Vera ‘Jack’ Holme: cross-dressing actress,suffragette and chauffeur

This article provides a chronological account of the life of Vera Holme—a militant suffragette in Edwardian Britain, chauffeur to the Pankhursts, actress, and aid worker—focusing on the period 1900–20. The account is based largely on readings of papers, diaries and photographs within her personal archive, held at The Women's Library at the London School of Economics (LSE), as well as identifying references to Holme in secondary texts. The article traces the development of her identity as an unconventional woman by focusing on her work as an actress, driver and mechanic, her lesbian relationships and her increasingly masculine image, in the context of the women's suffrage movement and the First World War.     

‘history’ is now: feminist theory and the production of historical feminisms1

Over the last decade, feminist practitioners across a variety of disciplines have been invoking history as an important grounding for both feminist politics and feminist theory. At the same time, however, insufficient account is taken of the extent to which standardized versions of ‘the feminist past’ are being invoked to represent a wide variety of feminist experiences and an equally heterogeneous set of historical circumstances and cultural contexts. It is suggested that if feminist reconceptualizations of history are to be taken seriously – if, in other words, history is the production of knowledges about the past and is itself contingent on the conditions of the present – feminist theorists must begin to reference both the imperial legacies of Anglo-European feminism and the multiplicity of feminist movements around the world. Only when feminists of all disciplinary persuasions begin to acknowledge the complex historical legacies of modern feminisms and situate their own critiques within them will feminist theory be properly grounded in, and responsive to, the exigencies of feminist history.     

‘door bitches of club feminism’?: academia and feminist competency

After years of invisibility, the position of migrant women from Islamic countries now forms the core of the Dutch discourse on integration and emancipation. This article presents the downside of this visibility by showing that it is situated within a growing culturalist discourse. In addition to being culturalist, this discourse focuses on the shortcomings of migrants and is flavoured with a touch of new realism in its argument that it is a right to break the taboos of migrants. More visibility for migrant women will not help their empowerment if the basic assumptions of the dominant discourse are not challenged. Through presenting a case study, this article shows how this visibility can even strengthen the border between the Dutch as ‘emancipated self’ and Islamic migrants as the ‘unemancipated other’. In so doing it reinforces boundaries instead of alliances, isolation instead of empowerment, and suppression instead of emancipation.     

Beyond the ‘big three’: the development of feminist theory into the 1990s

Abstract

This paper examines some of the changes that have taken place in Western feminist theory during its recent past. It begins by questioning whether previous practices of labelling feminism as liberal, Marxist or radical are still useful. It then considers those influences that have especially effected feminist thinking, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-structuralism. The paper argues that the nature of feminist theory has been profoundly transformed since the early days of second wave feminism. While some of these changes have been positive, others have had unfortunate and negative consequences. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how the usefulness and political potential of feminist theorising might be harnessed for the future.     

‘Quite the opposite of a feminist’: Phyllis McGinley,Betty Friedan and discourses of gender in mid-century American culture

This article examines the relationship between feminist and anti-feminist discourses in the period between World War II and the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). It takes as its primary focus the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘housewife poet’ and self-proclaimed anti-feminist, Phyllis McGinley. McGinley was a successful poet who has disappeared from the record since the publication in 1964 of Sixpence in her Shoe—her best-selling retort to The Feminine Mystique. Her example is important because it gives voice to the much-maligned suburban housewife and offers a spirited alternative to Friedan's reading of white, middle-class domesticity as always and inevitably oppressive. The article offers a close reading of McGinley's work and situates it in relation to its historical and cultural contexts (specifically the highly charged domain of suburban domesticity) and to its wider readership. It compares her anti-feminism with that of other anti-feminist writers of the period, thereby illuminating the tensions and contradictions in contemporary debates.     

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.     

‘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.     

Feminism,imperialism and orientalism: the challenge of the ‘Indian woman’

Abstract

This article examines the content and process of imperialist discourse on the ‘Indian woman’ in the writings of two North American women, one writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, the other a key exponent of the ‘second wave’ of the movement. By analysing these writings, it demonstrates how the content of the discourse was reproduced over time ith different but parallel effects in the changed political circumstances, in the first case producing the Western imperial powers as superior on the scale of civilisation, and in the second case producing Western women as the leaders of global feminism. It also identifies how the process of creating written images occurred within the context of each author's social relations with the subject, the reader and the other authors, showing how an orientalist discourse can be produced through the author's representation of the human subjects of whom she writes; how this discourse can be reproduced through the author's uncritical use of earlier writers; and how the discourse can be activated in the audience through the author's failure to challenge established cognitive structures in the reader.     

‘ah famous citie’: women,writing, and early modern London

This article explores aspects of the textual relationship between women and early modern London by examining three verbal ‘snapshots’ of the city in works either written by women or focusing on women in their urban environment. The first text, Isabella Whitney's ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573), addresses London from a rural perspective, treating the city as a fickle male to whom she wants to hand back all his treasures. The poem constructs a vivid and ironic social topography, giving a glimpse of the roles of men and women in the Tudor city. The second text is by Mary Carleton, the roguish Restoration figure who defended her apparently ‘counterfeit’ life in the prose of The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663). Carleton's London is a place of unwanted seduction and sexual intimidation, highlighting a gendered moral geography even while the memoir itself titillates the reader with the account of her bizarre experiences. Finally, in a coda to the discussions of Whitney and Carleton, early eighteenth-century London is viewed through Jonathan Swift's satirical mock-pastorals of squalid urban life, in which female identity, like the city itself, is a site of violence, disgust and deception. Together, these textual representations of women and early modern London indicate the complex interactions of gender, literature and the early modern city. The analysis of the texts also suggests the significance of the ironic voice as a quintessentially urban literary mode, the prevalence of the idea of woman as a commodified topographical site, and the function of metaphors of courtship or marriage as indicators of the paradoxical attractions of the city.     

A bit of a dirty word: ‘feminism’ and female teachers identifying as feminist

Following the identification of a gap in the literature around reasons for contemporary women’s self-identification as ‘feminist’, this paper discusses an empirical study of an intergenerational group of contemporary Australian female teachers collaboratively designing English curriculum around girls’ media. The paper explores the group’s shared conversations around feminism, over a series of meetings, as we (teachers and researcher) plan curriculum and negotiate broader subject positions possible for girls and women. These contexts include the competing discourses of feminism and postfeminism and how these mediate texts chosen for study, our pedagogical approaches, and the ways we experience our own lives. In this study, we struggle to find a shared language, across generations, with which to work collaboratively in a community of practice committed to the critical study of media, but involving different individual orientations to ‘feminism’. This is a space in which impediments to the feminist study of girls’ media quickly emerge. The paper also serves as a reminder that feminist scholarship takes place in schools, as well as in the academy, and that the gender studies work teachers do in schools is potentially whole population work, worthy of keen attention in the gender studies academic mainstream.     

‘Behind the blessed shelter of the microphone’: managing celebrity and career on the early BBC—Mabel Constanduros, 1925–1957

Mabel Constanduros was a much-loved radio star on the BBC for over thirty years. Best known as the creator and performer of the comedic Cockney family, the Bugginses, she also wrote and performed in numerous dramatic works and novel adaptations, and penned over one hundred plays and novels. Furthermore, she was a pioneer of both British situation comedy and soap opera. Yet, to date, there has been no serious academic attempt to understand Constanduros's life, craft, or influence on twentieth-century British popular culture. In addition to biographical recovery, this article analyses Constanduros's public and private personas in order to open a much-needed conversation about the contours of women's experiences on radio in the early days of the BBC.     

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.     

The new left and labor: The early years (1960–1963)

This article analyses the labour history of Italy's recruitment of workers for settlement in the Italian colony of Eritrea. The quest for full employment, both in Italy and within its nascent colonial ‘empire’, was the main driving force behind Italian colonialism in general. Italy's labour policy, which started to take shape in the 1890s, was never linear. Unlike the previous liberal Governments, the Fascist regime's policy was far more determined to use its colonies as places to settle the Italian peasant masses (the same that were migrating to the Americas for a better life, a trend which Fascist Italy considered humiliating to the mother country). In keeping with its vision of the colonies as a means to attain full employment, Fascist ideology characterised the Italian colonial empire as an ‘empire of labour’. In fact, the reality of the labour situation that Italian workers found themselves in after settling in Italy's African colonies would soon show the fallacy underlying Fascist colonial ideology.     

‘The Defection of Women’: the New Zealand Contagious Diseases Act repeal campaign and transnational feminist dialogue in the late nineteenth century

Over the past decade, historians have situated feminist reformers’ efforts to dismantle the British imperial contagious diseases apparatus at the heart of the transnational turn in women's history. New Zealand was an early emulator of British prostitution regulations, which provoked an organised repeal campaign in the 1880s, yet the colony is seldom considered in these debates. Tracing the dialogue concerning the repeal of contagious diseases legislation between British and New Zealand feminists in the 1890s, this article reaffirms the salience of political developments in the settler colonies for metropolitan reformers. A close reading of these interactions, catalysed by the Auckland Women's Liberal League's endorsement of the Act in 1895, reveals recently enfranchised New Zealand women's desire to act as model citizens for the benefit of metropolitan suffragists. Furthermore, it highlights the asymmetries that remained characteristic of the relationship between British feminists and their enfranchised Antipodean counterparts.     

The Spectre of the ‘Man-Woman Athlete’: Mark Weston,Zdenek Koubek,the 1936 Olympics and the uncertainty of sex

This article argues that women athletes were implicated in discussions of sex changeability occurring in 1930s Britain. The topics of the suitability of sport for women and of sex changeability were both given considerable press coverage. Sports officials were faced with the practical problem of how to differentiate female competitors from male ones. Medics at London's Charing Cross Hospital interpreted athleticism and an interest in sport as signs of maleness in patients. Sports practice developed muscles, which were held to be akin to a male secondary sex characteristic. An awareness of the unfixity ascribed to somatic sex means appreciating that debates about the masculinity of sportswomen cannot be understood simply as homophobia—the possibility of changing sex was a real concern.     

‘It’s what Emmeline Pankhurst would have wanted’: Celebrity Big Brother: Year of the Woman (2018, UK) and negotiations of popular feminism(s)

Feminist scholarship has invested attention in popular culture as a terrain upon which understandings of feminism are circulated, contested and explored. This is particularly so in the contemporary moment in which feminism appears to have achieved a new ascendency. But whilst popular culture and feminism are recognised as inextricably enmeshed, there remains the implicit or explicit assumption in feminist scholarship that popular media culture could do ‘better’, and that there is a more ‘authentic’ form of feminism waiting to find representation. In response to this context, this article undertakes an analysis of Twitter responses to Celebrity Big Brother: Year of the Woman (2018) in order to explore the ways in which a popular media text provides an arena for the negotiation of popular feminism. Rather than positioning reality TV and celebrity culture as a site of ‘ideological ruin’ for feminism, this article explores how CBB is discussed in relation to feminism as popular television, and the ways in which this may offer affordances and limitations. The article concludes that feminist media scholars need to give due attention to the complexities of popular feminism as articulated by popular media culture.     

‘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.     

‘Vials,ampoules and a bucketful of syringes’: the experience of the self-administration of hormonal drugs in IVF

During the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), hormonal drugs are used to stimulate the woman's ovaries to produce multiple eggs. The injecting of the drugs is often performed by the women themselves outside of the clinical context, constituting a gendered burden of work that is rendered invisible by the dominant representations of treatment as undergone by couples and performed by doctors. Based on a series of interviews with women and couples who have undergone IVF unsuccessfully and who have ended treatment at least two years previously, this paper focuses on two aspects of the self-injection of hormonal drugs that emerged from the participants accounts: firstly, the gendered ways in which the drug regimen was experienced as compromising privacy and secondly, the strategic use of images of both illicit and medical drug use in the accounts. The paper argues that in spite of the dominant representation of IVF as a couples' technology, the IVF process is profoundly gendered, both in terms of bodily intervention and in the distribution of labour in the implementation of treatment; that the invisibility of the drug regimens from dominant representations of IVF can leave those undergoing treatment unprepared for some of the problems that the self-administration of the drugs can raise, particularly in terms of maintaining privacy; and finally, that images of the drug injection are mobilized strategically in the accounts to locate themselves within normative social reproductive standards. This highlights the extent to which the enduring ideological construction of proper womanhood as defined by motherhood continues to pose a dilemma for those who are involuntarily childless.