Some problems of constructing and reconstructing a suffragette's life: Mary Richardson,suffragette, socialist and fascist

Abstract

Drawing on recent work on feminist autobiography, this article discusses the ways in which a range of autobiographical writing was used by Mary Richardson, a former suffragette, at different stages of her life. It considers the ways in which autobiography was rewritten to fit various political circumstances and to suggest political continuity and cohesion. The article explores the role of the historian in analysing her writing and raises questions about the use of autobiography in history.     

The feminist frontier: on trans and feminism

Against a back-drop of ongoing hostility between sections of feminism towards trans communities, and particularly feminist antagonism towards trans women, this paper explores the relationship between feminism and transgender. Through the use of original case study material, gathered by virtual methods, the paper explores events that have occurred since the millennium that are used to highlight particular epistemological and political tensions between feminism and trans. Central themes running through the case studies include the constitution of ‘woman’, the policing of feminist identities and spaces, and questions of bodily autonomy. In conclusion, the paper stresses the importance of rejecting trans-exclusionary feminism and of foregrounding the links between feminism and transgender as a key social justice project of our time.     

Emma Brooke: Fabian,feminist and writer

Largely overlooked in Fabian historiography and absent from major works of biographical reference, Emma Brooke (c1844-1926) was an early Fabian and successful novelist whose analysis of ‘the woman question’, and especially the sex question, significantly predates the better known critique by H. G. Wells. This posthumously published article examines Brooke's thinking over time, drawing on personal correspondence and literary representations, and offers further insights into the relationship between feminism and socialism in the 1880s and 1890s.     

The uses of hermeneutics for feminist scholarship

Although feminist scholars must be primarily devoted to understanding the experience of women, we can also use the critique of logocentrism being made by male thinkers of the hermeneutic/interpretive persuasion. The bulk of male scholarship in these movements has been unable to move beyond the preliminary effort of a negative critique of the limitations and irrelevancies of the traditional/scientistic methodology. Feminist scholarship has not only stood critical of traditional assumptions but has made the positive move of putting forth alternative epistemologies which use experience, intuition and evaluation as modes of knowing. For these new ideas to emerge in a powerful way, there has to be a locus for their emergence. Women's Studies is that place.     

A feminist family: the stracheys and feminism,c. 1860-1950

This article explores the importance and meaning of feminism within one prominent British family across two generations, spanning the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It discusses the changing nature of feminist activism, the ways in which suffrage and feminist activities could become full-time occupations for some women and looks at the links between personal or personal relationships that this sometimes entailed. Focusing on the younger women in the family, however, it also shows how feminism came to be seen as antithetical to modernity and as having little to offer those who sought personal and sexual emancipation in the period after the First World War.     

The critic as feminist: Reflections on women's poetry,feminism, and the art of criticism

And the sigh of that child

Is white as an orchid …

As the white hush between two se ntences.

—from “Jean Rhys” by Derek Wolcott

     

Elena Poniatowska: The feminist origins of commitment

Elena Poniatowska is a well-known, living Mexican woman writer who portrays the reality of the marginal, the disenfranchised, the oppressed. There is therefore an irony at the centre of her ‘popularity’ for many of the men who have reviewed her books have not recognised the reality she presents: they have imposed their own male reality on her work — and praised it. By such means is her reality negated and made invisible while it is simultaneously appropriated.     

The mothers' international: The Women's Co-operative Guild and feminist pacifism

The Women's Co-operative Guild (now the Co-operative Women's Guild), founded in 1983 as an auxilliary of the English Consumer Co-operative Movement, became a strong feminist representative of married working-class women. Its ‘social’ feminism stressed women's maternal, domestic role, deriving from it a series of values seen as lacking in male-dominated public life. Politics was to be transformed by means of women's active involvement, including but extending past their acquisition and use of the vote. The ‘female’ values were nurturant and cooperative; internationally, they focussed on international organization and peace. The Consumer Co-operative Movement provided a reformist ideology supportive of women's activism and pacifism, but the Movement itself as an organization was increasingly hostile to the Guild's feminism both within and outside the Movement. Although relatively uninfluential, the Guild thus embodies a tradition of feminist pacifism that is active and increasingly influential today.