chauvinism.” Second, this article aims to participate in the process of extending the history of women's suffrage from primary reliance on class analysis and towards methods that explore the multiple categories of exclusion and inclusion. Third, this article aims to explore the manner in which narratives of race were invoked within a feminist political campaign that occurred in a nation without a history of European colonization. The article demonstrates that the multiplicity of possible gains sought under the banner of “race” makes it an unreliable category to invoke for struggles that are ultimately determined by “gendered” divisions.     

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.     

Lynette D. Myles. Beyond Borders: Female Subjectivity in African American Women's Narratives of Enslavement

Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relations Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, introduction by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Woman Suffrage 6? Women's Rights, by Ellen Carol DuBois. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

The Madwoman Can't Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive, by Marta Caminero‐Santangelo. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Common Science? Women, Science, and Knowledge, by Jean Barr and Lynda Birke. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement, by Julie Roy Jeffrey. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Feminism and its Fictions: The Consciousness‐Raising Novel and the Women's Liberation Movement, by Lisa Marie Hogeland. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice, by Bonnie G. Smith. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, edited by Julia M. Walker. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998.     

Theorising the Women's Liberation Movement as Cultural Heritage

ABSTRACT

Recent interest in documenting and re-evaluating histories of the UK Women's Liberation Movement has produced varied appraisals of the movement. These have emerged from feminist communities wishing to preserve, organise and collect their histories. Such recovery and dissemination, I argue, is cultural heritage rather than ‘history’, as heritage offers different tools for re-presentation as well as creating alternative socio-cultural relationships with the legacies of the WLM. This article draws upon my practice as a curator of feminist histories, and argues for the articulation of a politics of transmission, essential for the longevity and sustainability of feminist cultural heritage and histories.     

Challenging the Biological: The Fantasy of Male Birth as a Nineteenth-Century Narrative of Ethical Failure

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë portrays a fully realized heroine who challenges society's and fiction's conventional roles for women. In order to broaden her heroine's role, Brontë had to go beyond the genres open to her — the novel of manners, the Gothic, and the governess novel — to establish a new genre: the feminist fairytale. In establishing this genre, Brontë pinpoints Jane's specifically female dilemma: how to achieve intimacy and still maintain independence.

At once beautiful and terrible, sustaining and destructive, fire is the perfect element to convey a sense of Jane's often conflicting desires. Brontë carefully establishes hearth fires as an index to how included and “at home” Jane feels. Similarly, Brontë uses metaphors of self‐sacrifice and immolation to indicate times when Jane feels her independence is being threatened.

The hearth fires and the metaphorical fires are overshadowed by the “big” fires in the novel, but their consistent, unobtrusive use allows Brontë to reinforce her theme in the simple details of the story and to maintain an attention to craft that is too often undervalued or ignored.     

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.     

Elusive Women Authors in Norwegian Nineteenth-Century Reading Societies

Abstract

Which women authors were read at the ebb of the nineteenth century and around the start of the twentieth? Research on historical readership groups reveals a strikingly different picture from the one transmitted through literary histories and textbooks. Empirical data from the catalogues of Norwegian reading societies from this period form the basis of the proposed conclusions. From a feminist, scholarly point of view, it is doubly interesting to investigate the fate of female authors among female readers; hence, the main emphasis is on the book collection of the women’s reading society based in Oslo from 1874. The collections of other societies, whether male or open to both sexes, are consulted for comparison. Although the material is Norwegian, the results turn out to be comparable to those seen in other countries, not least Finland. The data presented here serve to modify the received canon of European literary history, and to invite future revisions in the reception of female authorship and of women’s place in world literature.     

Narrative Swerves: Grand Narratives and the Disciplines

Beer explores the legacies of Jean-François Lyotard's proclamation of the death of 'grand narratives', including the gendered dimension of their fall-out in a 'domestication' or everydayness despised because it is perceived to hold no possibilities for invention and newness. Beer does not, however, seek to reinvent 'domestication', but rather to explore the possibilities of the 'narrative swerve': a model of narrative as flexible rather than totalizing. Its possibilities emerge in the philosopher Richard Rorty's account of 'irony' (which he genders as a female trope) and, more powerfully, in the 'trickster' figure of folk-tale which takes on new resonances in postmodern feminisms and in contemporary literature. Rorty's ironist ultimately controls language and meaning through her characteristic device of quotation marks, containing words while disclaiming responsibility for them. A more enabling site for the trickster (conceived by Beer as an enabling feminist thought-tool and not as an identity for women to assume) and for the narrative swerve might, paradoxically, be found in scientific studies, which are, and despite their declared ideals of coherence and testability, fascinated with the relations of deviation and rule. Thus we find spaces-between and across the 'two cultures' as well as other cultural borderlines - for productive knowledge-testing and knowledge-making which are neither held fast by 'grand narratives' nor wholly abandoned in and to their dereliction.