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.     

Nothing to spare : by Jan Carter, 237 pages. Penguin Books, Australia. Price, Aus. $6.95

When attempting to establish women's studies courses within institutions of higher education, women face a traditional power structure designed to obstruct movements for change. Four factors relevant to a power analysis of this situation are status, concrete resources, expertise and self-confidence. These factors are defined and examined in relation to the fight to establish women's studies courses. Within this background the issue of men as ‘patrons’ as teachers and as students, and the fact of women's anger are examined. Many arguments forwarded by conservative patriarchal institutions are discussed. The paper emerges from the experiences of the author in three universities. It is aimed at clarifying some of the traps set for women so that other women can eliminate any fears that their experiences are idiosyncratic or ‘their fault’ rather than part of a formalized power game.     

The Female Student on Trial, 1910–1915: Dorothy M. Gladish versus University College Nottingham versus Oscar Wilde

This article examines the student career of Dorothy M. Gladish at University College Nottingham from 1910–1915. By drawing on little-studied archives, a range of narratives about Gladish's multiple embodiments of the female student are analysed. In particular, these narratives are situated within the representational contexts of the Gong student magazine, which are marked by re-writings of Victorian literary texts that re-invent the contemporary female student. In the case of Gladish, the symbolic and literal ‘trial’ was also a feature of her student career. A ‘Mock Trial’ of Gladish is read alongside accounts of the college council’s examination of Professor R. G. F. Dolley, following a complaint by the Gladish family, and their responses to the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895, contained in a hitherto restricted archive. Consideration is given to how this case study extends our knowledge about women’s roles in civic universities at this period.     

Elusive Women Authors in Norwegian Nineteenth-Century Reading Societies

Abstract

Which women authors were read at the ebb of the nineteenth century and around the start of the twentieth? Research on historical readership groups reveals a strikingly different picture from the one transmitted through literary histories and textbooks. Empirical data from the catalogues of Norwegian reading societies from this period form the basis of the proposed conclusions. From a feminist, scholarly point of view, it is doubly interesting to investigate the fate of female authors among female readers; hence, the main emphasis is on the book collection of the women’s reading society based in Oslo from 1874. The collections of other societies, whether male or open to both sexes, are consulted for comparison. Although the material is Norwegian, the results turn out to be comparable to those seen in other countries, not least Finland. The data presented here serve to modify the received canon of European literary history, and to invite future revisions in the reception of female authorship and of women’s place in world literature.     

关于学年学分制条件下高校系部教学管理工作的思考

二战后,各国高校根据自身情况选择施行学分制、学年制及学年学分制.目前,在我国高校的教学管理制度中,这三种形式也是并存的.我校自转制成为普通本科高等院校以来,在施行学年学分制方面,进行了探索和尝试,其基本经验是:加强教学管理工作,帮助学生建立完整的专业知识结构,以适应市场经济需要.     

Learning about “the curse”: An anthropological perspective on experiences of menstruation

Learning about menstruation typically focuses on providing education about the biology and reproductive functions of a woman. This approach ignores individual variations of experience and the social influences in managing the menstrual event. A qualitative study of 20 women was conducted to explore how women learnt about the menstruation and its effect on their lives. With reference to medical discourse and medical anthropology, three themes will be examined: pollution, rites of passage, and the concept of secrecy and social seclusion. These themes are used to explore the role of menstruation in the emergence of female identity, the forces around women that influence their beliefs, and how these women manage their bodies. Some reference is made to the effects of menstruation on a woman's physical and mental health, sexual relationships, and perceived constraints during leisure time. A more phenomenological approach to menstruation should be considered by policymakers interested in “educating” young women about menstruation, where the emphasis should be on addressing women's experiences and concerns.     

Women, power and ordination: A psychological interpretation of objections to the ordination of women to the priesthood

The ordination of women to the priesthood is a subject which still encounters strong antagonism from both men and women. In this paper, such antagonism is interpreted using the thesis of Dinnerstein (1978) which suggests that it may be an expression of the flight from maternal power. The experience of a woman as the first caretaker, coupled with the infant's primitive capacity to deal with the necessarily dependent and frustrating relationship with her, leads men and women to associate their ambivalent fantasies of maternal power with female authority. In particular, the ordination of women for a role which is itself mystically powerful provokes arguments and attitudes which can be interpreted as an expression of this irrational fear.     

‘I'm going to get a job at the factory’: attitudes to women's employment in a mining community, 1945-65

This article examines how couples in mining households managed the increasing opportunities for women to work outside of the home in the period following the Second World War. Households in mining communities have regularly been characterised in research literature as operating strictly segregated gender roles and the lack of employment opportunities in mining areas appears to have accentuated the rigid division of labour. However, in some areas where the mining industry was in decline, new employment opportunities for married women increased, which inevitably placed a strain on the male provider model. This article explores these issues in relation to the ironstone mining district of East Cleveland and uses data generated from thirty-three semi-structured interviews. It will be argued that whilst the separation of the male provider and female homemaker role remained the ideal for many couples, others chose to avail themselves of the economic and psychological benefits of female employment. However, even amongst those couples where the women did undertake paid employment, the image of the male as provider was still preserved by the use of various strategies.     

‘I am … but a pawn in your chess board’: letters,self-presentation,and the making of a lady missionary's career

This article explores the epistolary exchanges of a female medical missionary, Mary Ann ‘May’ Harriet Allen, who served with the British Anglican Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in Zanzibar between 1875 and 1882. In particular, it focuses on two sets of letters—the first is set of letters Allen wrote to her father, which he subsequently published in their local newspaper. The second set comprises letters Allen exchanged with her colleagues at the mission. In the first set of letters, Allen cast herself as the protagonist in an African drama typical of Victorian-era missionary publications, a move that obscured the struggles that Allen was facing in her work on Zanzibar, and about which she wrote in letters to her colleagues. Reading these letters against one another offers insight into the techniques of self-actualization available to women in the nineteenth-century mission field, the strategies some women employed to negotiate the contemporary evangelical and patriarchal hierarchies, and into the interior life of a British ‘lady missionary’ navigating her career in the African mission field.     

Extending appropriate technology to rural African women

The vital role of women in the agricultural sector in Africa is gaining wider recognition. It is now apparent that although women are actively engaged in agriculture, they are often denied information on modern agricultural practices.Besides farming, women have other arduous responsibilities. Appropriate technologies of all kinds have been developed to lessen the time women spend on nonproductive tasks, assist them with processing and preserving foods and equip them with income-yielding skills.University Departments of Home Economics can extend the benefits of appropriate technology to village women in several ways. They can carry on research studies in collaboration with international agencies. They can revise their syllabi to include appropriate technology and make agricultural subjects a requirement in the Home Economics Extension Programme. Students can be given more research and practical projects related to appropriate technology. Lastly, universities can set up Appropriate Technology Centres for the benefit of contiguous communities.     

Institutional obstacles to equality between the sexes

After briefly mentioning the basic characteristics of the constitutional and legislative framework in which the people participate, I try to show how the legal system in Switzerland is biased in favour of men.Although since June 1981 the Constitution has guaranteed equal rights to men and women, women suffer significant discrimination. That discrimination is unchallengeable in court and difficult to overcome through legislative change, since the Swiss parliament is 90 per cent male. The institutional balance of power (between parliament, government, the courts and the people) means that women are excluded from the implementation of equality although they have a legal right to it. The refusal of the Federal Court to control the constitutionality of federal laws (which contain the worst discrimination) coupled with a restrictive interpretation of equality where it concerns women, makes it clear that our right to equality will remain ‘paper rights’ only for years to come.The constitutional amendment on equality of rights between women and men shows the myth of neutrality and objectivity of the legal system, and the necessity of referring to the notion of women as a group, and no longer as isolated individuals as classical constitutional jurisprudence teaches, for that is the only way to show the sex-based discrimination hurting women as women, and not as individuals at random.In our fight for equality we are faced with the dispersion of women in various groups according to class, religion, language, region, profession and so on and this means we cannot rely on a uniform conception of equality and of the means of achieving it, but must develop a new meaning of equality, going further than the dichotomy of ‘public man, private woman’, and fighting against male privilege, to achieve a better democracy.     

remotely sensed: a topography of the global sex trade

Voluntarily or not, women are moved in great numbers from Manila to Nigeria, from Burma to Thailand, and from post-socialist countries to Western Europe: female geobodies in the flow of global capitalism. The recently released 53-minute video essay Remote Sensing by the Swiss artist and video director Ursula Biemann traces the routes and reasons of women who migrate into the global sex industry. Taking a geographical approach to trafficking, the video develops a particular visual language generated by new media and satellite technologies, which traces the migration of women in the age of digital images.All stills are taken from the video that was shot in the Philippines, Thailand, California, and the German–Czech border.     

Remotely sensed: a topography of the global sex trade

Voluntarily or not, women are moved in great numbers from Manila to Nigeria, from Burma to Thailand, and from post-socialist countries to Western Europe: female geobodies in the flow of global capitalism. The recently released 53-minute video essay Remote Sensing by the Swiss artist and video director Ursula Biemann traces the routes and reasons of women who migrate into the global sex industry. Taking a geographical approach to trafficking, the video develops a particular visual language generated by new media and satellite technologies, which traces the migration of women in the age of digital images.All stills are taken from the video that was shot in the Philippines, Thailand, California, and the German–Czech border.     

Vulnerable Bodies, Vulnerable Borders: Extraterritoriality and Human Trafficking

In this article, I interrogate how the UK government constructs and manipulates the idiom of the vulnerable female, trafficked migrant. Specifically, I analyse how the government aligns aspects of its anti-trafficking plans with plans to enhance extraterritorial immigration and border control. In order to do this, I focus on the discursive strategies that revolve around the UK??s anti-trafficking initiatives. I argue that discourses of human trafficking as prostitution, modern-day slavery and organised crime do important work. Primarily, they provide the government with a moral platform from which it can develop its regulatory capacity overseas. It is not my intention to suggest that the government??s anti-trafficking plans are superficial, and that extraterritoriality is the sole driver. On the contrary, I argue that complex interrelationships exist and while the government??s interest in protecting vulnerable women from sexual exploitation may seem to be paramount, I assert that in fact it intersects with other agendas at key points. I consider how government action to protect vulnerable women in trafficking ??source?? and ??transit?? countries such as development aid and repatriation schemes relate to broader legal and political concerns about protecting the UK from unwanted ??Others??.     

Labiaplasty,Race and the Colonial Imagination

This article seeks to interrogate the cultural meaning of cosmetic labiaplasty surgery (CLS) in the Western context through a historical examination of the symbolic function of the labia in relation to the construction of racial difference in early colonial race science discourse. It seeks to think through CLS as materially invested in a transnational masculinist imperial encounter with indigenous women from the Cape of Good Hope, who were identified in the race sciences of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries as ‘Hottentots’ (and sometimes ‘Bushwomen’). We suggest that the production of desire in contemporary CLS practice and discourse has its roots in colonial anthropological Western representations of black female sexuality. The fear of abnormality so strikingly invoked in the medical literature and contemporary accounts of women's desire for CLS appears as a displacement of racial abjection onto the genitals and a production of the female body as the border object upon which the desire for whiteness is transcribed. We identify two interlocking features of this production of white desire: the rejection of the animal body and the correction of sexual deviancy, both of which are articulated through race, specifically the racialised ‘Hottentot’ bodies conjured up by the white, colonial imagination.     

Menstrual fictions: languages of medicine and menstruation,c. 1850–1930

Abstract

Gynaecological narratives of menstruation in the late nineteenth century placed woman firmly within the orbit of domesticity by virtue of her biology. In the rhetoric of medical ‘truths’, menstruation was defined as a ‘ldisability’, a physical ‘illness’ and a threat to emotional stability. Thus, it was argued, women could not hope to achieve equality with men when the dictates of Nature (as opposed to society) stipulated that they remain mothers, carers and homemakers. This article explores the notion that narratives of menstruation were created and articulated through subjective readings of social and cultural truths: menstruation was perceived and defined through the medium of ideas relating to what femininity was and ought to be. An examination of the medical languages of menstruation articulated between 1850 and 1930 reveals that the creation of menstrual knowledge was in perpetual flux. What remained a constant, however, was the appropriation of the female body as a field for the definition of ‘difference’     

Testing the reproductive hypothesis: or what made working-class women sick in early Victorian London

Using patient case records from University College Hospital in London in the 1830s and 1840s, this article re-evaluates the reproductive model of Victorian women's health. The women who were admitted to UCH were working-class women, and the evidence from the patient records suggests that their understandings of their bodies both conflicted with and supported the Victorian medical model of women as biologically fragile and delicate as a result of their reproductive functions. The female patients represented their bodies as essentially strong, but also recognized that this strength was very tenuous. Rather than concentrating solely on internally induced causes of ill health, the patients stressed socio-economic reasons for becoming sick.     

Sexual Attraction, Sexual Identity, and Psychosocial Wellbeing in a National Sample of Young Women During Emerging Adulthood

Identity-based conceptualizations of sexual orientation may not account adequately for variation in young women’s sexuality. Sexual minorities fare worse in psychosocial markers of wellbeing (i.e., depressive symptoms, anxiety, self esteem, social support) than heterosexual youth; however, it remains unclear whether these health disparities exclusively affect individuals who adopt a sexual minority identity or if they also may be present among heterosexually-identified youth who report same-sex attractions. We examined the relationship between sexual attraction, sexual identity, and psychosocial wellbeing in the female only subsample (weighted, n = 391) of a national sample of emerging adults (age 18–24). Women in this study rated on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely) their degree of sexual attraction to males and females, respectively. From these scores, women were divided into 4 groups (low female/low male attraction, low female/high male attraction, high female/low male attraction, or high female/high male attraction). We explored the relationship between experiences of attraction, reported sexual identity, and psychosocial outcomes using ordinary least squares regression. The results indicated sexual attraction to be predictive of women’s psychosocial wellbeing as much as or more than sexual identity measures. We discuss these findings in terms of the diversity found in young women’s sexuality, and how sexual minority status may be experienced by this group.     

‘The streets have been watched regularly’: the York Penitentiary Society,young working-class women,and the regulation of behaviour in the public spaces of York,c. 1845–1919

The York Penitentiary Society, a charitable female reformatory in York, aimed to transform ‘fallen’ women in the city into useful citizens through institutionalisation, domestic training, and moral and religious instruction. The Penitentiary focused on isolating its ‘inmates’ from wider society, but its moral reach extended far beyond the high walls of the Refuge, and the young women confined within. This article examines the York Penitentiary Society, and considers how it acted to police the streets and public spaces of York, and the behaviour of young women who populated them. In addition to adding detail to our understanding of the operation of female reform institutions, this study also adds to our knowledge on the unofficial policing of women’s behaviour in public space, and has significant implications for histories of urban life.     

The sultana and her sisters: black women in the British Isles before 1530

This interdisciplinary study examines cultural representation of black women in the British Isles before 1530. It addresses a lacuna in the historiography of black women which has, hitherto, paid little attention to the fact of their existence in the British Isles before British involvement in the slave trade. Representations of black women in stained glass and in poetry of the Middle Ages are examined and their meaning and function interrogated through an analysis of the medieval discourses which framed them and through which they were refracted: biblical exegesis, natural histories and travel literature, bestiaries, constructions of female beauty and medical treatises. These images suggest that the bodies and behaviours of black women were the site for a definition of gender and racial otherness long before the development of the slave trade of Elizabethan and Jacobean England