Endings and Beginnings …

How women remember, represent and write about their own lives and each other's lives is a central problem in the field of feminist auto/biography. Eglantyne Jebb (1876–1928) did not live long enough to write her own life story, but she is known as the founder of the Save the Children Fund in 1919 and as the author of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which was adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. Women who had a great deal invested in the telling of Jebb's life story provide the only accounts we have of her life. This article contributes to the field of feminist auto/biography by providing a fuller depiction of the life of Eglantyne Jebb. Today, the value of Jebb's private writing lies in its wit and honesty. Her letters and diaries illustrate the familiar hard and heroic struggle to accommodate to the ordinary and extraordinary demands of family relationships, the search for adult intimacy, the desire for a meaningful career and the acceptance, in the final years of her life, of new challenges and possibilities whereby Eglantyne Jebb became a notable humanitarian and children's rights activist.     

Editing daphne du maurier

The author of this article edited all Daphne du Maurier's work for nearly forty years, from 1943 until she published her last book in 1981. The article discusses the qualities which made her a best seller, whose books are read and studied in universities all over the world, and provides insights into her skill as a writer, and into the links between her books and her own life. It describes how author and editor worked together, and seeks to throw light on du Maurier's complex and often contradictory personality. There are also quotations from her letters, published here for the first time. Because of the author's particular relationship with du Maurier, the article gives a new and personal insight into how so many world-famous books came into being.     

Ellen Swallow,Lois Gibbs and Rachel Carson: Catalysts of the American environmental movement

There are none as responsible for the initiation and spirit of the American environmental movement as two scientists, Ellen Swallow and Rachel Carson, and a third woman, Lois Gibbs, a housewife and mother turned environmental activist. Ellen Swallow devised the world's first formal curriculum and scientific methods for the study of ecology. Although her science of ecology was ultimately rejected by male science and then relegated to the field of home economics, her legacy to environmental science has borne fruit nearly a century later in the phenomenon of the American housewife and mother, as exemplified in Lois Gibbs of Love Canal, New York. Gibbs, who is self-taught in the science of hazardous waste, has been the major force in the national protest against indiscriminate disposal of hazardous waste in the environment.Rachel Carson's final book. Silent Spring, was the clarion call to the American society to examine the excessive toll taken on insect, aquatic, animal, plant, and human life by the post World War II policy of increasing use of synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties in American agriculture, forestry, and management of natural resources. As a consequence of its passionate and irrefutable arguments, the American government created the Environmental Protection Agency and promulgated some of the most rigorous environmental legislation in the world.     

‘If Not Yourself,Who Would You Be?’: Writing the Female Body in Agatha Christie's Second World War Detective Fiction

The mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976) has long been understood as a best-seller who could negotiate the demands of the marketplace, but who never tried to engage with political or social issues. Formulaic, linguistically simple and dependent on stereotypes, her books have a reputation as ‘animated algebra’—retreats from reality. This essay rethinks Christie's political significance, with reference to selected texts published during the Second World War. During the crucial war years, Christie published murder mysteries prolifically, mostly set in country houses or holiday resorts. Apparently escapist settings, however, gave her space to explore problems facing women at a time when men had been displaced to the battlefield. The majority of Christie's victims in these texts are women and, more than usual, the plots revolve around identifying or misidentifying corpses. In the two novels explored here—Evil Under the Sun (1941) and The Body in the Library (1942)—Christie considers women as victims in commercial and domestic narratives. In both cases, women trade identities with each other in death: for example, a schoolgirl dresses up for a Hollywood screen test, only to be killed, her body swapped with a glamorous dancer's to obscure the time of death. In life and in death, characters read women as combinations of bodies and cosmetics. Far from avoiding reality, Christie engaged with concerns of the day. Her detective fiction rarely references war directly, but there is a running commentary on domestic and commercial spheres, and women's roles, as victims, within these.     

an interview with Kim Longinotto

Kim Longinotto is one of the UK's leading documentary directors whose body of work explores women's lives and their struggles for autonomy and human rights in a range of international cultural contexts. Her strategies interrogate the observationalist traditions of documentary cinema and visual anthropology to produce engaged and profoundly empathetic feminist films. She works in collaborative ways with her subjects, often with other directors, to represent the contradictions and multiple layers of their lives and political and social situations. This interview focuses on Longinotto's approach to representing her subjects and using the medium of documentary as a form of witnessing.     

The sacred may not be the same as the religious: Angela Carter's ‘Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene’ and ‘Black Venus’

John Everett Millais's painting The Bridesmaid (1851) depicts a young woman, on the evening of a wedding, attempting to conjure up a vision of her own future husband. This work has been linked to a number of others by Millais dealing with marriage, and has been seen as an articulation of 'matrimonial ideology'. Brown sets the picture in the context of the widespread, though clandestine, practice of fortune-telling, through which women in particular attempted to foreknow, and thus control, the central event of their lives. One of the most frequent questions asked of fortune-tellers was 'whom shall I marry?', the question the girl in the painting has herself asked. However, drawing on recent critical work on 'proposal composition' pictures, Bown argues that men, too, faced great uncertainty on the brink of marriage, and that artists repeatedly explored this uncertainty through attempts to represent a complex female subjectivity in their works. In The Bridesmaid Millais (who was thinking about marriage in the early 1850s) depicts a woman telling her fortune, but he also seeks to represent her as full of thoughts and feelings. The artist, and the viewer of the painting, then, engages in an act of divination in which he tries to discover the mysterious secrets of female subjectivity.     

Room of One's Own: 1920s Feminist Utopias

Virginia Woolf's aspiration in A Room of One's Own (1929) for a private space and independence for the 'uneducated' women who would write fiction was echoed in Jipping Street (1928), the fictional autobiography of the working-class Kathleen Woodward, as well as by numerous other women during the period. This article asks why this wish for a room emerged in the twenties, and what is shows about the political affect of feminism at that time. One of the effects of post-suffrage feminism was that working-class women's experience began to be not only observed but listened to, written down and published, but real changes in the legal and economic position of women only came slowly. Both Woolf's polemic and Woodward's fictional autobiography are diatribes against poverty and laments for women's wasted lives. Neither idealized suffering; poverty in their texts was an injustice that aroused anger, not a state of abjection or redemption which required an anguished identification. When these two books were published, just after women's suffrage was achieved, hopes were high. The thirties were a more brutal decade, with unemployment and the growth of fascism, and Woolf's Three Guineas (1938) is darker in tone. Neither Woolf nor Woodward had faith in conventional politics. Instead both writers chose silence, solitude and the aesthetic seduction of words and thoughts. Neither wanted to enter the world of men, but nor did they want to live lives like their mothers. Both these books require of women an inner change. The room represents a transitional space. There was no clear vision of the future yet. As so often with feminist thought, the wish is for a break with the past, a resistance to culture and a change in human nature.     

Silk dresses and lavender kid gloves: the wayward career of Jessie Craigen,working suffragist

Abstract

Occasional references to Jessie Craigen occur in the literature on the nineteenth-century women's suffrage movement, generally emphasizing her importance as a working-class suffragist. Previously unknown material throws more light on her career, revealing the eddies of love and exasperation which flowed around her. This paper discusses the various representations of Jessie Craigen to be found in letters among her friends, representations which served to paint her – sometimes warmly, sometimes dismissively – as odd, eccentric, undisciplined. It also examines the more positive sense of herself which she attempted to convey in letters to several of her middle-class promoters – as a romantic authentic in the grip of unbrookable, passionate conviction. Her story confirms the existence of a current of radical-liberal opinion within the nineteenth-century women's movement, and the difficulties which confronted those who found themselves among its paid employees     

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.     

Testimonies in Light: Nan Goldin: Devil's Playground

Nan Goldin: Devil's Playground, recently shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, represents the first retrospective in the United Kingdom for this American photographer who has lived, and photographed, internationally. Renowned for her photographs of the intimate lives of her friends-herself and the queer and drugs/bohemian communities-Goldin has taken a startling aesthetic/pictorial turn in her new photography. Prosser evaluates Goldin's career and the changes in it, and considers where her photography leaves the documentary tradition from which she arose. Charting in particular a trajectory towards light in her oeuvre, and working with the notion of testimony rather than documentary, Prosser suggests that Goldin has moved from an empathetic but critical representation of gender roles to a spiritual, accepting and visionary perspective on life and loss. His readings of photographs are focused on those from the exhibition and the curating of the exhibition is considered.     

Stories of life Stories of living: Women’ narratives and feminist biography

Narrative structure in biographical accounts is currently a much debated theme. This article brings together methodological debates in life story research and discussions within feminism about women's narratives and feminist biography. Connections between gendered conceptions of time and structures in narrative accounts are explored, and seen in relation to the context of interviewing. The latter is problematized as a setting that affects both the form and content of the biographical accounts given by informants. From this approach the opportunity arises for illuminating connections between “private troubles” in people's lives and “public issues” in society. An empirical discussion based on biographical interviews with white, Norwegian, middle‐class women, is carried out to illustrate the points made.     

‘This accursed child’: the early years of Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741-90) actress,philosophe and feminist

The childhood and early youth of Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741- 90) who later achieved some notoriety as an actress, correspondent of Denis Diderot and feminist, throws light on the lives of an artisan family in mideighteenth-century France and on the experience of one delinquent daughter. This study examines Marie Madeleine Jodin's life in relation to different categories of discrimination which she experienced; as a Protestant child, as a libertine daughter and as an actress. Her experience illustrates the workings of systems of authority employed in the eighteenth century to control young women as it impinged on an individual. It is argued that the violent familial and institutional conflicts of Jodin's early life were later reflected in her feminist treatise, Vues législatives pour les femmes (1790), which called for the establishment of a Women's jurisdiction over women. In particular her proposal to eliminate public prostitution and her attacks on the police des moeurs (morals police) have their origin in the bitter experience of her incarceration in a prison for prostitutes in her late teens. The collusion of authority (la police des moeurs) with les filles publiques came to symbolise for her the corruptions of the ancien régime     

Creating a Space for Absent Voices: Disabled Women's Experience of Receiving Assistance with Daily Living Activities

Feminist research on community care and ‘informal carers’ identified this as a women's issue but failed to address the interests and experiences of older and disabled women - those who received ‘care’. One consequence is that such feminist research has implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, undermined disabled women's rights to a home, children and personal relationships. Using qualitative research, the article highlights the actual experience of women whose physical impairment means that they need help with daily living activities, looking at the different circumstances in which such help is received.The disability movement's concept of ‘independent living’ raises particular issues for disabled women. ‘Independent living’ is about having choice and control over the assistance needed, rather than necessarily doing everything for yourself. However, gender inequalities may also inhibit the choice and control that women have in their lives.Assistance can be given within a personal relationship as an expression of love, but disabled women may also experience abusive, restrictive or exploitative relationships. Public services do not generally provide assistance in a way which enables a woman to have choice and control in her life, or even to carry out child-caring or homemaking tasks. The research on the various ways of receiving personal assistance found that those women who were able to purchase their own help were most likely to be living independently, in the sense of exerting choice and control in their lives.Feminist research can help to create a space for disabled women's absent voices, and add to the pressure for change in the way that personal assistance needs are met. This is a human and civil rights issue which has a key impact on the control that disabled women have over their lives.     

‘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.     

Women's studies and the women's movement in Britain: origins and evolution, 1970–2000

The article is based on research carried out in 1998-99 which involved interviewing United Kingdom based women who had been responsible for introducing degree courses in women's studies into British universities and polytechnics. The interviews are records of the memories of those women as they look back on a political moment when they were engaged in collective attempts to transform the academic curriculum. Personal memories are placed alongside accounts and debates which appeared in printed sources, such as books and newsletters from the British Women's liberation movement from 1970 onwards. The article also reflects on the process in which past events and personal memoirs move from stories to histories, enter the archive, and begin to acquire the status of history.     

Lessons from “Around the world with Oprah”: Neoliberalism,race, and the (geo)politics of beauty

On 6 October 2004, viewers went “Around the world with Oprah” and received a rare glimpse inside the lives of 30-year-old women from 17 different countries. When Oprah turned her gaze (and that of middle-class American housewives) eastward, she highlighted South Korean women's penchart for plastic surgery. Oprah's “trip” to South Korea is emblematic of Western discourse surrounding South Korean Women's plastic surgery consumption, most of which focuses on cosmetic eyelid surgery or the sangapul procedure as it is called in South Korea. Given its widespread popularity, the sangapul procedure has come to signify South Korean women's acquiescence to not only patriarchal oppression but racial oppression as well. This essay goes beyond the psychologization of South Korean women in order to ask what such psychological musings obscure about the very political nature of beauty itself. Using “Around the world with Oprah” as a starting point, then, this essay examines beauty at the intersection of race, technology, and (geo)politics in order to show that, in an era of neoliberalism, plastic surgery is often rationalized as an investment in the self towards a more normal, if not better future. As this essay suggests, such a framing of plastic surgery is contingent on Oprah's production of neoliberal feminism based on liberal notions of choice. Given her global reach, these neoliberal feminist subjects are not produced equally, however, but are discursively constructed along a First World/Third World divide.     

Gaining a Public Voice: Ottoman women's struggle to survive in the print life of early twentieth-century Ottoman society,and the example of Halide Edib (1884–1964)

After delving into the emergence of women in Ottoman print culture and the challenges associated with this process, this paper focuses on women's periodicals which provided a platform for women writers, education for a female audience and a means of communication between both parties. Analysing the social and technical challenges of establishing independently run and long-lived women's journals under the restrictive circumstances of the early twentieth century's gender-segregated Ottoman society, this article not only documents women's struggle for survival in the publishing world but also explains why women's periodicals and their female authors had an ephemeral print life. After acknowledging the role of print culture in the women's emancipation movement, the focus is on Halide Edib as an exceptional example in terms of her survival and transformation from unknown to world-renowned author. Her struggle to enter and become established in the print life of the late Ottoman society illustrates the potential and available positions for women in the publishing sphere and explains the failure of her female contemporaries to achieve success in this area.     

neither here nor there: the reproductive sphere in transnational feminist cinema

This article examines representations of motherhood in three transnational feminist films: Anayansi Prado's Maid in America (2004), Sabiha Sumar's Silent Waters (2002) and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2007). While these films differ at the levels of genre and style as well as in terms of their production contexts, they each feature several scenes that engage the tension between distance and proximity, separation and unity – an always unresolved tension integral to the reproductive sphere. Each film also provides at least one close-up shot of a mother's hands preparing food for her charge. Tracing Mary Ann Doane's explication of the close-up shot's engagement with the capitalist logic of the microcosm and macrocosm, I will show how the aforementioned films resignify what Doane identifies as the close-up's compensation for the loss of unity in modernity. The recurring image of a mother's labouring hands interrogates the false unity of the capitalist macrocosm, while also complicating the purportedly separate microcosm in which modern subject can touch and hold a given commodity. These films show that transnational mothers are simultaneously held within the immobile space of reproduction – owned and exploited by the larger structures that depend on their labour – while also actively recreating the cultures that render them invisible.     

Exploring Michèle Roberts’ Imagined Voices in The Walworth Beauty

The Walworth Beauty (2017) is Michèle Roberts’s haunting new novel, which links historical facts with imaginative fiction. Set in central London, the Anglo-French feminist writer’s novel explores certain Victorian women’s lives, lives which are simultaneously connected with those of twenty-first century men and women. A researcher from the nineteenth century, Joseph Benson, and a retired lecturer and writer from today, Madeleine, develop their stories in different times but in similar locations around a Walworth cul-de-sac and other London sites. Past and present, north and south London link to uncover the enigmatic accounts pictured by the protagonists of this sensuous work of fiction. Inspired by Henry Mayhew’s fourth volume dedicated to the villains, the poor and the prostitutes of the Victorian era, Michèle Roberts narrates the story that emerges from their unrecorded words, putting these women’s voices and personal testimonies on paper. Walking the streets of London will connect Joseph and Madeleine, two flâneurs who are witnessing and feeling the different pathways they encounter. The inner and the outer voices of the protagonists establish a dialogue between the man and the woman that celebrates human connection.