the new woman and ‘the dusky strand’: the place of feminism and women's literature in early Jamaican nationalism

This essay analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. Largely overlooked, this archival material is significant because it suggests a subtle yet significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but rather, it emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism, encompassing the overlapping projects of Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism. Thus, it becomes clear that first wave feminism, including white women writers, played a key but brief role in the formation of the middle class nationalism that would later dominate Jamaica's transition to independence. During the first five years of publication of the Jamaica Times, women wrote a significant proportion of the short stories published. However, they became marginalized as black folk culture became the defining symbol of national authenticity. The marginalization of middle class women writers reflects a broader pattern. In adopting first wave feminism from Britain and the United States, Jamaican nationalists reproduced colonial race and class dynamics that established an unbridgeable divide between middle class women, who served as ‘ladies bountiful,’ and the usually darker-skinned compatriots to whom they ministered. This class division continued to limit feminist activism in Jamaica throughout the first and second waves.     

The ‘Great Offender’: feminists and the campaign for women's ordination

Few scholars have investigated the relationship between feminism and religion in the aftermath of suffrage. This article explores how feminist organizations and individual feminists supported campaigns for women's ordination within the Anglican Church and their concern for gender equality within British churches more broadly during the forties and fifties. Focusing in particular on the 1944 ordination of the first female priest within the Anglican Communion (The Bishop of Hong Kong Ronald O. Hall ordained Chinese Deaconess Florence Li Tim Oi) and the institution of female chaplain's assistant positions in 1942, it argues that a full understanding of mid twentieth-century feminism requires consideration of the struggle for women's representation in their churches. The forties and fifties have often been portrayed by historians as the nadir of twentieth-century feminism, yet feminists continued their work for women's rights and religious identity and issues could be motivating factors for their activism. Feminists were neither anti-religious nor militantly secular and this article seeks to foster work which explores the connection between religion and women's political and social activism since the nineteenth century.     

‘a miserable sham’: Flora Annie Steel's short fictions and the question of Indian women's reform

The article examines a few short stories of Flora Annie Steel, a Scottish memsahib who spent a number of decades in the late nineteenth century in India with her husband, a British colonial official. Steel's short stories are interesting because they were produced at a time when most Anglo-Indian fictions (especially those authored by memsahibs) focused exclusively on station romances, and they explore with some seriousness and sense of complexity, issues related to the impact of Imperial reformatory intervention in the lives of Indian women. Her female contemporaries wrote fictions that more often than not completely ignored the existence of Indians, and even famous male writers like Kipling stereotypically reduced Indian women either to sexually licentious or completely passive, voiceless entities. Steel, in her stories, examines questions of gender, sexuality and reform in the context of Indian women's lives in ways that often seem to go beyond such racial stereotypes. The stories have been examined within the context of the different political and social formations of the specific regions – Punjab or Bengal – in which they are based, since women's reform had very different trajectories in these regions. The remarkableness of Steel's stories, however, lies in their attempting to look at the reform question from the Indian women's perspectives. What cannot be ignored are the ways in which these stories attempt to go beyond the prevalent Anglo-Indian modes of stereotyping or completely erasing Indian women and register their voices in examining questions related to their reform. This is not to say that racial and Imperial hierarchies are entirely abandoned in her writings. In fact the omniscient narrator in these fictions often narrates in ways that sustain and strengthen such hierarchies. However, there are moments when the diegetic narrative mode gives way to an ironically nuanced narrative voice and to ambivalences that seem to gesture at complex questioning of the bases of Imperial authority and its ostensibly benevolent intervention in the lives of Indian women. It is these moments that make the stories worth exploring.     

‘Immorality’, Nationalism and the Colonial State in British Malaya: Indian ‘coolie’ women's intimate lives as ideological battleground

ABSTRACT

Cases settled by colonial courts in British Malaya often revolved around issues of gender, class, race and colonial law. This article uses official and non-official archival records to explore the realities hidden behind the gender stereotypes conveyed in accounts given by colonial authorities and Indian nationalists of immorality and domestic violence. It makes a detailed investigation of alleged offences committed by husbands or partners of ‘deviant’ women, and illustrates factors influencing the attitudes of colonial courts, newspapers, members of the coolie community and Indian nationalists towards such incidents. Coolie women lived under oppressive conditions arising from colonial rule, capitalist exploitation and patriarchal control. In seeking to escape unsuitable marriages or oppressive relationships, women exhibited fleeting signs of agency, but neither colonial administrators nor nationalist leaders acknowledged the agency of women. The image of coolie women as passive victims allowed colonial administrators to present themselves as protectors of social order, and nationalist leaders to accuse colonial administrations of failing to preserve the social and moral welfare of their subjects. Illustrating the importance of gender in the political struggle between colonialism and nationalism, this article suggests the need for a sensitive understanding of how subjugated individuals, especially coolie women, reacted to such socio-political situations. In so doing, the article provides a nuanced and complex interpretation of social control as well as agency of subjugated individuals in colonial plantation contexts.     

‘Purifying’ the public world: feminist vigilantes in late Victorian England

In late nineteenth-century England, a number of feminists confronted prostitution through the closing of brothels and the expulsion of prostitutes from places of entertainment. Feminist historians have either understood this behaviour as reflective of feminist' powerlessness within the largely non-feminist movement for social purity, or they have neglected the behaviour and concentrated on the aspects of these women' work that appear more positive to feminists today. Neither approach attempts to understand why women took this more repressive stance and thought of it as feminist. To understand the actions of these women, it is necessary to recognise that their vision of a ‘purified’ public and private world was often informed by religious beliefs and adherence to temperance. Concern with the morality of public space also related to women' desire for safety in public places. And their ‘repressive’ and statist actions related in part to feminist philanthropist' changing attitude toward local government.     

the home,the veil and the world: reading Ismat Chughtai towards a ‘progressive’ history of the Indian women's movement

This paper discusses the work of Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991), a controversial writer whose long literary career extending over four decades roughly corresponds to the formative stages of the Indian women's movement. It interprets Chughtai's novella The Heart Breaks Free (1966) to forward an anti-teleological enquiry of the women's movement in India. This progressive teleology often suggested by a discussion of the ‘waves’, ‘stages’ or ‘phases’ of the Euro-American women's movement and adopted to postcolonial women's movements, such as those in India, Jamaica and South Africa, is belied by the piecemeal legislative gains won by activist efforts. Some of the questions governing my enquiry are: What lessons can a questioning of teleology teach us about the gains and losses of postcolonial women's movements? If the alternative to teleology is, as I suggest, a genealogy, then what constitutes a genealogical enquiry into the women's movement in India? In face of apparent and self-acknowledged losses and ineffectiveness in recent times, would the movement's apparent unity across religious differences be a way of initiating such an inquiry or is another mode of analysis required? The paper directs attention to the Indian women's movement's attempts at bringing together women of different religious persuasions, legislative, and religious edicts related to Muslim women's right to co-habitation and divorce, and ‘cases’ that serve as testing points of the movement's struggle against religious and state authority. It also points to the neglected factor of economic security for women as a way in which a genealogical inquiry can proceed so as to strengthen the legislation and the movement itself.     

A ‘Feminist Conspiracy’: Maude Royden,women's ministry and the British press, 1916–1921

This article examines Maude Royden's rise to fame as a preacher through a detailed consideration of three episodes: the National Mission of 1916, her Congregational City Temple years between 1917 and 1920, and the St Botolph's affair of 1919 and 1921. It argues that Royden's life illustrates the constellation of ideological connections between feminism, suffrage and women's ordination and explores the way in which these controversial issues were negotiated by individual churchmen through the religious and popular press. Conflicting clergy reactions to her radical religious activism are discussed to highlight the deep divisions and tensions within Anglican ecclesiastical patriarchy.     

‘I am … but a pawn in your chess board’: letters,self-presentation,and the making of a lady missionary's career

This article explores the epistolary exchanges of a female medical missionary, Mary Ann ‘May’ Harriet Allen, who served with the British Anglican Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in Zanzibar between 1875 and 1882. In particular, it focuses on two sets of letters—the first is set of letters Allen wrote to her father, which he subsequently published in their local newspaper. The second set comprises letters Allen exchanged with her colleagues at the mission. In the first set of letters, Allen cast herself as the protagonist in an African drama typical of Victorian-era missionary publications, a move that obscured the struggles that Allen was facing in her work on Zanzibar, and about which she wrote in letters to her colleagues. Reading these letters against one another offers insight into the techniques of self-actualization available to women in the nineteenth-century mission field, the strategies some women employed to negotiate the contemporary evangelical and patriarchal hierarchies, and into the interior life of a British ‘lady missionary’ navigating her career in the African mission field.     

re-negotiating reproductive technologies: the ‘public foetus’ revisited

In debates over abortion, the foetus and the woman have been continually positioned as antagonists. Given the stakes involved in such debates about personal integrity, individual responsibility, life and death, it is no wonder that many radical feminist authors have concentrated on refocusing the attention on women and away from the disembodied foetus. Such writers have worked hard to decode and deconstruct the public foetus in our midst and have mobilized interpretative tools such as cultural criticism to contextualize the production and consumption of foetal images. Barbara Duden's book, The Public Foetus, is an important and interesting contribution to this effort, which is still taken up by authors writing in this field. Duden's strategy is to seek to remind us (and in particular those who are involved in reproductive medicine) that pregnancy is concentrated in the embedded pregnant woman rather than the disembodied ‘public foetus’ and she attempts to retrieve the embodied woman as the site of pregnancy through what Michaels has termed a ‘fetal disappearing act’. While this may create as many problems for women as it resolves, I would argue that, while the ‘public foetus’ continues to loom large in the politics of abortion and women's positions in relation to the new reproductive technologies remain contested, Duden's work remains important in the continuing debate about how women's reproductive freedom can be continually re-negotiated and re-established.     

A ‘Discreet Dance’: technologies of menstrual management in Australian public toilets during the twentieth century

Across the twentieth century, the technologies available to Australian women for managing menstruation were transformed. Products for staunching blood flow changed from bulky, re-usable rags to ‘invisible’, disposable pads and tampons. Disposal facilities changed from the humble waste bin, through to incinerators, and eventually to specialised, antibacterial ‘sanitary disposal units’. The greatest impact of these shifts was felt in public toilets: places where women must deal with private bodily functions in semi-public, communal environments. Promotional materials for menstrual products and disposal facilities promised that use of their technologies would obviate age-old menstrual taboos, emancipating women from the anxiety and mortification long associated with menstruation. This paper draws upon oral histories to argue that by the close of the twentieth century the reverse was true. Increasingly efficacious and convenient menstrual products meant that Australian women could more convincingly maintain ‘menstrual etiquette’ by keeping their monthly bleeding almost completely concealed.     

‘Pinstripes on the prairies’: examining the financialization of farming systems in the Canadian prairie provinces

Drawing on recent scholarship on the financialization of agro-food systems and the global land grab, this paper examines new forms of financial investment in agriculture in the Canadian prairie provinces. We examine the factors underpinning investor involvement in the sector, including its anticipated financial performance as well as processes of agricultural restructuring that, combined with government actions to liberalize farmland ownership, have facilitated the enrollment of land and labour into new financial vehicles. We focus in particular on the emergence of two new forms of investment vehicles – farmland investment funds and an exchange-traded farming corporation – comparing the business model and investment strategy of each. In doing so, we highlight the ways in which the new investment patterns may propel the restructuring of the agricultural sector, alter power relations among key actors, and introduce new logics into the farming landscape. Our findings allow us to comment on the relevance of the land grabbing frame for making sense of the financialization of agriculture in the global North.     

‘lay experts’: women's social purity groups and the politics of sexuality in Switzerland, 1890–1915

Women's social purity groups were significant participants in the debates of the regulation of sexualities during the unification process of Swiss Criminal Law between the 1890s and the 1930s. Although not yet enfranchised, women claimed political participation through their status as ‘lay experts’ with regard to sexual matters and as an interest group with backing from their male counterparts. The article examines their demands in the reformulation of the regulation of sexualities and investigates their aims and strategies. Their expertise, gained through the experience of and investment in ‘moral guardianship’, is examined here in relation to their interventions on the age of protection, or the age of consent in contemporary terms. As ‘lay experts’ on sexual morality, the women's social purity groups participated in the increased interests and discourses of sexuality between 1890 and 1915 in the midst of legal, medical and political experts.     

Visualising the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’: emotion work and the representation of orgasm in pornography and everyday sexual interactions

Visual representations of orgasm – whether in the flesh or mediated through a screen – are produced in a context of intense uncertainty about whether what is being seen represents an authentically experienced bodily event. Despite detailed scientific scrutiny and close attention to bodily signs, the authenticity of women's orgasm remains a site of cultural anxiety and contested gender politics. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the construction of female orgasm as inherently invisible or un-see-able, and ‘faking’ orgasm as a prevalent social practice. Drawing on existing literature from psychology, sociology and porn studies, this theoretical paper explores the problem of visually representing orgasm in the context of these uncertainties, and examines how the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ is structured by discourses of authenticity. Pornography and everyday sexual interactions provide ideal contexts for exploring the practices of producing and consuming visual representations of embodied experience because both necessitate a see-able orgasm which consumers/lovers can read as ‘real’. This paper demonstrates that considerable interpretative work is necessary to read the female body as authentically orgasmic in the context of cultural uncertainty, and that distinctions between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ are continually reworked. Drawing on the contrast between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ acting (Hochschild, 1983), I argue that the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ cannot be established by recourse to unmediated bodily experience, and instead, researchers should consider how and when this distinction has traction in the world and the implications of this for gendered power relations, subjectivities and practices.     

A pen that ‘looks like a CEO in a business suit’: gendering the fountain pen

This article investigates the gendering of the fountain pen as a product category mainly used in the office environment. It draws on hobbyists’ accounts and evaluations of fountain pen use from online forums. The accounts suggest that hobbyists perceive the fountain pen market to take executive men as its authentic user group, whereas pens that target women often reflect stereotypical femininities. At the office, this gendering process impacts users’ everyday experiences especially with reference to the managerial norms that govern the use of suits and accessories, since the fountain pen is considered by its users as part of an array of men’s status objects. The article contributes to the literature on the gendering of artifacts by describing a hegemonic manner in which artifacts are gendered, that is, as a range of products that target diverse masculinities and femininities in contradistinction to a single, masculine product type.     

‘A Jazzed and Patchwork Modern’: ‘future’ girls and modern masculinities in the early popular romances of Berta Ruck

As a best‐selling writer of popular romances during the first half of the twentieth century, Berta Ruck (1878–1978) has been characterised as a producer of ‘omelettes of frivolity and sweetness’ whose appeal was confined to adolescent girls and the servant classes. Closer attention to some of the early novels and to her own evaluation of her work, however, reveals her attempts to confront and articulate the impact of societal change upon a generation whose world was being irrevocably altered by the Great War and its aftermath. Her almost forensic attention to local detail and her treatment of contemporary questions of gender identity make her a compelling chronicler of the period and lend credibility to her claims of a broader readership than that generally associated with the genre.     

‘Beauty isn't all a matter of looking glamorous’: attitudes to glamour and beauty in 1950s women's magazines

This article analyses representations of glamour in two British magazines during the 1950s: Home and Country and Woman's Outlook, the publications of the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI) and the Women's Co-operative Guild (WCG) respectively. Both publications shared many traits with best-selling women's magazines of the period but they also had certain distinctive characteristics, such as a relative lack of advertising for beauty products, which make them particularly interesting subjects for a study of glamour. Through its exploration of the diverse and even contradictory attitudes towards glamour evidenced in these publications, the article contributes to continuing feminist debates about women and beauty as well as offering fresh insights into the NFWI and WCG. Its findings demonstrate heterogeneous understandings of femininity, thus challenge the stereotypes of 1950s womanhood that continue to abound, and add another case study to the growing body of revisionist literature on women in the post-1945 period.     

‘Labour and new social movements in a globalising world system’: the future of the past

A new set of questions [is] being created by a changing present. Questions about who constitutes the working class, about how fragmented and divided groups of workers have organised, issues about workplace and community and the democratisation of unions and state policies are assuming centre stage. As the contours of the present shift, it is becoming possible to look back from new perspectives.1 Rowbotham, ‘New Entry Points,’ 68.