‘Quality’, Cinema and the ‘Superior Woman’ Persona: understanding women’s film criticism in post‐war Britain (1945–59)

Criticism was a particularly buoyant area of film culture in Britain during the post‐war period, a regular feature in newspapers, periodicals, magazines, and BBC radio programmes. What has not been widely recognised is the central role that women played as critics of film at this time, and where their interests differed from those of their male peers. This article recovers the contribution made by women film critics, arguing that middle‐class writers such as C. A. Lejeune and E. Arnot Robertson adopted a form of ‘distanced amusement’ with regard to themes of sentimentality and romance (associated with low‐brow female pleasures). This strategy permitted them to engage with the broader cultures of film‐watching, commenting on subjects such as female crying and character identification, and recognising cinema‐going as a pleasurable activity for women, subjects which male critics did not discuss. These findings expand knowledge about film criticism in the post‐war period and reconfigure received understandings of film culture to account for women’s gendered contribution to the critical field.     

Queening it: Women's taste for jewelry excesses in post‐war Britain

In “Dahil Sa Iyo: The Performative Power of Imelda's Song,” Christine Bacareza Balance articulates the role of musical performance in the shaping of the “spectacular politics” of the former Philippine first lady. The article argues against depoliticized aesthetic and critical practices that attempt to separate art from politics. Instead, the article suggests that it was the deployment of musical art forms in Marcos’ performance of self that could bolster the execution of the Marcos’ political agenda, characterized by corruption, extra-juridical violence, and human rights abuse. Thus, the article concludes with a turn to artistic renderings of Marcos, arguing that such performances map the relationship between US imperialism, Filipino history, and the intimate sphere of Filipino America.     

‘A Great Politicianess’: Ann Jebb,Rational Dissent and politics in late eighteenth‐century Britain 1

This article discusses the life of Ann Jebb (1735–1812) in light of recent scholarship on gender and politics in late eighteenth‐century Britain. Wife of the Unitarian political activist John Jebb, Ann was one of the most respected women among ‘enlightened’ Rational Dissenters. In the 1770s at Cambridge, and afterwards in London, she held ‘tea parties’ for reformers, and wrote pamphlets and newspaper articles supporting religious, educational and political reform. Her case sheds light on the activities and status of women in reform circles during the ‘age of cultural revolution’, and further complicates the separate spheres model of gender in the late eighteenth century.     

The Missionary Narrative as Coercive Interrogation: seduction,confession and self‐presentation in women’s ‘letters home’ 1

This article takes as its starting point the late nineteenth and early twentieth century missionary discourse of feminine self‐denial, and attempts to chart the ways in which it became a subversive theme in women missionaries’ ‘letters home.’ It argues that in the simultaneously public and private act of letter writing, women missionaries created complex sexual and political self‐narratives. By co‐opting the imperial rhetoric of a threatening, violent East, and then setting up their letters as conversations with an invisible interrogator, missionary women repeatedly forced their audiences to discover the various ways in which they had been seduced by this East, and had thereby deviated from accepted feminine norms. In the process, they both reinforced imperial notions of race and civilization and undermined the likewise imperial notion of protective domestic space.     

‘When Two Loving Hearts Beat as One’: same‐sex marriage,subjectivity and self‐representation in the Australian case of Marion‐Bill‐Edwards, 1906–1916

This article focuses on the Australian case of Marion‐Bill‐Edwards who lived most of her adult life in male attire. It examines three bursts of publicity Edwards encountered, a 1906 criminal trial, her 1908 autobiography and a 1916 court case in which she was a witness. The case is significant because it makes an important contribution to understandings of the sexual subjectivity of women (especially women of the lower classes) who had same‐sex relationships in the early years of the twentieth century. The article explores changes in Edwards’ self‐representation and subjectivity in this pivotal period in which (research has indicated) new models for modern sexual identities began to emerge.     

Rules of thumb: British history and ‘imperial culture’ in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain1

Abstract

This paper examines the traditions of both British imperial and British domestic historiography and calls for a re-mapping of both so that the so-called separate spheres of ‘home’ and ‘away’ may be brought back into the same fields of debate. Its central claim is that imperial ideology and its effects were not phenomena ‘out there’. Empire was not a singular place; nor did ‘home’ exist in isolation from it. In spite of the polarization, which has been characteristic of their historiographies, their relationship was dialectic rather than dichotomous. These insights, while derived in part from new trends inside British history itself, owe both their theoretical rigor and their self-avowedly political concerns to post-colonial and feminist historiographical work, which together insist on the desacralization of ‘Britain’ proper.     

‘inebriates’, ‘heathens’, templars and suffragists: Scotland and imperial feminism c. 1870-1914

This article examines the extent to which the British Empire was central to the women's suffrage debate within the Scottish Christian Union. This analysis follows two trends in the historiography of Britain and of women's suffrage: an integration of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘imperial’ in the historiography of Britain; and a recognition of internationalism within women's suffrage. This discussion points to regional diversity within Great Britain and to the influence of imperialism and evangelicalism on women's activism in the so-called Celtic fringe. In so doing, this article aims to contribute to a more complex representation of middle-class women's participation in Britain's temperance and women's suffrage movements.     

Labour relations in the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors: Report of a case study in south Gujarat,India. Part 2.

The fate of peasants, agricultural labourers and others who leave the agrarian sector, either temporarily or permanently, to seek employment in towns and cities, must be of great interest to anyone concerned with the peasantry. Yet it is an area about which we are remarkably ignorant. Jan Breman's study of the ‘labour relations’ (or, one might say, the ‘poverty') of those who are, to a significant extent, first‐generation town‐dwellers, or who, indeed, although they seek employment in towns, have not yet severed their connections with the countryside, is extremely enlightening in this respect. Although it is not directly about peasants we publish it as an important contribution to our knowledge of this hitherto ‘dark’ area, in which rural origins or connections are of manifest significance. The author employs the ‘informal'/'formal’ sector dichotomy, with suitable scepticism, to examine in great detail the labour system outside agriculture in the Valsad district of South Gujarat.??     

‘Blackberrying in the Sun’? Modernism and the Ageing Woman in Rhys’s Good Morning,Midnight, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent

Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West break with tradition in re-envisioning the aging woman. No longer content with representing the forlorn dowager or the redundant females of Gaskell’s Cranford, these writers challenge earlier representations while also confronting modernism itself. Instead of focusing on youth, they ‘make it [modernism] new’ by carefully detailing the various ways ageism and sexism make us ‘the other’, as they speak out against the interlocking oppressions of ageism and sexism. Whereas Rhys underscores what it means to be an impoverished, aging woman, Woolf and Sackville-West shift their concerns to the ways in which their characters come to terms with aging. For Woolf, there is both a sense of mourning and a sense of celebration as Clarissa attempts to unite her world through her ‘offering’ of parties that ‘defy’ the Gods. In contrast, Sackville-West’s dutiful Lady Slane claims her independence for the first time in her life, as she refuses the ways in which her children infantilize her.     

‘The modern way to loveliness’: middle-class cosmetics and chain-store beauty culture in mid-twentieth-century Britain

In May 1935, the British manufacturer Boots launched ‘Number Seven’, a premium range of skin-care products sold via its nationwide network of chain-store chemists. Using material from the Boots Archive, this paper traces the early history of Number Seven to explore the changing meanings of middle-class cosmetics across the mid-twentieth century. Number Seven offered provincial and suburban women an explicitly modern form of facial beauty that married the logics of mass production to traditional moral aesthetics. Through the discourse of ‘loveliness’ and the careful management of in-store experience, it negotiated the prerogative connotations of colour cosmetics and the problematic influence of cinematic glamour. Yet by the mid-1950s, this construction had been superseded by a more situational understanding of beauty that was dependent on context and the appreciation of others. This fundamental shift in the normative aesthetics of public femininity had important implications for women on both sides of Boots’ toilet counters.     

‘Nature takes no notice of morality’: singleness and married love in interwar Britain1

This article draws attention to the dominance of marriage during the twentieth century and the strain this institution was, and still is, under. This is achieved by focusing upon the single as a problematic category in the context of interwar Britain through an examination of the writings of Marie Carmichael Stopes, one of the leading experts on marriage, and her single correspondents. There are clear contradictions in Stopes's writings, which she was unable to acknowledge, between sex as a normal healthy appetite which it could be dangerous to suppress and the denial of a sex life to the single. These are shown to have had the potential to destabilise marriage as the only site of legitimate reproduction and sexual relations. Examining the differences between her advice to single men and women also exposes the gender divide in relation to the concept of sublimation and the difficulties inherent in the concept of substitute mother as a stable and coherent identity for the single woman. The article concludes by making links between the position of single men and women in the early twentieth century and today.     

naming and defining ‘domestic violence’: lessons from research with violent men

In this paper we draw on data from in-depth interviews with men who have used violence and abuse within intimate partner relationships to provide a new lens through which to view the conceptual debates on naming, defining and understanding ‘domestic violence’, as well as the policy and practice implications that flow from them. We argue that the reduction of domestic violence to discrete ‘incidents’ supports and maintains how men themselves talk about their use of violence, and that this in turn overlaps with contentions about the appropriate interventions and responses to domestic violence perpetrators. We revisit Hearn’s 1998 work The Violences of Men, connecting it to Stark’s later concept of coercive control, in order to develop and extend understandings of violence through analysis of the words of those who use it. We conclude by exploring the implications of these findings for recent legal reform in England and Wales and for policies on how we deal with perpetrators.     

The ‘Good’ Attached Mother: An Analysis of Postmaternal and Postracial Thinking in Birth and Breastfeeding Policy in Neoliberal Britain

ABSTRACT

In the last 20 years, a new parenting philosophy has garnered increasing attention and popularity. Coined by William Sears in the early 1980s, attachment parenting (AP) proposes that secure attachment between parent and child is necessary for optimal development and therefore ‘good’ parenting. Simultaneously, neoliberalism, a socio-political context defined by market logic, has emerged as the dominant global trend. In this article, I examine the correspondence between AP, and the broader ideology of intensive mothering it expresses, and the parenting-related policies advanced by the neoliberal state. Specifically, I focus on how birth and breastfeeding policy in Britain aligns with AP, contextualising the emergence of AP and its appearance in contemporary state policy as the result of two features of neoliberalism: postmaternal and post-racial thinking. I draw attention to the experiences of black mothers and, through this lens, reveal the raced, gendered and classed dimensions of ‘good’ parenting. In my examination of these policies, I argue that postmaternal and postracial thinking have enabled the emergence of AP, an approach that individualises child-rearing and relies upon an uncritical appropriation of the so-called traditional practices of racialised women.     

The Brazilian quilombo: ‘race’, community and land in space and time

More than a century after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, the term ‘quilombo’ continues to evolve new meanings, not all of them associated with its common definition as a runaway slave community. In this article, I discuss the significance of quilombo in its diverse social, political and historical contexts, demonstrating how changes in the uses and meanings of the term reveal broader trans-historical, juridical, political and metaphorical processes. I argue that quilombola communities should not be conceptualized as a racial category, but rather as a system of social organization and a right. Specifically, I show how the term quilombola is currently a way actors identify with Afro-descendants in order to achieve political recognition. I also describe how contemporary practices involving quilombos reveal historical tensions over land conflicts between historically marginalized rural black communities, private interests and governmental authority. I draw on evidence from field research in southern Brazil to illustrate my understanding of how quilombos work.     

Captivity,Confrontation, and Self‐Empowerment: identity in Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry

In modern Iranian literature, Forugh Farrokhzad, undoubtedly, occupies a pivotal position. Her poetry presents the singular voice of an Iranian woman who dared to challenge the social and patriarchal boundaries imposed on Iranian women for centuries. Farrokhzad’s pioneering artistic career and her bold lifestyle created an unprecedented legacy for the woman artist in Iran. Her work defies all categories as she not only confronted the stereotypes forced on Iranian women’s identity, but she also challenged the long‐established tradition of the classic Persian poetry. In both arenas, Farrokhzad proved herself resilient and uncompromising. Her unique poetic voice articulates inclusion in literary and social activism and subversion from the mainstream male‐dominated literary circles. Confronting the individual and collective definitions of identity, and sexual and textual territories, Farrokhzad broke many boundaries and expressed the need for self‐awareness and affirmation of female identity. This study is an attempt, in part, to explore and investigate Farrokhzad’s rebellion against the confinement of self in the bondage of conformity and subjection and the delineation of her arduous journey to liberation and self‐empowerment.     

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.     

‘C’mon,No One Wants a Dick Pic’: exploring the cultural framings of the ‘Dick Pic’ in contemporary online publics

The ‘dick pic’ (DP) has become a growing cultural phenomenon in the digital realm, attracting increasing commentary regarding why men send them, with women’s responses constituting online social movements. Emerging research concerning the practice of DPs has been incredibly limited, with discussion focused on youth sexting practices and online harassment more broadly. However, research focusing specifically on the gendered dynamics of heterosexual boys’ and men’s engagement with DPs is significantly absent, and there has been no attempt to explore how the DP is framed in public commentary. We draw from a qualitative content analysis of social media and digital news articles, comics and blogs discussing the ‘dick pic’, highlighting four major ways in which the ‘dick pic’ is framed. These include: assumptions regarding men’s motivations, women’s production of ‘counterpublics’ and feminist resistance to the DP, satirical and humourous responses to DPs, and positive and transformative responses involving the active solicitation of men’s DPs. We argue that such responses work to interpret and address men’s behaviours, but lack critical consideration regarding their underlying motives and the roles DPs might have in relation to their sexual subjectivities. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of such responses and calls for future research.