Imperial Families: women writing home in Georgian Britain

This article critically engages with the concept of home to question what home meant and how it was constructed in eighteenth-century Britain. It particularly focuses on elite imperial families for whom ideas of home were significant, yet fragile as family members became dispersed across ever-greater distances. It uses letters as its source base to examine how families managed to construct a sense of home and belonging despite different locations and underlines the important role that women played in organizing and completing the work of home building. In doing so this article challenges understandings of homes as stable entities and highlights how elite imperial families worked to constantly negotiate and construct them.     

Leaving home: Irish press debates on female employment,domesticity and emigration to Britain in the 1930s

Although Ireland has had a long history of female emigration, the 1930s saw an important shift in emigration patterns. In the context of southern Irish nation-building, the emigration of tens of thousands of young Irish women to Britain raised serious questions about the opportunities and roles of women in the Irish Free State. This article analyses the Irish print media of the 1930s as discursive spaces within which female emigration was repeatedly highlighted and debated. Discussions of female emigration were usually related to issues of female education, female employment and the duties of women within the home. These issues need to be located within the specific context of Irish Free State economics and politics. The Conditions of Employment Act (1936) and the Constitution of 1937 were legislative measures that attempted to define and regulate the role of Irish women. But that is not to imply a simple ideological hegemony in the Free State; I argue that the media debates reveal the competing discourses surrounding women's roles in the newly established nation state. For example, one view was that young women and girls should be given training and preparation for emigration, another view was that plenty of jobs were available at home, while a third view was that women should be content to remain within the domestic sphere. The much-repeated view that women would be better off (at home) illustrates the overlapping constructions of home – domestic sphere – and home – the nation. The overlapping and interconnecting of these home spaces signified a blurring of boundaries that meant Irish women were expected to carry the responsibility for national as well as domestic well-being.     

Women in the firing line: the home guard and the defence of gender boundaries in Britain in the second world war

This article focuses on the formation and application of the principles of Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936). Despite her lifelong and innovative commitment to social and housing reform, she has received only perfunctory recognition in women's history. The aims here are twofold. First, this oversight will be redressed by foregrounding the subtle, shrewd and imaginative means of persuasion Barnett used in the pursuit of her ideals. Second, her principles and practices will be included in a wider debate concerning the means by which middle-class women subverted dominant discourses without apparently transgressing boundaries of decency. Throughout, the intention is to problematise the widely held assumptions of her intransigence and insensitivity, which appear to have confined her to the footnotes of history.     

Deconstructing Whiteness: Irish Women in Britain

The Irish are largely invisible as an ethnic group in Britain but continue to be racialized as inferior and alien Others. Invisibility has been reinforced by academic treatment. Most historians have assumed that a framework of assimilation is appropriate and this outcome is uncritically accepted as desirable. Sociologists on the other hand have excluded the Irish from consideration, providing tacit support for the ‘myth of homogeneity’ of white people in Britain against the supposedly new phenomenon of threatening (Black) ‘immigrants’.Focus on the paradigm of ‘colour’ has limited the range of racist ideologies examined and led to denial of anti-Irish racism. But an analysis of nineteenth-century attitudes shows that the ‘Irish Catholic’ was a significant Other in the construction of the British nationalist myth. Despite contemporary forgetting, hostility towards the Irish continues, over and above immediate reactions to recent IRA campaigns. Verbal abuse and racial harassment are documented in London and elsewhere, but unacknowledged.The masculine imagery of ‘Paddy’ hides the existence of Irish women in Britain, although they have outnumbered men since the 1920s. In America, by contrast, there is a strong stereotype of ‘Bridget’ and her central contribution to Irish upward mobility is recognized. But invisibility does not protect Irish women in Britain from racism. Indeed, they are often more exposed since their productive and reproductive roles connect more firmly to British society. Moreover, women have played a key role in maintaining Catholic adherence, which continues to resonate closely with Irishness and difference.     

Roberto G. Gonzales: Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America

Journal of Youth and Adolescence -     

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.