Public history and popular memory: issues in the commemoration of the British militant suffrage campaign

Drawing on Raphael Samuel's work on the construction of historical knowledge, this article argues that British militant suffrage feminists had a strong sense of their role in history. Once the vote was won, militants became the first public historians of their own suffrage history by collecting ‘relics’ of the campaign and commemorating suffrage events. The work of curators, especially at the Museum of London and National Library of Australia, Canberra, also enabled wider access to the movement's ephemera. Subsequent generations have ‘remembered’ suffrage in different ways, including depiction in fiction, film, local histories and the physical landscape. An exploration of such depictions might help us start to understand the continuing fascination with this aspect of women's history.     

Afterword: challenging women in the British professions

ABSTRACT

Places the first women lawyers in the context of the experiences of women in other professions in Britain as their access gradually grew, also within the wider history of women and women’s movements, including for the vote, in the time period covered by these articles. It examines the challenges women faced in all professions and in the wider world, especially of sexist discrimination, and how they themselves challenged them, increasingly with professional support from women lawyers. It assesses the changes they achieved and failed to achieve, and the obstacles.     

Over the centuries: a history of Wollstonecraft reception

ABSTRACT

Both Wollstonecraft’s fame and infamy are attributable to her lived experience as the woman author of the only radical republican feminist text published in the pamphlet war of the 1790s. Yet, her radical republican politics were divorced from her gender politics in the early reception. This paper argues that this separation was subsequently sustained in part by interpretive practices that rest on the suppression of the original split. It shows that over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both outside and within academia, the dominant interpretive tendency of neglecting Wollstonecraft’s radical republican politics has deradicalized both her historical political thought and her iconic image. This conventional reception has both enabled and limited the resources made available through Wollstonecraft to feminists throughout history.     

Congruence in Service of the Children's Best Interests

Abstract

This method seems to contradict the present popular belief that the best education means letting the child do as he likes. We consider that these continual limitations of his freedom are in the child's interest. In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.     

Exporting suffrage: British influences on the Canadian suffrage movement

While the Canadian suffrage movement followed its own distinct pathway to full voting rights for women, it was deeply influenced by British ideas which were transplanted, translated and reinterpreted to fit Canadian social conditions. The Canadian media assumed WSPU speaking tours were most significant, and these did generate publicity for the Canadian movement. However, British influences were far more diverse. The transfer of ideas associated with British labourism, the flow of British immigrants to Canada, and the influence of British and Commonwealth organizations in the interwar years were also important influences on the Canadian movement.     

Writing suffragette history: the contending autobiographical narratives of the pankhursts

On 10 October 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an organisation that was to become the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian England. Their militant campaign was led by Emmeline and her eldest daughter, Christabel, the WSPU's Chief Organiser, the two younger Pankhurst daughters, Sylvia and Adela, also becaming active in the movement. While all four women wrote accounts of the campaign, the focus here is on the published autobiographical narratives of the three elder Pankhurst women – Emmeline's My Own Story (1914), Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement (1931) and Christabel's Unshackled (1959). In particular, the ways in which these women presented themselves and each other, and how they related the story of their private family relationships as mother, daughters and siblings, is explored     

Bound to Please: a history of the Victorian corset

This paper addresses feminist materialism as political practice through a case study of IWW-Earth First! Local 1, the late Judi Bari's organization of a radical ecology/timber workers' union in the ancient redwood forests of Northern California. Rejecting the Earth First! mythology of timber workers as ‘enemies’ of nature, Bari sought to unite workers and environmentalists in pursuit of sustainable forestry practices against the devastating approaches favoured by multinational logging corporations. In so doing, she brought a working-class feminist perspective to the radical ecology of Earth First! Bari's work provided a significant instance of community organizing in opposition to the masculinist, exclusionary practices and misanthropic posturing of Earth First!'s self-proclaimed ‘eco-warriors’ and ‘rednecks for nature’. What is perhaps most interesting about the development of Local 1 is the articulation of feminist, environmentalist and labour discourses through a series of political actions.     

British Lesbian Poetics: A Brief Exploration

In a post-feminist, post-lesbian feminist, postmodern or queer world, should lesbian work remain clearly identifiable, even when it refuses to claim lesbian identity as such? Scanning anthologies from the past three decades of lesbian poetry, and focusing particularly on the work of Maureen Duffy, Marge Yeo, Dorothea Smartt, Gillian Spraggs and Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Yorke addresses issues of lesbian visibility, lesbian identification, lesbian desire, and lesbian performativity. How do we identify what constitutes a lesbian poetic in an era when ‘lesbian’ as an identity is less overtly defended, and many anthologies gloss over lesbian difference in prioritizing a higher order dedication to theme?     

Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: British socialist women and the politics of consumption

Abstract

Historically, socialist strategy has privileged production over consumption, yet consumption was a space in which socialist women could have constructed a woman-focused politics. This article discusses the possibility of a politics of consumption where consumption provided the focus for overt political demands around which consumer-centred tactics were developed. It explores an attempt by British socialist women to create a politics of consumption around shopping for food. Although Margaretta Hicks and the National Women's Council of the British Socialist Party ultimately failed to reorder socialist priorities, they did try to build a politics of consumption in the years 1912 to 1915. Their significance was to imagine one way in which the border between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘political’ could be dissolved so that consumption and production could be recognised as complementary and equally necessary spheres of socialist politics.     

Back to the factory: the continuing salience of industrial workplace history

ABSTRACT

Factories remain significant sites of employment, crucial to capitalism. In the twentieth century, scholars registered achievements in documenting their history, but since the late 1980s, and for a generation, the field lost impetus within labour history although insights continued to accumulate through work in adjacent disciplines. The factory has not featured on the agenda of ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ labour history, but we suggest that it can and should contribute to that broader global project, reinvigorating labour history, not least by contributing a dimension close to workers’ everyday experience.     

Elderly British men: homohysteria and orthodox masculinities

Abstract

There is limited research about homosociality and physical tactility between men in the early to middle decades of the twentieth century. This research utilizes 27 in-depth interviews with heterosexual British men aged between 65 and 91 in order to explore their masculinity and homosociality, then and today. Participants were interviewed about (1) their recollections of masculinity and same-sex friendships aged 18; (2) their awareness of, and attitudes towards, homosexuality at this age; and (3) their current views regarding today’s heterosexual male’s gendered behaviours, inclusive of their kissing, cuddling and loving other men. Results show that men born between 1924 and 1951 lived in absence of, or desire for, homosocial affection. Even today they look upon the display of inclusive masculinities by today’s male youth with disdain. We suggest that their antipathy towards homosociality is reflective of elevated cultural homophobia and homohysteria of their youths.     

women's history,oral history and active learning: an experience from southern England

Abstract

This article aims to open up a discussion on teaching methodologies in history and women's studies, particularly in relation to oral history as a form of ‘active learning’. It contains an account of a course in which a group of third-year history students undertook a joint research project on domesticity in Britain in the 1930s and the 1950s.