Helena Normanton: legal crusader or myth Maker? ‘[S]urely the one thing history teaches us is that we cannot generalise,or even worse,categorise individual humans into saints and sinners,or heroes and villains’

ABSTRACT

Helena Normanton aspired to become a lawyer at a time when women were prohibited from entering the legal profession. This aspiration became a reality when, on 24 December 1919, she became the first woman to be admitted to an institution of the legal profession after the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, thus enshrining her place in legal history. Her achievement was, without doubt, remarkable. She has become the ‘face’ of women’s entry to the legal profession, but what was her contribution to the opening the legal profession to women? How should history remember her? This article will examine her role in this history and compare it to her own narrative. Further it will consider how we reconcile her trailblazing challenge to the male exclusivity of the Bar with the difficulties her behaviour often presents to us. Helena Normanton: saint or sinner? And does it matter?     

Thwarted ambitions: the biography of Auvergne Doherty,an aspiring female barrister

ABSTRACT

Auvergne Doherty was the first woman from the Commonwealth to be admitted and called to the Bar of England and Wales.?In the first part of this article, Doherty's family background, education, legal training, and post-Bar experiences are set out. The second part analyses her profile compared with the other women called to the Bar in 1922 and considers why Doherty may not have gone on to practise as a barrister. This article argues that Doherty’s biography is important because it evidences how vital it was to have the necessary financial means and networks to be able to forget a career at the Bar. It was precisely the lack of these factors that impeded Doherty to fulfil her career as a barrister.     

Virginia Stephen at the Dr Williams’s Library

This article considers the implications of Virginia Stephen’s membership of the foremost library of Protestant nonconformity in London—the Dr Williams’s Library. Drawing on research in the library’s archives, the author focuses on the original record of Stephen’s membership in the 1905 ‘Index of Readers’. While paying close attention to the semantic specificities of the record itself, this article also positions Stephen’s individual record in the wider context of the community of readers this index documents. The article explores the degree to which Stephen’s encounter with the predominantly female and scholarly, but also distinctly lower-middle-class and professional readership of the Dr Williams’s Library may have influenced the concerns of her 1909 short story ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ and her first novel, The Voyage Out.     

Sacred year or broken reed? The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919

ABSTRACT

The Sex Disqualification (Removal Act 1919) enabled women to enter some professions including law for the first time. Virginia Woolf calls 1919 a ‘sacred year’ because of this Act in her later essay ‘Three Guineas’. However, the historical literature largely considers the act to be a ‘broken reed’, focussing on its failure to equalise the franchise, remove the marriage bar or to enable women to sit in the House of Lords. This article argues that such negative verdicts fail to take into account the political and Parliamentary situation in 1919 and overlooks the genuine achievements of the Act.     

‘We who strive for the foundation of a principle’: feminism and suffrage in the biography of Bessie Parkes Belloc

ABSTRACT

Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Belloc, 1829–1925) was a central figure in British women’s rights activism during the 1850s and 1860s. She was founding editor of the feminist English Woman’s Journal and one of the organisers of the pioneering 1866 petition for women’s suffrage. She lived long enough to witness some women gaining the vote in 1918, by which time her children, Marie Belloc Lowndes and Hilaire Belloc, were themselves public figures who had taken up opposing positions on women’s suffrage. This article takes as its starting point 1866, a pivotal moment in nineteenth-century agitation for women’s suffrage and in Parkes Belloc’s individual biography, before moving to a longer view of her feminist life before and after this date. It demonstrates the value of a biographical approach to exploring the diversity of perspectives and experiences of women within first-wave feminism and the suffrage movement.     

“I have never met the normal woman”: Stella Browne and the politics of womanhood

Abstract

F. W. Stella Browne (1880–1995) and her views on female sexuality have been much discussed of recent years. These discussions have tended to rely on a limited number of her copious (if often hard-to-find) writings, and have also failed to take into account where Stella, as an individual woman, was coming from. In the light of ongoing researches into her life and career, this article locates her writings in her life of activism in a wide variety of causes. It argues that her opinions about women's needs do not conform to a simplistic model of a ‘New’ feminism of difference, and that her relationship to the thought of contemporary male sexologists has been presented in a one-dimensional and misleading way. Her tripartite commitment to feminism, socialism, and individualism is illustrated, drawing on a wide range of her writings and statements between 1912 and 1937. In her crusade to celebrate and liberate the “variety and variability of women” Stella sought constantly to overthrow concepts of a monolithic female nature as well as to reject the Double Moral Standard: ‘normality’ to her was an instrument for the oppression of women. Consideration is also given to the wider influence of her ideas.     

‘This fair lady,in her laces’: Margaret Howie Strang Hall,the first woman in Scotland to try to become a lawyer

ABSTRACT

Margaret Howie Strang Hall was the first woman in Scotland, and the youngest woman in the UK, to try to become a lawyer through the same formal process open to her male contemporaries. This examination of Hall’s attempt aims to set it in context, using contemporary court documents and newspaper reports, while expanding on what is known of her life. Hall’s story is an important one in the struggle for equal professional opportunities and her experience in the Scottish legal system provides a counterpoint to the better-known English examples.     

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.     

Medical careers and health care for Indian women: patterns of control

Abstract

In the 1880s reform-minded men and women in Great Britain had joined the missionaries and a number of Indian reformers in demanding that Western medical care be extended to Indian women. The subjects of their concern were high-status Indian women who observed the norms of seclusion. British women, at this time entering the medical profession, supported this initiative because it legitimized their professional goals and promised employment. This paper explores the introduction of medical care for Indian women with reference to the life of Dr Haimavati Sen (c. 1867-1932), ‘lady doctor’ in charge of an exclusively women's hospital in Hughli district of Bengal. The paper explores two issues: the ways in which imperialism, feminism, and racism worked to marginalize Indian women in professional medical roles and the impact of this process upon women as patients and clients.     

Chrystal Macmillan,Scottish campaigner for women’s equality through law reform

ABSTRACT

This article will explore the work of Chrystal Macmillan, who used her knowledge of the law to further the cause of women’s equality through her committee work with several voluntary organisations, and her presentations to the British Government, the League of Nations, and the International Labour Office. Using archival material, both from committee minutes and family anecdotes, we will show the substantial amount of voluntary work undertaken by Chrystal Macmillan both before and after she became a practising lawyer in 1924. The article will also try to capture something of the woman’s character through the comments of her friends and colleagues.     

The prison letters of Alice Ker and Mary Ellen Taylor: suffragettes and mothers

ABSTRACT

This article considers the prison letters of Dr Alice Ker and the relatively unknown Mary Ellen Taylor which are held in the Women’s Library at LSE Library. These women were suffragettes and mothers who were both arrested on 4 March 1912, in separate incidents, but as part of the Women’s Social and Political Union’s window-smashing campaign. The letters allow us to consider what these women must have been feeling and reveal what factors they felt were important to write about at that time. Of even more significance is that they provide an insight into these women as people. The article also considers the effect that suffrage campaigning had on family life and family relationships and whether the letters convey any sense that campaigning caused tensions or concerns within families.     

The Double Play of Mirrors: Anna Kavan,Autobiography and Self-Portraiture

Abstract

Better known as the author of complex visionary novels of female experience, it is important to note that Anna Kavan was not only a writer, but also an artist, painting throughout her adult life in tandem with her writing. This article considers the nature of the relationship between her literary life and her artistic life, and what her novels tell us about her relationship to the cultivation of her self-image. Famously destroying her personal archive, shirking notable correspondents and recapitulating a mental disquiet across many of her paintings and prose works, it is of little surprise that Kavan’s enigmatic presence often figures more prominently than serious discussion of her literary and artistic achievements. How did this mercurial relationship to identity shape the ways in which Kavan explored her self-image?     

Segregation,regulation, and the gendering of space at the University of Wales,Bangor, 1884–1907

ABSTRACT

In 1892, the Senate of the University College of North Wales in Bangor conducted an enquiry into the behaviour of Frances Hughes, Lady Principal of the women’s hall of residence, for defamatory remarks she had made about one of her students. Her accusations instigated a scandal that rocked the provincial college to its core, led to two separate libel lawsuits, and was even mentioned in the House of Lords. Using the ‘Bangor College Scandal’ as a case study, this article explores how student life in the new civic universities of the late-nineteenth century was shaped by regulation and supervision, as university authorities sought to avoid controversy through limiting mixed-gender interaction. It will argue that this control was often manifested in spatial terms, enabled by the deliberate design and arrangement of university spaces.     

The many lives of Bertha,Georges and Jean: a transgender mystic in interwar Belgium

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the religious career of a transgender mystic who died as Père Jean in 1967. While it might sound contradictory, for scholars working on women, mysticism and charisma, sources on Jean’s life offer exceptional insights. When Jean made the news in the 1920s, he headlined as Bertha Mrazek/Georges Marasco and was still perceived as a woman. Bertha’s cross-dressing, miraculous cure and law suit started discussions about what it meant to be a charismatic woman in post-war Belgium. Rather than focusing on the sensational aspects, the emphasis here is on Jean’s reinventions, the historicity of his appeal to others, and the importance of ideals of gender and sanctity as well as the historical context in the reception of this transgender mystic.     

Legal Form and Temporal Rationalities in UK Work–Life Balance Law

Abstract

This article attempts to crack open the temporal assumptions in the goal of ‘balancing’ work and family, as it is mobilised in UK law. Within studies of gender and labour, ‘balance’, as a concept and a politico-legal objective, is worthy of much more scholarly attention than it has received to date. In the UK context, balance is understood as a means of achieving equilibrium, both at the level of the labour market and within the context of unpaid care. Specifically, mobilising the short horizon of a ‘reckonable present’, balance creates a paradigm or topos through which dilemmas of value and care can be played out and resolved. The specific qualities of the UK's right to request flexible work, for its part, indicate that law's temporal qualities can have specific regulatory functions, shifting scale and reframing responsibilities. By looking closely at legal technicalities, we can discern much about the conceptual logic that affects many of us through influential regulatory strategies. The political imperative of analysing work–life balance might, in this way, require us to return not only to time, but also, strangely, to legal form.     

Racialized Women,the Law and the Violence of White Settler Colonialism

In 2001, Rie Fujii, a 23-year-old Japanese national living without legal status in Calgary, Alberta, Canada left her two infant children alone in her apartment for 10 days while visiting her out-of-town boyfriend. The children, Domenic and Gemini, died of dehydration and starvation. Charged with two counts of second-degree homicide, Fujii plead guilty to manslaughter and received an 8-year sentence. Through an analysis of the publicly available judicial documents relating to the crimes of Rie Fujii, this paper explores how the law’s individualization and medicalization of crime and violence may obscure the multiple forms of everyday and structural violence that racialized women in white settler states such as Canada experience and may perpetrate. Drawing on Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois’ concept of the violence continuum, I argue that the law’s conceptualization of crime and violence conceals and thus advances the violence endemic to white settler colonialism.     

Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.     

Sisters in a Fashion: Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth, two US born feminists who came to Australia during two key moments in feminist history, as a way of thinking about the relationship between feminists and fashion. Ansara arrived in Sydney in 1969 carrying women’s liberation literature in her suitcase; she became an important generative figure in the Australia’s women’s liberation movement, particularly as an independent filmmaker and proponent of consciousness raising. Welteroth arrived in 2017 to speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival during a period of international resurgence of feminist activism. She brought with her images of women of colour she had featured in Teen Vogue and she invoked second wave consciousness raising, albeit in a remodelled, corporate-led form when she talked about the title’s plans to bring young girls around kitchen tables to ‘solve’ political problems. The article uses comments both women have made in relation to fashion and beauty, close readings of their works, and a discussion of their respective feminist milieus to suggest a trajectory of feminism’s relationship to the fashion industry that appears to have changed from a position of opposition to one of open embrace. It also complicates this reading by pointing to the resonances between these women of different feminist eras.     

Black Feminist Voices in Politics

Abstract

Nearly 80 years after they gained entry to the legal profession in England women remain greatly underrepresented in the judiciary. This article examines the career of Sybil Campbell, England's first full-time woman judge. It explores the criticisms of her appointment as stipendiary magistrate at Tower Bridge in 1945 and the press campaign against her severe sentences which followed. It concludes that, while she was not esteemed a success by the authorities, the main reason for the long gap before the appointment of the next female judge (in 1962) was the control of practically all appointments