Ethel Bright Ashford: more and less than a role model

ABSTRACT

There is a tendency to position the first women lawyers as role models for today’s young women. This article argues, through an exploration of the life and career of Ethel Bright Ashford, that these women are better recognised as pioneers or foremothers than promoted as role models. Ashford was one of the first women barristers, a long-serving borough councillor, and tireless activist for civic causes. Nonetheless, aspects of her career and politics pose problems for purely celebratory accounts. Yet there is real value in considering her biography: she offers both an alternative definition of a successful professional life and the reassurance that imperfection is not equivalent to failure. Ashford therefore illustrates the vital importance of a more nuanced and historically situated consideration of the first women lawyers.     

Gendered testimonies: autobiographies, diaries, and letters by women as sources for Caribbean history.

This analysis of memoirs, diaries, and letters written by English-speaking women living in the Caribbean region since the early 1800s pays particular attention to testimony on their gendered life experiences. The analysis draws examples from five autobiographical writings, three memoirs, three diaries, and the letters of three women in its consideration of various aspects of the women's lives. The essay opens with an acknowledgement of the recent efforts of historians to incorporate women's experiences into the concept of "history" and a discussion of the ways that women's voices can be recaptured that notes the paucity of primary sources. The topics covered in the examined documents reveal information about motherhood and marriage, health and sexuality, domestic life and household management, the conditions and suffering of female slaves, the rearing and education of girls, the influence of Christian missionaries, and the general status of women.     

Rethinking the political: Ottoman women as feminist subjects

This article examines late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Muslim Ottoman women’s journals. Drawing attention to the historical and social phenomenon of Ottoman Muslim women’s print culture, the author argues that women’s writings and activism around these journals functioned as a significant feminist public sphere that built a community of women’s discourse. Women’s journals established a real community of intellectual women writers and readers who overtly promoted a feminist agenda in the public sphere. Thus, they envisioned and created alternative roles for upper middle class and middle class Ottoman women. Contrary to the conventional narrative of Turkish feminism that identifies its origin with the Republican period, it was Ottoman women’s periodicals and associations that laid the groundwork for future feminists in the Republican period. In providing an analysis of these magazines, the author explores a class of now nearly forgotten publications that, she argues, created a feminist discourse in their time.     

The British federation of university women and the status of women in universities, 1907-1939

Abstract

The early 1990s have marked a turning point in the history of the British Federation of University Women (BFUW), which has recently renamed itself the British Federation of Women Graduates, and has had to leave its historic premises in Crosby Hall, Chelsea. This article looks at the origin of the BFUW in the context of feminist concern with women's position in the universities in the first decade of this century. It sketches some of the difficulties faced by the Federation in defining, promoting and defending ‘women's interests’ in the universities and highlights its role in providing a supportive network for women in academic posts.     

Class,ethnicity and gender intertwined: Jewish women and the East London rent strikes, 1935-1940

Abstract

Feminist theorists have long debated whether gender or class position is of primary importance in shaping women's political consciousness; the consequences of ethnic or religious distinctions have not been examined as fully. This article hopes to rectify some of these oversights by focusing on the experiences of working-class, east London Jewish women involved in the pre-war rent strikes organized by the Communist-led Stepney Tenants' Defence League. It attempts to explain why so many of them became left-wing militants while their female Irish neighbors, equally marginalized, often gravitated towards the radical right. It concludes that in these close-knit communities ethnic identity proved more politically salient than did class or gender.     

Educated doubt: women,religion and the challenge of higher education,c. 1870-1920[1]

Abstract

The advent of higher education for women, with its emphasis on reason, on scientific thought and on critical approaches to knowledge, constituted a potential threat to religious belief. The stories of male ‘doubters’ are legion but what happened to thoughtful women, confronted with challenges to their belief systems? This article shows that educated doubt was not only a male affliction. Women responded to the challenge in a variety of ways. Some rejected belief, turning their religious impulses to aesthetic or social ends. Others brought scientific reasoning to bear on religious phenomena, hoping to ‘prove’ the existence of spirituality. Some saw in science and reason a further manifestation of the spiritual impulse; in education further possibilities of the life of the spirit. A common thread unites the responses, the search for a voice, an authority which women sought in the new secular institutions of higher learning.     

Patchwork politics in the Netherlands, 1946-50: women,gender and the world war II trauma[1]

Abstract

This paper describes the campaign launched in 1946 by a prominent Dutch feminist, resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor, to make women wear so-called National Celebration Skirts, homemade patchwork skirts constructed of, for instance, old pieces of cloth of family members and friends that were killed by the Germans or of Jewish children hiding from the German persecutors. The skirts were to be worn on public holidays as well as in private celebrations. The campaigners supposed that by making such skirts women could cope with their wartime experiences. The Celebration Skirt is analysed as a female mode of political expression to be understood in the context of the politics of war, reconstruction and gender. The story of the skirt refutes some standard Dutch historiography on (the failure of) post-war renewal; it gives new information on what happened to women after the war, and on the ways in which some women tried to overcome their grief; and it contributes to the women's studies debate on, ‘equality and Difference’.